Robert Browning

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 £400 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.

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."

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 tête-à-tête, 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 Siècle. 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 coupé 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.