Robert Browning by Edward Dowden (page 2)

i. 474.]

[Footnote 24: Letters of D.G. Rossetti to William Allingham, p. 168.]

[Footnote 25: The above statement is substantially that of Browning; but on certain points his memory misled him. Whoever is interested in the matter should consult Professor Lounsbury’s valuable article “A Philistine View of a Browning Play” in _The Atlantic Monthly_, December 1899, where questions are raised and some corrections are ingeniously made.]

[Footnote 26: An uncle seems to have accompanied him. See _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 57: and (for Shelley’s Grave) i. 292; for “Sordello” at Naples, i., 349.]

[Footnote 27: In later years no friendship existed between the two. We read in Mr. W.M. Rossetti’s Diary for 1869, “4th July…. I see Browning dislikes Trelawny quite as much as Trelawny dislikes him (which is not a little.)” _Rossetti Papers_, p. 401.]

[Footnote 28: See Mr R. Holt Hutton’s article on Browning in “Essays Theological and Literary.”]

[Footnote 29: Luria withdraws from life “to prevent the harm Florence will do herself by striking him.” _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 427.]

Chapter IV

The Maker of Plays–_(Continued)_

The women of the dramas, with one or two exceptions, are composed of fewer elements than the men. A variety of types is presented, but each personality is somewhat constrained and controlled by its idea; the free movement, the iridescence, the variety in oneness, the incalculable multiplicity in unity, of real character are not always present. They admit of definition to a degree which places them at a distance from the inexplicable open secrets of Shakespeare’s creation; they lack the simple mysteriousness, the transparent obscurity of nature. With a master-key the chambers of their souls can one after another be unlocked. Ottima is the carnal passion of womanhood, full-blown, dazzling in the effrontery of sin, yet including the possibility, which Browning conceives as existing at the extreme edge of every expansive ardour, of being translated into a higher form of passion which abolishes all thought of self. Anael, of _The Return of the Druses_, is pure and measureless devotion. The cry of “Hakeem!” as she falls, is not an act of faith but of love; it pierces through the shadow of the material falsehood to her one illuminated truth of absolute love, like that other falsehood which sanctifies the dying lips of Desdemona. The sin of Mildred is the very innocence of sin, and does not really alter the simplicity of her character; it is only the girlish rapture of giving, with no limitation, whatever may prove a bounty to him whom she loves:–

Come what, come will,
You have been happy.

The remorse of Mildred is the remorse of innocence, the anguish of one wholly unlearned in the dark colours of guilt. This tragedy of Mildred and Mertoun is the _Romeo and Juliet_ of Browning’s cycle of dramas. But Mildred’s cousin Guendolen, by virtue of her swift, womanly penetration and her brave protectiveness of distressed girlhood, is a kinswoman of Beatrice who supported the injured daughter of Leonato in a comedy of Shakespeare which rings with laughter.

Polyxena, the Queen of Sardinia–a daughter not of Italy but of the Rhineland–is, in her degree, an eighteenth century representative of the woman of the ancient Teutonic tribes, grave, resolute, wise, and possessing the authority of wisdom. She, whose heart and brain work bravely together like loyal comrades, is strongly but also simply, conceived as the helpmate, the counsellor, and, in the old sense of the word, the comforter of her husband. Something of almost maternal feeling, as happens at times in real life, mingles with her wifely affection for Charles, who indeed may prove on occasions a fractious son. Like a wise guardian-angel she remembers on these occasions that he is only a man, and that men in their unwisdom may grow impatient of unalleviated guardian-angelhood; he will by and by discover his error, and she can bide her time. Perhaps, like other heroines of Browning, Polyxena is too constantly and uniformly herself; yet, no doubt, it is right that opaline, shifting hues should not disturb our impression of a character whose special virtue is steadfastness. The Queen of the English Charles, who is eager to counsel, and always in her petulance and folly to counsel ill, is slightly sketched; but she may be thanked for one admirable speech–her first–when Strafford, worn and fevered in the royal service, has just arrived from Ireland, and passing out from his interview with the King is encountered by her:–

Is it over then?
Why he looks yellower than ever! Well At least we shall not hear eternally
Of service–services: he’s paid at least.

The Lady Carlisle of the same play–a creature in the main of Browning’s imagination–had the play been Elizabethan or Jacobean would have followed her lord in a page’s dress, have lived on half a smile a day, and perhaps have succeeded in dying languishingly and happily upon his sword; she is not quite unreal, nor yet quite real; something much better than a stage property and not wholly a living woman; more of a Beaumont and Fletcher personage of the boards–and as such effective–than a Shakespearian piece of nature. The theatrical limbo to which such almost but not quite embodied shadows ultimately troop, is capacious.

In Browning’s dramatic scene of 1853, _In a Balcony_, he created with unqualified success “a very woman” in the enamoured Queen, whose heart at fifty years beats only more wildly and desperately than a girl’s.[30] The young lovers, Constance and Norbert, are a highly meritorious pair, who express their passion in excellent and eloquent periods; we have seen their like before, and since. But the Queen, with her unslaked thirst for the visionary wells under the palm-trees, who finds herself still amid the burning sands, is an original and tragic figure–a royal Mlle. de Lespinasse, and crowned with fiery and immitigable pain. Although she has returned the “glare” of Constance with the glare of “a panther,” the Queen is large-hearted. The guards, it is true, arrive as the curtain falls; but those readers who have wasted their tender emotion on a couple of afflicted prisoners or decapitated young persons, whom mother Nature can easily replace, are mistaken. If the Queen does not die that night, she will rise next morning after sleepless hours, haggard, not fifty but eighty years old, and her passion will, heroically slay itself in an act of generosity.[31] Little more, however, than a situation is represented in this dramatic scene. Of Browning’s full-length portraits of women in the dramas, the finest piece of work is the portrait of the happiest woman–the play-Duchess of Juliers, no longer Duchess, but ever

Our lady of dear Ravestein.

Colombe is no incarnated idea but a complete human being, irreducible to a formula, whom we know the better because there is always in her more of exquisite womanhood to be discovered. Even the too fortunate Valence–all readers of his own sex must pronounce him too fortunate–will for ever be finding her anew.

In the development of his dramatic style Browning more and more lost sight of the theatre and its requirements; his stage became more and more a stage of the mind. _Strafford_, his first play, is the work of a novice, who has little of the instinct for theatrical effect, but who sets his brain to invent striking tableaux, to prepare surprises, to exhibit impressive attitudes, to calculate–not always successfully–the angle of a speech, so that it may with due impact reach the pit. The opening scene expounds the situation. In the second Wentworth and Pym confront each other; the King surprises them; Wentworth lets fall the hand of Pym, as the stage tradition requires; as Wentworth withdraws the Queen enters to unmake what he has made, and the scene closes with a tableau expressing the sentimental weakness of Charles:

Come, dearest!–look, the little fairy, now That cannot reach my shoulder! Dearest, come!

And so proceeds the tragedy, with much that ought to be dear to the average actor, which yet is somehow not always even theatrically happy. The pathos of the closing scene where Strafford is discovered in The Tower, sitting with his children, is theatrical pathos of the most correct kind, and each little speech of little William and little Anne is uttered as much for the audience as for their father, implying in every word “See, how we, poor innocents, heighten the pity of it.” The hastily written _A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon_ is, perhaps, of Browning’s dramas the best fitted for theatrical representation. Yet it is incurably weak in the motives which determine the action; and certain passages are almost ludicrously undramatic. If Romeo before he flung up his ladder of ropes had paused, like Mertoun, to salute his mistress with a tenor morceau from the opera, it is to be feared that runaways’ and other eyes would not have winked, and that old Capulet would have come upon the scene in his night-gown, prepared to hasten the catastrophe with a long sword. Yet _A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon_, with its breadth of outline, its striking situations, and its mastery of the elementary passions–love and wrath and pride and pity–gives us assurance that Browning might have taken a place of considerable distinction had he been born in an age of great dramatic poetry. If it is weak in construction so–though in a less degree–are Webster’s _Duchess of Malfi_, and Shakespeare’s _Cymbeline_.

In _King Victor and King Charles_ Browning adopted, and no doubt deliberately, a plain, unfigured and uncoloured style, as suiting both the characters and the historical subject. The political background of this play and that of _Strafford_ hardly entitles either drama to be named political. Browning was a student of history, but it was individuals and not society that interested him. The affairs of England and the affairs of Sardinia serve to throw out the figures of the chief _dramatis persons_; those affairs are not considered for their own sake. Certain social conditions are studied as they enter into and help to form an individual. The Bishop who orders his tomb at St Praxed’s is in part a product of the Italian Renaissance, but the causes are seen only in their effects upon the character of a representative person. If the plain, substantial style of _King Victor and King Charles_ is proper to a play with such a hero as Charles and such a heroine as Polyxena, the coloured style, rich in imagery, is no less right in _The Return of the Druses_, where religious and chivalric enthusiasm are blended with the enthusiasm of the passion of love. But already Browning was ceasing to bear in mind the conditions of the stage. Certain pages where Djabal and Khalil, Djabal and Anael, Anael and Loys are the speakers, might be described as dialogues conducted by means of “asides,” and even the imagination of a reader resents a construction of scenes which requires these duets of soliloquies, these long sequences of the audible-inaudible. With the “very tragical mirth” of the second part of Chiappino’s story of moral and political disaster, the spectators and the stage have wholly disappeared from Browning’s theatre; the imaginary dialogue is highly dramatic, in one sense of the word, and is admirable in its kind, but we transport ourselves best to the market-place of Faenza by sitting in an easy chair.

_Pippa Passes_ is singular in its construction; scenes detached, though not wholly disconnected, are strung pendant-wise upon the gold thread, slender but sufficiently strong, of an idea; realism in art, as we now call it, hangs from a fine idealism; this substantial globe of earth with its griefs, its grossnesses, its heroism, swings suspended from the seat of God. The idea which gives unity to the whole is not a mere fantasy. The magic practised by the unconscious Pippa through her songs is of that genuine and beautiful kind which the Renaissance men of science named “Magia Naturalis.” It is no fantasy but a fact that each of us influences the lives of others more or less every day, and at times in a peculiar degree, in ways of which we are not aware. Let this fact be seized with imaginative intensity, and let the imagination render it into a symbol–we catch sight of Pippa with her songs passing down the grass-paths and under the pine-wood of Asolo. Her only service to God on this one holiday of a toilsome year is to be glad. She misconceives everything that concerns “Asolo’s Four Happiest Ones”–to her fancy Ottima is blessed with love, Jules is no victim of an envious trick, Luigi’s content in his lot is deep and unassailable, and Monsignor is a holy and beloved priest; and, unawares to her, in modes far other than she had imagined, each of her dreams comes true; even Monsignor for one moment rises into the sacred avenger of God. Her own service, though she knows it not, is more than a mere twelve-hours’ gladness; she, the little silk-winder, rays forth the influences of a heart that has the potency ascribed to gems of unflawed purity; and such influences–here embodied in the symbol of a song–are among the precious realities of our life. Nowhere in literature has the virtue of mere innocent gladness been more charmingly imagined than in her morning outbreak of expectancy, half animal glee, half spiritual joy; the “whole sunrise, not to be suppressed” is a limitless splendour, but the reflected beam cast up from the splash of her ewer and dancing on her poor ceiling is the same in kind; in the shrub-house up the hill-side are great exotic blooms, but has not Pippa her one martagon lily, over which she queens it? With God all service ranks the same, and she shall serve Him all this long day by gaiety and gratitude.

_Pippa Passes_ is a sequence of dramatic scenes, with lyrics interspersed, and placed in a lyrical setting; the figures dark or bright, of the painting are “ringed by a flowery bowery angel-brood” of song. But before his _Bells and Pomegranates_ were brought to a close Browning had discovered in the short monodrama, lyrical or reflective, the most appropriate vehicle for his powers of passion and of thought. Here a single situation sufficed; characters were seen rightly in position; the action of the piece was wholly internal; a passion could be isolated, and could be either traced through its varying moods or seized in its moment of culmination; the casuistry of the brain could be studied apart,–it might have its say uninterrupted, or it might be suddenly encountered and dissipated by some spearlike beam of light from the heart or soul; the traditions of a great literary form were not here a cause of embarrassment; they need not, as in work for the theatre, be laboriously observed or injuriously violated; the poet might assert his independence and be wholly original.

