Chapter 15

1863-1869

Pornic--'James Lee's Wife'--Meeting at Mr. F. Palgrave's--Letters to
Miss Blagden--His own Estimate of his Work--His Father's Illness and
Death; Miss Browning--Le Croisic--Academic Honours; Letter to the Master
of Balliol--Death of Miss Barrett--Audierne--Uniform Edition of his
Works--His rising Fame--'Dramatis Personae'--'The Ring and the Book';
Character of Pompilia.

The most constant contributions to Mr. Browning's history are supplied
during the next eight or nine years by extracts from his letters to Miss
Blagden. Our next will be dated from Ste.-Marie, near Pornic, where he
and his family again spent their holiday in 1864 and 1865. Some idea
of the life he led there is given at the close of a letter to Frederic
Leighton, August 17, 1863, in which he says:

'I live upon milk and fruit, bathe daily, do a good morning's work, read
a little with Pen and somewhat more by myself, go to bed early, and get
up earlyish--rather liking it all.'

This mention of a diet of milk and fruit recalls a favourite habit of
Mr. Browning's: that of almost renouncing animal food whenever he went
abroad. It was partly promoted by the inferior quality of foreign meat,
and showed no sign of specially agreeing with him, at all events in his
later years, when he habitually returned to England looking thinner and
more haggard than before he left it. But the change was always congenial
to his taste.

A fuller picture of these simple, peaceful, and poetic Pornic days comes
to us through Miss Blagden, August 18:

'. . . This is a wild little place in Brittany, something like that
village where we stayed last year. Close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen
houses, perfectly lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by
the sea for miles. Our house is the Mayor's, large enough, clean and
bare. If I could, I would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out
of the very earth sometimes as I sit here at the window; with the little
church, a field, a few houses, and the sea. On a weekday there is nobody
in the village, plenty of hay-stacks, cows and fowls; all our butter,
eggs, milk, are produced in the farm-house. Such a soft sea, and such a
mournful wind!

'I wrote a poem yesterday of 120 lines, and mean to keep writing whether
I like it or not. . . .'

That 'window' was the 'Doorway' in 'James Lee's Wife'. The sea, the
field, and the fig-tree were visible from it.

A long interval in the correspondence, at all events so far as we are
concerned, carries us to the December of 1864, and then Mr. Browning
wrote:

'. . . on the other hand, I feel such comfort and delight in doing the
best I can with my own object of life, poetry--which, I think, I never
could have