Browning Society

“ The young man never forgave it. And that, so I have always been told, is how the [Pg 34] first Browning Society came to be founded.
It was a meeting with this undergraduate—purely accidental on my part—in the romantic garden of the poet’s house that first turned my mind towards the university town of Oxbridge. I had no difficulty in finding employment as a waitress there in a restaurant where knowledge of the business was considered less essential than a turn for repartee and some gift for keeping the young of our great nobility in their proper place. ”

“ Browning argues that for one who values the good opinion of society—not for himself—that good opinion is a possession which may, like other possessions, be defended at the risk of a man's life, and as for capital punishment, is not evil to be suppressed at any price? Is not a miscreant to be expelled out of God's world? The difference of opinion was the first that had arisen between the friends, and Browning's words carried with them a certain sense of pain in the thought that they could in any thing stand apart. ”

“ Browning, although in this year 1847 he made a move towards an appointment as secretary to a mission to the Vatican, at heart cared little for men in groups or societies; he cared greatly for individuals, for the growth of individual character. He had faith in a forward movement of society; but the law of social evolution, as he conceived it, is not in the hands of political leaders or ministers of state. ”

“ Ah, says Browning, they are not exiled from God because they wanted to commit adultery: they are exiled because they did not actually do it. This is the paradox.
Browning takes a crime to test character; for a crime can test character as well as a virtue. We must draw a clear distinction here between society and the individual. It is a good thing for society that people are restrained from crime by what are really bad motives—fear, presence of police, irresolution, love of ease, selfishness: furthermore, society and the law do not consider men's motives, but only their actual deeds. ”

“ Any such movement has on its edge a frayed [xviii] sort of membership, but no one can note the names of members or read the communications which appear in the society's proceedings without recognizing the intellectual ability that carried the movement along. Browning's own attitude toward the society is pretty clearly expressed in the following words which he wrote to Mr. Edmund Yates at the time of the society's foundation:—
"The Browning Society, I need not say, as well as Browning himself, are fair game for criticism. I had no more to do with the founding it than the babe unborn ”

“ They always treat me gently in 'Punch'—why don't you do the same by the Browning Society? I see you emphasize Miss Hickey's acknowledgement of defects in time and want of rehearsal: but I look for no great perfection in a number of kindly disposed strangers to me personally, who try to interest people in my poems by singing and reading them. They give their time for nothing, offer their little entertainment for nothing, and certainly get next to nothing in the way of thanks—unless from myself who feel grateful to the faces I shall never see, the voices I shall never hear. ”

“ Robert exceedingly admires her. As to Italian society, one may as well take to longing for the evening star, for it seems quite as inaccessible; and indeed, of society of any sort, we have not much, nor wish for it, nor miss it. Dearest friend, if I could open my heart to you in all seriousness, you would see nothing there but a sort of enduring wonder of happiness—yes, and some gratitude, I do hope, besides. Could everything be well in England, I should only have to melt out of the body at once in the joy and the glow of it. ”

“ With man as a species, with man as a society, he does not concern himself, but with individual man and man. Every man is for him an epitome of the universe, a centre of creation. Life exists for each as completely and separately as if he were the only inhabitant of our planet. In the religious sense this is the familiar Christian view; but Browning, while accepting, does not confine himself to, the religious sense. ”

“ Yet for a certain kind of opportunism—that which conserves rather than destroys—Browning thought that much might fairly be said. To say this with a special reference to the fallen Emperor of France he wrote his Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.
Browning's instinctive sympathies are not with the "Saviour of Society," who maintains for temporary reasons a tottering edifice. He naturally applauds the man who builds on sure foundations, or the man who in order to reach those foundations boldly removes the accumulated lumber of the past. ”

“ Receive her! or . . or . . never mind what else!'
Thus moral suasion heralding brute force,
How had he seen the old abuses die,
And new life kindle here, there, everywhere.
Roused simply by that mild yet potent spell —
Beyond or beat of drum or stroke of sword —
Public opinion!"
"How, indeed?" he asked,
"When all to see, after some twenty years,
Were your own fool-face waiting for the sight.
Faced by as wide a grin from ear to ear
O' the knaves that, while the fools were waiting, worked —
Broke yet another generation's heart —
Twenty years' respite helping! ”

“ But she wants a new moral atmosphere—a little society. She is thrown too entirely on her own resources, and her own resources are of somewhat a gloomy character. This is all wrong. It has been partly necessary and a little her fault, at one time. I would give my right hand to take her to Italy; but if I gave right and left, it would not be found possible. My father has remained in London, and may not go to Ventnor for the next week or two, says a letter from Arabel this morning.... The very day he heard of our being in Devonshire Place he gave orders that his family should go away. ”

“ And here as usual we can trace good indirect results, while, as in the case of Carlyle, the activity of modern criticism and the modern prevalence of the common interest in speech over egoisms and cliqueisms have prevented any direct contagion of the faults. While preparing for himself the penalty of future neglect, as regards not a little of his over-abundant output, Browning has pushed contemporary English poetry towards vivacity, towards variety, towards intellectuality, without setting up a Browning school even in the Browning Society. ”

“ Of human life and liberty: for want
O' the by-blow, came deliberate butcher's-work!"
"Elsewhere go carry your complaint!" bade he.
"Least, largest, there's one law for all the minds,
Here or above: be true at any price!
'T is just o' the great scale, that such happy stroke
Of falsehood would be found a failure. Truth
Still stands unshaken at her base by me,
Reigns paramount i' the world, for the large good
O' the long late generations, — I and you
Forgotten like this buried foohshness! ”