And original, in the best sense of the word–entirely true to his highest self–Browning was in the “Dramatic Lyrics” of 1842, and the “Dramatic Romances and Lyrics” of 1845. His senses were at once singularly keen and energetic, and singularly capacious of delight; his eyes were active instruments of observation, and at the same time were possessed by a kind of rapture in form–and not least in fantastic form–and a rapture still finer in the opulence and variety of colour. In these poems we are caught into what may truly be called an enthusiasm of the senses; and presently we find that the senses, good for their own sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit. Having returned from his first visit to southern Italy, the sights and sounds, striking upon the retina and the auditory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience, still attack the eye and ear _as_ he writes his _Englishman in Italy_, and by virtue of their eager obsession demand and summon forth the appropriate word.[32] The fisherman from Amalfi pitches down his basket before us,

All trembling alive
With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit, –You touch the strange lumps,
And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner Of horns and of humps.

Or it is the “quick rustle-down of the quail-nets,” or the “whistling pelt” of the olives, when Scirocco is loose, that invades our ears. And by and by among the mountains the play of the senses expands, and the soul has its great word to utter:

God’s own profound
Was above me, and round me the mountains, And under, the sea,
And within me, my heart to bear witness hat was and shall be.

Not less vivid is the vision of the light craft with its lateen sail outside Triest, in which Waring–the Flying Englishman–is seen “with great grass hat and kerchief black,” looking up for a moment, showing his “kingly throat,” till suddenly in the sunset splendour the boat veers weather-ward and goes off, as with a bound, “into the rose and golden half of the sky.” And what animal-painter has given more of the leonine wrath in mane and tail and fixed wide eyes than Browning has conveyed into his lion of King Francis with three strokes of the brush? Or it is only a bee upon a sunflower on which the gazer’s eye is fixed, and we get the word of Rudel:

And therefore bask the bees
On my flower’s breast, as on a platform broad.

Or–a grief to booklovers!–the same eye is occupied by all the grotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy tome lurking in the plum tree’s crevice of Browning’s _Garden Fancy_, which creeps and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.[33] Or it is night and moonlight by the sandy shore, and for a moment–before love enters–all the mind of the impressionist artist lives merely in the eye:

The grey sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep
As I gain the cove with pushing prow.

If Browning did not rejoice in perfect health and animal spirits–and in the letters to Miss Barrett we hear of frequent headaches and find a reference to his pale thin face as seen in a mirror–he had certainly the imagination of perfect vitality and of those “wild joys of living,” sung by the young harper David in that poem of _Saul_, which appeared as a fragment in the _Bells and Pomegranates_, and as a whole ten years later, with the awe and rapture of the spirit rising above the rapture of the senses.[34]

Of these poems of 1842 and 1845 one _The Pied Piper_, was written in the spirit of mere play and was included in _Bells and Pomegranates_ only to make up a number, for which the printer required more copy. One or two–the flesh and blood incarnations of the wines of France and Hungary, _Claret_ and _Tokay_, are no more than clever caprices of the fancy. One, _The Lost Lender_, remotely suggested by the conservatism of Wordsworth’s elder days, but possibly deflected by some of the feeling attributed to Pym in relation to Strafford of the drama, and certainly detached from direct personal reference to Wordsworth, expresses Browning’s liberal sentiment in politics. One, the stately _Artemis Prologuizes_, is the sole remaining fragment of a classical drama, “Hippolytus and Aricia,” composed in 1840, “much against my endeavour,” wrote the poet,–a somewhat enigmatical phrase–“while in bed with a fever.” A considerable number of the poems may be grouped together as expressions or demonstrations of various passions, central among which is the passion of love. A few, and these conspicuous for their masterly handling of novel themes, treat of art, and the feeling for art as seen in the painter of pictures or in the connoisseur. Nor is the interpretation of religious emotion–though in a phase that may be called abnormal–wholly forgotten.

With every passion that expands the spirit beyond the bounds of self, Browning, as the dramas have made evident to us, is in cordial sympathy. The reckless loyalty, with its animal spirits and its dash of grief, the bitterer because grief must be dismissed, of the _Cavalier Tunes_, is true to England and to the time in its heartiness and gallant bluffness. The leap-up of pride and joy in a boy’s heart at the moment of death in his Emperor’s cause could hardly be more intensely imagined than it is in the poem of the French camp, and all is made more real and vivid by the presence of that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in presence of a death so devoted. And side by side with this poem of generous enthusiasm is placed the poem of passion reduced to its extreme of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy–the _Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister_; a grotesque insect, spitting ineffectual poison, is placed under the magnifying-glass of the comic spirit, and is discovered to be–a brother in religion! A noble hatred, transcending personal considerations, mingles with a noble and solemn love–the passion of country–in the Italian exile’s record of his escape from Austrian pursuers; with the clear-obscure of his patriotic melancholy mingles the proud recollection of the Italian woman who was his saviour, over whose conjectured happiness as peasant wife and peasant mother the exile bows with a tender joy. The examples of abnormal passion are two–that of the amorous homicide who would set on one perfect moment the seal of eternity, in _Porphyria’s Lover_, and that of the other occupier of the mad-house cells, Johannes Agricola, whose passion of religion is pushed to the extreme of a mystical antinomianism.

Browning’s poems of the love of man and woman are seldom a simple lyrical cry, but they are not on this account the less true in their presentment of that curious masquer and disguiser–Love. When love takes possession of a nature which is complex, affluents and tributaries from many and various faculties run into the main stream. With Browning the passion is indeed a regal power, but intellect, imagination, fancy are its office-bearers for a time; then in a moment it resumes all authority into its own hands, resolves of a sudden all that is complex into the singleness of joy or pain, fuses all that is manifold into the unity of its own life and being. His dramatic method requires that each single faculty should be seen in the environment of a character, and that its operations should be clothed more or less in circumstance. And since love has its ingenuities, its fine-spun and far-flung threads of association, its occult symbolisms, Browning knows how to press into the service of the central emotion objects and incidents and imagery which may seem remote or curious or fantastic or trivial or even grotesque. In _Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli_ love which cometh by the hearing of the ear (for Rudel is a sun-worshipper who has never seen his sun) is a pure imaginative devotion to the ideal. In _Count Gismond_ love is the deliverer; the motive of the poem is essentially that of the Perseus and Andromeda myth refined upon and mediaevalised. In _Cristine_ love is the interpreter of life; a moment of high passion explains, and explains away, all else that would obscure the vision of what is best and most real in this our world and in the worlds that are yet unattained. From a few lines written to illustrate a Venetian picture by Maclise _In a Gondola_ was evolved. If Browning was not entirely accurate in his topography of Venice, he certainly did not fail in his sense of the depth and opulence of its colour. Here the abandonment to passion is relieved by the quaint ingenuities and fancies of love that seeks a momentary refuge from its own excess, and then returns more eagerly upon itself; and the shadow of death is ever at hand, but like the shadows of a Venetian painter it glows with colour.

The motives of two narrative poems, _The Glove_ and _The Flight of the Duchess_, have much in common; they lie in the contrast between the world of convention and the world of reality. In each the insulter of proprieties, the breaker of bounds is a woman; in each the choice lies between a life of pretended love and vain dignities and a life of freedom and true love; and in each case the woman makes her glad escape from what is false to what is true. In restating the incident of the glove Browning brings into play his casuistry, but casuistry is here used to justify a passion which the poet approves, to elucidate, not to obscure, what he represents as the truth of the situation. _The Flight of the Duchess_ in part took its rise “from a line, ‘Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!’–the burden of a song, which the poet, when a boy, heard a woman singing on a Guy Fawkes’ day.” Some two hundred lines were given to Hood for his magazine, at a time when Hood needed help, and death was approaching him. The poem was completed some months later. It is written, like _The Glove_, in verse that runs for swiftness’ sake, and that is pleased to show its paces on a road rough with boulder-like rhymes. The little Duchess is a wild bird caged in the strangely twisted wirework of artificial modes and forms. She is a prisoner who is starved for real life, and stifles; the fresh air and the open sky are good, are irresistible–and that is the whole long poem in brief. Such a small prisoner, all life and fire, was before many months actually delivered from her cage in Wimpole Street, and Robert Browning himself, growing in stature amid his incantations, played the part of the gipsy.

Another Duchess, who pined for freedom and never attained it, has her cold obituary notice from her bereaved Duke’s lips in the _Dramatic Lyrics_ of 1842. _My Last Duchess_ was there made a companion poem to _Count Gismond_; they are the pictures of the bond-woman and of the freed-woman in marriage. The Italian Duchess revolts from the law of wifehood no further than a misplaced smile or a faint half-flush, betraying her inward breathings and beamings of the spirit; the noose of the ducal proprieties is around her throat, and when it tightens “then all smiles stopped together.” Never was an agony hinted with more gentlemanly reserve. But the poem is remarkable chiefly as gathering up into a typical representative a whole phase of civilisation. The Duke is Italian of Renaissance days; insensible in his egoistic pride to the beautiful humanity alive before him; yet a connoisseur of art to his finger-tips; and after all a Duchess can be replaced, while the bronze of Glaus of Innsbruck–but the glory of his possessions must not be pressed, as though his nine hundred years old name were not enough. The true gift of art–Browning in later poems frequently insists upon this–is not for the connoisseur or collector who rests in a material possession, but for the artist who, in the zeal of creation, presses through his own work to that unattainable beauty, that flying joy which exists beyond his grasp and for ever lures him forward. In _Pictor Ignotus_ the earliest study in his lives of the painters was made by the poet. The world is gross, its touch unsanctifies the sanctities of art; yet the brave audacity of genius is able to penetrate this gross world with spiritual fire. Browning’s unknown painter is a delicate spirit, who dares not mingle his soul with the gross world; he has failed for lack of a robust faith, a strenuous courage. But his failure is beautiful and pathetic, and for a time at least his Virgin, Babe, and Saint will smile from the cloister wall with their “cold, calm, beautiful regard.” And yet to have done otherwise to have been other than this; to have striven like that youth–the Urbinate–men praise so! More remarkable, as the summary of a civilisation, than _My Last Duchess_, is the address of the worldling Bishop, who lies dying, to the “nephews” who are sons of his loins. In its Paganism of Christianity–which lacks all the manly virtue of genuine Paganism–that portion of the artistic Renaissance which leans towards the world and the flesh is concentrated and is given as in quintessential form. The feeble fingers yet cling to the vanities of earth; the speaker babbles not of green fields but of his blue lump of lapis-lazuli; and the last word of all is alive only with senile luxury and the malice of perishing recollection.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 30: _In a Balcony_, published in _Men and Women_, 1855, is said to have been written two years previously at the Baths of Lucca.]

[Footnote 31: I had written the above–and I leave it as I wrote it–before I noticed the following quoted from the letter of a friend by Mrs Arthur Bronson in her article Browning in Venice: “Browning seemed as full of dramatic interest in reading ‘In a Balcony’ as if he had just written it for our benefit. One who sat near him said that it was a natural sequence that the step of the guard should be heard coming to take Norbert to his doom, as, with a nature like the queen’s, who had known only one hour of joy in her sterile life, vengeance swift and terrible would follow on the sudden destruction of her happiness. ‘Now I don’t quite think that,’ answered Browning, as if he were following out the play as a spectator. ‘The queen has a large and passionate temperament, which had only once been touched and brought into intense life. She would have died by a knife in her heart. The guard would have come to carry away her dead body.’ ‘But I imagine that most people interpret it as I do,’ was the reply. ‘Then,’ said Browning, with quick interest, ‘don’t you think it would be well to put it in the stage directions, and have it seen that they were carrying her across the back of the stage?'”]

[Footnote 32: Browning’s eyes were in a remarkable degree unequal in their power of vision; one was unusually long-sighted; the other, with which he could read the most microscopic print, unusually short-sighted.]

[Footnote 33: See a very interesting passage on Browning’s “odd liking for ‘vermin'” in _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B._. i. 370, 371: “I always liked all those wild creatures God ‘_sets up for themselves_.'” “It seemed awful to watch that bee–he seemed so _instantly_ from the teaching of God.”]

