A new source of interest also presented itself to him in some aspects of the life of the English country gentleman.He was struck by the improvements effected by its actual owner on a neighbouring estate,and by the provisions contained in them for the comfort of both the men and the animals under his care;and he afterwards made,in reference to them,what was for a professing Liberal,a very striking remark:'Talk of abolishing that class of men!
They are the salt of the earth!'Every Sunday afternoon he and his sister drank tea --weather permitting --on the lawn with their friends at Brintysilio;and he alludes gracefully to these meetings in a letter written in the early summer of 1888,when Lady Martin had urged him to return to Wales.
The poet left another and more pathetic remembrance of himself in the neighbourhood of Llangollen:his weekly presence at the afternoon Sunday service in the parish church of Llantysilio.
Churchgoing was,as I have said,no part of his regular life.
It was no part of his life in London.But I do not think he ever failed in it at the Universities or in the country.The assembling for prayer meant for him something deeper in both the religious and the human sense,where ancient learning and piety breathed through the consecrated edifice,or where only the figurative 'two or three'were 'gathered together'
within it.A memorial tablet now marks the spot at which on this occasion the sweet grave face and the venerable head were so often seen.
It has been placed by the direction of Lady Martin on the adjoining wall.
It was in the September of this year that Mr.Browning heard of the death of M.Joseph Milsand.This name represented for him one of the few close friendships which were to remain until the end,unclouded in fact and in remembrance;and although some weight may be given to those circumstances of their lives which precluded all possibility of friction and risk of disenchantment,I believe their rooted sympathy,and Mr.Browning's unfailing powers of appreciation would,in all possible cases,have maintained the bond intact.
The event was at the last sudden,but happily not quite unexpected.
Many other friends had passed by this time out of the poet's life --those of a younger,as well as his own and an older generation.
Miss Haworth died in 1883.Charles Dickens,with whom he had remained on the most cordial terms,had walked between him and his son at Thackeray's funeral,to receive from him,only seven years later,the same pious office.Lady Augusta Stanley,the daughter of his old friend,Lady Elgin,was dead,and her husband,the Dean of Westminster.
So also were 'Barry Cornwall'and John Forster,Alfred Domett,and Thomas Carlyle,Mr.Cholmondeley and Lord Houghton;others still,both men and women,whose love for him might entitle them to a place in his Biography,but whom I could at most only mention by name.
For none of these can his feeling have been more constant or more disinterested than that which bound him to Carlyle.
He visited him at Chelsea in the last weary days of his long life,as often as their distance from each other and his own engagements allowed.
Even the man's posthumous self-disclosures scarcely availed to destroy the affectionate reverence which he had always felt for him.
He never ceased to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his wife,or to believe that in the matter of their domestic unhappiness she was the more responsible of the two.Yet Carlyle had never rendered him that service,easy as it appears,which one man of letters most justly values from another:that of proclaiming the admiration which he privately expresses for his works.The fact was incomprehensible to Mr.Browning --it was so foreign to his own nature;and he commented on it with a touch,though merely a touch,of bitterness,when repeating to a friend some almost extravagant eulogium which in earlier days he had received from him tete-a-tete.
'If only,'he said,'those words had been ever repeated in public,what good they might have done me!'
In the spring of 1886,he accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy,rendered vacant by the death of Lord Houghton.
He had long been on very friendly terms with the leading Academicians,and a constant guest at the Banquet;and his fitness for the office admitted of no doubt.But his nomination by the President,and the manner in which it was ratified by the Council and general body,gave him sincere pleasure.
Early in 1887,the 'Parleyings'appeared.Their author is still the same Robert Browning,though here and there visibly touched by the hand of time.Passages of sweet or majestic music,or of exquisite fancy,alternate with its long stretches of argumentative thought;and the light of imagination still plays,however fitfully,over statements of opinion to which constant repetition has given a suggestion of commonplace.But the revision of the work caused him unusual trouble.
The subjects he had chosen strained his powers of exposition;and I think he often tried to remedy by mere verbal correction,what was a defect in the logical arrangement of his ideas.
They would slide into each other where a visible dividing line was required.
The last stage of his life was now at hand;and the vivid return of fancy to his boyhood's literary loves was in pathetic,perhaps not quite accidental,coincidence with the fact.It will be well to pause at this beginning of his decline,and recall so far as possible the image of the man who lived,and worked,and loved,and was loved among us,during that brief old age,and the lengthened period of level strength which had preceded it.The record already given of his life and work supplies the outline of the picture;but a few more personal details are required for its completion.
