The Brownings, Their Life and Art
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Title: The Brownings, Their Life and Art
Author: Lilian Whiting
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THE BROWNINGS
Their Life and Art
[Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING
_From a drawing made by Field Talfourd, in Rome, 1855_]
THE BROWNINGS
Their Life and Art
by
LILIAN WHITING
Author of "The World Beautiful," "Italy
the Magic Land," "The Spiritual
Significance," Etc.
Illustrated
Boston
Little, Brown, and Company
1911
Copyright, 1911,
by Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Published, October, 1911
Printers
S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U.S.A.
INSCRIBED TO
ROBERT BARRETT BROWNING
(CAVALIERE DELLA CORONA D'ITALIA)
PAINTER, SCULPTOR, CONNOISSEUR IN ART
WITH ENCHANTING REMEMBRANCES OF HOURS IN "LA TORRE
ALL' ANTELLA" AND THE FAITHFUL REGARDS OF
LILIAN WHITING
FLORENCE, ITALY,
June, 1911
FOREWORD
The present volume was initiated in Florence, and, from its first
inception, invested with the cordial assent and the sympathetic
encouragement of Robert Barrett Browning. One never-to-be-forgotten day,
all ethereal light and loveliness, has left its picture in memory, when,
in company with Mr. Browning and his life-long friend, the Marchesa
Peruzzi di' Medici (_náta_ Story), the writer of this biography strolled
with them under the host's orange trees and among the riotous roses of his
Florentine villa, "La Torre All' Antella," listening to their sparkling
conversation, replete with fascinating reminiscences. To Mr. Browning the
tribute of thanks, whose full scope is known to the Recording Angel alone,
is here offered; and there is the blending of both privilege and duty in
grateful acknowledgements to Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Company for their
courtesy in permitting the somewhat liberal drawing on their published
Letters of both the Brownings, on which reliance had to be based in any
effort to
"Call up the buried Past again,"
and construct the story, from season to season, so far as might be, of
that wonderful interlude of the wedded life of the poets.
Yet any formality of thanks to this house is almost lost sight of in the
rush of memories of that long and mutually-trusting friendship between the
late George Murray Smith, the former head of this firm, and Robert
Browning, a friendship which was one of the choicest treasures in both
their lives.
To The Macmillan Company, the publishers for both the first and the
present Lord Tennyson; To Houghton Mifflin Company; to Messrs. Dodd, Mead,
& Company; to The Cornhill Magazine (to which the writer is indebted for
some data regarding Browning and Professor Masson); to each and all,
acknowledgments are offered for their courtesy which has invested with
added charm a work than which none was ever more completely a labor of
love.
To Edith, Contessa Rucellai (_náta_ Bronson), whose characteristically
lovely kindness placed at the disposal of this volume a number of letters
written by Robert Browning to her mother, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, special
gratitude is offered.
"Poetry," said Mrs. Browning, "is its own exceeding great reward." Any
effort, however remote its results from the ideal that haunted the writer,
to interpret the lives of such transcendent genius and nobleness as those
of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, must also be its own exceeding
reward in leading to a passion of pursuit of all that is highest and
holiest in the life that now is, and in that which is to come.
LILIAN WHITING
THE BRUNSWICK, BOSTON
Midsummer Days, 1911
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
1812-1833
The Most Exquisite Romance of Modern Life--Ancestry and Youth of
Robert Browning--Love of Music--Formative Influences--The
Fascination of Byron--A Home "Crammed with Books"--The Spell
of Shelley--"Incondita"--Poetic Vocation Definitely
Chosen--"Pauline" 1
CHAPTER II
1806-1832
Childhood and Early Youth of Elizabeth Barrett--Hope End--"Summer
Snow of Apple-Blossoms"--Her Bower of White Roses--"Living
with Visions"--The Malvern Hills--Hugh Stuart Boyd--Love of
Learning--"Juvenilia"--Impassioned Devotion to Poetry 16
CHAPTER III
1833-1841
Browning Visits Russia--"Paracelsus"--Recognition of Wordsworth
and Landor--"Strafford"--First Visit to Italy--Mrs. Carlyle's
Baffled Reading of "Sordello"--Lofty Motif of the Poem--The
Universal Problem of Life--Enthusiasm for Italy--The
Sibylline Leaves Yet to Unfold 26
CHAPTER IV
1833-1841
Elizabeth Barrett's Love for the Greek Poets--Lyrical Work--
Serious Entrance on Professional Literature--Noble Ideal
of Poetry--London Life--Kenyon--First Knowledge of Robert
Browning 44
CHAPTER V
1841-1846
"Bells and Pomegranates"--Arnould and Domett--"A Blot in the
'Scutcheon"--Macready--Second Visit to Italy--Miss Barrett's
Poetic Work--"Colombe's Birthday"--"Lady Geraldine's
Courtship"--"Romances and Lyrics"--Browning's First Letter
to Miss Barrett--The Poets Meet--Letters of Robert Browning
and Elizabeth Barrett--"Loves of the Poets"--Vita Nuova 67
CHAPTER VI
1846-1850
Marriage and Italy--"In That New World"--The Haunts of
Petrarca--The Magic Land--In Pisa--Vallombrosa--"Un Bel
Giro"--Guercino's Angel--Casa Guidi--Birth of Robert Barrett
Browning--Bagni di Lucca--"Sonnets from the Portuguese"--The
Enchantment of Italy 92
CHAPTER VII
1850-1855
"Casa Guidi Windows"--Society in Florence--Marchesa d'Ossoli--
Browning's Poetic Creed--Villeggiatura in Siena--Venice--
Brilliant Life in London--Paris and Milsand--Browning on
Shelley--In Florence--Idyllic Days in Bagni di Lucca--Mrs.
Browning's Spiritual Outlook--Delightful Winter in Rome--A
Poetic Pilgrimage--Harriet Hosmer--Characteristics of Mrs.
Browning 115
CHAPTER VIII
1855-1861
London Life--An Interlude in Paris--"Aurora Leigh"--Florentine
Days--"Men and Women"--The Hawthornes--"The Old Yellow
Book"--A Summer in Normandy--The Eternal City--The Storys and
Other Friends--Lilies of Florence--"It Is Beautiful!" 163
CHAPTER IX
1861-1869
The Completed Cycle--Letters to Friends--Browning's Devotion to
His Son--Warwick Crescent--"Dramatis Personæ"--London Life--
Death of the Poet's Father--Sarianna Browning--Oxford Honors
the Poet--Death of Arabel Barrett--Audierne--"The Ring and
the Book" 199
CHAPTER X
1869-1880
In Scotland with the Storys--Browning's Conversation--An Amusing
Incident--With Milsand at St. Aubin's--"The Red Cotton
Night-cap Country"--Robert Barrett Browning's Gift for Art--
Alfred Domett ("Waring")--"Balaustion's Adventure"--Browning
and Tennyson--"Pacchiarotto"--Visits Jowett at Oxford--
Declines Lord Rectorship of St. Andrews--"La Saisiaz"--Italy
Revisited--The Dream of Asolo--"Ivanovitch"--Pride in His
Son's Success--"Dramatic Idylls" 221
CHAPTER XI
1880-1888
"Les Charmettes"--Venetian Days--Dr. Hiram Corson--The Browning
Society--Oxford Honors Browning--Katherine DeKay Bronson--
Honors from Edinburgh--Visit to Professor Masson--Italian
Recognition--Nancioni--The Goldoni Sonnet--At St. Moritz--
In Palazzo Giustiniani--"Ferishtah's Fancies"--Companionship
with His Son--Death of Milsand--Letters to Mrs. Bronson--
DeVere Gardens--Palazzo Rezzonico--Sunsets from the Lido--
Robert Barrett Browning's Gift in Portraiture 238
CHAPTER XII
1888-1889
"Asolando"--Last Days in DeVere Gardens--Letters of Browning and
Tennyson--Venetian Lingerings and Friends--Mrs. Bronson's
Choice Circle--Browning's Letters to Mrs. Bronson--Asolo--
"In Ruby, Emerald, Chrysopras"--Last Meeting of Browning and
Story--In Palazzo Rezzonico--Last Meeting with Dr. Corson--
Honored by Westminster Abbey--A Cross of Violets--Choral
Music to Mrs. Browning's Poem, "The Sleep"--"And with God Be
the Rest!" 269
Index 297
ILLUSTRATIONS
_In Photogravure_
PAGE
Robert Browning _Frontispiece_
From a drawing by Field Talfourd, Rome, 1855
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 39
From a drawing by Field Talfourd, Rome, 1855
_Engravings_
Busts of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 2
Monument to Michael Angelo, by Vasari 80
Church of Santa Croce, Florence
Old Monastery at Vallombrosa 98
The Guardian Angel, Guercino 103
Church of San Agostino, Fano
Monument to Dante, by Stefano Ricci 108
Piazza di Santa Croce, Florence
Palazzo Vecchio, Florence 113
Statue of Savonarola, by E. Pazzi 116
Sala dei Cinquecento, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
Fresco of Dante, by Giotto 121
The Bargello, Florence
Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence (known as
the Duomo) 126
The Ponte Vecchio and the Arno, Florence 142
Casa Guidi 146
The Clasped Hands of the Brownings 153
Cast in bronze from the model taken by Harriet Hosmer in
Rome, 1853
The Campagna and Ruins of the Claudian Aqueducts, Rome 156
The Coronation of the Virgin, by Filippo Lippi 166
Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence
Andrea del Sarto. Portrait of the Artist and his Wife 170
Pitti Gallery, Florence
Equestrian Statue of Ferdinando de' Medici, by Giovanni
da Bologna 174
Piazza dell' Annunziata, Florence
Villa Petraja, near Florence 178
Church of San Miniato, near Florence 182
The Palazzo Barberini, Via Quattro Fontane, Rome 188
The English Cemetery, Florence 197
Tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning 200
Kate Field 208
From the portrait by Elihu Vedder, Florence, 1860
The Pallazzo Riccardi, Florence 214
Bust of Robert Browning, by his Son 226
Portrait of Robert Browning in 1882, by his Son 242
Church of San Lorenzo, Florence 246
Portrait of Robert Barrett Browning, as a Child, 1859 263
Portrait of Robert Browning, by George Frederick Watts, R.A. 270
Mrs. Arthur Bronson, by Ellen Montalba, in Asolo 274
Miss Edith Bronson, (Comtessa Rucellai) 280
Portrait of Professor Hiram Corson, by J. Colin Forbes, R.A. 290
Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice 294
Engraved Facsimile of a letter from Robert Browning to
Professor Hiram Corson 260
THE BROWNINGS
THEIR LIFE AND ART
CHAPTER I
1812-1833
"Allons! after the Great Companions! and to belong to them!"