[Footnote 34: Of the first part of _Saul_ Mr Kenyon said finely that “it reminded him of Homer’s shield of Achilles thrown into lyrical whirl and life” _(Letters R.B. and E.B.B_. i. 326).]

Chapter V

Love and Marriage

In 1841, John Kenyon, formerly a school-fellow of Browning’s father, now an elderly lover of literature and of literary society, childless, wealthy, generous-hearted, proposed to Browning that he should call upon Elizabeth Barrett, Kenyon’s cousin once removed, who was already distinguished as a writer of ardent and original verse. Browning consented, but the poetess “through some blind dislike of seeing strangers”–as she afterwards told a correspondent–declined, alleging, not untruly, as a ground of refusal, that she was then ailing in health.[35] Three years later Kenyon sent his cousin’s new volumes of _Poems_ as a gift to Sarianna Browning; her brother, lately returned from Italy, read these volumes with delight and admiration, and found on one of the pages a reference in verse to his “Pomegranates” of a kind that could not but give him a vivid moment of pleasure. Might he not relieve his sense of obligation by telling Miss Barrett, in a letter, that he admired her work? Mr Kenyon encouraged the suggestion, and though to love and be silent might on the whole have been more to Browning’s liking, he wrote–January 10, 1845–and writing truthfully he wrote enthusiastically.[36] Miss Barrett, never quite recovered from a riding accident in early girlhood, and stricken down for long in both soul and body by the shock of her brother’s death by drowning, lay from day to day and month to month, in an upper room of her father’s house in Wimpole Street, occupied, upon her sofa, with her books and papers–her Greek dramatists and her Elizabethan poets–shut out from the world, with windows for ever closed, and with only an occasional female visitor, to gossip of the social and literary life of London. Never was a spirit of more vivid fire enclosed within a tomb. The letter from Browning, “the author of _Paracelsus_ and King of the mystics,” threw her, she says, “into ecstasics.” Her reply has a thrill of pleasure running through its graceful half-restraint, and she holds out a hope that when spring shall arrive a meeting in the invalid chamber between her and her new correspondent may be possible.

[Illustration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

_From a drawing in chalk by_ FIELD TALFOURD _in the National Portrait Gallery_.]

From the first a headlong yet delicate speed was in her pen; from the first there was much to say. “Oh, for a horse with wings!” Mr Browning, who had praised her poems, must tell her their faults. He must himself speak out in noble verse, not merely utter himself through the masks of _dramatis personae_. Can she, as he alleges, really help him by her sympathy, by her counsel? Let him put ceremony aside and treat her _en bon camerade_; he will find her “an honest man on the whole.” She intends to set about knowing him as much as possible immediately. What poets have been his literary sponsors? Are not the critics wrong to deny contemporary genius? What poems are those now in his portfolio? Is not AEschylus the divinest of divine Greek spirits? but how inadequately her correspondent has spoken of Dante! Shall they indeed–as he suggests–write something together? And then–is he duly careful of his health, careful against overwork? And is not gladness a duty? to give back to the world the joy that God has given to his poet? Though, indeed, to lean out of the window of this House of Life is for some the required, perhaps the happiest attitude.

And why–replies the second voice–lean out of the window? His own foot is only on the stair. Where are the faults of her poems, of which she had inquired? Yes, he will speak out, and he is now planning such a poem as she demands. But she it is, who has indeed spoken out in her verse? In his portfolio is a drama about a Moor of Othello’s country, one Luria, with strange entanglings among his Florentines. See this, and this, how grandly it is said in the Greek of Eschylus! But Dante, all Dante is in his heart and head. And he has seen Tennyson face to face; and he knows and loves Carlyle; and he has visited Sorrento and trod upon Monte Calvano. Oh, the world in this year 1845 must be studied, though solitude is best. He has been “polking” all night, and walked home while the morning thrushes piped; and it is true that his head aches. She shall read and amend his manuscript poems. To hear from her is better than to see anybody else. But when shall he see her too?

So proceed from January to May the letters of Rudel and the still invisible Lady of Wimpole Street. It was happy comradeship on her part, but on his it was already love. His spirit had recognised, had touched, a spirit, which included all that he most needed, and union with which would be the most certain and substantial prize offered by life. There was nothing fatuous in this inward assurance; it was the simplest and most self-evidencing truth. The word “mistrustful”–“do not see me as long as you are mistrustful of”–with its implied appeal to her generous confidence, precipitated the visit. How could she be mistrustful? Of course he may come: but the wish to do so was unwisely exorbitant. On the afternoon of May 20th, 1845, Browning first set eyes on his future wife, a little figure, which did not rise from the sofa, pale ringleted face, great eager, wistfully pathetic eyes. He believed that she was suffering from some incurable disease of the spine, and that whatever remained to her of life must be spent in this prostrate manner of an invalid.

A movement of what can only be imperfectly described as pity entered into his feeling for her: it was less pity than the joy of believing that he could confer as well as receive. But his first thought on leaving was only the fear that he might have stayed too long or might have spoken too loud. The visit was on Tuesday. On Thursday, Browning wrote the only letter of the correspondence which has been destroyed, one which overflowed with gratitude, and was immediately and rightly interpreted by the receiver as tending towards an offer, implied here, but not expressed, of marriage. It was read in pain and agitation; her heart indeed, but not her will, was shaken; and, after a sleepless night, she wrote words effective to bar–as she believed–all further advance in a direction fatal to his happiness. The intemperate things he had said must be wholly forgotten between them; or else she will not see him again; friends, comrades in the life of the intellect they might continue to be. For once and once only Browning lied to Miss Barrett, and he lied a little awkwardly; his letter was only one of too boisterous gratitude; his punishment–that of one infinitely her inferior–was undeserved; let her return to him the offending letter. Returned accordingly it was, and immediately destroyed by the writer. In happier days, Miss Barrett hoped to recover what then would have been added to a hoard which she treasured; but, Browning could not preserve the words which she had condemned.

Wise guardian-angels smile at each other, gently and graciously, when a lover is commanded to withdraw and to reappear in the character of a friend. An incoming tide may seem for a while to pause; but by and by we look and the rock is covered. Browning very dutifully submitted and became a literary counsellor and comrade. The first stadium in the progress of his fortunes opened in January and closed before the end of May; the second closed at the end of August. To a friend Miss Barrett, assured that he never could be more, might well be generous; visits were permitted, and it was left to Browning to fix the days; the postal shuttle threw swift and swifter threads between New Cross, Hatcham, and 50 Wimpole Street. The verse of Tennyson, the novels of George Sand were discussed; her translations from the Greek were considered; his manuscript poems were left for her corrections; but transcription must not weary him into headaches; she would herself by and by act as an amanuensis. Each of the correspondents could not rest happy until the other had been proved to be in every intellectual and moral quality the superior. Browning’s praise could not be withheld; it seemed to his friend–and she wrote always with crystalline sincerity–to be an illusion which humbled her. Glad memories of Italy, sad memories of England and the invalid life were exchanged; there is nothing that she can teach him–she declares–except grief. And yet to him the day of his visit is his light through the dark week. He is like an Eastern Jew who creeps through alleys in the meanest garb, destitute to all wayfarers’ eyes, who yet possesses a hidden palace-hall of marble and gold. Even in matters ecclesiastical, the footsteps of the two friends had moved with one consent; each of them preferred a chapel to a church; each was Puritan in a love of simplicity in the things of religion; each disowned the Puritan narrowness, and the grey aridity of certain schools of dissent. On June 14–with the warranty of her published poem which had told of flowers sent in a letter–Browning encloses in his envelope a yellow rose; and again and again summer flowers arrive bringing colour and sweetness into the dim city room. Once Miss Barrett can report that she has been out of doors, and with no fainting-fit, yet unable to venture in the carriage as far as the Park; still her bodily strength is no better than that of a tired bird; she is moreover, years older than her friend (the difference was in fact that between thirty-nine and thirty-three); and the thunder of a July storm has shaken her nerves. There is some thought of her seeking health as far off as Malta or even Alexandria; but her father will jestingly have it that there is nothing wrong with her except “obstinacy and dry toast.” Thus cordially, gladly, sadly, and always with quick leapings of the indomitable flame of the spirit, these letters of friend to friend run on during the midsummer days. Browning was willing and happy to wait; a confidence possessed him that in the end he would be known fully and aright.

On August 25th came a great outpouring of feeling from Miss Barrett. She took her friend so far into her confidence as to speak plainly of the household difficulties caused by her father’s autocratic temper. The conversation was immediately followed by a letter in which she endeavoured to soften or qualify the impression her words had given, and her heart, now astir and craving sympathy, led her on to write of her most sorrowful and sacred memories–those connected with her brother’s death. Browning was deeply moved, most grateful for her trust in him, but she had forbidden him to notice the record of her grief. He longed to return confidence with confidence, to tell what was urgent in his heart. But the bar of three months since had not been removed, and he hesitated to speak. His two days’ silence was unintelligible to his friend and caused her inexpressible anxiety. Could any words of hers have displeased him? Or was he seriously unwell? She wrote on August 30th a little letter asking “the alms of just one line” to relieve her fears. When snow-wreaths are loosened, a breath will bring down the avalanche. It was impossible to receive this appeal and not to declare briefly, decisively, his unqualified trust in her, his entire devotion, his assured knowledge of what would constitute his supreme happiness.

Miss Barrett’s reply is perfect in its disinterested safe-guarding of his freedom and his future good as she conceived it. She is deeply grateful, but she cannot allow him to empty his water-gourds into the sand. What could she give that it would not be ungenerous to give? Yet his part has not been altogether the harder of the two. The subject must be left. Such subjects, however, could not be left until the facts were ascertained. Browning would not urge her a step beyond her actual feelings, but he must know whether her refusal was based solely on her view of his supposed interests. And with the true delicacy of frankness she admits that even the sense of her own unworthiness is not the insuperable obstacle. No–but is she not a confirmed invalid? She thought that she had done living when he came and sought her out. If he would be wise, all these thoughts of her must be abandoned. Such an answer brought a great calm to Browning’s heart; he did not desire to press her further; let things rest; it is for her to judge; if what she regards as an obstacle should be removed, she will certainly then act in his best interests; to himself this matter of health creates no difficulty; to sit by her for an hour a day, to write out what was in him for the world, and so to save his soul, would be to attain his ideal in life. What woman would not be moved to the inmost depths by such words? She insists that his noble extravagances must in no wise bind him; but all the bitternesses of life have been taken away from her; henceforth she is his for everything except to do him harm; the future rests with God and with him. And amid the letters containing these grave sentences, so full of fate, first appears a reference to the pet name of her childhood–the “Ba” which is all that here serves, like Swift’s “little language,” to indulge a foolish tenderness; and the translator of _Prometheus_ is able to put Greek characters to their most delightful use in her “[Greek: o philtate].”

In love-poetry of the Middle Age the allegorical personage named “Danger” plays a considerable part, and it is to be feared that Danger too often signified a husband. In Wimpole Street that alarming personage always meant a father. Edward Moulton Barrett was a man of integrity in business, of fortitude in adversity, of a certain stern piety, and from the superior position of a domestic autocrat he could even indulge himself in occasional fiats of affection. We need not question that there were springs of water in the rock, and in earlier days they had flowed freely. But now if at night he visited his ailing daughter’s room for a few minutes and prayed with her and for her, it meant that on such an occasion she was not too criminal to merit the pious intercession. If he called her “puss,” it meant that she had not recently been an undutiful child of thirty-nine or forty years old. A circus-trainer probably rewards his educated dogs and horses with like amiable familiarities, and he is probably regarded by his troupe with affection mingled with awe. Mr Barrett had been appointed circus-trainer by the divine authority of parentage. No one visited 50 Wimpole Street, where there were grown-up sons as well as daughters, without special permission from the lord of the castle; he authorised the visits of Mr Browning, the poet, being fondly assured that Mr Browning’s intentions were not those of a burglar, or–worse–an amorous knight-errant. If any daughter of his conceived the possibility of transferring her prime love and loyalty from himself to another, she was even as Aholah and Aholibah who doted upon the Assyrians, captains, and rulers clothed most gorgeously, all of them desirable young men. “If a prince of Eldorado” said Elizabeth Barrett to her sister Arabel, “should come with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, and a ticket of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the other–” “Why, even then,” interrupted Arabel, “it would not _do_” One admirable trait, however, Mr Moulton Barrett did possess–he was nearly always away from home till six o’clock.

