At Venice for a time the quiet Albergo dell' Universo suited Browning and his sister well, but when Mrs Bronson pressed them to accept the use of a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati and the kind offer was accepted, the gain was considerable; and the Palazzo has historical associations dating from the fifteenth century which pleased Browning's imagination. It was his habit to rise early, and after a light breakfast to visit the Public Gardens with his sister. He had many friends—Mrs Bronson is our informant—whose wants or wishes he bore in mind—the prisoned elephant, the baboon, the kangaroo, the marmosets, the pelicans, the ostrich; three times, with strict punctuality, he made his rounds, and then returned to his apartment. At noon appeared the second and more substantial breakfast, at which Italian dishes were preferred. Browning wrote passionately against the vivisection of animals, and strenuously declaimed against the decoration of a lady's hat with the spoils of birds—
Clothed with murder of His best
Of harmless beings.
He praised God—for pleasure as he teaches us is praise—by heartily enjoying ortolans, "a dozen luscious lumps" provided by the cook of the Giustiniani-Recanati palace; to vary his own phrasing, he was
Fed with murder of His best
Of harmless beings,
and laughed, innocently enough, with his good sister over the delicious "mouthfuls for cardinals."[[136]] As if the pleasure of the eye in beauty gained at a bird's expense were more criminal than the gusto of the tongue in lusciousness, curbed by piquancy, gained at the expense of a dozen other birds! At three o'clock came the gondola, and it was often directed to the Lido. "I walk, even in wind and rain, for a couple of hours on Lido," Browning wrote when nearly seventy, "and enjoy the break of sea on the strip of sand as much as Shelley did in those old days."[[137]] And to another friend: "You don't know how absolutely well I am after my walking, not on the mountains merely, but on the beloved Lido. Go there, if only to stand and be blown about by the sea wind."[[138]] At one time he even talked of completing an unfinished villa on the Lido from which "the divine sunsets" could be seen, but the dream-villa faded after the manner of such dreams. Sunsets, however, and sunrises never faded from Browning's brain. "I will not praise a cloud however bright," says Wordsworth, although no one has praised them more ardently than he. From Pippa's sunrise to the sunrises of mornings when his life drew towards its close, Browning lavished his praise upon the scenery of the sky. A passage quoted by Mrs Orr from a letter written a little more than a year before his death is steeped in colour; when Pippa Passes becomes the prey of the annotating editor it will illuminate his page: "Every morning at six I see the sun rise.... My bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few sea-gulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins." The sea-gulls of which this extract speaks were, Mrs Bronson tells us, a special delight to Browning. On a day of gales "he would stand at the window and watch them as they sailed to and fro, a sure sign of heavy storms in the Adriatic." To him, as he declared, they were even more interesting than the doves of St Mark.
Sometimes his walks, guided by Mrs Bronson's daughter, "the best cicerone in the world," he said, were through the narrowest by-streets of the city, where he rejoiced in the discovery, or what he supposed to be discovery, of some neglected stone of Venice. Occasionally he examined curiously the monuments of the churches. His American friend tells at length the story of a search in the Church of San Niccolò for the tomb of the chieftain Salinguerra of Browning's own Sordello. At times he entered the bric-a-brac shops, and made a purchase of some piece of old furniture or tapestry. His rule "never to buy anything without knowing exactly what he wished to do with it" must have been interpreted liberally, for when about to move in June 1887 from Warwick Crescent to De Vere Gardens many treasures acquired in Italy were, Mrs Orr tells us, stowed away in the house which he was on the point of leaving. And the latest bibelot was always the most enchanting: "Like a child with a new toy," says Mrs Bronson, "he would carry it himself (size and weight permitting) into the gondola, rejoice over his chance in finding it, and descant eloquently upon its intrinsic merits." Thus, or with his son's assistance, came to De Vere Gardens brass lamps that had hung in Venetian chapels, the silver Jewish "Sabbath lamp," and the "four little heads"—the seasons—after which, Browning declared, he would not buy another thing for the house.[[139]] Returning from his walks on the Lido or wanderings through the little calli, he showed that unwise half-disdain, which an unenlightened masculine Herakles might have shown, for the blessedness of five o'clock tea. At dinner he was in his toilet what Mr Henry James calls the "member of society," never the poet whose necktie is a dithyramb. Good sense was his habit if not his foible. And why should we deny ourselves here the pleasure of imagining Miss Browning at these pleasant ceremonies, as Mrs Bronson describes her, wearing "beautiful gowns of rich and sombre tints, and appearing each day in a different and most dainty French cap and quaint antique jewels"? If other guests were not present, sometimes a visit to the theatre followed. The Venetian comedies of Gallina especially pleased Browning; he went to his spacious box at the Goldoni evening after evening, and did not fail to express his thanks to his "brother dramatist" for the enjoyment he had received. In his Toccata of Galuppi he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory gaiety of eighteenth-century life in Venice; but he could also remember its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy. When in 1883 the committee of the Goldoni monument asked Browning to contribute a poem to their Album he immediately complied with the request. It was "scribbled off," according to Mrs Orr, while Professor Molmenti's messenger was waiting; it was ready the day after the request reached him, says Mrs Bronson, and was probably "carefully thought out before he put pen to paper." It catches, in the happiest temper, the spirit of Goldoni's sunniest plays:
There throng the People: how they come and go,
Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb—see—
On Piazza, Calle, under Portico
And over Bridge! Dear King of Comedy,
Be honoured! Thou that didst love Venice so,
Venice, and we who love her, all love thee!
The brightness and lightness of southern life soothed Browning's northern strenuousness of mood. He would enumerate of a morning the crimes of "the wicked city" as revealed by the reports of the public press—a gondolier's oars had been conveyed away, a piece of linen a-dry had corrupted the virtue of some lightfingered Autolycus of the canals![[140]] Yet all the while much of his heart remained with his native land. He could not be happy without his London daily paper; Mrs Orr tells us how deeply interested he was in the fortunes of the British expedition for the relief of General Gordon.
In 1885 Browning's son for the first time since his childhood was in Italy. With Venice he was in his father's phrase "simply infatuated." For his son's sake, but also with the thought of a place of retreat when perhaps years should bring with them feebleness of body, Browning entered into treaty with the owner, an Austrian and an absentee, for the purchase of the Manzoni Palazzo on the Grand Canal. He considered it the most beautiful house in Venice. Ruskin had described it in the "Stones of Venice" as "a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance." It wholly captured the imagination of Browning. He not only already possessed it in his dream, but was busy opening new windows to admit the morning sunshine, and throwing out balconies, while leaving undisturbed the rich façade with its medallions in coloured marble. The dream was never realised. The vendor, Marchese Montecucculi, hoping to secure a higher price, drew back. Browning was about to force him by legal proceedings to fulfil his bargain, when it was discovered that the walls were cracked and the foundations were untrustworthy. To his great mortification the whole scheme had to be abandoned. It was not until his son in 1888, the year after his marriage, acquired possession of the Palazzo Rezzonico—"a stately temple of the rococo" is Mr Henry James's best word for it—that Browning ceased to think with regret of the lost Manzoni. At no time, however, did he design a voluntary abandonment of his life in England. When in full expectation of becoming the owner of the Palazzo Manzoni he wrote to Dr Furnivall: "Don't think I mean to give up London till it warns me away; when the hospitalities and innumerable delights grow a burden.... Pen will have sunshine and beauty about him, and every help to profit by these, while I and my sister have secured a shelter when the fogs of life grow too troublesome."
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