Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/296

He had no record of schoolboy distinction, no university life. The little bourgeois household, ennobled by a collection of books, and the mild learning and erudite studies of its master, Robert Browning’s father, gives a glimpse of something in the sequestered vale of life which might have illuminated that landscape, but it is not carried out. We can imagine a very charming picture of that house at Hatcham, with its “long low rooms” filled with “the elder Mr Browning's six thousand books,” and the “large garden opening on the Surrey hills,” and the amiable and philosophic toad which “burrowed” (but do toads burrow?) “under a white rose tree,” and came forth to hold communings with the young poet when he “announced himself by a pinch of gravel dropped into its hole.” All this is pretty; and who can tell what mysteries that Ascidian—who might (for toads, as is well known, are the most long-lived of animals) have been his great-great-grandfather for anything we can tell—communicated to the musing youth? It might have had as great luck in the world as that immortal Crapaud, whose piteous tale is to be found in Victor Hugo, but did not, the more’s the pity. We have the elder Mr Browning’s step-mother and her numerous family, who are not interesting, instead. Once Thomas Carlyle, accompanied by old John, his brother the doctor, two very strange figures for Hatcham, appeared there at dinner, where also we see and wonder at “a Captain Lloyd, indirectly associated with the “Flight of the Duchess’;” but how was that innocent gentleman associated with her flight?—as its partner the reader will of course suppose. A libel case might be built upon words, if it were not that the description of the hero is so vague. It turns out, however, that Captain Lloyd’s connection with the erring lady was only the very harmless one of coming in to see the family at moments when the poet was tired of his work. “Mr Browning vividly knew the click of the garden gate, and the sight of the familiar figure advancing towards the house breaking in upon his work and dispelling its first inspiration.” This proves incidentally that the poet worked like a common man, and that the “Flight of the Duchess” was actually written in pieces, like, let us say, a magazine article; and we who were disposed to believe that such a chef-d’œuvre dropped like Minerva in all her burnished armour from her father’s brain!

A little later we have the impressions of Mr W. T. Fox—a very well-known man in his day, Unitarian preacher and member of parliament—of the young poet. “His simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention and won opinions from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.” What Mr Browning might look in his youth we cannot tell, but he did not look like a middle-aged poet in his middle age, nor an old poet in his later years. He looked like an agreeable and intelligent Englishman generally interested about most subjects, and keeping his lyre and his singing robes strictly for home use, which we imagine is what he wished to do. Lord Tennyson, it is true, looks more like a poet than ever any man was; but then he kindly takes care to dispel the illusion as soon as possible to the uninitiated. Mr Browning was always the soul of courtesy, never wanting in that supreme grace.

He was born “soon after a