The design that Miss Barrett should winter abroad was still under consideration, but the place now fixed upon was Pisa. Suddenly, in mid-September, she finds herself obliged to announce that “it is all over with Pisa.” Her father had vetoed the undutiful project, and had ceased to pay her his evening visits; only in his separate and private orisons were all her sins remembered. To admit the fact that he did not love her enough to give her a chance of recovery was bitter, yet it could not be denied. Her life was now a thing of value to herself, for it was precious to another. She beat against the bars of her cage; planned a rebellious flight; made inquiries respecting ships and berths; but she could not travel alone; and she would not subject either of her sisters to the heavy displeasure of the ruler of the house. Robert Browning held strong opinions on the duty of resisting evil, and if evil assume the guise of parental authority it is none the _less_–he believed–to be resisted. To submit to the will of another is often easy; to act on one’s own best judgment is hard; our faculties were given us to put to use; to be passively obedient is really to evade probation–so with almost excessive emphasis Browning set forth a cardinal article of his creed; but Elizabeth Barrett was not, like him, “ever a fighter,” and, after all, London in 1845 was not bleak and grey as it had been a year previously–“for reasons,” to adopt a reiterated word of the correspondence, “for reasons.”

On two later occasions Browning sang the same battle-hymn against the enemies of God and with a little too much vehemence–not to say truculence–as is the way with earnest believers. His gentler correspondent could not tolerate the thought of duelling, and she disapproved of punishment by death. Browning argues that for one who values the good opinion of society–not for himself–that good opinion is a possession which may, like other possessions, be defended at the risk of a man’s life, and as for capital punishment, is not evil to be suppressed at any price? Is not a miscreant to be expelled out of God’s world? The difference of opinion was the first that had arisen between the friends, and Browning’s words carried with them a certain sense of pain in the thought that they could in any thing stand apart. Happily the theoretical fire-eater had faith superior to his own arguments;–faith in a woman’s insight as finer than his own;–and he is let off with a gratified rebuke for preternatural submissiveness and for arraying her in pontifical garments of authority which hang loose upon so small a figure. The other application of his doctrine of resisting evil was even more trying to her feelings and the preacher was instant certainly out of season. Not the least important personage in the Wimpole Street house was Miss Barrett’s devoted companion Flush. Loyal and loving to his mistress Flushie always was; yet to his lot some canine errors fell; he eyed a visitor’s umbrella with suspicion; he resented perhaps the presence of a rival; he did not behave nicely to a poet who had not written verses in his honour; for which he was duly rebuked by his mistress–the punishment was not capital–and was propitiated with bags of cakes by the intruder. When the day for their flight drew near Miss Barrett proposed somewhat timidly that her maid Wilson should accompany her to Italy, but she was gratefully confident that Flush could not be left behind. Just at this anxious moment a dreadful thing befell; a gang of dog-stealers, presided over by the arch-fiend Taylor, bore Flushie away into the horror of some obscure and vulgar London alley. He was a difficult dog to capture and his ransom must be in proportion to his resistance. There was a terrible tradition of a lady who had haggled about the sum demanded and had received her dog’s head in a parcel. Miss Barrett was eager to part with her six guineas and rescue her faithful companion from misery. Was this an occasion for preaching from ethical heights the sin of making a composition with evil-doers? Yet Browning, still “a fighter” and armed with desperate logic, must needs declaim vehemently against the iniquity of such a bargain. It is something to rejoice at that he was dexterously worsted in argument, being compelled to admit that if Italian banditti were to carry off his “Ba,” he would pay down every farthing he might have in the world to recover her, and this before he entered on that chase of fifty years which was not to terminate until he had shot down with his own hand the receiver of the infamous bribe.

The journey of Miss Barrett to Pisa having been for the present abandoned, friendship, now acknowledged to be more than friendship, resumed its accustomed ways. Visits, it was agreed, were not to be too frequent–three in each fortnight might prudently be ventured; but Wednesday might have to be exchanged for Thursday or Saturday for Monday, if on the first elected day Miss Mitford–dear and generous friend–threatened to come with her talk, talk, talk, or Mrs Jameson with her drawings and art-criticism, or some unknown lion-huntress who had thrown her toils, or kindly Mr Kenyon, who knew of Browning’s visits, and who when he called would peer through his all-scrutinising spectacles with an air of excessive penetration or too extreme unconsciousness. And there were times–later on–when an avalanche of aunts and uncles would precipitate itself on Wimpole Street–perspicacious aunts and amiable uncles who were wished as far off as Seringapatam, and who wrung from an impatient niece–to whom indeed they were dear–the cry “The barbarians are upon us.” Miss Barrett’s sisters, the gentle Henrietta, who preferred a waltz to the best sermon of an Independent minister, and the more serious Arabel, who preferred the sermon of an Independent minister to the best waltz, were informed of the actual state of affairs. They were trustworthy and sympathetic; Henrietta had special reasons of her own for sympathy; Captain Surtees Cook, who afterwards became her husband, might be discussing affairs with her in the drawing-room at the same time that Mr Browning the poet–“the man of the pomegranates” as he was named by Mr Barrett–held converse on literature with Elizabeth in the upper chamber. The household was honeycombed with treasons.

For the humours of superficial situations and passing incidents Miss Barrett had a lively sense, and she found some relief in playing with them; but with a nature essentially truthful like hers the necessity of concealment was a cause of distress. The position was no less painful to Browning, and in the end it became intolerable. Yet while there were obstructions and winding ways in the shallows, in the depths were flawless truth and inviolable love. What sentimental persons fancy and grow effusive over was here the simplest and yet always a miraculous reality–“He of the heavens and earth brought us together so wonderfully, holding two souls in his hand.”[37] In the most illuminating words of each correspondent no merely private, or peculiar feeling is expressed; it is the common wave of human passion, the common love of man and woman, that here leaps from the depths to the height, and over which the iris of beauty ever and anon appears with–it is true–an unusual intensity. And so in reading the letters we have no sense of prying into secrets; there are no secrets to be discovered; what is most intimate is most common; only here what is most common rises up to its highest point of attainment. “I never thought of being happy through you or by you or in you even, your good was all my idea of good, and _is_” “Let me be too near to be seen…. Once I used to be more uneasy, and to think that I ought to _make_ you see me. But Love is better than sight.” “I love your love too much. And _that_ is the worst fault, my beloved, I can ever find in my love of _you_.” These are sentences that tell of what can be no private possession, being as liberal and free as our light and air. And if the shadow of a cloud appears–appears and passes away–it is a shadow that has floated over many other hearts beside that of the writer: “How dreadfully natural it would be to me, seem to me, if you _did_ leave off loving me! How it would be like the sun’s setting … and no more wonder. Only, more darkness.” The old exchange of tokens, the old symbolisms–a lock of hair, a ring, a picture, a child’s penholder–are good enough for these lovers, as they had been for others before them. What is diffused through many of the letters is gathered up and is delivered from the alloy of superficial circumstance in the “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” in reading which we are in the presence of womanhood–womanhood delivered from death by love and from darkness by; light–as much as in that of an individual woman. And the disclosure in poems and in letters being without reserve affects us as no disclosure, but simply as an adequate expression of the truth universal.

One obstacle to the prospective marriage was steadily diminishing in magnitude; Miss Barrett, with a new joy in life, new hopes, new interests, gained in health and strength from month to month. The winter of 1845-46 was unusually mild. In January one day she walked–walked, and was not carried–downstairs to the drawing-room. Spring came early that year; in the first week of February lilacs and hawthorn were in bud, elders in leaf, thrushes and white-throats in full song. In April Miss Barrett gave pledges of her confidence in the future by buying a bonnet; a little like a Quaker’s, it seemed to her, but the learned pronounced it fashionable. Early in May, that bonnet, with its owner and Arabel and Flush, appeared in Regent’s Park, while sunshine was filtering through the leaves. The invalid left her carriage, set foot upon the green grass, reached up and plucked a little laburnum blossom (“for reasons”), saw the “strange people moving about like phantoms of life,” and felt that she alone and the idea of one who was absent were real–“and Flush,” she adds with a touch of remorse, “and Flush a little too.” Many drives and walks followed; at the end of May she feloniously gathered some pansies, the flowers of Paracelsus, and this notwithstanding the protest of Arabel, in the Botanical Gardens, and felt the unspeakable beauty of the common grass. Later in the year wild roses were found at Hampstead; and on a memorable day the invalid–almost perfect in health–was guided by kind and learned Mrs Jameson through the pictures and statues of the poet Rogers’s collection. On yet another occasion it was Mr Kenyon who drove her to see the strange new sight of the Great Western train coming in; the spectators procured chairs, but the rush of people and the earth-thunder of the engine almost overcame Miss Barrett’s nerves, which on a later trial shrank also from the more harmonious thunder of the organ of the Abbey. Sundays came when she enjoyed the privilege of sitting if not in a pew at least in the secluded vestry of a Chapel, and joining unseen in those simple forms of prayer and praise which she valued most. Altogether something like a miracle in the healing of the sick had been effected.

Money difficulty there was none. Browning, it is true, was not in a position to undertake the expenses of even such a simple household economy as they both desired. He was prepared to seek for any honourable service–diplomatic or other–if that were necessary. But Miss Barrett was resolved against task-work which might divert him from his proper vocation as a poet. And, thanks to the affection of an uncle, she had means–some L400 a year, capable of considerable increase by re-investment of the principal–which were enough for two persons who could be content with plain living in Italy. Browning still urged that he should be the bread-winner; he implored that her money should be made over to her own family, so that no prejudice against his action could be founded on any mercenary feeling; but she remained firm, and would consent only to its transference to her two sisters in the event of his death. And so the matter rested and was dismissed from the thoughts of both the friends.

Having the great patience of love, Browning would not put the least pressure upon Miss Barrett as to the date of their marriage; if waiting long was for her good, then he would wait. But matters seemed tending towards the desired end. In January he begged her to “begin thinking”; before that month had closed it was agreed that they should look forward to the late summer or early autumn as the time of their departure to Italy. Not until March would Miss Barrett permit Browning to fetter his free will by any engagement; then, to satisfy his urgent desire, she declared that she was willing to chain him, rivet him–“Do you feel how the little fine chain twists round and round you? do you hear the stroke of the riveting?” But the links were of a kind to be loosed if need be at a moment’s notice. June came, and with it a proposal from a well-intentioned friend, Miss Bayley, to accompany her to Italy, if, by and by, such a change of abode seemed likely to benefit her health. Miss Barrett was prepared to accept the offer if it seemed right to Browning, or was ready, if he thought it expedient, to wait for another year. His voice was given, with such decision as was possible, in favour of their adhering to the plan formed for the end of summer; they both felt the present position hazardous and tormenting; to wear the mask for another year would suffocate them; they were “standing on hot scythes.”

Accordingly during the summer weeks there is much poring over guide-books to Italy; much weighing of the merits of this place of residence and of that. Shall it be Sorrento? Shall it be La Cava? or Pisa? or Ravenna? or, for the matter of that, would not Seven Dials be as happy a choice as any, if only they could live and work side by side? There is much balancing of the comparative ease and the comparative cost of routes, the final decision being in favour of reaching Italy by way of France. And as the time draws nearer there is much searching of time-tables, in the art of mastering which Robert Browning seems hardly to have been an expert. May Mr Kenyon be told? Or is it not kinder and wiser to spare him the responsibility of knowing? Mrs Jameson, who had made a friendly proposal similar to that of Miss Bayley,–may she be half-told? Or shall she be invited to join the travellers on their way? What books shall be brought? What baggage? And how may a box and a carpet bag be conveyed out of 50 Wimpole Street with least observation?

