A Rich Full Death (8 page)

He was not going home, then—at least not directly. And yet he had justified his abrupt departure with talk of his wife’s illness. I had noticed at the time, but without remarking its significance, that this rather failed to tally with his mention of an ‘appointment’ he was prepared to postpone in order to see DeVere. There was no reason to suppose that the Brownings’ marriage was upon such terms that husband and wife were in the habit of making appointments to see each other.

At this point you may be forgiven for thinking that the atmosphere of continual mystery and intrigue I had been breathing since Isabel’s death had quite turned my head, so that I saw riddles in everything. Might Browning not be going quite simply to an appointment with a doctor, or a pharmacist, or lawyer, on any ordinary everyday business, before returning to his wife’s side? That indeed was what I asked myself as I hurried along over the great treacherous gleaming flagstones of the street, which was emptying earlier than usual owing to the onset of a light drizzle. All I found by way of justification for my impulse was that I was surrounded by so many mysteries that the possibility of finally resolving even one of them was not to be missed.

By the time I reached the Cathedral I had almost despaired of catching up with Browning, who is an almost aggressively brisk walker—one of those you fancy might actually tear themselves to pieces were they tied to a chair for twenty-four hours together, so necessary to their spiritual and intellectual economy does the relief that walking affords them seem to be. I was in fact on the point of giving up the chase when I suddenly caught sight of him, buying something from a street-trader. I approached, taking good care that he did not spot me, and waited until he had concluded his purchase. I then made a slight detour past the huckster’s stall, and discovered that his principal stock-in-trade appeared to consist of embroidered lace handkerchiefs.

Browning had meanwhile got ahead of me again, striding away down Via De’ Calzaioli. We were now heading south, and I thought that he must be going home after all, having picked up a little keepsake for his wife. The street runs straight into the very centre of Florence: a mess of mediaeval squalor grown like congestion in a lung upon the clear grid of the ancient Roman city. This area is a maze of the narrowest and crookedest alleys you will ever see, lined with that typical Florentine assortment of wretched tumbledown tenements with more inhabitants than a dog has fleas; ancient palaces whose rock-like walls seem to ooze the memories of evil deeds; quaint churches, half-amalgamated with the rest, preserving primitive frescoes as faded as the piety of their parishioners; the truncated stumps of the tall towers built by proud Guelf or Ghibelline to pour scorn and boiling pitch on their opponents; and little squares, like clearings in the forest, where men lounge and smoke cigars, children play noisy games, women gossip and make eyes, appear and disappear at windows.

When we left the Piazza del Duomo Browning was some hundred yards ahead of me, a lead which by dint of breaking almost into a run I had gradually reduced to half that distance. I dared not approach closer, after the incident of the police spy, for if he had noticed my presence he must have become suspicious. Thus I was obliged to hang back to some extent, and when Browning suddenly turned left into a side-street I was some fifty yards behind him.

I increased my pace directly, and on reaching the corner was just in time to see him cross into the next street. I could tell by the sound of his footsteps that he had turned neither right nor left, but continued straight on, and I hastened on through the gloom towards the feeble oil-lamp at the next street-corner.

When I reached it I paused: all was still. The only sound was the steady hush of the rain, which had grown more persistent.

The next street, named after Dante Aligheri, whose house stands there, was too long for Browning to have reached the other end before I gained the corner where I now stood. He must therefore have entered one of the buildings in it. But which? There was no way of telling, save by keeping watch until such time as he might emerge—which is what I determined to do.

I was counting on his reappearing almost immediately. ‘He has gone to call on a friend on his way home’ I thought. ‘He will stay but a few minutes—is not his wife ill and anxiously awaiting his return?’

So I reasoned; but I was mistaken. Ï crouched in a doorway for more than three quarters of an hour, but in vain; of Mr Browning there was no further sign. Meanwhile the rain grew ever heavier, until my clothes were quite soaked. In the end, cold and dispirited, I abandoned my vigil.

Perhaps you think that I was foolish to risk my health like that—despite the fact that my lungs are quite mended now, and I feel younger and healthier than ever—to risk it for nothing, for a mere whim of curiosity, an unseemly nosiness about matters that are none of my business. And so before going on to describe what happened the next day, let me explain; let me give you the good news I spoke of at the beginning of this letter, since without it you will be unable to understand even what I do — never mind these other mysteries.

First, though, you must understand
me
more deeply—must understand, above all, that I have been one who, while still young, knew—
blew
, mind!—that he had been born to excel greatly.

At what, I could not say—nor did it seem important. I dabbled in writing, because I could write, but often it seemed to me that my soul might worship more aptly at some other altar. Music moved me very greatly, and Art—but as I could never tell a crotchet from a minim, or draw a passable likeness, I stuck to words, over which, though poor things, I had at least some power. It mattered little what I achieved: that was for the future, of which I knew only that it would be glorious. For the moment it was enough, and more than enough, just gloriously to
be;
to feel, think, plan, dream …

Oh Prescott, those days! I walked, I talked, I sang and danced and laughed and wept with spirits! The rhythms of the Universe sometimes whispered, at others roared through me, at the behest of rules so ancient and all-embracing that it is absurd to speak of rules at all, as of something that might be broken.

Such, then, is what I was at five, at ten, at fifteen. Much, though by no means all, survived, surprisingly intact, into my twenties—a mere decade ago! It might be a century. But then the rot set in: slowly at first, and by fits and starts, I began to have doubts. What had I achieved? True, my room was full of paper—as full of paper as my life was empty of anything else, for I had sold my soul and kept my end of the bargain—but was all that paper covered in my scribbles worth any more than it had been blank, fresh from the stationers at a dollar a ream? Was it not rather worth
less?
I had spoiled it, and added nothing. That was the terrible truth which, over the course of several years, I gradually came to admit to myself.