"To know the universe itself as a road--as many roads--as
roads for travelling souls."
THE MOST EXQUISITE ROMANCE OF MODERN LIFE--ANCESTRY AND YOUTH OF ROBERT
BROWNING--LOVE OF MUSIC--FORMATIVE INFLUENCES--THE FASCINATION OF
BYRON--A HOME "CRAMMED WITH BOOKS"--THE SPELL OF SHELLEY--
"INCONDITA"--POETIC VOCATION DEFINITELY CHOSEN--"PAULINE."
Such a very page _de Contes_ is the life of the wedded poets, Robert and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that it is difficult to realize that this
immortal idyl of Poetry, Genius, and Love was less than fifteen years in
duration, out of his seventy-seven, and her fifty-five years of life. It
is a story that has touched the entire world
"... with mystic gleams,
Like fragments of forgotten dreams,"
this story of beautiful associations and friendships, of artistic
creation, and of the entrance on a wonderful realm of inspiration and
loveliness. At the time of their marriage he was in his thirty-fifth, and
she in her forty-first year, although she is described as looking so
youthful that she was like a girl, in her slender, flower-like grace; and
he lived on for twenty-eight years after
"Clouds and darkness
Fell upon Camelot,"
with the death of his "Lyric Love." The story of the most beautiful
romance that the world has ever known thus falls into three distinctive
periods,--that of the separate life of each up to the time of their
marriage; their married life, with its scenic setting in the enchantment
of Italy; and his life after her withdrawal from earthly scenes. The story
is also of duplex texture; for the outer life, rich in associations,
travel, impressions, is but the visible side of the life of great creative
art. A delightful journey is made, but its record is not limited to the
enjoyment of friends and place; a poem is written whose charm and power
persist through all the years.
[Illustration: BUSTS OF ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Made in 1861 by William Wetmore Story]
No adequate word could be written of the Brownings that did not take
account of this twofold life of the poets. It is almost unprecedented that
the power and resplendence and beauty of the life of art should find, in
the temporal environment, so eminent a correspondence of beauty as it did
with Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Not that they were in any wise exempt
from sorrow and pain; the poet, least of all, would choose to be
translated, even if he might, to some enchanted region remote from all the
mingled experiences of humanity; it is the common lot of destiny, with its
prismatic blending of failure and success, of purpose and achievement, of
hope and defeat, of love and sorrow, out of which the poet draws his song.
He would not choose
"That jar of violet wine set in the air,
That palest rose sweet in the night of life,"
to the exclusion of the common experiences of the day.
"Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping, and watching for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye unseen Powers."
But to those who, poets or otherwise, see life somewhat in the true
proportion of its lasting relations, events are largely transmuted into
experiences, and are realized in their extended relations. The destiny of
the Brownings led them into constantly picturesque surroundings; and the
force and manliness of his nature, the tender sweetness and playful
loveliness of hers, combined with their vast intellectual range, their
mutual genius for friendships, their devotion to each other and to their
son, their reverence for their art, and their lofty and noble spirituality
of nature,--all united to produce this exquisite and unrivaled romance of
life,--
"A Beauty passing the earth's store."
The rapture of the poet's dream pervaded every experience.
"O Life, O Poetry,
Which means life in life."
The transmutation of each into the other, both Life and Poetry, as
revealed in their lives, is something as exceptional as it is beautiful in
the world's history.
It is only to those who live for something higher than merely personal
ends, that the highest happiness can come; and the aim of these wedded
poets may well be read in the lines from "Aurora Leigh":
"... Beloved, let us love so well,
Our work shall still be better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work,
And both commended, for the sake of each,
By all true workers and true lovers born."
In the ancestry of Robert Browning there was nothing especially
distinctive, although it is representative of the best order of people; of
eminently reputable life, of moderate means, of culture, and of assured
intelligence. It is to the Brownings of Dorsetshire, who were large
manor-owners in the time of Henry VII, that the poet's family is traced.
Robert Browning, the grandfather of the poet, was a clerk in the Bank of
England, a position he obtained through the influence of the Earl of
Shaftesbury. Entering on this work at the age of twenty, he served
honorably for fifty years, and was promoted to the position of the Bank
Stock office, a highly responsible place, that brought him in constant
contact with the leading financiers of the day. Born in 1749, he had
married, in 1778, Margaret Tittle, the inheritor of some property in the
West Indies, where she was born of English parentage. The second Robert,
the father of the poet, was the son of this union. In his early youth he
was sent out to take charge of his mother's property, and his grandson,
Robert Barrett Browning, relates with pardonable pride how he resigned the
post, which was a lucrative one, because he could not tolerate the system
of slave labor prevailing there. By this act he forfeited all the estate
designed for him, and returned to England to face privation and to make
his own way. He, too, became a clerk in the Bank of England, and in 1811,
at the age of thirty, married Sarah Anna Wiedemann, the daughter of a
ship-owner in Dundee. Mr. Wiedemann was a German of Hamburg, who had
married a Scotch lady; and thus, on his maternal side, the poet had
mingled Scotch and German ancestry. The new household established itself
in Southampton Street, Camberwell, and there were born their two children,
Robert, on May 7, 1812, and on January 7, 1814, Sarah Anna, who came to be
known as Sarianna through all her later life.
The poet's father was not only an efficient financier, but he was also a
man of scholarly culture and literary tastes. He was a lover of the
classics, and was said to have known by heart the first book of the Iliad,
and the Odes of Horace. There is a legend that he often soothed his little
son to sleep by humming to him an ode of Anacreon. He wrote verse, he was
a very clever draughtsman, and he was a collector of rare books and
prints. Mr. W. J. Stillman, in his "Autobiography of a Journalist," refers
to the elder Browning, whom he knew in his later years, as "a serene,
untroubled soul,... as gentle as a gentle woman, a man to whom, it seemed
to me, no moral conflict could ever have arisen to cloud his frank
acceptance of life as he found it come to him.... His unworldliness had
not a flaw." In Browning's poem entitled "Development" (in "Asolando") he
gives this picture of his father and of his own childhood:
"My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
'What do you read about?'
'The siege of Troy.'
'What is a siege, and what is Troy?'
Whereat
He piled up chairs and tables for a town,
Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat
--Helen, enticed away from home (he said)
By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close
Under the footstool....
* * * * *
This taught me who was who and what was what;
So far I rightly understood the case
At five years old; a huge delight it proved
And still proves--thanks to that instructor sage
My Father...."
The poet's mother was a true gentlewoman, characterized by fervent
religious feeling, delicacy of perception, and a great love for music. She
was reared in the Scottish kirk, and her husband in the Church of
England, but they both connected themselves after their marriage with an
"Independent" body that held their meetings in York Street, where the
Robert Browning Hall now stands. They were, however, greatly attached to
the Rev. Henry Melvill (later Canon at St. Paul's), whose evening service
they habitually attended. While the poet's mother had little training in
music, she was a natural musician, and was blessed with that keen,
tremulous susceptibility to musical influence that was so marked a trait
in her son. William Sharp pictures a late afternoon, when, playing softly
to herself in the twilight, she was startled to hear a sound in the room.
"Glancing around, she beheld a little white figure distinctly outlined
against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large wistful eyes
looking earnestly at her. The next moment the child had sprung into her
arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm of
emotion subsided, whispering over and over,'Play! Play!'"
The elder Browning was an impassioned lover of medieval legend and story.
He was deeply familiar with Paracelsus, with Faust, and with many of the
Talmudic tales. His library was large and richly stored,--the house,
indeed, "crammed with books," in which the boy browsed about at his own
will. It was the best of all possible educations, this atmosphere of
books. And the wealth of old engravings and prints fascinated the child.
He would sit among these before a glowing fire, while from the adjoining
room floated strains "of a wild Gaelic lament, with its insistent falling
cadences." It is recorded as his mother's chief happiness,--"her hour of
darkness and solitude and music." Of such fabric are poetic impressions
woven. The atmosphere was what Emerson called the "immortal ichor." The
boy was companioned by the "liberating gods." Something mystic and
beautiful beckoned to him, and incantations, unheard by the outer sense,
thronged about him, pervading the air. The lad began to recast in English
verse the Odes of Horace. From his school, on holiday afternoons, he
sought a lonely spot, elm-shaded, where he could dimly discern London in
the distance, with the gleam of sunshine on the golden cross of St.
Paul's,--lying for hours on the grass whence, perchance, he
"Saw distant gates of Eden gleam
And did not dream it was a dream."
Meantime the boy read Junius, Voltaire, Walpole's Letters, the "Emblems"
of Quarles (a book that remained as a haunting influence all his life),
and Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees." The first book of his own purchase
was a copy of Ossian's poems, and his initial effort in literary creation
was in likeness of the picturesque imaginations that appealed with
peculiar fascination to his mind.
"The world of books is still the world," wrote Mrs. Browning in "Aurora
Leigh," and this was the world of Robert Browning's early life. The
genesis of many of his greatest poems can be traced directly to this
atmosphere of books, and their constant use and reference in his
childhood. Literature and life, are, indeed, so absolutely interpenetrated
and so interdependent that they can almost invariably be contemplated as
cause and effect, each reacting upon the other in determining sequences.
By the magic of some spiritual alchemy, reading is transmuted into the
qualities that build up character, and these qualities, in turn, determine
the continued choice of books, so that selection and result perpetuate
themselves, forming an unceasing contribution to the nature of life. If
with these qualities is united the kindling imagination, the gift that
makes its possessor the creative artist, the environment of books and
perpetual reference to them act as a torch that ignites the divine fire.
Browning's early stimulus owes much, not only to the book-loving father,
but to his father's brother, his uncle Reuben Browning, who was a
classical scholar and who took great interest in the boy. Preserved to the
end of the poet's life was a copy of the Odes of Horace, in translation,
given to him as a lad of twelve, with his uncle's autograph inscription on
the fly-leaf. This was the translation made by Christopher Smart, whose
"Song of David" soon became one of the boy's favorites, and it is curious
to trace how, more than sixty years later, Browning embodied Smart in his
"Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day," as one with
whom
"... truth found vent
In words for once with you...."
Browning, with the poet's instant insight, read the essential story of his
boyhood into the lines:
"... Dreaming, blindfold led
By visionary hand, did soul's advance
Precede my body's, gain inheritance
Of fact by fancy...?"