It was deeply repugnant to Miss Barrett’s feelings to practise reserve on such a matter as this with her father. Her happier companion had informed his father and mother of their plans, and had obtained from the elder Mr Browning a sum of money, asked for as a loan rather than a gift, sufficient to cover the immediate expenses of the journey. Mr Barrett was entitled to all respect, and as for affection he received from his daughter enough to make the appearance of disloyalty to him carry a real pang to her heart. But she believed that she had virtually no choice; her nerves were not of iron; the roaring of the Great Western express she might face but not an angry father. A loud voice, and a violent “scene,” such as she had witnessed, until she fainted, when Henrietta was the culprit, would have put an end to the Italian project through mere physical collapse and ruin. Far better therefore to withdraw quietly from the house, and trust to the effect of a subsequent pleading in all earnestness for reconciliation.

[Illustration: Yours very truly, Robert Browning. _From an engraving by_ J.G. ARMYTAGE.]

As summer passed into early autumn the sense of dangers and difficulties accumulating grew acute. “The ground,” wrote Browning, “is crumbling from beneath our feet with its chances and opportunities.” In one of the early days of August a thunder-storm with torrents of rain detained him for longer than usual at Wimpole Street; the lightning was the lesser terror of the day, for in the evening entered Mr Barrett to his daughter with disagreeable questioning, and presently came the words–accompanied by a gaze of stern displeasure–“It appears that _that man_ has spent the whole day with you.” The louring cloud passed, but it was felt that visits to be prudent must be rare; for the first time a week went by without a meeting. Early in September George Barrett, a kindly brother distinguished by his constant air of dignity and importance, was commissioned to hire a country house for the family at Dover or Reigate or Tunbridge, while paperers and painters were to busy themselves at Wimpole Street. The moment for immediate action had come; else all chance of Italy might be lost for the year 1846. “We must be married directly,” wrote Browning on the morning when this intelligence arrived. Next day a marriage license was procured. On the following morning, Saturday, September 12th, accompanied by her maid Wilson, Miss Barrett, after a sleepless night, left her father’s house with feet that trembled; she procured a fly, fortified her shaken nerves with a dose of sal volatile at a chemist’s shop, and drove to Marylebone Church, where the marriage service was celebrated in the presence of two witnesses. As she stood and knelt her central feeling was one of measureless trust, a deep rest upon assured foundations; other women who had stood there supported by their nearest kinsfolk–parents or sisters–had one happiness she did not know; she needed it less because she was happier than they.[38] Then husband and wife parted. Mrs Browning drove to the house of her blind friend, Mr Boyd, who had been made aware of the engagement. On his sitting-room sofa she rested and sipped his Cyprus wine; by and by arrived her sisters with grave faces; the carriage was driven to Hampstead Heath for the soothing happiness of the autumnal air and sunshine; after which the three sisters returned to their father’s house; the wedding-ring was regretfully taken off; and the prayer arose in Mrs Browning’s heart that if sorrow or injury should ever follow upon what had happened that day for either of the two, it might all fall upon her.

Browning did not again visit at 50 Wimpole Street; it was enough to know that his wife was well, and kept all these things gladly, tremblingly, in her heart. For himself he felt that come what might his life had “borne flower and fruit.”[39] On the Monday week which succeeded the marriage the Barrett family were to move to the country house that had been taken at Little Bookham. On Saturday afternoon, a week having gone by since the wedding, Mrs Browning and Wilson, left what had been her home. Flush was warned to make no demonstration, and he behaved with admirable discretion. It was “dreadful” to cause pain to her father by a voluntary act; but another feeling sustained her:–“You _only_! As if one said _God only_. And we shall have _Him_ beside, I pray of Him.” At Hodgson’s, the stationer and bookseller’s, they found Browning, and a little later husband and wife, with the brave Wilson and the discreet Flush, were speeding from Vauxhall to Southampton, in good time to catch the boat for Havre. A north wind blew them vehemently from the English coast. In the newspaper announcements of the wedding the date was to be omitted, and Browning rejected the suggestion that on this occasion, and with reference to the great event of his life, he should be defined to the public as “the author of _Paracelsus_.”

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 35: _Letters of E.B.B._, i. 288.]

[Footnote 36: See _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 281.]

[Footnote 37: E.B.B. to R.B., March 30, 1846.]

[Footnote 38: E.B.B. to R.B., Sept. 14, 1846.]

[Footnote 39: R.B. to E.B.B., Sept. 14, 1846.]

Chapter VI

Early Years in Italy

The letters from which this story has been drawn have from first to last one burden; in them deep answers to deep; they happily are of a nature to escape far from the pedantries of literary criticism. It cannot be maintained that Browning quite equals his correspondent in the discovery of rare and exquisite thoughts and feelings; or that his felicity in giving them expression is as frequent as hers. Even on matters of literature his comments are less original than hers, less penetrating, less illuminating. Her wit is the swifter and keener. When Browning writes to afford her amusement, he sometimes appears to us, who are not greatly amused, a little awkward and laborious. She flashes forth a metaphor which embodies some mystery of feeling in an image entirely vital; he, with a habit of mind of which he was conscious and which often influences his poetry, fastens intensely on a single point and proceeds to muffle this in circumstance, assured that it will be all the more vividly apparent when the right instant arrives and requires this; but meanwhile some staying-power is demanded from the reader. Neither correspondent has the art of etching a person or a scene in a few decisive lines; the gift of Carlyle, the gift of Carlyle’s brilliant wife is not theirs, perhaps because acid is needed to bite an etcher’s plate. And, indeed, many of the minor notabilities of 1845, whose names appear in these letters, might hardly have repaid an etcher’s intensity of selective vision. Among the groups of spirits who presented themselves to Dante there were some wise enough not to expect that their names should be remembered on earth; such shades may stand in a background. It is, however, strange that Browning who created so many living men and women should in his letters have struck out no swift indelible piece of portraiture; even here his is the inferior touch. And yet throughout the whole correspondence we cannot but be aware that his is the more massive and the more complex nature; his intellect has hardier thews; his passion has an energy which corresponds with its mass; his will sustains his passion and projects it forward. And towards Miss Barrett his strength is seen as gentleness, his energy as an inexhaustible patience of hope.

When Browning and his wife reached Paris, Mrs Browning was worn out by the excitement and fatigue. By a happy accident Mrs Jameson and her niece were at hand, and when the first surprise, with kisses to both fugitives, was over, she persuaded them to rest for a week where they were, promising, if they consented, to be their companion and aider until they arrived at Pisa. Their “imprudence,” in her eyes, was “the height of prudence”; “wild poets or not” they were “wise people.” The week at Paris was given up to quietude; once they visited the Louvre, but the hours passed for the most part indoors; it all seemed strange and visionary–“Whether in the body or out of the body,” wrote Mrs Browning, “I cannot tell scarcely.” From Paris and Orleans they proceeded southwards in weather, which, notwithstanding some rains, was delightful. From Avignon they went on pilgrimage to Petrarch’s Vaucluse; Browning bore his wife to a rock in mid stream and seated her there, while Flush scurried after in alarm for his mistress. In the passage from Marseilles to Genoa, Mrs Browning was able to sit on deck; the change of air, although gained at the expense of some weariness, had done her a world of good.

Early in October the journeying closed at Pisa. Rooms were taken for six months in the great Collegio Ferdinando, close to the Duomo and the Leaning Tower, rooms not quite the warmest in aspect. Mrs Jameson pronounced the invalid not improved but transformed. The repose of the city, asleep, as Dickens described it, in the sun and the secluded life–a perpetual _tete-a-tete_, but one so happy–suited both the wedded friends; days of cloudless weather, following a spell of rain, went by in “reading and writing and talking of all things in heaven and earth, and a little besides; and sometimes even laughing as if we had twenty people to laugh with us, or rather _hadn’t_.” Their sole acquaintance was an Italian Professor of the University; for three months they never looked at a newspaper; then a loophole on the world was opened each evening by the arrival of the Siecle. The lizards were silent friends of one poet, and golden oranges gleamed over the walls to the unaccustomed eyes of the other like sunshine gathered into globes. They wandered through pine-woods and drove until the purple mountains seemed not far off. At the Lanfranchi Palace they thought of Byron, to see a curl of whose hair or a glove from whose hand, Browning declares (so foolish was he and ignorant) he would have gone farther than to see all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey condensed in Rosicrucian fashion into a vial. In the Campo Santo they listened to a musical mass for the dead. In the Duomo they heard the Friar preach. And early in the morning their dreams were scattered by the harmonious clangour of the church bells. “I never was happy before in my life,” wrote Mrs Browning. Her husband relieved her of all housekeeping anxieties. At two o’clock came a light dinner–perhaps thrushes and chianti–from the _trattoria_; at six appeared coffee and milk-rolls; at nine, when the pine-fire blazed, roast chestnuts and grapes. Debts there were none to vex the spirits of these prudent children of genius. If a poet could not pay his butcher’s and his baker’s bills, Browning’s sympathies were all with the baker and the butcher. “He would not sleep,” wrote his wife, “if an unpaid bill dragged itself by any chance into another week “; and elsewhere: “Being descended from the blood of all the Puritans, and educated by the strictest of dissenters, he has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact of owing five shillings five days.” Perhaps some of this horror arose from the sense of that weight which pecuniary cares hang upon all the more joyous mountings of the mind. One grief and only one was still present; Mr Barrett remained inexorable; his daughter hoped that with time and patience his arms would open to her again. It was a hope never to be fulfilled. In the cordial comradeship of Browning’s sister, Sarianna, a new correspondent, there was a measure of compensation.

Already Browning had in view the collected edition of his Poetical Works which did not appear until 1849. The poems were to be made so lucid, “that everyone who understood them hitherto” was to “lose that mark of distinction.” _Paracelsus_ and _Pippa_ were to be revised with special care. The sales reported by Moxon were considered satisfactory; but of course the profits as yet were those of his wife’s poems. “She is,” he wrote to his publisher, “there as in all else, as high above me as I would have her.”

It was at Pisa that the highest evidence of his wife’s powers as a poet came as an unexpected and wonderful gift to her husband. In a letter of December 1845–more than a year since–she had confessed that she was idle; and yet “silent” was a better word she thought than “idle.” Her apology was that the apostle Paul probably did not work hard at tent-making during the week that followed his hearing of the unspeakable things. At the close of a letter written on July 22, 1846, she wrote: “You shall see some day at Pisa what I will not show you now. Does not Solomon say that ‘there is a time to read what is written?’ If he doesn’t, he ought.” The time to read had now come. “One day, early in 1847,” as Mr Gosse records what was told to him by Browning, “their breakfast being over, Mrs Browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table should be cleared. He was presently aware of someone behind him, although the servant was gone. It was Mrs Browning who held him by the shoulder to prevent his turning to look at her, and at the same time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his coat. She told him to read that, and to tear it up if he did not like it; and then she fled again to her own room.” The papers were a transcript of those ardent poems which we know as “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” Some copies were printed at Reading in 1847 for private circulation with the title “Sonnets by E.B.B.” The later title under which they appeared among Mrs Browning’s Poems in the edition of 1850 was of Browning’s suggestion. His wife’s proposal to name them “Sonnets from the Bosnian” was dismissed with words which allude to a poem of hers, “Catarina to Camoens,” that had long been specially dear to him: “Bosnian, no! that means nothing. From the Portuguese: they are Catarina’s sonnets!”

Pisa with all its charm lacked movement and animation. It was decided to visit Florence in April, and there enjoy for some days the society of Mrs Jameson before she left Italy. The coupe of the diligence was secured, and on April 20th Mrs Jameson’s “wild poets but wise people” arrived at Florence. An excellent apartment was found in the Via delle Belle Donne near the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and for Browning’s special delight a grand piano was hired. When Mrs Browning had sufficiently recovered strength to view the city and its surroundings her pleasure was great: “At Pisa we say, ‘How beautiful!’ here we say nothing; it is enough if we can breathe.” They had hoped for summer wanderings in Northern Italy; but Florence held them throughout the year except for a few days during which they attempted in vain to find a shelter from the heat among the pines of Vallombrosa. Provided with a letter of recommendation to the abbot they set forth from their rooms at early morning by vettura and from Pelago onwards, while Browning rode, Mrs Browning and Wilson in basket sledges were slowly drawn towards the monastery by white bullocks. A new abbot, a little holy man with a red face, had been recently installed, who announced that in his nostrils “a petticoat stank.” Yet in the charity of his heart he extended the three days ordinarily permitted to visitors in the House of Strangers to five; during which period beef and oil, malodorous bread and wine and passages from the “Life of San Gualberto” were vouchsafed to heretics of both sexes; the mountains and the pinewoods in their solemn dialect spoke comfortable words.

