Each winter brought its searching attack of cold and cough;each summer reduced him to the state of nervous prostration or physical apathy of which I have already spoken,and which at once rendered change imperative,and the exertion of seeking it almost intolerable.
His health and spirits rebounded at the first draught of foreign air;the first breath from an English cliff or moor might have had the same result.
But the remembrance of this fact never nerved him to the preliminary effort.
The conviction renewed itself with the close of every season,that the best thing which could happen to him would be to be left quiet at home;and his disinclination to face even the idea of moving equally hampered his sister in her endeavour to make timely arrangements for their change of abode.
This special craving for rest helped to limit the area from which their summer resort could be chosen.It precluded all idea of 'pension'-life,hence of any much-frequented spot in Switzerland or Germany.
It was tacitly understood that the shortening days were not to be passed in England.Italy did not yet associate itself with the possibilities of a moderately short absence;the resources of the northern French coast were becoming exhausted;and as the August of 1874approached,the question of how and where this and the following months were to be spent was,perhaps,more than ever a perplexing one.
It was now Miss Smith who became the means of its solution.
She had more than once joined Mr.and Miss Browning at the seaside.
She was anxious this year to do so again,and she suggested for their meeting a quiet spot called Mers,almost adjoining the fashionable Treport,but distinct from it.It was agreed that they should try it;and the experiment,which they had no reason to regret,opened also in some degree a way out of future difficulties.
Mers was young,and had the defect of its quality.Only one desirable house was to be found there;and the plan of joint residence became converted into one of joint housekeeping,in which Mr.and Miss Browning at first refused to concur,but which worked so well that it was renewed in the three ensuing summers:Miss Smith retaining the initiative in the choice of place,her friends the right of veto upon it.
They stayed again together in 1875at Villers,on the coast of Normandy;in 1876at the Isle of Arran;in 1877at a house called La Saisiaz --Savoyard for the sun --in the Saleve district near Geneva.
The autumn months of 1874were marked for Mr.Browning by an important piece of work:the production of 'Aristophanes'Apology'.
It was far advanced when he returned to London in November,after a visit to Antwerp,where his son was studying art under M.Heyermans;and its much later appearance must have been intended to give breathing time to the readers of 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country'.
Mr.Browning subsequently admitted that he sometimes,during these years,allowed active literary occupation to interfere too much with the good which his holiday might have done him;but the temptations to literary activity were this time too great to be withstood.
The house occupied by him at Mers (Maison Robert)was the last of the straggling village,and stood on a rising cliff.
In front was the open sea;beyond it a long stretch of down;everywhere comparative solitude.Here,in uninterrupted quiet,and in a room devoted to his use,Mr.Browning would work till the afternoon was advanced,and then set forth on a long walk over the cliffs,often in the face of a wind which,as he wrote of it at the time,he could lean against as if it were a wall.And during this time he was living,not only in his work,but with the man who had inspired it.
The image of Aristophanes,in the half-shamed insolence,the disordered majesty,in which he is placed before the reader's mind,was present to him from the first moment in which the Defence was conceived.
What was still more interesting,he could see him,hear him,think with him,speak for him,and still inevitably condemn him.
No such instance of always ingenious,and sometimes earnest pleading foredoomed to complete discomfiture,occurs in Mr.Browning's works.
To Aristophanes he gave the dramatic sympathy which one lover of life can extend to another,though that other unduly extol its lower forms.
To Euripides he brought the palm of the higher truth,to his work the tribute of the more pathetic human emotion.
Even these for a moment ministered to the greatness of Aristophanes,in the tear shed by him to the memory of his rival,in the hour of his own triumph;and we may be quite sure that when Mr.Browning depicted that scene,and again when he translated the great tragedian's words,his own eyes were dimmed.
Large tears fell from them,and emotion choked his voice,when he first read aloud the tran of the 'Herakles'to a friend,who was often privileged to hear him.
Mr.Browning's deep feeling for the humanities of Greek literature,and his almost passionate love for the language,contrasted strongly with his refusal to regard even the first of Greek writers as models of literary style.The pretensions raised for them on this ground were inconceivable to him;and his translation of the 'Agamemnon',published 1877,was partly made,I am convinced,for the pleasure of exposing these claims,and of rebuking them.His preface to the tran gives evidence of this.The glee with which he pointed to it when it first appeared was no less significant.
At Villers,in 1875,he only corrected the proofs of 'The Inn Album' for publication in November.When the party started for the Isle of Arran,in the autumn of 1876,the 'Pacchiarotto'volume had already appeared.
When Mr.Browning discontinued his short-lived habit of visiting away from home,he made an exception in favour of the Universities.
