Horatio F. Brown

Nice, 1854 - 1926, Belluno

BiographyLC name authority no94036636
LC Heading: Brown, Horatio F. (Horatio Forbes), 1854-1926
Biography:
Brown, Horatio Robert Forbes (1854–1926), historian, the elder son of Hugh Horatio Brown, of Newhall House, Carlops, Midlothian, and his wife, Giulielmina Forbes, sixth daughter of Alexander Ranaldson Macdonell, last chief of Glengarry, was born at Nice, then part of the kingdom of Sardinia, on 16 February 1854. Mrs Brown, who was considerably younger than her husband, after his death took a house at Clifton, Bristol, to be near her two sons, Horatio and Allan. The boys had been entered at Clifton College, then under the headmastership of Dr John Percival, in 1864. While at school Horatio Brown made the acquaintance of John Addington Symonds, who gave lectures on the Greek poets to the Clifton College boys. Thus began one of the closest and most formative friendships of Brown's life. Symonds replaced the father that Brown had lost, and Brown took the place of the son that Symonds never had. Symonds appointed Brown his literary executor, and on Symonds's death in 1893 Brown inherited all his private papers. Because of its homosexual content, Brown made only very discreet use of this material in his two books on Symonds, John Addington Symonds, a Biography (1895) and Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds (1923), and in his will he left instructions that all papers in his possession were to be destroyed. The only exception was Symonds's autobiography, which he bequeathed to the London Library with an embargo against publication of fifty years.

From Clifton, Brown proceeded to New College, Oxford, with an exhibition which he forfeited owing to two failures to pass responsions. He was, however, encouraged to read for literae humaniores, in which he obtained a second class in 1877. He did not proceed to a degree, and consequently in the course of time became senior commoner of New College, a position which he used to say nothing but death or bankruptcy could take from him. He thought, however, that he would have made a good fellow of All Souls. He spoke French, Italian, and German, and read Greek fluently. The books which he knew he absorbed; to write verse, he said, was the greatest pleasure in life; he had a tenderness for minor poets, saying that ‘they were more like us’ (such as T. E. Brown, his Clifton master, to whose works he contributed an introduction in 1908). Contemporaries remembered him as ‘pleasant and sociable ... having artistic tastes which he could afford to indulge’, and as ‘a fair-haired, breezy out-of-doors person with a crisp Highland-Scottish speech’ (DNB).

In 1877 the family finances deteriorated, and Allan Brown emigrated to New South Wales, where he was killed in an accident in 1901. Newhall House was let, and Brown's circumstances never allowed him to live there again. In the same year the Symonds family moved to Davos. It may have been this example which decided Brown and his mother to settle at Venice. This they did, after trying Florence (where Mrs Brown's relatives, the Misses Forbes, lived), in 1879. The Browns first took an apartment on the Grand Canal, in the Palazzo Balbi-Valier. In 1885, however, they bought a tenement block on the Zattere, adjacent to the Ponte dei Incurabili, and converted it into a single residence. It was a high, narrow building, something like a ship, which commanded the Giudecca Canal and the Giudecca itself opposite. Brown, who never married, became devoted to a gondolier, Antonio Salin, whom he now installed with his wife and family in the back parts of his house. This he called Cà Torresella, from the name of the side canal as given on an old map.

In 1883 Rawdon Lubbock Brown died. He had been commissioned by the British government to calendar the Venetian state papers, preserved at the Frari, which concerned British history. His calendars, chiefly of the reports sent home by the Venetian ambassadors in London, had reached the year 1558 and were brought down to 1580 by his executor, G. Cavendish-Bentinck. Through the influence of Sir Henry Layard, head of the Anglo-American colony in Venice, Horatio Brown (he was no connection) was appointed to succeed him, and between 1889 and 1905 he compiled calendars covering the years 1581 to 1613. He occupied his mornings with transcription and epitomization, and more or less liked the work. He would return home for lunch, and then set out on the solito giro in the Fisolo (his sandolo) with Antonio to the Lido, then a nearly deserted sandbank. His Monday receptions were attended by Venetians as well as by members of the somewhat miscellaneous English colony, and were described with satirical bite by Frederick Rolfe in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1934). He was fond of climbing, belonged to the Venetian Alpine Club, and scaled peaks in Switzerland, the Tyrol, and the Friulan Alps.