“Rolling or sliding down the precipitous path” they returned to Florence in a morning glory, very merry, says Mrs Browning, for disappointed people. Shelter from the glare of August being desirable, a suite of comparatively cool rooms in the Palazzo Guidi were taken; they were furnished in good taste, and opened upon a terrace–“a sort of balcony terrace which … swims over with moonlight in the evenings.” From Casa Guidi windows–and before long Mrs Browning was occupied with the first part of her poem–something of the life of Italy at a moment of peculiar interest could be observed. Europe in the years 1847 and 1848 was like a sea broken by wave after wave of Revolutionary passion. Browning and his wife were ardently liberal in their political feeling; but there were differences in the colours of their respective creeds and sentiments; Mrs Browning gave away her imagination to popular movements; she was also naturally a hero-worshipper; she hoped more enthusiastically than he was wont to do; she was more readily depressed; the word “liberty” for her had an aureole or a nimbus which glorified all its humbler and more prosaic meanings. Browning, although in this year 1847 he made a move towards an appointment as secretary to a mission to the Vatican, at heart cared little for men in groups or societies; he cared greatly for individuals, for the growth of individual character. He had faith in a forward movement of society; but the law of social evolution, as he conceived it, is not in the hands of political leaders or ministers of state. He valued liberty chiefly because each man here on earth is in process of being tested, in process of being formed, and liberty is the condition of a man’s true probation and development. Late in life he was asked to give his answer to the question: “Why am I a Liberal?” and he gave it succinctly in a sonnet which he did not reprint in any edition of his Works, although it received otherwise a wide circulation. It may be cited here as a fragment of biography:

“Why?” Because all I haply can and do, All that I am now, all I hope to be,– Whence comes it save from fortune setting free Body and soul the purpose to pursue,
God traced for both? If fetters, not a few, Of prejudice, convention, fall from me, These shall I bid men–each in his degree Also God-guided–bear, and gladly too?

But little do or can the best of us: That little is achieved through Liberty. Who then dares hold–emancipated thus– His fellow shall continue bound? Not I Who live, love, labour freely, nor discuss A brother’s right to freedom. That is “Why.”[40]

This is an excellent reason for the faith that was in Browning; he holds that individual progress depends on individual freedom, and by that word he understands not only political freedom but also emancipation from intellectual narrowness and the bondage of injurious convention. But Browning in his verse, setting aside the early _Strafford_, nowhere celebrates a popular political movement; he nowhere chaunts a paean, in the manner of Byron or Shelley, in honour of the abstraction “Liberty.” Nor does he anywhere study political phenomena or events except as they throw light upon an individual character. Things and persons that gave him offence he could summarily dismiss from his mind–“Thiers is a rascal; I make a point of not reading one word said by M. Thiers”; “Proudhon is a madman; who cares for Proudhon?” “The President’s an ass; _he_ is not worth thinking of.”[41] This may be admirable economy of intellectual force; but it is not the way to understand the course of public events; it does not indicate a political or a historical sense. And, indeed, his writings do not show that Browning possessed a political or a historical sense in any high degree, save as a representative person may be conceived by him as embodying a phase of civilisation. When Mrs Trollope called at Casa Guidi, Browning was only reluctantly present; she had written against liberal institutions and against the poetry of Victor Hugo, and that was enough. Might it not have been more truly liberal to be patient and understand the grounds of her prejudice? “Blessed be the inconsistency of men!” exclaimed Mrs Browning, for whose sake he tolerated the offending authoress until by and by he came to like in her an agreeable woman.

On the anniversary of their wedding day Browning and his wife saw from their window a brilliant procession of grateful and enthusiastic Florentines stream into the _Piazza_. Pitti with banners and _vivas_ for the space of three hours and a half It was the time when the Grand Duke was a patriot and Pio Nono was a liberal. The new helmets and epaulettes of the civic guard proclaimed the glories of genuine freedom. The pleasure of the populace was like that of children, and perhaps it had some serious feeling behind it. The incomparable Grand Duke had granted a liberal constitution, and was led back from the opera to the Pitti by the torchlights of a cheering crowd–“through the dark night a flock of stars seemed sweeping up the piazza.” A few months later, and the word of Mrs Browning is “Ah, poor Italy”; the people are attractive, delightful, but they want conscience and self reverence.[42] Browning and she painfully felt that they grew cooler and cooler on the subject of Italian patriotism. A revolution had been promised, but a shower of rain fell and the revolution was postponed. Now it was the Grand Duke _out_, and the bells rang, and a tree of liberty was planted close to the door of Casa Guidi; six weeks later it was the Grand Duke _in_, and the same bells rang, and the tree of liberty was pulled down. The Pope is well-meaning but weak; and before long honorific epithets have to be denied him–he is merely a Pope; his prestige and power over souls is lost. The liberal Grand Duke is transformed into a Duke decorated with Austrian titles. As for France, Mrs Browning had long since learnt from the books she read with so much delight to feel a debt to the country of Balzac and George Sand. She thought that the unrest and the eager hopes of the French Revolution, notwithstanding its errors, indicated at least the conception of a higher ideal than any known to the English people. Browning did not possess an equal confidence in France; he did not accept her view that the French occupation of Rome was capable of justification; nor did he enter into her growing hero-worship–as yet far from its full development–of Louis Napoleon. Her admiration for Balzac he shared, and it is probable that the death of the great novelist moved him to keener regret than did the death, at no considerable distance of time, of Wordsworth. With French communism or socialism neither husband nor wife, however republican in their faith, had sympathy; they held that its tendency is to diminish the influence of the individual, and that in the end the progress of the mass is dependent on the starting forth from the mass and the striding forward of individual minds. They believed as firmly as did Edmund Burke in the importance of what Burke styles a natural aristocracy.

For four years–from 1847 to 1851–Browning never crossed the confines of Italy. No duties summoned him away, and he was happy in his home. “We are as happy,” he wrote in December 1847, “as two owls in a hole, two toads under a tree-stump; or any other queer two poking creatures that we let live after the fashion of their black hearts, only Ba is fat and rosy; yes indeed.” In spring they drove day by day through the Cascine, passing on the way the carven window of the _Statue and the Bust_, and “the stone called Dante’s,” whereupon

He used to bring his quiet chair out, turned To Brunelleschi’s church.[43]

And after tea there was the bridge of Trinita from which to watch the sunsets turning the Arno to pure gold while the moon and the evening-star hung aloft. It was a life of retirement and of quiet work. Mrs Browning mentions to a friend that for fifteen months she could not make her husband spend a single evening out–“not even to a concert, nor to hear a play of Alfieri’s,” but what with music and books and writing and talking, she adds, “we scarcely know how the days go, it’s such a gallop on the grass.” The “writing” included the revision and preparation for the press of Browning’s _Poems_, in two volumes, which Chapman & Hall, more liberal than Moxon, had undertaken to publish at their own risk, and which appeared in 1849. Some care and thought were also given by Browning to the alterations of text made in the edition of his wife’s Poems of the following year; and for a time his own _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_ was an absorbing occupation. As to the “reading,” the chief disadvantage of Florence towards the middle of the last century was the difficulty of seeing new books of interest, whether French or English. Yet _Vanity Fair_ and _The Princess, Jane Eyre_ and _Modern Painters_ somehow found their way to Casa Guidi.[44]

Casa Guidi proper, the Casa Guidi which held the books and pictures and furniture and graceful knick-knacks chosen by its occupants, who were lovers of beauty, dates only from 1848. Previously they had been satisfied with a furnished apartment. Not long before the unfurnished rooms were hired, a mistake in choosing rooms which suffered from the absence of sunshine and warmth gave Browning an opportunity of displaying what to his wife’s eyes appeared to be unexampled magnanimity. The six months’ rent was promptly paid, and chambers on the Pitti “yellow with sunshine from morning to evening” were secured. “Any other man, a little lower than the angels,” his wife assured Miss Mitford, “would have stamped and sworn a little for the mere relief of the thing, but as to _his_ being angry with _me_ for any cause, except not eating enough dinner, the sun would turn the wrong way first.” It seemed an excellent piece of economy to take the spacious suite of unfurnished rooms in the Via Maggio, now distinguished by the inscription known to all visitors to Florence, which were to be had for twenty-five guineas a year, and which, when furnished, might be let during any prolonged absence for a considerable sum. The temptation of a ground-floor in the Frescobaldi Palace, and a garden bright with camellias, to which Browning for a time inclined, was rejected. At Casa Guidi the double terrace where orange-trees and camellias also might find a place made amends for the garden with its threatening cloud of mosquitoes, “worse than Austrians”; every need of space and height, of warmth and coolness seemed to be met; and it only remained to expend the welcome proceeds of the sale of books in the recreation of gathering together “rococo chairs, spring sofas, carved bookcases, satin from cardinals’ beds and the rest.” Before long Browning amused himself in picking up for a few pauls this or that picture, on seeing which an accomplished connoisseur, like Kirkup, would even hazard the name of Cimabue or Ghirlandaio, or if not that of Giotto, then the safer adjective Giottesque.

Although living the life of retirement which his wife’s uncertain state of health required, Browning gradually obtained the acquaintance of several interesting persons, of whom Kirkup, who has just been mentioned, was one. “As to Italian society,” wrote Mrs Browning, “one may as well take to longing for the evening star, for it seems quite inaccessible.” But the name of Elizabeth Barrett, if not yet that of Robert Browning, was a sufficient introduction to cultivated Englishmen and Americans who had made Florence their home. Among the earliest of these acquaintances were the American sculptor Powers, Swedenborgian and spiritualist (a simple and genial man, “with eyes like a wild Indian’s, so black and full of light”), and Hillard, the American lawyer, who, in his _Six months in Italy_, described Browning’s conversation as “like the poetry of Chaucer,” meaning perhaps that it was hearty, fresh, and vigorous, “or like his own poetry simplified and made transparent.” “It seems impossible,” Hillard goes on, “to think that he can ever grow old.” And of Mrs Browning: “I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl.” A third American friend was one who could bring tidings of Emerson and Hawthorne–Margaret Fuller of “The Dial,” now Countess d’Ossoli, “far better than her writings,” says Mrs Browning, “… not only exalted but _exaltee_ in her opinions, yet calm in manner.” Her loss, with that of her husband, on their voyage to America deeply affected Mrs Browning. “Was she happy in anything?” asks her sorrowing friend. The first person seen on Italian soil when Browning and his wife disembarked at Leghorn was the brilliant and erratic Irish priest, “Father Prout” of _Fraser’s Magazine_, who befriended them with good spirits and a potion of eggs and port wine when Browning was ill in Florence, and chided Mrs Browning as a “bambina” for her needless fears. Charles Lever “with the sunniest of faces and cordialest of manners”–animal spirits preponderating a little too much over an energetic intellect–called on them at the Baths of Lucca, but the acquaintance did not ripen into friendship. And little Miss Boyle, one of the family of the Earls of Cork, would come at night, at the hour of chestnuts and mulled wine, to sparkle as vivaciously as the pine-log that warmed her feet. These, with the Hoppners, known to Shelley and Byron, a French sculptress of royalist sympathies, Mlle. de Fauveau, much admired by Browning, and one of the grandsons of Goethe, who flits into and out of the scene, were a compensation for the repulsiveness of certain English folk at Florence who gathered together only for the frivolities, and worse than frivolities, of foreign wayfaring.