No transcription of the poet's childhood could even suggest the fortunate
influences surrounding him that did not emphasize the rare culture and
original power of his father. The elder Browning was familiar with old
French and with both Spanish and Italian literature. "His wonderful store
of information might really be compared to an inexhaustible mine," said
one who knew him well.
It is easy to see how out of such an atmosphere the future poet drew
unconsciously the power to weave his "magic web" of such poems as the
"Parleyings," "Abt Vogler," "Ferishtah's Fancies," and was lured on into
that realm of marvelous creation out of which sprang his transcendent
masterpiece, "The Ring and the Book."
The elder Browning's impassioned love of books was instanced by the
curious fact that he could go in the dark to his library, and out of many
hundreds of volumes select some particular one to which conversational
reference had incidentally been made regarding some point which he wished
to verify. He haunted all the old book-stalls in London, and knew their
contents better than did their owners.
Books are so intimately associated with the very springs of both character
and achievement that no adequate idea of the formative influences of the
life and poetry of Robert Browning could be gained without familiarity
with this most determining and conspicuous influence of his boyhood. The
book with which a man has lived becomes an essential factor in his growth.
"None of us yet know," said Ruskin, "for none of us have yet been taught
in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought,
proof against all adversity, bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble
histories, faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful
thoughts,... houses built without hands for our souls to live in." These
houses for the soul, built in thought, will be transposed into outer form
and semblance.
There is a nebulous but none the less pernicious tradition that great
literature is formidable, and presents itself as a task rather than as a
privilege to the reader. Devotion to the best books has been regarded as
something of a test of mental endurance, for which the recompense, if not
the antidote, must be sought in periods of indulgence in the frivolous and
the sensational. Never was there a more fatal misconception. It is the
inconsequential, the crude, the obtuse, that are dull in literature, as in
life; and stupidity in various languages might well be entitled to rank
among the Seven Deadly Sins of Dante. Even in the greatest literature
there is much that the child may easily learn to appreciate and to love.
"Great the Master
And sweet the Magic"
that opens the golden door of literary stimulus. Books are to the mind as
is food to the body. Emerson declares that the poet is the only teller of
news, and Mrs. Browning pronounced poets as
"The only truth-tellers now left to God."
Familiarity with noble thought and beautiful expression influences the
subconscious nature to an incalculable degree, and leads "the spirit
finely touched" on "to all fine issues."
Browning lived in this stimulating atmosphere. He warmed his hands at the
divine fire; and the fact that all this richness of resource stimulated
rather than stifled him is greatly to the credit of his real power.
Favorable surroundings and circumstances did not serve him as a cushion on
which to go to sleep, but rather as the pedestal on which he might climb
to loftier altitudes. It was no lotus-eating experience into which the lad
was lulled, but the vital activity of the life of creative thought. The
Heavenly Powers are not invariably, even if frequently, sought in sorrow
only, and in the mournful midnight hours. There are natures that grow by
affluence as well as by privation, and that develop their best powers in
sunshine.
"Even in a palace life can be well lived," said Marcus Aurelius. The
spirit formed to dwell in the starry spaces is not allured to the mere
enjoyment of the senses, even when material comfort and intellectual
luxuries may abound. Not that the modest abundance of the elder Browning's
books and pictures could take rank as intellectual luxury. It was
stimulus, not satiety, that these suggested.
Pictures and painters had their part, too, in the unconscious culture that
surrounded the future poet. London in that day afforded little of what
would be called art; the National Gallery was not opened until Browning
was in his young manhood; the Tate and other modern galleries were then
undreamed of. But, to the appropriating temperament, one picture may do
more than a city full of galleries might for another, and to the small
collection of some three or four hundred paintings in the Dulwich Gallery,
Browning was indebted for great enjoyment, and for the art that fostered
his sympathetic appreciation. In after years he referred to his gratitude
for being allowed its privileges when under the age (fourteen) at which
these were supposed to be granted. Small as was the collection, it was
representative of the Italian and Spanish, the French and the Dutch
schools, as well as of the English, and the boy would fix on some one
picture and sit before it for an hour, lost in its suggestion. It was the
more imaginative art that enchained him. In later years, speaking of these
experiences in a letter to Miss Barrett, he wrote of his ecstatic
contemplation of "those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt's 'Jacob's
Vision,' such a Watteau...." An old engraving from Correggio, in his
father's home, was one of the sources of inspiration of Browning's
boyhood. The story fascinated him; he never tired of asking his father to
repeat it, and something of its truth so penetrated into his consciousness
that in later years he had the old print hung in his room that it might be
before him as he wrote. It became to him, perhaps, one of
"the unshaped images that lie
Within my mind's cave."
The profound significance of the picture evidently haunted him, as is made
evident by a passage in "Pauline" that opens:
"But I must never grieve whom wing can waft
Far from such thoughts--as now. Andromeda!
And she is with me; years roll, I shall change,
But change can touch her not--so beautiful
With her fixed eyes...."
Is there gained another glimpse of Browning's boyhood in those lines in
"Pauline"?:
"I am made up of an intensest life,
Of a most clear idea of consciousness
Of self, distinct from all its qualities,
From all affections, passions, feelings, powers."
The various and complex impressions, influences, and shaping factors of
destiny that any biographer discerns in the formative years of his subject
are as indecipherable as a palimpsest, and as little to be classified as
the contents of Pandora's box; nor is it on record that the man himself
can look into his own history and rightly appraise the relative values of
these. Nothing, certainly, could be more remote from the truth than the
reading of autobiographic significance into any stray line a poet may
write; for imagination is frequently more real than reality. Yet many of
the creations of after life may trace their germination to some incident
or impression. William Sharp offers a beautiful and interesting instance
of one of these when he ascribes the entrancing fantasy of "The Flight of
the Duchess" to a suggestion made on the poet's mind as a child on a Guy
Fawkes day, when he followed across the fields a woman singing a strange
song, whose refrain was: "Following the Queen of the Gypsies, O!" The
haunting line took root in his memory and found its inflorescence in that
memorable poem.
It was not conducive to poetic fancy when the lad was placed in the school
of a Mr. Ready, at Peckham, where he solaced himself for the rules and
regulations which he abhorred by writing little plays, and persuading his
school-fellows to act in them with him.
Browning's first excursion into Shelley's poems, brought home to him one
night as a gift from his mother, was in one of the enchanting evenings of
May; where, at the open window by which he sat, there floated in the
melody of two nightingales, one in a laburnum, "heavy with its weight of
gold," and the other in a copper-beech, at the opposite side of the
garden. Such an hour mirrors itself unconsciously in a poet's memory, and
affords, in future years, "such stuff as dreams are made of."
Byron, who, as Mazzini says, "led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage
throughout all Europe," stamped an impress upon the youthful Browning that
may be traced throughout his entire life. There was something in the
genius of Byron that acted as an enormous force on the nature in response
to it, that transformed nebulous and floating ideals and imaginings into
hope and resolution, that burned away barriers and revealed truth. By its
very nature influence is determined as much by the receiver as by the
inspirer, and if a light is applied to a torch, the torch, too, must be
prepared to ignite, or there will be no blaze.
"A deft musician does the breeze become
Whenever an Æolian harp it finds;
Hornpipe and hurdygurdy both are dumb
Unto the most musicianly of winds."
The fire of Byron, the spirituality of Shelley, illuminated that world of
drift and dream in which Robert Browning dwelt; and while Shelley, with
his finer spirit, his glorious, impassioned imagination,
"A creature of impetuous breath,"
incited poetic ardors and unmeasured rapture of vision, Byron penetrated
his soul with a certain effective energy that awakened in him creative
power. The spell of Shelley's poetry acted upon Browning as a vision
revealed of beauty and radiance. For Shelley himself, who, as Tennyson
said, "did yet give the world another heart and new pulses," Browning's
feeling was even more intense.
In the analysis of Shelley's poetic nature Browning offers the critical
reader a key to his own. He asserts that it is the presence of the highest
faculty, even though less developed, that gives rank to nature, rather
than a lower faculty more developed. Although it was in later years that
the impression Shelley made upon his boyhood found adequate expression in
his noted essay, the spell reflected itself in "Pauline," and is to be
distinctly traced in many of his poems throughout his entire life. He was
aware from the first of that peculiarly kindling quality in Shelley, the
flash of life in his work:
"He spurreth men, he quickeneth
To splendid strife."
Under the title of "Incondita" was collected a group of the juvenile
verses of Robert Browning, whose special claim to interest is in the
revelation of the impress made upon the youth by Byron and Shelley.
Among the early friends of the youthful poet were Alfred Domett (the
"Waring" of his future poem), and Joseph Arnould, who became a celebrated
judge in India.
With Browning there was never any question about his definite vocation as
a poet. "Pauline" was published in 1833, before he had reached his
twenty-first birthday. Rejected by publishers, it was brought out at the
expense of his aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne; and his father paid for the
publication of "Paracelsus," "Sordello," and for the first eight parts of
"Bells and Pomegranates." On the appearance of "Pauline," it was reviewed
by Rev. William Johnson Fox, as the "work of a poet and a genius." Allan
Cunningham and other reviewers gave encouraging expressions. The design
of "Pauline" is that spiritual drama to which Browning was always
temperamentally drawn. It is supposed to be the confessions and
reminiscences of a dying man, and while it is easy to discern its
crudeness and inconsistencies, there are in it, too, many detached
passages of absolute and permanent value. As this:
"Sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever!
Thou art gone from us; years go by and spring
Gladdens, and the young earth is beautiful,
Yet thy songs come not...."
Mr. Browning certainly gave hostages to poetic art when he produced
"Pauline," in which may be traced the same conceptions of life as those
more fully and clearly presented in "Paracelsus" and "Sordello." It
embodies the conviction which is the very essence and vital center of all
Browning's work--that ultimate success is attained through partial
failures. From first to last Browning regards life as an adventure of the
soul, which sinks, falls, rises, recovers itself, relapses into
faithlessness to its higher powers, yet sees the wrong and aims to
retrieve it; gropes through darkness to light; and though "tried,
troubled, tempted," never yields to alien forces and ignominious failure.
The soul, being divine, must achieve divinity at last. That is the
crystallization of the message of Browning.
The poem "Pauline," lightly as Mr. Browning himself seemed in after life
to regard it, becomes of tremendous importance in the right approach to
the comprehension of his future work. It reveals to us in what manner the
youthful poet discerned "the Gleam." Like Tennyson, he felt "the magic of
Merlin,"--of that spirit of the poetic ideal that bade him follow.
