A Rich Full Death

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?

7

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.

The streets, glimpsed from my window, presented a prospect which was uninviting in the extreme. The rain had turned hard and punchy, coming down in squally showers beaten into every corner by a nasty wind which roamed the streets like a mob in search of victims. It found few enough, for sensible folk stayed at home, and listened to it howling in the chimney. But I could not, alas, and so, bundled up in every protection against the elements I could lay my hands on, I set off across town towards the Ponte Vecchio.

Having noted that Mr Browning is extremely particular about punctuality, I had taken care to pay him the politeness of kings myself, and was therefore both surprised and mildly annoyed when Aere was no sign of him by the time the nearby churches had finished ringing nine o’clock. I was still puzzling over his non-appearance when my attention was drawn by a crowd of men in the standard Florentine garb of slouch hats, short cloaks and cigars, clustered around a doorway to my right.

As Mr Jarves has said, Florence is a city where you may see ten men watching an eleventh buy two oranges from a street-trader with a degree of lively interest which an American crowd might bestow upon one of Mr Barnum’s raree-shows. But the natives’ aversion to foul weather is even more marked than their curiosity, and for a crowd to collect on such a day as that the spectacle, I felt, must possess some greater intrinsic interest than orange-trading. After another five minutes’ fruitless wait, I therefore walked over to investigate.

When I reached the fringes of the crowd I heard my name called, looked up-for the voice had come from above-and found Robert Browning waving at me from a window of the house before which the onlookers had gathered. The next moment he disappeared, but I shouldered my way through the crowd, which parted reluctantly to let me through, and when I reached the doorway Browning was there to lead me past the police constable on guard into the dry empty echoing spaces of the vestibule.

His eyes glittered with a hard intense brilliance.

‘It is all over!’ he hissed excitedly. ‘Come!’

We mounted the shallow slab-like steps to the first floor, three at a time. I asked what had happened, but my companion would say only that he wished me to see for myself.

Another policeman guarded the door to DeVere’s apartments, and once again Browning’s word was enough to gain us entrance, and I could not help remarking on this astonishing volte-face in the authorities’ attitude to my companion. A few days before he had been the object of a police interrogation, his house was watched and he himself followed by a police agent — for all the world like a man under suspicion. Yet here he was, a foreigner with no official standing, ordering the local constables about like one of their own officers! How on earth had he effected