In March 1849 joy and sorrow met and mingled in the lives of Browning and his wife. On the ninth of that month a son was born at Casa Guidi, who six weeks later was described by his mother as “a lovely, fat, strong child, with double chin and rosy cheeks and a great wide chest.” He was baptised, with the simple Lutheran rites, Robert Wiedemann Barrett–the “Wiedemann” in remembrance of the maiden name of Browning’s mother. From the first, Browning and his wife, to adopt a phrase from one of her letters, caught up their parental pleasures with a sort of passion.[45] Mrs Browning’s letters croon with happiness in the beauty, the strength, the intelligence, the kind-hearted disposition of her boy. And the boy’s father, from the days when he would walk up and down the terrace of Casa Guidi with the infant in his arms to the last days of his life, felt to the full the gladness and the repose that came with this strong bondage of his heart. When little Wiedemann could frame imperfect speech upon his lips he transformed that name into “Penini,” which abbreviated to “Pen” became serviceable for domesticities. It was a fantastic derivation of Nathaniel Hawthorne which connected Penini with the colossal statue in Florence bearing the name of “Apeninno.” Flush for a time grew jealous, and not altogether without cause.

But the joy was pursued and overtaken by sorrow. A few days after the birth of his son came tidings of the death of Browning’s mother. He had loved her with a rare degree of passion; the sudden reaction from the happiness of his wife’s safety and his son’s birth was terrible; it almost seemed a wrong to his grief to admit into his consciousness the new gladness of the time. In this conflict of emotions his spirits and to some extent his health gave way. He could not think of returning to his father’s home without extreme pain–“It would break his heart,” he said, “to see his mother’s roses over the wall, and the place where she used to lay her scissors and gloves.” He longed that his father and sister should quit the home of sorrow, and hasten to Florence; but this was not to be. As for England, it could not be thought of as much on his wife’s account as his own. Her father held no communication with her; supplicating letters remained unnoticed; her brothers were temporarily estranged. Her sister Henrietta had left her former home; having “insulted” her father by asking his consent to her marriage with Captain Surtees Cook, she had taken the matter into her own hands; the deed was done, and the name of his second undutiful daughter–married to a person of moderate means and odiously “Tractarian views”–was never again to be mentioned in Mr Barrett’s presence. England had become for Mrs Browning a place of painful memories, and a centre of present strife which she did not feel herself as yet able to encounter.

The love of wandering, however, when successive summers came, and Florence was ablaze with sunshine, grew irresistible, and drove Browning and his household to seek elsewhere for fresh interests or for coolness and repose. In 1848, beguiled by the guide-book, they visited Fano to find it quivering with heat, “the very air swooning in the sun.” Their reward at Fano was that picture by Guercino of the guardian angel teaching a child to pray, the thought of which Browning has translated into song:

We were at Fano, and three times we went To sit and see him in his chapel there, And drink his beauty to our soul’s content –My angel with me too.

Ancona, where the poem was written, if its last line is historically true, followed Fano, among whose brown rocks, “elbowing out the purple tides,” and brown houses–“an exfoliation of the rock”–they lived for a week on fish and cold water. The tour included Rimini and Ravenna, with a return to Florence by Forli and a passage through the Apennines. Next year–1849–when Pen was a few months old, the drop of gipsy blood in Browning’s veins, to which his wife jestingly refers, tingled but faintly; it was Mrs Browning’s part to compel him, for the baby’s sake and hers, to seek his own good. They visited Spezzia and glanced at the house of Shelley at Lerici; passed through olive woods and vineyards, and rested in “a sort of eagle’s nest” at the highest habitable point of the Baths of Lucca. Here the baby’s great cheeks grew rosier; Browning gained in spirits; and his wife was able “to climb the hills and help him to lose himself in the forests.” When they wandered at noon except for some bare-footed peasant or some monk with the rope around his waist, it was complete solitude; and on moonlit nights they sat by the waterfalls in an atmosphere that had the lightness of mountain air without its keenness. On one occasion they climbed by dry torrent courses five miles into the mountains, baby and all, on horseback and donkeyback–“such a congregation of mountains; looking alive in the stormy light we saw them by.” It was certainly a blessed transformation of the prostrate invalid in the upper room at Wimpole Street. Setting aside his own happiness, Browning could feel with regard to her and his deep desire to serve her, that he had seen of the travail of his soul, and in this matter was satisfied.

The weeks at Siena of the year 1850 were not quite so prosperous. During that summer Mrs Browning had been seriously ill. When sufficiently recovered she was carried by her husband to a villa in the midst of vines and olives, a mile and a half or two miles outside Siena, which commanded a noble prospect of hills and plain. At first she could only remain seated in the easy-chair which he found for her in the city. For a day there was much alarm on behalf of the boy, now able to run about, who lay with heavy head and glassy eyes in a half-stupor; but presently he was astir again, and his “singing voice” was heard in the house and garden. Mrs Browning in the fresh yet warm September air regained her strength. Before returning to Florence, they spent a week in the city to see the churches and the pictures by Sodoma. Even little Wiedemann screamed for church-interiors and developed remarkable imitative pietisms of a theatrical kind. “It was as well,” said Browning, “to have the eyeteeth and the Puseyistical crisis over together.”

This comment, although no more than a passing word spoken in play, gives a correct indication of Browning’s feeling, fully shared in by his wife, towards the religious movement in England which was altering the face of the established Church. “Puseyism” was for them a kind of child’s play which unfortunately had religion for its play-ground; they viewed it with a superior smile, in which there was more of pity than of anger. Both of them, though one was a writer for the stage and the other could read _Madame Bovary_ without flinching and approved the morals of _La Dame aux Camelias_, had their roots in English Puritanism.[46] And now the time had come when Browning was to embody some of his Puritan thoughts and feelings relating to religion in a highly original poem.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: “Why am I a Liberal?” Edited by Andrew Reid. London, 1885.]

[Footnote 41: Letters of E.B.B., i. 442.]

[Footnote 42: To Miss Mitford, August 24, 1848.]

[Footnote 43: Casa Guidi Windows, i.]

[Footnote 44: “Jane Eyre” was lent to E.B.B. by Mrs Story.]

[Footnote 45: _To Miss Mitford, Feb. 18, 1850._]

[Footnote 46: In January 1859, Pen was reading an Italian translation of _Monte Cristo_, and announced, to his father’s and mother’s amusement, that after Dumas he would proceed to “papa’s favourite book, _Madame Bovary_”.]

Chapter VII

Christmas Eve and Easter Day

_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_ was published by Chapman & Hall in the year 1850. It was reported to the author that within the first fortnight two hundred copies had been sold, with which evidence of moderate popularity he was pleased; but the initial success was not maintained and subsequently the book became, like _Sordello_, a “remainder.” As early as 1845, in the opening days of the correspondence with Miss Barrett, when she had called upon her friend to speak as poet in his own person and to speak out, he assured her that whereas hitherto he had only made men and women utter themselves on his behalf and had given the truth not as pure white light but broken into prismatic hues, now he would try to declare directly that which was in him. In place of his men and women he would have her to be a companion in his work, and yet, he adds, “I don’t think I shall let _you_ hear, after all, the savage things about Popes and imaginative religions that I must say.” We can only conjecture as to whether the theme of the poem of 1850 was already in Browning’s mind. His wife’s influence certainly was not unlikely to incline him towards the choice of a subject which had some immediate relation to contemporary thought. She knew that poetry to be of permanent value must do more than reflect a passing fashion; that in a certain sense it must in its essence be out of time and space, expressing ideas and passions which are parts of our abiding humanity. Yet she recognised an advantage in pressing into what is permanent through the forms which it assumes in the world immediately around the artist. And even in 1845 the design of such a poem as her own _Aurora Leigh_ was occupying her thoughts; she speaks of her intention of writing a sort of “novel-poem, running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, ‘where angels fear to tread’; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly.” Browning’s poem did not rush into drawing-rooms, but it stepped boldly into churches and conventicles and the lecture-rooms of theological professors.

The spiritual life individual and the spiritual life corporate–these, to state it in a word, are the subjects dealt with in the two connected poems of his new volume; the spiritual life individual is considered in _Easter Day_; the spiritual life corporate in _Christmas Eve._ Browning, with the blood of all the Puritans in him, as his wife expressed it, could not undervalue that strain of piety which had descended from the exiles at Geneva and had run on through the struggles for religious liberty in the nonconformist religious societies of the seventeenth century and the Evangelical revival of times less remote. Looking around him he had seen in his own day the progress of two remarkable movements–one embodying, or professing to embody, the Catholic as opposed to the Puritan conception of religion, the other a free critical movement, tending to the disintegration of the traditional dogma of Christianity, yet seeking to preserve and maintain its ethical and even in part its religious influence. The facts can be put concisely if we say that one and the same epoch produced in England the sermons of Spurgeon, the _Apologia pro vita sua_ of Newman, and the _Literature and Dogma_ of Matthew Arnold. To discuss these three conceptions of religion adequately in verse would have been impossible even for the argumentative genius of Dryden, and would have converted a work of art into a theological treatise. But three representative scenes might be painted, and some truths of passionate feeling might be flung out by way of commentary. Such was the design of the poet of _Christmas Eve_.

To topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult. But the presence of humour might save the sublimities from a fall, and Browning had hitherto in his art made but slight and occasional use of a considerable gift of humour which he possessed. It was humour not of the highest or finest or subtlest kind; it was very far from the humour of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, which felt so profoundly all the incongruities, majestic, pathetic, and laughable, of human nature. But it had a rough vigour of its own; it was united with a capacity for exact and shrewd observation; and if it should ever lead him to play the part of a satirist, the satire must needs be rather that of love than of malice. One who esteemed so highly the work of Balzac and of Flaubert might well be surmised to have something in his composition of what we now call the realist in art; and the work of the realist might serve to sustain and vindicate the idealist’s ventures of imaginative faith. The picture of the lath-and-plaster entry of “Mount Zion” and of the pious sheep–duly indignant at the interloper in their midst–who one by one enter the fold, if not worthy of Cervantes or of Shakespeare, is hardly inferior to the descriptive passages of Dickens, and it is touched, in the manner of Dickens, with pity for these rags and tatters of humanity. The night, the black barricade of cloud, the sudden apparition of the moon, the vast double rainbow, and He whose sweepy garment eddies onward, become at once more supernatural and more unquestionably real because sublimity springs out of grotesquerie. Is the vision of the face of Christ an illusion?

The whole face turned upon me full, And I spread myself beneath it,
As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it In the cleansing sun, his wool,–
Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness Some defiled, discoloured web–
So lay I saturate, with brightness.

Is this a phantom or a dream? Well, at least it is certain that the witness has seen with his mortal eyes the fat weary woman, and heard the mighty report of her umbrella, “wry and flapping, a wreck of whalebones.” And the fat woman of Mount Zion Chapel, with Love Lane at the back of it, may help us to credit the awful vision of the Lord.

Thus the poem has the imaginative sensuousness which art demands; it is not an argument but a series of vivid experiences, though what is sensuous is here tasked in the service of what is spiritual, and a commentary is added. The central idea of the whole is that where love is, there is Christ; and the Christ of this poem is certainly no abstraction, no moral ideal, no transcendental conception of absolute charity, but very God and very man, the Christ of Nazareth, who dwelt among men, full of grace and truth. Literary criticism which would interpret Browning’s meaning in any other sense may be ingenious, but it is not disinterested, and some side-wind blows it far from the mark.

Love with defective knowledge, he maintains, is of more spiritual worth than knowledge with defective love. Desiring to give salience to this idea, he deprives his little pious conventicle of every virtue except one–“love,” and no other word is written on each forehead of the worshippers. Browning, the artist and student of art, was not insensible to the spiritual power of beauty; and beauty is conspicuously absent from the praise and prayer that went up from Mount Zion chapel; its forms of worship are burlesque and uncouth. Browning, the lover of knowledge, was not insensible to the value of intelligence in things of religion; and the congregation of Mount Zion sit on “divinely flustered” under

the pig-of-lead-like pressure
Of the preaching man’s immense stupidity.

The pastor, whose words so sway his enraptured flock, mangles the Holy Scriptures with a fine irreverence, and pours forth his doctrine with an entirely self-satisfied indifference to reason and common sense. Nor has love accomplished its perfect work, for the interloper who stands at the entry is eyed with inquisitorial glances of pious exclusiveness–how has a Gallio such as he ventured to take his station among the elect? Matthew Arnold, had he visited Mount Zion, might have discoursed with a charmingly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in English dissent, and the supreme need of bringing a current of new ideas to play upon the unintelligent use of its traditional formulae. And Matthew Arnold would have been right. These are the precise subjects of Browning’s somewhat rough-and-ready satire. But Browning adds that in Mount Zion, love, at least in its rudiments, is present, and where love is, there is Christ.