"The Master whisper'd
'Follow The Gleam.'"
And what unguessed sweetness and beauty of life and love awaited the poet
in the unfolding years!
CHAPTER II
1806-1832
"Here's the garden she walked across.
* * * * *
Roses ranged in a valiant row,
I will never think she passed you by!"
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH OF ELIZABETH BARRETT--HOPE END--"SUMMER SNOW OF
APPLE-BLOSSOMS"--HER BOWER OF WHITE ROSES--"LIVING WITH VISIONS"--THE
MALVERN HILLS--HUGH STUART BOYD--LOVE OF LEARNING--"JUVENILIA"--
IMPASSIONED DEVOTION TO POETRY.
The literature of childhood presents nothing more beautiful than the
records of the early years of Elizabeth Barrett. Fragmentary though they
be, yet, gathered here and there, they fall into a certain consecutive
unity, from which one may construct a mosaic-like picture of the daily
life of the little girl who was born on March 6, 1806, in Coxhoe Hall,
Durham, whence the family soon removed to Hope End, a home of stately
beauty and modest luxury. There were brothers to the number of eight; and
two sisters, Henrietta and Arabel, all younger than herself. Edward, the
eldest son, especially cared for Elizabeth, holding her in tender and
almost reverential love, and divining, almost from his infancy, her
exquisite gifts. Apparently, the eldest sister was also greatly beloved by
the whole troop of the younger brothers,--Charles, Samuel, George, Henry,
Alfred, and the two younger, who were named Septimus and Octavius.
With three daughters and eight sons, the household did not lack in
merriment and overflowing life; and while the little Elizabeth was born
to love books and dreams, and assimilated learning as naturally as she
played with her dolls, she was no prodigy, set apart because of fantastic
qualities, but an eager, earnest little maid, who, although she read Homer
at eight years of age, yet read him with her doll clasped closely in one
hand, and who wrote her childish rhymes as unconsciously as a bird sings.
It is a curious coincidence that this love of the Greeks, as to history,
literature, and mythology, characterized the earliest childhood of both
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Pope's Homer was the childish
favorite of each. "The Greeks were my demigods," she herself said, in
later life, of her early years, "and haunted me out of Pope's Homer, until
I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony."
The house at Hope End has been described by Lady Carmichael as "a
luxurious home standing in a lovely park, among trees and sloping hills,"
and the earliest account that has been preserved of the little girl
reveals her sitting on a hassock, propped against the wall, in a lofty
room called "Elizabeth's chamber," with a stained glass oriel window
through which golden gleams of light fell, lingering on the long curls
that drooped over her face as she sat absorbed in a book. She was also an
eager worker in her garden, the children all being given a plot to
cultivate for themselves, and Elizabeth won special fame for her bower of
white roses.
There are few data about the parents of Elizabeth Barrett, and the legal
name, Moulton-Barrett, by which she signed her marriage register and by
which her father is commonly known, has been a source of some confused
statements. Her father, Edward Barrett Moulton, came into an inheritance
of property by which he was required to add the name of Barrett again,
hyphenating it, and was thus known as Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett. He
married Mary Graham Clarke, a native of Newcastle-on-the-Tyne, a woman of
gentle loveliness, who died on October 1, 1828. Mr. Moulton-Barrett lived
until 1860, his death occurring only a year before that of his famous
daughter, who was christened Elizabeth Barrett Moulton, and who thus
became, after her father's added name, Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett,
although, except when a legal signature was necessary, she signed her name
as Elizabeth Barrett. The family are still known by the hyphenated name;
and Mrs. Browning's namesake niece, a very scholarly and charming young
woman, now living in Rome, is known as Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett. She is
the daughter of Mrs. Browning's youngest brother, Alfred, and her mother,
who is still living, is the original of Mrs. Browning's poem, "A
Portrait." While Miss Moulton-Barrett never saw her aunt (having been born
after her death), she is said to resemble Mrs. Browning both in
temperament and character. By a curious coincidence the Barrett family,
like the Brownings, had been for generations the owners of estates in the
West Indies, and it is said that Elizabeth Barrett was the first child of
their family to be born in England for more than a hundred years.
Her father, though born in Jamaica, was brought to England as a young
child, and he was the ward of Chief Baron Lord Abinger. He was sent to
Harrow, and afterwards to Cambridge, but he did not wait to finish his
university course, and married when young. One of his sisters was painted
by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and this portrait is now in the possession of
Octavius Moulton-Barrett, Esq., of the Isle of Wight.
Elizabeth's brother Edward was but two years her junior. It was he who was
drowned at Torquay, almost before her eyes, and who is commemorated in her
"De Profundis." Of the other brothers only three lived to manhood. When
Elizabeth was three years of age, the family removed to Hope End in
Herefordshire, a spacious and stately house with domes and minarets
embowered in a grove of ancient oaks. It was a place calculated to appeal
to the imagination of a child, and in later years she wrote of it:
"Green the land is where my daily
Steps in jocund childhood played,
Dimpled close with hill and valley,
Dappled very close with shade,--
Summer-snow of apple-blossoms,
Running up from glade to glade."
Here all her girlhood was passed, and it was in the garden of Hope End
that she stood, holding up an apron filled with flowers, when that lovely
picture was painted representing her as a little girl of nine or ten years
of age. Much of rather apochryphal myth and error has grown up about Mrs.
Browning's early life. However gifted, she was in no wise abnormal, and
she galloped on Moses, her black pony, through the Herefordshire lanes,
and offered pagan sacrifices to some imaginary Athene, "with a bundle of
sticks from the kitchen fire and a match begged from an indulgent
housemaid." In a letter to Richard Hengist Home, under date of October 5,
1843, in reply to a request of his for data for a biographical sketch of
her for "The New Spirit of the Age," she wrote:
"... And then as to stories, mine amounts to the knife-grinder's, with
nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage would have as good
a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have
passed in my thoughts. I wrote verses--as I dare say many have done
who never wrote any poems--very early, at eight years of age, and
earlier. But, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will,
and remained with me, and from that day to this, poetry has been a
distinct object with me,--an object to read, think, and live for."
When she was eleven or twelve, she amused herself by writing a great epic
in four books, called "The Battle of Marathon," which possessed her fancy.
Her father took great pride in this, and, "bent upon spoiling me," she
laughingly said in later years, had fifty copies of this childish
achievement printed, and there is one in the British Museum library
to-day. No creator of prose romance could invent more curious coincidences
than those of the similar trend of fancy that is seen between the
childhood of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Her "Battle of
Marathon" revealed how the Greek stories enchanted her fancy, and how
sensitive was her ear in the imitation of the rhythm caught from Pope.
This led her to the delighted study of Greek, that she might read its
records at first hand; and Greek drew her into Latin, and from this
atmosphere of classic lore, which, after all, is just as interesting to
the average child as is the (too usual) juvenile pabulum, she drew her
interest in thought and dream. The idyllic solitude in which she lived
fostered all these mental excursions. "I had my fits of Pope and Byron and
Coleridge," she has related, "and read Greek as hard under the trees as
some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the
dramatists, and ate and drank Greek.... Do you know the Malvern Hills? The
Hills of Piers Plowman's Visions? They seem to me my native hills.
Beautiful, beautiful they were, and I lived among them till I had passed
twenty by several years."
Mr. Moulton-Barrett was one of the earliest of social reformers. So much
has been said, and, alas! with too much justice, it must be conceded, of
his eccentric tyranny, his monomania,--for it amounted to that, in
relation to the marriage of any of his children regarding which his
refusal was insanely irrational,--that it is pleasant to study him for a
moment in his more normal life. In Ledbury, the nearest village, he would
hold meetings for the untaught people, read and pray with them, and this
at a period when for a man of wealth to concern himself in social
betterment was almost unknown. He was truly "the friend of the unfriended
poor," and by his side, with wondering, upturned, childish eyes, was the
little Elizabeth, an ardent and sympathetic companion. Until quite
recently there were still living those who remembered Mr. Barrett as this
intelligent and active helper; and in the parish church is a monument to
him, by the side of a gloriously decorated tomb of the fourteenth century,
with an inscription to his memory that vividly recalls the work of one who
strove to revive the simple faith in God that has always, in all nations
and in all centuries, met every real need of life.
Mrs. Barrett, a sweet and gentle woman, without special force of
character, died when Elizabeth was but twenty years of age; and it was
some five years before her mother's death that Elizabeth met with the
accident, from the fall from her saddle when trying to mount her pony,
that caused her life-long delicacy of health. Her natural buoyancy of
spirits, however, never failed, and she was endowed with a certain
resistless energy which is quite at variance with the legendary traditions
that she was a nervous invalid.
Hardly less than Browning in his earliest youth, was Elizabeth Barrett
"full of an intensest life." Her Italian master one day told her that
there was an unpronounceable English word that expressed her exactly, but
which, as he could not give in English, he would express in his own
tongue,--_testa lunga_. Relating this to Mr. Browning in one of her
letters, she says: "Of course the signor meant headlong!--and now I have
had enough to tame me, and might be expected to stand still in my stall.
But you see I do not. Headlong I was at first, and headlong I
continue,--precipitately rushing forward through all manner of nettles and
briers instead of keeping the path; guessing at the meaning of unknown
words instead of looking into the dictionary,--tearing open letters, and
never untying a string,--and expecting everything to be done in a minute,
and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning."
Impetuous, vivacious, with an inimitable sense of humor, full of
impassioned vitality,--this was the real Elizabeth Barrett, whose
characteristics were in no wise changed during her entire life. Always was
she
"A creature of impetuous breath,"
full of vivacious surprises, and witty repartee.
Hope End was in the near vicinity of Eastnor Castle, a country seat of the
Somersets; it is to-day one of the present homes of Lady Henry Somerset,
and there are family records of long, sunny days that the young girl-poet
passed at the castle, walking on the terraces that lead down to the still
water, or lying idly in the boat as the ripples of the little lake lapped
against the reeds and rushes that grew on the banks. In the castle library
is preserved to-day an autograph copy of the first volume of Elizabeth
Barrett's poems, published when she was twenty, and containing that
didactic "Essay on Mind" written when she was but seventeen, and of which
she afterward said that it had "a pertness and a pedantry which did not
even then belong to the character of the author," and which she regretted,
she went on to say, "even more than the literary defectiveness." This
volume was presented by her to a member of the Somerset family whose name
is inscribed over that of her own signature.
