the key and the clue to character, and perhaps no one ever read Carlyle more truly than she, when she interpreted his bitterness only as melancholy, and his scorn as sensibility.
The Brownings had not been long in Paris before they were invited to a reception at Lady Elgin’s, where they met Madame Mohl, who at once cordially urged their coming to her “evenings,” to meet her French celebrities. Lady Elgin was domiciled in the old Faubourg Saint Germain, and received every Monday evening from eight to twelve, sans façon, people being in morning dress, and being served with simple refreshment of tea and cakes. Lady Elgin expressed the hope that the Brownings would come to her on every one of these evenings, Mrs. Browning said that she had expected “to see Balzac’s duchesses and hommes de lettres on all sides,” but she found it less notable, though very agreeable. The elder Browning and his daughter pay a visit to them, greatly to Mrs. Browning’s enjoyment. At this time they half contemplated living permanently in Paris, if it seemed that Mrs. Browning could endure the climate, and she records, during the visit of her husband’s father and sister, that if they do remain in Paris they hope to induce these beloved members of the family to also establish themselves there. As it turned out, the Brownings passed only this one winter in the French capital, but the next spring Mr. Browning (père) and his daughter Sarianna took up their residence in Paris, where they remained during the remainder of his life. Mrs. Browning was always deeply attached to her husband’s sister. “Sarianna is full of accomplishment and admirable sense,” she wrote of her, and the visit of both gave her great pleasure. The coup d’état took place early in December, but they felt no alarm. Mrs. Browning expressed her great faith in the French people, and declared the talk about “military despotism” to be all nonsense. The defect she saw in M. Thiers was “a lack of breadth of view, which helped to bring the situation to a dead lock, on which the French had no choice than to sweep the board clean and begin again.”
It was during this early winter, with French politics and French society and occasional spectacles and processions extending from the Carrousel to the Arc de l’Étoile, that Browning wrote that essay on Shelley, which his publisher of that time, Mr. Moxon, had requested to accompany a series of Shelley letters which had been discovered, but which were afterward found to be fraudulent. The edition was at once suppressed; but a few copies had already gone out, and, as Professor Dowden says, “The essay is interesting as Browning’s only considerable piece of prose;... for him the poet of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ was not that beautiful and ineffectual angel of Matthew Arnold’s fancy, beating in the void his luminous wings. A great moral purpose looked forth from Shelley’s work, as it does from all lofty works of art.” It was “the dream of boyhood,” Browning tells us, to render justice to Shelley; and he availed himself of this opportunity with alluring eagerness. His interpretation of Shelley is singularly noble and in accord with all the great spiritual teachings of his own poetic work. Browning’s plea that there is no basis for any adequate estimate of Shelley, who “died before his youth was ended,” cannot but commend its justice; and he urges that in any measurement of Shelley as a man he must be contemplated “at his ultimate spiritual stature” and not judged by the mistakes of ten years before when in his entire immaturity of character.
How all that infinite greatness of spirit and almost divine breadth of comprehension that characterize Robert Browning reveal themselves in this estimate of Shelley. It is seeing human errors and mistakes as God sees them,—the temporary faults, defects, imperfections of the soul on its onward way to perfection. This was the attitude of Browning’s profoundest convictions regarding human life.
“Eternal process moving on;
From state to state the spirit walks.”
This achievement of the divine ideal for man is not within the possibilities of the brief sojourn on earth, but what does the transition called death do for man but to
“Interpose at the difficult moment, snatch Saul, the mistake,
Saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now,—and bid him awake
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set
Clear and safe in new light and new life,—a new harmony yet
To be run, and continued, and ended—who knows?—or endure!
The man taught enough by life’s dream, of the rest to make sure.”
Browning’s message in its completeness was invariably that which is imaged, too, in these lines from Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”:
“And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights.”
For it is only in this drama of the infinite life that the spiritual man can be tested. It was from the standpoint of an actor on this celestial stage that Browning considered Shelley. In the entire range of Browning’s art the spiritual man is imaged as a complex and individualized spark of the divine force. He is seen for a flitting moment on his way toward a divine destiny.
Professor Hall Griffin states as his belief that Browning’s paper was to some degree inspired by that of Joseph Milsand on himself, which appeared in August, 1851, in the Revue des Deux Mondes in which Milsand commended Browning’s work “as pervaded by an intense belief in the importance of the individual soul.”
To Browning this winter was enchanted by the initiation of his friendship with Milsand, the distinguished French scholar and critic, who had already made a name as a philosophic thinker and had published a book on Ruskin (L’Esthétique Anglaise), and who was a discerner of spirits in poetic art as well. About the time that “Paracelsus” appeared, Milsand had seen an extract from the poem that captivated him, and he at once sent for the volume. He had also read, with the deepest interest, Browning’s “Christmas Eve and Easter Day.” He was contributing to the Revue des Deux Mondes two papers on La Poésie Anglaise depuis Byron, the first of which, on Tennyson, had appeared the previous August. Milsand was about completing the second paper of this series (on Browning), and it happened just at this time that Miss Mitford’s “Recollections of a Literary Life” was published, in which, writing of the Brownings, she had told the story of that tragic death of Mrs. Browning’s brother Edward, who had been drowned at Torquay. In these days, when, as Emerson rhymes the fact,
“Every thought is public,
Every nook is wide,
The gossips spread each whisper
And the gods from side to side,”
it is a little difficult to quite comprehend, even in comprehending Mrs. Browning’s intense sensitiveness and the infinite sacredness of this grief, why she should have been so grieved at Miss Mitford’s tender allusion to an accident that was, by its very nature, public, and which must have been reported in the newspapers of the day. Mrs. Browning was always singularly free from any morbid states, from any tendency to the idée fixe, to which a semi-invalid condition is peculiarly and pardonably liable; but she said, in an affectionate letter to Miss Mitford:
“I have lived heart to heart (for instance) with my husband these five years: I have never yet spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never yet could find heart or breath; never yet could bear to hear a word of reference from his lips.”
It is said there are no secrets in heaven, and in that respect, at least, the twentieth century is not unlike the celestial state; and it is almost as hard a task for the imagination to comprehend the reserve in all personal matters that characterized the mid-nineteenth century as it would be to enter into absolute comprehension of the medieval mind; but Mrs. Browning’s own pathetic deprecation of her feelings regarding this is its own passport to the sympathy of the reader. To Miss Mitford’s reply, full of sympathetic comprehension and regret, Mrs. Browning replied that she understood, “and I thank you,” she added, “and love you, which is better. Now, let us talk of reasonable things.” For Mrs. Browning had that rare gift and grace of instantly closing the chapter, and turning the page, and ceasing from all allusion to any subject of regret, after the inevitable reference of the moment had been made. She had the mental energy and the moral buoyancy to drop