Of English nonconformity in its humblest forms Browning can write, as it were, from within; he writes of Roman Catholic forms of worship as one who stands outside; his sympathy with the prostrate multitude in St. Peter’s at Rome is of an impersonal kind, founded rather upon the recognition of an objective fact than springing from an instinctive feeling. For a moment he is carried away by the tide of their devout enthusiasms; but he recovers himself to find indeed that love is also here and therefore Christ is present, but the worshippers fallen under “Rome’s gross yoke,” are very infants in their need of these sacred buffooneries and posturings and petticoatings; infants

Peevish as ever to be suckled,
Lulled with the same old baby-prattle With intermixture of the rattle.

And this, though the time has come when love would have them no longer infantile, but capable of standing and walking, “not to speak of trying to climb.” Such a short and easy method of dealing with Roman Catholic dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite possible to be on the same side as Browning without being as crude as he in misconception. He does not seriously consider the Catholic idea which regards things of sense as made luminous by the spirit of which they are the envoys and the ministers. It is enough for him to declare his own creed which treats any intermediary between the human soul and the Divine as an obstruction or a veil:

My heart does best to receive in meekness That mode of worship, as most to his mind, Where earthly aids being left behind,
His All in All appears serene
With the thinnest human veil between, Letting the mystic lamps, the seven,
The many motions of his spirit,
Pass as they list to earth from heaven.

This was the creed of Milton and of Bunyan; and yet with both Milton and Bunyan the imagery of the senses is employed as the means not of concealing but revealing the things of the spirit.

From the lecture-room of Goettingen, with its destructive and reconstructive criticism, Browning is even farther removed than he is from the ritualisms of the Roman basilica. Yet no caricature can be more amiable than his drawing of the learned Professor, so gentle in his aspect, so formidable in his conclusions, who, gazing into the air with a pure abstracted look, proceeds in a grave sweet voice to exhibit and analyse the sources of the myth of Christ. In the Professor’s lecture-room Browning finds intellect indeed but only the shadow of love. He argues that if the “myth” of Christ be dissolved, the authority of Christ as a teacher disappears; Christ is even inferior to other moralists by virtue of the fact that He made personal claims which cannot be sustained. And whatever may be Christ’s merit as a teacher of the truth, the motive to action which His life and words supplied must cease to exist if it be shown that the divine sacrifice of God manifest in the flesh is no more than a figment of the devout imagination. At every point the criticism of Browning is as far apart as it is possible to conceive from the criticism set forth in the later writings of Matthew Arnold. The one writer regards the “myth” as no more than the grave-clothes of a risen Christ whose essential virtue lies in his sweet reasonableness and his morality touched with enthusiasm. The other believes that if the wonderful story of love be proved a fable, a profound alteration–and an alteration for the worse–has been made in the religious consciousness of Christendom. And undoubtedly the difference between the supernatural and the natural theories of Christianity is far greater than Arnold represented it to be. But Browning at this date very inadequately conceived the power of Christ as a revealer of the fatherhood of God. In that revelation, whether the Son of God was human or divine, lay a truth of surpassing power, and a motive of action capable of summoning forth the purest and highest energies of the soul. That such is the case has been abundantly evidenced by the facts of history. Browning finds only much learning and the ghost of dead love in the Goettingen lecture-room; and of course it was easy to adapt his Professor’s lecture so as to arrive at this conclusion. But the process and the conclusion are alike unjust.

Having traversed the various forms of Christian faith and scepticism, the speaker in _Christmas Eve_ declines into a mood of lazy benevolence and mild indifferentism towards each and all of these. Has not Christ been present alike at the holding-forth of the poor dissenting son of thunder, who tore God’s word into shreds, at the tinklings and posturings and incense-fumes of Roman pietism, and even at the learned discourse which dissolved the myth of his own life and death? Why, then, over-strenuously take a side? Why not regard all phases of belief or no-belief with equal and serene regard? Such a mood of amiable indifferentism is abhorrent to Browning’s feelings. The hem of Christ’s robe passes wholly at this point from the hand of the seer of visions in his poem. One best way of worship there needs must be; ours may indeed not be the absolutely best, but it is our part, it is our probation to see that we strive earnestly after what is best; yes, and strive with might and main to confer upon our fellows the gains which we have found. It may be God’s part–we trust it is–to bring all wanderers to the one fold at last. As for us, we must seek after Him and find Him in the mode required by our highest thought, our purest passion. Here Browning speaks from his central feeling. Only, we may ask, what if one’s truest self lie somewhere hidden amid a thousand hesitating sympathies? And is not the world spacious enough to include a Montaigne as well as a Pascal or a Browning? Assuredly the world without its Montaigne would be a poorer and a less hospitable dwelling-place for the spirits of men.

Mrs Browning complained to her husband of what she terms the asceticism of _Easter Day_, the second part of his volume of 1850; his reply was that it stated “one side of the question.” “Don’t think,” Mrs Browning says, “that he has taken to the cilix–indeed he has not–but it is his way to _see_ things as passionately as other people _feel_ them.” _Easter Day_ has nothing to say of religious life in Churches and societies, nothing of the communities of public worship. For the writer of this poem only three things exist–God, the individual soul, and the world regarded as the testing place and training place of the soul. Browning has here a rigour of moral or spiritual earnestness which may be called, by any one who so pleases, Puritan in its kind and its intensity; he feels the need, if we are to attain any approximation to the Christian ideal, of the lit lamp and the girt loin. Two difficulties in the Christian life in particular he chooses to consider–first, the difficulty of faith in the things of the spirit, and especially in what he regards as the essential parts of the Christian story; and secondly, the difficulty of obeying the injunction to renounce the world. That we cannot grow to our highest attainment by the old method enjoined by pagan philosophy–that of living according to nature, he regards as evident, for nature itself is warped and marred; it groans and travails, and from its discords how shall we frame a harmony? It was always his habit of mind, he tells us, from his childhood onwards, to face a danger and confront a doubt, and if there were anywhere a lurking fear, to draw this forth from its hiding-place and examine it in the light, even at the risk of some mortal ill. Therefore he will press for an answer to his present questionings; he will try conclusions to the uttermost.

As to the initial difficulty of faith, Browning with a touch of scorn, assures us that evidences of spiritual realities, evidences of Christianity–as they are styled–external and internal will be readily found by him who desires to find; convincing enough they are for him who wants to be convinced. But in truth faith is a noble venture of the spirit, an aspiring effort towards what is best, even though what is best may never be attained. The mole gropes blindly in unquestionably solid clay; better be like the grasshopper “that spends itself in leaps all day to reach the sun.” A grasshopper’s leap sunwards–that is what we signify by this word “faith.”

But the difficulties of the Christian life only shift their place when faith by whatever means has been won. We are bidden to renounce the world: what does the injunction mean? in what way shall it be obeyed? “Ascetic” Mrs Browning named this poem; and ascetic it is if by that word we understand the counselling and exhorting to a noble exercise and discipline; but Browning even in his poem by no means wears the cilix, and no teaching can be more fatal than his to asceticism in the narrower sense of the word. To renounce the world, if interpreted aright, is to extinguish or suppress no faculty that has been given to man, but rather to put each faculty to its highest uses:

“Renounce the world!”–Ah, were it done By merely cutting one by one
Your limbs off, with your wise head last, How easy were it!–how soon past,
If once in the believing mood.

The harder and the higher renunciation is this–to choose the things of the spirit rather than the things of sense, and again in accepting, as means of our earthly discipline and development, the things of sense to press through these to the things of the spirit which lie behind and beyond and above them.

Such, and such alone, is the asceticism to which Browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue. A certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy. And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of the spirit shines through with only a fuller potency? In the choice between sense and spirit, or, to put it more generally, in the choice between what is higher and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also its means of growth. And what is the meaning of this mortal life–this strange phenomenon otherwise so unintelligible–if it be not the moment in which a soul is proved, the period in which a soul is shaped and developed for other lives to come?

To forget that Browning is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of criticism which detaches the idea of beauty from the total of our humanity addressed by the greater artists. But the solemn thoughts that are taken up by beauty in such work, for example, as that of Michael Angelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its peculiar character as a thing of beauty. And armour, we know, may be as lovely to the mere senses as a flower. Browning’s doctrine may sometimes protrude gauntly through his poetry; but at his best–as in _Rabbi ben Ezra_ or _Abt Vogler_–the thought of the poem is needful in the dance of lyrical enthusiasm, as the male partner who takes hands with beauty, and to separate them would bring the dance to a sudden close. Both are present in _Easter Day_, and we must watch the movement of the two. In a passage already quoted from _Christmas Eve_ the face of Christ is nobly imagined as the sun which bleaches a discoloured web. Here the poet’s imagination is as intense in its presentation of Christ the doomsman:

He stood there. Like the smoke
Pillared o’er Sodom, when day broke– I saw Him. One magnific pall
Mantled in massive fold and fall
His head, and coiled in snaky swathes About His feet; night’s black, that bathes All else, broke, grizzled with despair, Against the soul of blackness there.
A gesture told the mood within–
That wrapped right hand which based the chin,– That intense meditation fixed
On His procedure,–pity mixed
With the fulfilment of decree.
Motionless thus, He spoke to me,
Who fell before His feet, a mass, No man now.

The picture of the final conflagration of the Judgment Day is perhaps over-laboured, a descriptive _tour de force_, horror piled upon horror with accumulative power,–a picture somewhat too much in the manner of Martin; and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublimity of terror. The glow of Milton’s hell is intenser, and Milton’s majestic instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames. The real awfulness of Browning’s Judgment Day dwells wholly in the inner experiences of a solitary soul. The speaker finds of a sudden that the doom is upon him, and that in the probation of life his choice was earth, not heaven. The sentence pronounced upon him is in accordance with the election of his own will–let earth, with all its beauty of nature, all its gifts of human art, all its successes of the intellect, as he had conceived and chosen them, be his. To his despair, he finds that what he had prized in life, and what is now granted to him cannot bring him happiness or even content. The plenitude of beauty, of which all partial beauty was but a pledge, is forever lost to him. The glory of art, which lay beyond its poor actual attainments, is lost. The joy of knowledge, with all those

grasps of guess
Which pull the more into the less,

is lost. And as to earth’s best possession–love–had he ever made a discovery through human love of that which it forthshadows–the love that is perfect and divine? Earth is no longer earth to the doomed man, but the star of the god Rephan of which we read in one of Browning’s latest poems; in the horror of its blank and passionless uniformity, untroubled by any spiritual presences, he cowers at the Judge’s feet, and prays for darkness, hunger, toil, distress, if only hope be also granted him:

Then did the form expand, expand–
knew Him through the dread disguise As the whole God within his eyes
Embraced me.

The Doomsman has in a moment become the Saviour. In all this, if Browning has the burden of a prophecy to utter, he utters it, after the manner of earlier prophets, as a vision. His art is sensuous and passionate; his argument is transformed into a series of imaginative experiences.

Mrs. Browning’s illness during the summer and early autumn of 1850 left her for a time more shaken in health than she had been since her marriage. But by the spring of the following year she had recovered strength; and designs of travel were formed, which should include Rome, North Italy, Switzerland, the Rhine, Brussels, Paris and London. Almost at the moment of starting for Rome at the end of April, the plans were altered; the season was too far advanced for going south; ways and means must be economised; Rome might be postponed for a future visit; and Venice would make amends for the present sacrifice. And Venice in May and early June did indeed for a time make amends. “I have been between heaven and earth,” Mrs. Browning wrote, “since our arrival at Venice.” The rich architecture, the colour, the moonlight, the music, the enchanting silence made up a unity of pleasures like nothing that she had previously known. When evening came she and her husband would follow the opera from their box hired for “two shillings and eightpence English,” or sit under the moon in the piazza of St Mark sipping coffee and reading the French papers. But as the month went by, Browning lost appetite and lost sleep. The “soothing, lulling, rocking atmosphere”