During these years Hugh Stuart Boyd, the blind scholar, was living in
Great Malvern, and one of Miss Barrett's greatest pleasures was to visit
and read Greek with him. He was never her "tutor," in the literal sense,
as has so widely been asserted, for her study of Greek was made with her
brother Edward, under his tutor, a Mr. MacSweeney; but she read and
talked of Greek literature (especially of the Christian poets) with him,
and she loved to record her indebtedness to him "for many happy hours."
She wrote of him as one "enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and
one of the most simple and upright of human beings." The memory of her
discussions with him is embalmed in her poem, "Wine of Cyprus," which was
addressed to him:
"And I think of those long mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio's turnings,
Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek."
Elizabeth Barrett was more than a student, however scholarly, of Greek.
She had a temperamental affinity for the Greek poets, and such
translations as hers of "Prometheus Bound" and Bion's "Lament for Adonis,"
identify her with the very life itself of Æschylus and Bion. In her essay
on "The Greek Christian Poets" we find her saying: "We want the touch of
Christ's hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things ...
Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian
poets,... religious poets of whom the universal church and the world's
literature would gladly embrace more names than can be counted to either."
All her work of these early years is in that same delicate microscopic
handwriting of her later life. She laughingly professed a theory that "an
immense amount of physical energy must go to the making of those immense,
sweeping hand-writings achieved by some persons." She instanced that of
Landor, "who writes as if he had the sky for a copy-book and dotted his
i's in proportion."
Poetry as a serious art was the most earnest object in the life of
Elizabeth Barrett. To her poetry meant "life in life."
"Art's a service,--mark."
The poetic vocation could hardly be said to be so much a conscious and
definite choice with her as a predetermined destiny, and still it was
both. The possibility of not being a poet could never have occurred to
her. There could have been as little question of Beethoven's being other
than a musician or of Raphael as being other than a painter. In poetry
Elizabeth Barrett recognized the most potent form of service; and she held
that poetic art existed for the sake of human co-operation with the Divine
purposes.
The opening chapters of her life in the lovely seclusion of Hope End
closed in 1832 with the removal of the family to Sidmouth in Devonshire.
Here they were bestowed in a house which had been occupied by the Grand
Duchess Helena. It commanded a splendid sea view, on which four
drawing-room windows looked out, and there were green hills and trees
behind. They met a few friends,--Sir John Kean, the Herrings,--and the
town abounded in green lanes, "some of them quite black with foliage,
where it is twilight in the middle of the day, and others letting in
beautiful glimpses of the hills and the sunny sea." Henrietta Barrett took
long walks, Elizabeth accompanying her sister, mounted on her donkey. The
brothers and sisters were all fond of boating and passed much time on the
water. They would row as far as Dawlish, ten miles distant, and back; and
after the five o'clock dinner there were not infrequently moonlight
excursions on the sea. During these first months at Sidmouth Miss Barrett
read Bulwer's novels, which she asserts "quite delighted" her; as she
found in them "all the dramatic talent which Scott has, and all the
passion which he has not." Bulwer seemed to her, also, "a far more
profound discriminator of character" than Scott. She read Mrs. Trollope,
"that maker of books," whose work she characterized as not novels but
"libels." She found in Mrs. Trollope "neither the delicacy nor the candor
which constitute true nobility of mind," and thought that her talent
formed but "a scanty veil to shadow her other defects."
Miss Barrett grew to love Sidmouth, with its walks on the seashore; and
letters, reading, poetic production, and family interests filled the time.
Here, too, she found time to enter on a task dear to her, the translation
of the "Prometheus Bound" of Æschylus.
Some years later, however, she entirely revised this early translation, of
which she wrote to Hugh Stuart Boyd that it was "as cold as Caucasus, and
flat as the neighboring plain," and that "a palinodia, a recantation," was
necessary to her. In her preface to the later translation she begged that
her reader would forgive her English for not being Greek, and herself for
not being Æschylus.
CHAPTER III
1833-1841
"... I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendor, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom; I shall emerge one day."
BROWNING VISITS RUSSIA--"PARACELSUS"--RECOGNITION OF WORDSWORTH AND
LANDOR--"STRAFFORD"--FIRST VISIT TO ITALY--MRS. CARLYLE'S BAFFLED
READING OF "SORDELLO"--LOFTY MOTIF OF THE POEM--THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM
OF LIFE--ENTHUSIASM FOR ITALY--THE SIBYLLINE LEAVES YET TO UNFOLD.
From Camberwell to St. Petersburg was somewhat of a transition. This was
Mr. Browning's initial excursion into a wider world of realities, as
distinguished from that mirage which rises in the world of dreams and
mental nebulæ. "To know the universe itself as a road,--as many roads," is
the way in which the beckoning future prefigures itself to the artist
temperament.
"All around him Patmos lies
Who hath spirit-gifted eyes."
The eyes thus touched with the chrism of poetic art see the invisible
which is peopled with forms unseen to others, and which offers a panorama
of living drama. It is the poet who overhears the "talk of the gods," and
when he shall report
"Some random word they say,"
he becomes
"... the fated man of men
Whom the ages must obey."
This was the undreamed destiny hovering over the young poet, luring him on
like a guiding cloud which became a pillar of fire by night.
Among his London friends was the Chevalier George de Benkhausen, the
Russian Consul-General, who, being suddenly summoned to Russia on some
secret mission of state, invited Browning to accompany him. Browning went
"nominally in the character of secretary," Mrs. Orr says, and they fared
forth on March 1, by steamer to Rotterdam, and then journeyed more than
fifteen hundred miles by diligence, drawn by relays of galloping horses.
The expedition was to Browning a rich mine of poetic material. The
experience sank into the subconsciousness as seed to await fruition. In
his "Ivan Ivanovitch," where is seen
"This highway broad and straight e'en from the Neva's mouth
To Moscow's gates of gold,"
and in which the unending pine forests rising from the snow-covered ground
are so vividly pictured; and in "Colombe's Birthday," where is seen the
region of the heroine,--
"Castle Ravestein--
That sleeps out trustfully its extreme age
On the Meuse' quiet bank, where she lived queen
Over the water-buds,..."
and the place
"... when he hid his child
Among the river-flowers at Ravestein,"
it can be seen how all this country impressed his imagination. Professor
Hall Griffin finds in the fifth book of "Sordello" an unmistakable
description of the most famous and oldest portrait of Charlemagne, which
hangs in the Council Hall of the Rath-haus, in Aix, which Mr. Browning saw
on this trip. During these three months he saw something of Russian
society, and on the breaking up of the ice in the Neva in spring,
witnessed the annual ceremony of the Czar's drinking the first glass of
water from it. Much of the gorgeous, barbaric splendor of Russian fairs
and booths, "with droshkies and fish-pies" on the one hand, and stately
palaces on the other, haunted him, and reflected themselves in several of
his poems. Especially did the Russian music and strains of folk-song
linger in his memory for all the after years.
On his return from Russia Browning had some fancy for entering on a
diplomatic career, and was momentarily disappointed at not receiving an
appointment to Persia, which he had in mind; fortunately for him and for
the world he was held to the orbit of his poetic gift. Diplomacy has an
abundance of recruits without devastating poetic genius to furnish them.
The winter of 1834 found him deeply absorbed in "Paracelsus." This poem is
dedicated to the Marquis Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, who was a great friend
of Browning at this time. The Marquis was four years his senior; he was in
England as a private agent for the Duchesse de Berri and the Royalist
party in France to the English government. The subject of the poem is said
to have been suggested by the Marquis, although the fact that all this
medieval lore had been familiar to Browning from his earliest childhood
must be accounted the pre-determining factor in its creation. William
Sharp quotes Browning as having once said of his father: "The old
gentleman's brain was a storehouse of literary and philosophical
antiquities. He was completely versed in medieval legend, and seemed to
have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages, personally,"
and his son assimilated unconsciously this entire atmosphere.
Both "Paracelsus" and "Sordello" seem to spring, as by natural poetic
evolution, from "Pauline"; all three of these poems are, in varying
degree, a drama of the soul's progress. They all suggest, and
"Paracelsus," especially, in a great degree embodies, the Hegelian
philosophy; yet Mr. Barrett Browning expresses his rather positive
conviction that his father never read Hegel at any period of his life. Dr.
Corson regarded these early poems of Browning as of peculiar value in
showing his attitude toward things. "We see in what direction the poet has
set his face," said Dr. Corson, "what his philosophy of life is, what
soul-life means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means
in its deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple." Dr.
Corson further illuminated this attitude of the poet by pointing out that
he emphasized the approach to perfection as something that cannot be
brought out through what is born and resides in the brain; but it must be
by "the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute
personality being the God-man, Christ. The human soul is regarded in
Browning's poetry," continued Dr. Corson, "as a complexly organized,
individualized, divine force, destined to gravitate toward the Infinite.
How is this force with its numberless checks and counter-checks, its
centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in its necessarily
oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry to keep it
sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed down with
materialistic heaviness?" Incredibly enough, in the revelations of the
retrospective view, "Paracelsus" made little impression on the literary
critics of the day; the _Athenæum_ devoting to it less space even than to
"the anonymous Pauline," while the "Philip van Artevelde" of Henry Taylor
(now hardly remembered) received fifteen columns of tribute, in which the
critic confided to the public his enthusiastic estimate of that
production. Neither _Blackwood's_, the _Quarterly_, nor the _Edinburgh_
even mentioned "Paracelsus"; the _Athenæum_ admitted that it had talent,
but admonished the poet that "Writers would do well to remember that
though it is not difficult to imitate the mysticism and vagueness of
Shelley, we love him--not because of these characteristics, but in spite
of them." The one gleam of consolation to the young poet in all this
general neglect or unfavorable comment was that of a three-column article
from the pen of John Forster in the _Examiner_, then conducted by Leigh
Hunt, and on whose staff were Sergeant Talfourd and Proctor (Barry
Cornwall) beside Forster, who was then a rising young journalist of
twenty-three, only one month the senior of Browning. But Forster spoke
with no uncertain note; rather, with authority, and in this critique he
said:
"Since the publication of 'Philip van Artevelde' we have met with no
such evidences of poetical genius ... and we may safely predict for
its author a brilliant career, if he continues true to the present
promise of his genius."
The immediate effect of the publication of "Paracelsus" was of a social
rather than of a literary character, for something in it seemed magnetic
to the life of the day, and the young poet found himself welcomed by a
brilliant literary circle. He met Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor,
Dickens, Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton), Proctor (Barry Cornwall),
Horne, Sergeant Talfourd, Leigh Hunt, and others. Hunt was then domiciled
in Cheyne Row, in close proximity to the Carlyles, with whom Browning had
already formed a friendship.