Note the point—it was not the world’s judgment which sank me, but my own. I was quite prepared to be ignored, despised, rejected by my contemporaries. It was, indeed, almost a requirement; for what, after all, did they know? Was true greatness ever recognised or rewarded? Their contempt would, all other things being equal, have set the seal upon my belief in my stature and assured my ultimate triumph—posthumous, if necessary. I was ready even for that. But the wound I had now was internal, and mortal: a slow draining-away of that youthful faith, drop by drop, until nothing remained.

When this knowledge truly came home to me, and had settled down, coiled like a foul worm in my breast—well, my friend, just try and imagine (you won’t succeed, but try) that one day you gradually came to the realisation that instead of being the eminent and well-respected Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Tuft’s University, Medford, Massachusetts, you were in fact the inmate of quite another kind of institution! In short, that you were, and had long been, a pitiful lunatic—but one for whom there was apparently some reason to hope, since your delusions were now happily beginning to lose their force, and there was every prospect that you would soon be able to grasp for the first time the realities of your position! What a joyful awakening that would be, eh Prescott?

It was in much the same spirit that I gradually awakened from
my
delirium—to what? A world stripped bare of any inducement to endure its puerile crudities a moment longer. And when you consider that this was also the period when my health collapsed and when Isabel finally tired of teasing me—well, all in all I think it is a wonder I did not put an end to my miserable existence there and then.

Instead, I drifted to Europe, and round Europe, until I came to rest with all the other flotsam and jetsam of every nationality in this pleasant backwater. Florence is the right place for us weightless men: a burned-out city with a past too massy for its present, and no future at all. We gravitate towards it as naturally as waste paper and dead leaves end up in an angle of wall, whirling about in a miniature tornado of febrile energy—hollowly gay, exhausting itself in a restless round, changing nothing and itself unchanged.

Oh, I know that from where you sit at your daily grind in dull joyless New England, it must seem a splendid and an enviable thing, this exile existence of mine—a continual dream of Art, Romance and Pleasure in a land where the good life’s to be had at prices which even a Joseph Eakin can find little to complain about; where I have my dinner sent up from the trattoria with a flask of Montepulciano, and a valet in to cook my eggs and make my coffee in the morning, and a girl to clean and wash, and can walk or ride or drive out any day to see what’s best and costs nothing: the most beautiful landscapes in the world; and not mind Fra Somebody’s frescoes, but choose instead to study — what luxury!—that lizard there upon the sun-hot wall, so absolutely still and weighty you’d swear him incapable of movement, a toy worked in gold and bronze by Cellini, except if you blink he’s gone! All this, Prescott, and much more, upon the miserable pittance my father sends, thinking it not quite enough to live on (as would be true in Boston) so that I’ll be obliged sooner or later to turn my hand to some earnest trade—and in the meantime he’s done his duty by his feckless idle offspring.

But after a while these marvels pall, as marvels will—is this not why literary visions of hell are so much more convincing than those of paradise? And what’s your exile life then but a heap of motley moments pasted at random into a commonplace book: some good, some bad, all meaningless, devoid of any sense of purpose, neither redeemed nor threatened by the informing touch of the Real.

And then one day I had my insight! I had been reading Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists
—reading it
here
in the city where Vasari was born, and which he never ceased to regard—like the majority of his fellow-citizens—as the centre and cynosure of the world; reading it amid the surviving works of those giants of whom he writes with the same easy yet undiminishing familiarity as Homer of his heroes. And as I came to know this second-rate dauber, who walked with the Great and was transfigured, something stirred in the back of my own brain. Like Vasari, I was not Great—that bitter lesson had been learned. But had Greatness therefore been abolished? Because I had fallen short, did the goal cease to exist? And were there not others, more worthy than I, who would grasp that torch handed down through the ages? All that I had to do, then, was to find one of these men who have that Power, to stand close to him, and draw off a portion of that Greatness from him, as Buonarroti’s Adam draws Life itself from his Creator’s finger.

But first I had to find the man! No easy task, and one of which I have often despaired. He had, first, to be truly Great—for, having duped myself for dreary years, I have no wish now to become another’s dupe. First, then, the threshing, to tell wheat from chaff—nor could I make the task easier by following the crowd to one of the idols of the age such as Mr Powers, for I had no wish to worship from afar, one of a throng. My Great Man would be mine alone!
My
glory would lie in my having recognised
his
before it became a mere commonplace, parroted in every review.

And now at last I think my efforts are all rewarded, Prescott, and I almost dare to say that I have found my man! I shall speak no more of this for the moment—though I expect to talk of nothing else for the remainder of my life—for first I must conclude my account of this bad business by describing the dramatic developments which ensued the following morning. But can you now understand my interest in every detail of Browning’s life, in every one of his words and deeds, however obscure or apparently trivial? For what particle of Greatness is not itself Great, and which of its meanest features is unworthy of our attention?

When I awoke the next morning the weather had changed completely. The sky weighed down like a cauldron lid upon the city, which on such a day can appear the most dreary, inhospitable, depressing place on earth. All its picturesque charms wither and shrivel away to nothing, illusions foisted on us by our desire to escape the realities of our own bleak age. Seen with such a cold eye, what are all these palaces and towers and walls and gates but the grim relics of a history that was anything but gay, if the truth be known. It is on such days that the exile asks himself for the hundredth time just what on earth he is doing here, ekeing out a tenuous unreal existence in the shadow of these massive monuments to Power and Wealth and Privilege and Will: these grim memorials to the mighty Dead, who so terribly outnumber—outeverything!—us.