Browning's Italy - A Study Of Italian Life And Art In Browning

INTRODUCTION THE inspiration for much of Robert Brownings work was found elsewhere than in Italy, yet the fact that many of his most popular shorter poems as well as his great crux Sordello and his great masterpiece The Ring and the Book blossomed from the soil of Italian life and art has brought into prominence his debt to Italian sources. Doubtless his many years of happy life with Mrs. Browning in Italy, as well as her enthu- siasm for the cause of Italian independence, served to intensify the interest and delight which he felt upon his initial visit to the land that was to become one of enchantment to him. His first journey thither was taken in 1838, with a view to becoming familiar with the scenes among which Sordello had been conceived. The special experience of this visit seems to have been the admiration awak- ened in him for the beautiful little hill-town of Asolo, the play-kingdom of Caterina Cornaro. His first love among Italian cities he was wont to call it. So intense was his feeling for this town that he used frequently to dream of it. He described this dream, which had haunted him, to his friend, Mrs. Bronson I am traveling with a friend, sometimes with one person, sometimes with another, oftenest with one I do not recognize. Suddenly I see the town I love sparkling in the sun on the hillside. I cry to my companion, Look look there is Asolo Oh, do let us go there The friend invariably an- swers, Impossible we cannot stop. Pray, pray, let us go there, I entreat. No persists the friend, we cannot we must go on and leave Asolo for another day, and so I arn hurried away, and wake to know that I have been dreaming it all, both pleasure and disappointment. This deep sentimentfor Asolo lasted to the end of his life, and was enshrined not only in his poetry but in the gift which the younger Browning made the town in memory of his father namely, the establishment of the lace industry. A visitor to Asolo now will find il poeta, as he is called, held in reveren- tial memory. There he heard, in his early manhood, the little peasant child singing a snatch of Sordellos poetry as he climbed his way up the mountain toward the sky here he imagined the little silk-winder Pippa scat- tering, all-unconscious, her uplifting influences in a naughty world, so far a little candle throws its beams, - and put her into a play of which Mrs. Browning said she distinctly envied the authorship and here, at the very last, he and his sister spent royal days with their kind American friend Mrs. Bronson. He prepared his last volume, Asolando, for the press here, and dedicated it with most appreciative words to Mrs. Bronson. But a few short weeks later, upon the day this volume was published in England, he died in Venice. In a Gondola gives his impressions of Venice received on this first visit to Italy, though the poem was directly inspired by a picture of Maclises, a divine Venetian work, the poet calls it, for which he was asked to write appropriate lines. These grew into the longer poem. Another visit to Italy in 1844 is made mem- orable in Brownings literary life by his poem, The Englishman in Italy. In this is given a wonderful picture of a sirocco on the plain of Sorrento. It has his usual dramatic touch. The storm is not described for itself, but, by the way, as he tries to comfort a little Italian girl, who is frightened at the black clouds, with stories of what he sees thepeasant folk do when getting ready for the storm, and how nature is affected by the coming fury of wind and wave...