Rev. William Johnson Fox, one of Browning's earliest friends, was at this
time living at Craven Hill, Bayswater, and on an evening when Macready had
dined with him, Browning came in. This evening (November 27, 1835) is
noted in Macready's diary, and after speaking of Mr. Fox as an "original
and profound thinker," he adds:
"Mr. Robert Browning, the author of 'Paracelsus,' came in after
dinner; I was very much pleased to meet him. His face is full of
intelligence.... I took Mr. Browning on, and requested to be allowed
to improve my acquaintance with him. He expressed himself warmly, as
gratified by the proposal, wished to send me his book. We exchanged
cards, and parted."
Later (under date of December 7), Mr. Macready records:
"Read 'Paracelsus,' a work of great daring, starred with poetry of
thought, feeling, diction, but occasionally obscure. The writer can
scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of the time."
On New Year's Eve Mr. Macready invited a little house party, among whom
were Forster and Browning. "Mr. Browning was very popular with the whole
party," writes Mr. Macready in his journal; "his simple and enthusiastic
manner engaged attention and won golden opinions from all present; he
looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw."
Browning's personal appearance, "slim, and dark, and very handsome," as
Mary Cowden Clarke said, is pictured by many of his friends of that time.
"As a young man," writes William Sharp, "he seems to have had a certain
ivory delicacy of coloring ... and he appeared taller than he really was,
partly because of his rare grace of movement, and partly from a
characteristic high poise of the head when listening intently to music or
conversation.... His hair was so beautiful in its heavy sculpturesque
waves as to attract frequent notice. Another, and more subtle personal
charm, was his voice, then with a rare, flute-like tone, clear, sweet, and
resonant."
Macready was not only a notable figure on the stage at this period, but he
was also (what every great actor must be) a man of thought, intense
sensibility, and wide culture. Soon after Macready had appeared in
Talfourd's "Ion" (the _première_ being on the playwright's birthday),
Talfourd gave a supper at his house, at which Browning for the first time
met Wordsworth and Landor. Macready himself sat between these two
illustrious poets, with Browning opposite to him. The guests included
Ellen Tree, Miss Mitford, and Forster. Macready, recording this night in
his diary, writes of "Wordsworth who pinned me." Landor, it seems, talked
of constructing drama, and said he "had not the faculty," that he "could
only set persons to talking; all the rest was chance." But an ever
remembered moment came for the young poet when the host proposed a toast
to the author of "Paracelsus," and Wordsworth, rising, said: "I am proud
to drink to your health, Mr. Browning," and Landor bowed with his
inimitable, courteous grace, raising his glass to his lips. For some
years, whenever Wordsworth visited London, Forster invited Browning to
meet him. The younger poet was never an enthusiast in his mild friendship
for the elder, although in after years (1875) he replied to a question by
Rev. A. B. Grosart, the editor of Wordsworth's works, that while in hasty
youth he did "presume to use the great and venerated personality of
Wordsworth as a sort of painter's model," he intended in "The Lost Leader"
no portrait of the entire man. While Wordsworth's political attitude did
not please the young disciple of Shelley, for Landor he conceived the most
profound admiration and sympathetic affection. It was a striking sequel to
this youthful attraction that in Landor's desolate old age it should be
Browning who tenderly cared for him, and surrounded his last days with
unfailing comfort and solicitude.
At this memorable supper, just as Browning was about to take his leave,
Macready laid his hand on the young man's shoulder, saying earnestly:
"Write a play for me, and keep me from going to America." The thought
appealed to the poet, who replied: "Shall it be historical and English?
What do you say to 'Strafford' for a subject?" Forster was then bringing
out his biography of Strafford, on which Browning had assisted, so that
the theme had already engaged his imagination. A few days after the supper
Macready records in his diary receiving a note from Browning and adds:
"What can I say upon it? It was a tribute which remunerated me for the
annoyances and cares of years; it was one of the very highest, may I not
say the highest, honor I have through life received."
A certain temperamental sympathy between the two men is evident, though
Macready sounded no such fathomless depths as lay, however unsuspected, in
Browning; but Macready gives many indications of poetic sympathies, as,
for instance, when he records in his diary how he had been looking through
Coleridge's translation of Wallenstein, "abounding with noble passages and
beautiful scenes," to see if it would lend itself to stage representation.
On November 19 of this autumn Macready notes in his journal that Browning
came that night to bring his tragedy of "Strafford," of which the fourth
act was incomplete. "I requested him to write in the plot of what was
deficient," says Macready, and drove to the Garrick Club while Browning
wrote out this story. Later, there was a morning call from Browning, who
gave him an interesting old print of Richard, from some tapestry, and they
talked of "La Vallière." All the time we get glimpses of an interesting
circle: Bulwer and Forster call, and they discuss Cromwell; Bulwer's play
of "Virginius" is in rehearsal; Macready acts Cardinal Wolsey; there is a
dinner at Lady Blessington's, where are met Lord Canterbury, Count
D'Orsay, Bulwer, Trelawney, and Proctor; there is a call on Miss
Martineau, and meetings with Thackeray and Dickens; Kenyon appears in the
intersecting circles; Marston (the father of the blind poet) writes his
play, "The Patrician's Daughter"; Mr. Longfellow, "a Professor at one of
the U. S. Universities," appears on the scene, and there is a dinner at
which "Mr. and Mrs. N. P. Willis sat next to Longfellow." On a night when
Browning came with some alterations for "Strafford," a stranger called,
"saying he was a Greek, a great lover of the drama; I introduced Browning
to him as a great tragic poet," records Macready, "and the youth wrote
down his name, telling us he was setting off for Athens directly."
The rehearsals of "Strafford" came on, but Macready seems already to have
had misgivings. "In Shakespeare," he writes, "the great poet has only
introduced such events as act on the individuals concerned; but in
Browning's play we have a long scene of passion--upon what? A plan
destroyed, a parliament dissolved...." It is easy to see how Browningesque
this was; for to the poet no events of the objective life were so real and
significant as those of the purely mental drama of thought, feeling, and
purpose. The rehearsals were, however, gratifying to the author, it seems,
for Macready records in his diary (that recurs like the chorus in a Greek
tragedy) that he was happy "with the extreme delight Browning testified at
the rehearsal of my part, which he said to him was a full recompense for
having written the play, as he had seen his utmost hopes of character
perfectly embodied." The play was performed at the Covent Garden Theater
on the night of May 3, 1837.
Both Edmund Gosse and William Sharp deny that Browning's plays failed on
the stage; at all events, with each attempt there were untoward
circumstances which alone would have contributed to or even doomed a play
to a short tenure.
In 1886 "Strafford" was produced in London under the auspices of the
Browning Society, and the real power of the play surprised as well as
deeply impressed the audiences who saw it. But "Pauline," "Paracelsus,"
and "Strafford" all have a peculiar element of reminiscent importance, if
it may be so termed, in that they were the forerunners, the indications of
the great work to come.
There is no dramatic poem of Browning's that has not passages of superb
acting effects, as well as psychological fascinations for the thinker; and
the future years were to touch him with new power to produce work whose
dramatic power lives in imperishable significance. "Strafford" had a run
of only five nights at this first time of its production; Macready
received and accepted an offer to go to America, and other things
happened. Browning became absorbed in his "Sordello," and suddenly, on
Good Friday of 1838, he sailed for Venice, "intending to finish my poem
among the scenes it describes," he wrote to John Robertson, who had been
introduced to Browning by Miss Martineau. On a sailing ship, bound for
Trieste, the poet found himself the only passenger. It was on this voyage,
while between Gibraltar and Naples, that he wrote "How They Brought the
Good News from Ghent to Aix." It was written on deck, penciled on the
fly-leaf of Bartoli's _De' Simboli trasportati al Morale_. When Dr. Corson
first visited Browning in 1881, in his London home in Warwick Crescent,
Browning showed his guest this identical copy of the book, with the
penciled poem on the fly-leaves, of which Dr. Corson said, in a private
letter to a friend:
"One book in the library I was particularly interested in,--Bartoli's
_Simboli_, or, rather, in what the poet had written in pencil on its
fly-leaves, front and back, namely, 'How they brought the good news
from Ghent to Aix.'"
Dr. Corson added that he had been so often asked as to what this "good
news" was, that he put the question to Mr. Browning, who replied:
"'I don't remember whether I had in my mind any in particular, when I
wrote the poem'; and then, after a pause," continued Dr. Corson, "he
said, with a dash of expression characteristic of him, 'Of course,
very important news were carried between those two cities during that
period.'"
In Mrs. Orr's biography of Browning she quotes a long letter written by
him to Miss Haworth, in the late summer of 1838, after his return from
this Italian trip, in which he says:
"You will see 'Sordello' in a trice, if the fagging fit holds. I did
not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted
down as we sailed through the straits of Gibraltar), but I did hammer
out some four, two of which are addressed to you,... I saw the most
gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world.... I went to Trieste, then to
Venice, then through Treviso, and Bassano to the mountains, delicious
Asolo, all my places and castles you will see. Then to Vicenza, Padua,
and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Innspruck (the Tyrol),
Munich, Salzburg, Frankfort and Mayence; down the Rhine to Cologne,
then to Aix-le-Chapelle, Liège, and Antwerp; then home.... I saw very
few Italians, 'to know,' that is. Those I did see I liked...."
It is related that the captain of the ship became so much attached to
Browning that he offered him a free passage to Constantinople; and that
his friendly attraction to his youthful passenger was such that on
returning to England he brought to the poet's sister a gift of six bottles
of attar of roses. The poems of "Pippa Passes" and "In a Gondola" may be
directly traced to this visit, and Browning seemed so invigorated by it
that his imagination was aflame with a multitude of ideas at once.
Meanwhile "Paracelsus" was winning increasing appreciation. The poet did
not escape the usual sweeping conclusion generally put forth regarding any
unusual work, that the author has made extensive studies for it,--as if
ideas and imagination drew their inspiration from the outer world, and
were solely to be appraised, as to their results, by the capacity for
cramming. So much cramming, so much genius! He who thus mistakes
inspiration for industry certainly proves how very remote is his mind from
the former. With this marvelous work by a young man of twenty-three the
usual literary legends were set afloat, like thistledown in the air, which
seem to have floated and alighted everywhere, and which now, more than
seventy-five years later, are apparently still floating and alighting on
the pens of various writers, to the effect that "Paracelsus" is the result
of "vast research among contemporary records," till the poem added another
to the Seven Labors of Hercules. As a matter of fact, and as has already
been noted, Browning had merely browsed about his father's library.