“ Browning’s death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! A woman of real genius, I know; but what is the upshot of it all! She and her sex had better mind the kitchen and the children; and perhaps the poor. Except in such things as little novels, they only devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that which men do worse or not at all.” (Life and Letters of Edward Fitzgerald. Edited by Aldis Wright.) —Browning Society Papers, Notes, 229.
Tokay. See Nationality in Drinks. (Dramatic Lyrics, III.)
Too Late. ”

“ The members have also done a good work in causing some of Browning's plays to be produced again on the stage, and in Miss Alma Murray and others have found sympathetic and able exponents of some of the poet's most attractive `dramatis personae'. There can be no question as to the powerful impetus given by the Society to Browning's steadily-increasing popularity. ”

“ Interests outside of medicine claimed some of my time, of which activities in the Working Women’s League, emergency lectures to a Girls’ Friendly Society, and to nurses in one of the city hospitals, membership in a German [Pg 330] class, in a Browning club, even in a Plato club, were among the chief. The Browning club, especially, proved intensely interesting—three or four married couples, three spinsters (including myself) and one bashful bachelor. None of us, except Dr. Randolph, knew anything about Browning when we began ”

“ Henry James in commenting on Browning's rich and ample London period with "its felicities and prosperities of every sort," says that in contemplating "the wonderful Browning ... the accomplished, saturated, sane, sound man of the London world and the world [29] of culture," it was impossible not to believe that "he had arrived somehow, for his own deep purposes, at the enjoyment of a double identity," so dissociated were the poet and the "member of society." ”

“ I do not value society—others do: ‘we are all His children’ says Euripides and quotes Paul.
Now, love, let this be a moot point to settle among the flowers one day—with Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘other hard questions yet not impossible to be solved’ (‘What song the Sirens sang to Ulysses,’ is the first!) in which blessed hope let me leave off; for I confess to having written myself all-but-tired, headachy. But ‘vexed with you’! Ba, Ba; you perplex me, bewilder me; let me get right again; kiss me, dearest, and all is right—God bless you ever—
Your R.
[53]
E.B.B. to R.B. Wednesday Evening. ”

“ The formation of a Ruskin Society in the previous year had already established a precedent for allowing a still living worker to enjoy the fruits of his work, or, as some one termed it, for making a man a classic during his lifetime. But this fact was not yet generally known; and meanwhile a curious contradiction developed itself in the public mind. The outer world of Mr. Browning's acquaintance continued to condemn the too great honour which was being done to him ”

“ To knaves and fools. As thus began his sway,
So, through its twenty years, one rule of right
Sufficed him: govern for the many first,
The poor mean multitude, all mouths and eyes:
Bid the few, better favoured in the brain,
Be patient, nor presume on privilege.
Help him, or else be quiet, — never crave
That he help them, — increase, forsooth, the gulf
Yawning so terribly 'twixt mind and mind
I' the world here, which his purpose was to block
At bottom, were it by an inch, and bridge,
If by a filament, no more, at top, ⁠1500
Equalize things a little! ”

“ Browning's friendships reveals itself in great measure in even a simple outline of his life. His first friends of his own sex were almost exclusively men of letters, by taste if not by profession; the circumstances of his entrance into society made this a matter of course. In later years he associated on cordial terms with men of very various interests and professions; and only writers of conspicuous merit, whether in prose or poetry, attracted him as such. No intercourse was more congenial to him than that of the higher class of English clergymen. ”

“ To the fools, not knaves: they saw him walk straight down
Each step of the eminence, as he first engaged,
And stand at last o' the level, — all he swore.
"People, and not the people's varletry,
This is the task you set myself and these! ”

“ O' the world, by ministry impossible
Before and after fulness of the days:
Some dervish desert-spectre, swordsman, saint, ⁠350
Law-giver, lyrist, — Oh, we know the names!
Quite other these than I. Our time requires
No such strange potentate, — who else would dawn, —
No fresh force till the old have spent itself.
Such seems the natural economy. ”

“ But the merit of true poetry lies so largely in its suggestiveness, that even mistaken impressions of it have their positive value and also their relative truth; and the intellectual friction which was thus created, not only in the parent society, but in its offshoots in England and America, was not their least important result.
These Societies conferred, it need hardly be said, no less real benefits on the public at large. They extended the sale of Mr. Browning's works, and with it their distinct influence for intellectual and moral good. ”

“ He confesses the disability in a pretty note to Professor Knight, written in reference to a recent meeting of the Wordsworth Society.
19, Warwick Crescent, W.: May 9, '84.
My dear Professor Knight,—I seem ungracious and ungrateful, but am neither; though, now that your festival is over, I wish I could have overcome my scruples and apprehensions. It is hard to say—when kind people press one to 'just speak for a minute'—that the business, so easy to almost anybody, is too bewildering for oneself. Ever truly yours, Robert Browning. ”

“ Do not say he needs not renounce it,—we go avowedly on the vulgar broad ground of fact—you very well know it is a fact that by his refusing to accept a challenge, or send one, on conventionally sufficient ground, he will be infallibly excluded from a certain class of society thenceforth and forever. What society should do rather, is wholly out of the question—what will be done? ”

“ E'en to the punished reptile, 'There's my oath
Restrains my foot,' objects our guide and guard,
'I must leave guardianship and guidance now:
Rather than stretch one handbreadth of the law,
I am bound to see it break from end to end.
First show me death i' the body politic:
Then prescribe pill and potion, what may please
Hohenstiel-Schwangau! all is for her sake:
'T was she ordained my service should be so.
What if the event demonstrate her unwise,
If she unwill the thing she willed before? ”