Brown's appointment at the Frari had the result of turning his attention from literature to history. Sir Richard Lodge said of him:
My impression is that Brown's original tastes and interests were literary rather than historical. His work in the archives compelled him to turn to history and to become a very competent historian. He had no academic training in modern history, and he never had to teach it. The result was that in his historical writings there was always a little of what some people would call ‘amateurishness’, but which was really the freshness and vigour of one who was exploring hitherto rather unfamiliar fields—refreshing in contrast to the rather blasé treatment of most academic historians. (DNB)
Brown produced Venetian Studies (1887), a collection of articles on historical subjects; a formal history, Venice, an Historical Sketch (1893; compressed as the Venetian Republic, 1902, which Edward Armstrong declared was his best book); some chapters in the Cambridge Modern History (vol. 1, 1902, and vol. 4, 1905); and Studies in the History of Venice (2 vols., 1907), his most substantial work. Towards the end of his life he wrote a chapter for the Cambridge Medieval History (vol. 4, 1923). His interest was in politics and political theory, as, for instance, the relations between the Serene Republic and the Holy See, and he projected a book on Paolo Sarpi, on whom he delivered the Taylorian lecture at Oxford in 1900. As a recognition the University of Edinburgh conferred on him the degree of LLD, and this was followed by a gold medal from the British Academy and the rank of cavaliere from the Italian crown.

Brown's researches at the Frari had another result. He discovered the registers of printed books, the laws of the republic dealing with publishing, and other documents relating to the book trade—all unpublished. He had these transcribed, and prefixed to them chapters on the early printers and their production in The Venetian Printing Press (1891). The experts in possession of this field were not cordial to the newcomer, and Symonds disapproved of his spending time over bibliography. The value of the documents, however, was acknowledged.

During his first years in Venice Brown led something of a double life. This donnish littérateur, pillar of the Anglo-American colony, churchwarden of St George's Church, president of the Cosmopolitan Hospital, and treasurer of the Sailors' Institute, cultivated contacts and friendships among the gondoliers and fishermen, whose battles he helped to fight and whose world he described in one of his earliest and most popular books, Life on the Lagoons (1884). Like many British expatriates in Italy, he undoubtedly sought and found homosexual encounters. However, he was not by nature promiscuous, and he flinched from the unbridled sexual heresy of Symonds. He published a few mildly homoerotic poems in his collection Drift (1900); but thereafter made no further excursions into the territory of ‘pagan’ literature. The early works of Gide left him somewhat aghast, and he was apt to be scathing about the Uranian circle of poets and writers whose centre was Edward Carpenter. Because of his failure to publish the truth about Symonds, they regarded him as pusillanimous and a hindrance to the cause of homosexual emancipation. This accusation was endorsed by the Bloomsbury circle, to whom Brown was ‘an old pussycat’; but it was with justice resented by Brown, who had in fact been willing to divulge far more than Symonds's family would permit.

After the death of his formidable mother, in 1909, Venice, now invaded by American millionaires, became less congenial, and Brown felt increasingly out of sympathy with the new spirit of imperialistic hubris in Italian public life. He began to return regularly to Britain and spent every summer in Midlothian, where he either stayed at the village inn of Penicuik or enjoyed the hospitality of his friend and neighbour Lord Rosebery. The First World War put paid to his plans to exploit the shale deposits at Newhall, and hastened his decision to sell the estate. He remained in Venice during the first part of the war, opening his house as a refuge to the poor of the quarter when a bombardment was threatened, ‘My duty’, he said, ‘is to appear at the top of the stairs and say calma, calma’. As there are no Venetian cellars, the shelter was illusory. When the capture of Venice seemed imminent he said he could not face an Austrian prison, and went first to Florence and then to Scotland, where he lived among the military at the New Club in Edinburgh or in his own village of Carlops.

Brown returned to Venice in 1919, destined not to see Scotland again. Venetian society was even less agreeable after the war; his sight had deteriorated, despite an operation for cataracts at Zürich; and his income had diminished. Newhall was without a purchaser, and he had to sell Cà Torresella, retaining the mezzanino. He assisted in the arrangements for the visit of George V to the Asiago battlefields in 1923. In March 1925 Brown had a severe heart attack, from which he recovered, thanks to the skill of his doctor and the devotion of his servants. His estate had been sold, and he spent his last year serenely, dying of heart failure on 19 August 1926 at his doctor's house at Belluno, where he had gone to escape the heat. His body, like that of his mother, was cremated on the Venetian cemetery island of San Michele. A monument was put up to him in St George's Church, campo San Vio, Venice.

John Pemble
(Brown, Horatio Robert Forbes (1854–1926),” John Pemble in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, accessed September 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)

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