Dr. Berdoe points out that the real "Paracelsus" cannot be understood
without considerable excursions into the occult sciences, and he is quite
right as to the illumination these provide, in proportionate degree as
they are acquired by the reader; as a matter of course they enlarge his
horizon, and offer him clues to unsuspected labyrinths; and so fine and
complete is Dr. Berdoe's own commentary on "Paracelsus" that it might not
unduly be held as supplementary to the reader's entire enjoyment of the
poem. Dr. Berdoe notes that the Bishop of Spanheim, who was the instructor
of Paracelsus, defined "divine magic," as another name for alchemy, "and
lays down the great doctrine of all medieval occultism, as of all modern
theosophy,--of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the
immaterial, in nature and in the consciousness of man." The sympathetic
reader of Browning's "Paracelsus" will realize, however, that the drama he
presents is spiritual, rather than occult. It is not the search for the
possible mysteries, or achievements of the crucible. It is the adventure
of the soul, not the penetration into the secrets of unknown elementals.
In the autumn of 1835 the Browning family removed from Camberwell to
Hatcham. They bestowed themselves in a spacious, delightful old house,
with "long, low rooms," wherein the household gods, inclusive of the six
thousand books of the elder Browning's treasured library, found abundant
accommodation; and the outlook on the Surrey hills gratified them all.
During these years we catch a few glimpses of the poet's only sister,
Sarianna, who was two years younger than her brother, and quite as fond of
listening to the conversation of an uncle, William Shergold Browning, who
had removed to Paris. Here he was connected with the Rothschild banking
house, and had achieved some distinction as the author of a "History of
the Huguenots." He also wrote two historical novels, entitled "Hoel Mar en
Morven" and "Provost of Paris," and compiled one of those harmless volumes
entitled "Leisure Hours." It was this uncle who had brought about the
introduction of his nephew and Marquis Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, whose
uncle, the Marquis de Fortia, a member of the Institut, was a special
friend of William Shergold Browning. In later years a grandson of the
Paris Browning, after graduating at Lincoln College, became Crown
prosecutor in New South Wales. He is known as Robert Jardine Browning, and
he was on terms of intimacy with his cousins, Robert and Sarianna, whom he
often visited.
[Illustration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
_From a drawing made by Field Talfourd, in Rome, 1855_]
The family friendship with Carlyle was a source of great pleasure to Mrs.
Browning, the poet's mother, and there is on record a night when Carlyle
and his brother dined with the Brownings at Hatcham. Another family friend
and habitué was the Rev. Archer Gurney, who at a later time became
Chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris. Mr. Gurney was a writer of poems
and plays, lyrics and dramatic verse, and a volume of his work entitled
"Fra Cipollo and Other Poems" was published, from which Browning drew his
motto for "Colombe's Birthday." Mr. Gurney was deeply interested in
young Browning's poetry, and there is a nebulous trace of his having
something to do with the publication of "Bells and Pomegranates." Another
friend of the poet was Christopher Dowson, who married the sister of
Alfred Domett; at their homes, Albion Terrace, and their summer cottage in
Epping Forest, Browning was a frequent visitor. Dowson died early; but
Field Talfourd (a brother of the author of "Ion" and the artist who made
those crayon portraits of Browning and his wife, in the winter of 1859, in
Rome), Joseph Arnould, and Alfred Domett, with one or two other young men,
comprised the poet's more intimate circle at this time. Arnould and Domett
were both studying for the Bar; Arnould had gained the Newdigate in 1834,
and had won great applause by his recital (in the Sheldonian Theater) of
his "Hospice of St. Bernard." Later he was offered the editorship of the
_Daily News_, founded by Forster and Dickens, but he kept true to his
legal studies and in time became the Judge of the High Court at Bombay,
and was knighted by the Crown.
There was a dinner given by Macready at which Browning, Carlyle, and Miss
Martineau were guests, and later a dinner at the Carlyles' where Browning
met a son of Burns "who sang some of his father's songs." To a friend
Browning wrote: "I dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling
people 'dear' in a hurry) yesterday. I don't know any people like them."
Browning passed a day with Miss Martineau at Ascot, and again visited her
in Elstree, where she was staying with the Macreadys. She greatly admired
"Paracelsus," and spoke of her first acquaintance with his poetry as a
"wonderful event." He dined with her at her home in Westminster, and there
met John Robertson, the assistant editor of the _Westminster Review_, to
which Miss Martineau was a valued contributor. Henry Chorley, a musical
critic of the day, was another guest that night, and soon after Browning
dined with him "in his bachellor abode," the other guests being Arnould,
Domett, and Bryan Proctor; later, at a musicale given by Chorley, Browning
met Charlotte Cushman and Adelaide Kemble. Chorley drew around him the
best musicians of the time: Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Liszt, David, and
other great composers were often rendered in his chambers. Proctor was
then living in Harley Street, and his house was a center for the literary
folk of the day.
George Eliot speaks of the indifference with which we gaze at our
unintroduced neighbor, "while Destiny stands by, sarcastic, with our
_dramatis personæ_ folded in her hands." It was such an hour of destiny as
this when, at a dinner given by Sergeant Talfourd, at his home (No. 56) in
Russell Square, Browning first met John Kenyon. Our great events mostly
come to us like gods in disguise, and this evening was no exception.
Unknown and undreamed of, the young poet had come to one of those partings
of the ways which are only recognized in the perspective of time.
Browning's life had been curiously free from any romance beyond that with
the muses. The one woman with whom he had seemed most intimate, Miss Fanny
Haworth, was eleven years his senior, and their intercourse, both
conversationally and in letters, had been as impersonal as literature
itself. She was a writer of stories and verse, and had celebrated her
young friend in two sonnets. This friendship was one of literary
attractions alone, and the poet had apparently devoted all his romance to
poetry rather than demanded it in life. But now, golden doors were to
open.
At this dinner at Mr. Talfourd's, John Kenyon came over to the poet, after
they had left the dining-room, and inquired if he were not the son of his
old school-fellow, Robert Browning. Finding this surmise to be true, he
became greatly attached to him. Mr. Kenyon had lost his wife some time
previously; he had no children, and he was a prominent and favorite figure
in London society. Southey said of Kenyon that he was "one of the best and
pleasantest of men, whom every one likes better the longer he is known,"
and Kenyon, declaring that Browning "deserved to be a poet, being one in
heart and life," offered to him his "best and most precious gift,"--that
of an introduction to his second cousin, Elizabeth Barrett.
This was the first intimation of Destiny, but the meeting was still to
remain in the future. "Sordello" was published in 1840,--"a colossal
derelict on the ocean of poetry," as William Sharp terms it. The
impenetrable nature of the intricacies of the work has been the theme of
many anecdotes. Tennyson declared that there were only two lines in
it--the opening and the closing ones--which he understood, and "they are
both lies," he feelingly added. Douglas Jerrold tackled it when he was
just recovering from an illness, and despairingly set down his inability
to comprehend it to the probability that his mind was impaired by disease;
and thrusting the book into the hands of his wife he entreated her to read
it at once. He watched her breathlessly, and when she exclaimed, "I don't
know what this means; it is gibberish," Jerrold exclaimed, "Thank God, I
am not an idiot."
Still another edifying testimony to the general inability to understand
"Sordello" is given by a French critic, Odysse Barot, who quotes a passage
where the poet says, "God gave man two faculties," and adds, "I wish while
He was about it (_pendant qu'il était en train_) God had supplied
another--namely, the power of understanding Mr. Browning."
Mrs. Carlyle declared that she read "Sordello" attentively twice, but was
unable to discover whether the title referred to "a man, a city, or a
tree"; yet most readers of this poem will be able to recognize that
Sordello was a singer of the thirteenth century, whose fame suddenly
lures him from the safety of solitude to the perils of society in Mantua,
after which "immersion in worldliness" he again seeks seclusion, and
partially recovers himself. The _motif_ of the poem recalls the truth
expressed in the lines:
"Who loves the music of the spheres
And lives on earth, must close his ears
To many voices that he hears."
Suddenly a dazzling political career opens before Sordello; he is
discovered to be--not a nameless minstrel, but the son of the great
Ghibelline chief, Salinguerra; more marvelous still, he is loved by Palma,
in her youthful beauty and fascination; and the crucial question comes, as
in some form it must come to every life, whether he shall choose all the
kingdoms of power and glory, or that kingdom which is not of earth, and
cometh not with observation.
It is easy to realize how such a problem would appeal to Robert Browning.
Notwithstanding the traditional "obscurity" of "Sordello," it offers to
the thoughtful reader a field of richest and most entrancing suggestion.
To Alfred Domett, under date of May 22, 1842, Browning writes:[1]
"... I cannot well say nothing of my constant thoughts of you, most
pleasant remembrances of you, earnest desires for you. I have a notion
you will come back some bright morning a dozen years hence and find me
just gone--to heaven, or Timbuctoo! I give way to this fancy, for it
lets me write what, I dare say, I have written niggardly enough, of my
real love for you, better love than I had supposed I was fit for.... I
have read your poems; you can do anything, and I should think would do
much. I will if I live. At present, if I stand on head or heels I
don't know; what men require I know as little; and of what they are in
possession I know not.... With this I send you your 'Sordello.' I
suppose, I am sure, indeed, that the translation from Dante, on the
fly-leaf, is your own...."
In another letter to Alfred Domett, Browning thus refers to Tennyson:
"... But how good when good he is! That noble 'Locksley Hall!'"
Browning had already become enamored of Italy; and Mrs. Bridell-Fox,
writing to William Sharp, speaks of meeting the poet after his return, and
thus describes the impression he made upon her:[2]
"I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just
returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for
certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used
to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces,
the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking
up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle,
moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and
then utilizing the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what
not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and
palace, on bridge or gondola, on the vague and dreamy surface he had
produced. My own passionate longing to see Venice dates from those
delightful, well-remembered evenings of my childhood."
This visit of the young poet to Italy forged the link of that golden chain
which was to unite all his future with that land of art and song which
held for him such wonderful Sibylline leaves of the yet undreamed-of
chapters of his life.
CHAPTER IV
1833-1841
"O Life, O Beyond,
_Art_ thou fair, _art_ thou sweet?"
"How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment's product thus,
When a soul declares itself--to wit,
By its fruit, the thing it does!"
ELIZABETH BARRETT'S LOVE FOR THE GREEK POETS--LYRICAL WORK--SERIOUS
ENTRANCE ON PROFESSIONAL LITERATURE--NOBLE IDEAL OF POETRY--LONDON
LIFE--KENYON--FIRST KNOWLEDGE OF ROBERT BROWNING.
Elizabeth Barrett was but twelve days in translating the "Prometheus
Bound" of Æschylus, and of the result of this swift achievement she
herself declared, when laughingly discussing this work with Home in later
years, that it ought to have been "thrown in the fire immediately
afterward as the only means of giving it a little warmth." Combined with a
few of her other poems, however, it was published (anonymously) in 1832,
and received from the _Athenæum_ the edifying verdict that "those who
adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation should touch any
one rather than Æschylus, and they may take warning from the writer before
us."
The quiet life at Sidmouth goes on,--goes on, in fact, for three
years,--and the life is not an unmixed joy to Miss Barrett. "I like the
greenness and the tranquillity and the sea," she writes to a friend.
"Sidmouth is a nest among elms; and the lulling of the sea and the shadow
of the hills make it a peaceful one; but there are no majestic features in
the country. The grandeur is concentrated upon the ocean without deigning
to have anything to do with the earth...."
In the summer of 1835 the Barretts left Sidmouth for London, locating at
first in Gloucester Place (No. 74) where they remained for three years.
Hugh Stuart Boyd had, in the meantime, removed to St. John's Wood; Mr.
Kenyon and Miss Mitford became frequent visitors. Miss Barrett's literary
activity was stimulated by London life, and she began contributing to a
number of periodicals, and her letter-writing grew more and more
voluminous. To Mr. Boyd she wrote soon after their arrival in London:
"As George is going to do what I am afraid I shall not be able to do
to-day,--to visit you,--he must take with him a few lines from me, to
say how glad I am to feel myself again only at a short distance from
you; and gladder I shall be when the same room holds both of us. But I
cannot open the window and fly.... How much you will have to say to me
about the Greeks, unless you begin first to abuse me about the Romans.
If you begin that, the peroration will be a very pathetic one, in my
being turned out of your doors. Such is my prophecy.
"Papa has been telling me of your abusing my stanzas on Mrs. Hemans's
death. I had a presentiment that you would...."
If the classic lore and ponderous scholarship unfitted Mr. Boyd to feel
the loveliness of this lyric, those who enter into its pathos may find
some compensation for not being great classicists. It is in this poem that
the lines occur,--
"Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning:
Would she have lost the poet's fire, for anguish of the burning?
* * * * *
Albeit softly in our ears her silver song was ringing,
The foot-fall of her parting soul is softer than her singing."
Miss Barrett's fugitive poems of this time tell much of the story of her
days. She sees Haydon's portrait of Wordsworth, and it suggests the sonnet
beginning:
"Wordsworth upon Helvellyn!..."
The poems written previously to "A Drama of Exile" do not at all indicate
the power and beauty and the depth of significance for which all her
subsequent work is so remarkable. "The Seraphim," "Isobel's Child," "The
Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus," however much they may contain occasional
glimpses of poetic fire, would never have established her rank. Yet "The
Sleep" belongs to this period, and that poem of exquisite pathos,
"Cowper's Grave." Anticipating a little, there came that poem which
awakened England and the modern world, indeed, to a sense of the suffering
of children in factory life, "The Cry of the Children," which appeared
almost simultaneously with Lord Shaftesbury's great speech in Parliament
on child labor. The poem and the statesman and philanthropist together
aroused England.
A poem called "Confessions" is full of a mysterious power that haunts the
reader in a series of pictures:
"Face to face in my chamber, my silent chamber, I saw her:
God and she and I only, there I sate down to draw her
Soul through the clefts of confession--'Speak, I am holding thee fast,
As the angel of resurrection shall do at the last.'"
And what touching significance is in these lines:
"The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day and
by night;
Their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through me,
if ever so light."
There were the "Crowned and Wedded" that celebrated the marriage of
England's beloved queen; "Bertha in the Lane," which has been one of the
most universal favorites of any of her lyrics; still later, "The Dead
Pan," which essentially embodies her highest convictions regarding the
poetic art: that Poetry must be real, and, above all, true.
"O brave poets, keep back nothing,
Nor mix falsehood with the whole!
* * * *
Hold, in high poetic duty,
Truest Truth the fairest Beauty!"
In such lines as these she expressed her deepest feeling.
Then appeared "Comfort," "Futurity," and "An Apprehension"; the dainty
little picture of her childish days in "Hector in the Garden"; the sonnets
to George Sand, on which the French biographer[3] of Mrs. Browning, in
recent years, has commented, translating the first line,--
"_Vrai genie, mais vraie femme!_"
and adding that these words, addressed to George Sand, are illustrated by
her own life.
The sonnet "Insufficiency," of this period, closes with the lines,
"And what we best conceive we fail to speak.
Wait, soul, until thine ashen garments fall,
And then resume thy broken strains, and seek
Fit peroration without let or thrall."
In all this work that deep religious note, that exaltation of spirituality
which so completely characterized Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is felt by
the reader. Religion was always to her a life, not a litany. The Divine
Love was as the breath of life to her, wherein she lived and moved, and on
which she relied for her very being.
The poem called "A Rhapsody of Life's Progress," though not often noted
by the critical writers on Mrs. Browning, is one full of impressive lines,
with that haunting refrain of every stanza,--
"O Life, O Beyond,
Thou art strange, thou art sweet!"
Albeit, a candid view must also recognize that this poem reveals those
early faults, the redundancy, the almost recklessness of color and rhythm,
that are much less frequently encountered in the poems of Mrs. Browning
than they were in those of Miss Barrett. For poetic work is an art as well
as a gift, and while "Poets are born, not made," yet, being born, the poet
must proceed also to make himself. In this "Rhapsody" occur the lines that
are said to have thrown cultured Bostonians into a bewilderment
exceptional; a baffled and despairing state not to be duplicated in all
history, unless by that of the Greeks before the Eleusinian mysteries; the
lines running,--
"Let us sit on the thrones
In a purple sublimity,
And grind down men's bones
To a pale unanimity."
Polite circles in Boston pondered unavailingly upon this medley, and were
apparently reduced to the same mental condition as was Mrs. Carlyle when
she read "Sordello." Unfortunately for Jane Carlyle there were in her day
no Browning societies, with their all-embracing knowledge, to which
Browning himself conveniently referred all persons who questioned him as
to the meaning of certain passages. One Boston woman, not unknown to fame,
recalls even now that she walked the Common, revolving these cryptic lines
in her mind, and meeting Dr. Holmes, asked if he understood them, to which
the Autocrat replied, "God forbid!"
This very affluence of feeling, however, or even recklessness of imagery,
was not without its place as a chastened and subdued factor in the power
of Miss Barrett later on. From her earliest childhood she had the
scholar's instinct and love of learning; she read fluently French, German,
and Italian; she was well grounded in Latin, and for the Greek she had
that impassioned love that made its literature to her an assimilation
rather than an acquirement. Its rich intellectual treasure entered into
her inmost life. She also read Hebrew, and all her life kept with her a
little Hebrew Bible, as well as a Greek Testament, the margins of both of
which are filled with her notes and commentaries in her clear, microscopic
handwriting. Miss Barrett's earliest work, published anonymously, at her
father's expense, rather to gratify himself and a few friends than to make
any appeal to the public, had no special claim to literary immortality,
whatever its promise; but once in London, something in the very atmosphere
seemed to act as a solvent to precipitate her nebulous dreams and
crystallize them into definite and earnest aims. Poetry had always been to
her "its own exceeding great reward," but she was now conscious of a
desire to enter into the stress and storm of the professional writer, who
must sink or swim, accept the verdict of success or failure, and launch
forth on that career whose very hardships and uncertainties are a part of
its fascination. To Elizabeth Barrett, secure in her father's home, there
was little possibility of the hardships and privations on the material
side not unfrequently incidental to the pursuit of letters, but to every
serious worker life prefigures itself as something not unlike the Norse
heaven with its seven floors, each of which must be conquered.
"Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way,--
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards ... day!"
Miss Barrett finds London "wrapped up like a mummy, in a yellow mist," but
she tries to like it, and "looks forward to seeing those here whom we
might see nowhere else." Her brother George, who had recently graduated
from the University of Glasgow, was now a barrister student at the Inner
Temple. Henrietta and Arabel, the two sisters, found interest and delight
in the new surroundings.
Retrospectively viewed, Mrs. Browning's life falls easily into three
periods, which seem to name themselves as a prelude, an interlude, and a
realization. She was just past her twenty-ninth birthday when the family
came up to London, and up to that time she had, indeed, lived with dreams
and visions for her company. These years were but the prelude, the
preparatory period. She then entered on the experimental phase, the
testing of her powers, the interlude that lay between early promise and
later fulfillment. In her forty-first year came her marriage to Robert
Browning and the beginning of those nearly fifteen years of marvelous
achievement, during which the incomparable "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
and "Aurora Leigh" were written,--the period of realization.
Before the beginning of the London period Miss Barrett's literary work had
been largely that of the amateur, though in the true meaning of that
somewhat misused term, as the lover, rather than as merely the more or
less crude experimenter. For Poetry to Elizabeth Barrett was a divine
commission no less than an inborn gift. Under any circumstances, she would
have poured her life "with passion into music," and with the utmost
sincerity could she have said, with George Eliot's "Armgart,"
"I am not glad with that mean vanity
Which knows no good beyond its appetite
Full feasting upon praise! I am only glad,
Being praised for what I know is worth the praise;
Glad of the proof that I myself have part
In what I worship!"
As is revealed and attested in many expressions of her maturer years,
Poetry was to her the most serious, as well as the most enthralling, of
pursuits, while she was also a very accomplished scholar. A special gift,
and a facility for the acquirement of scholarly knowledge in the academic
sense, do not invariably go together; often is the young artist so
bewitched with his gift, so entranced with the glory and the splendor of a
dream, that the text-book, by contrast, is a dull page, to which he cannot
persuade himself to turn. To him the air is peopled with visions and
voices that fascinate his attention. In the college days of James Russell
Lowell is seen an illustration of this truth, the young student being
temporarily suspended, and sent--not to Coventry, but to Concord. Perhaps
the banishment of a Harvard student for the high crime and misdemeanor of
being addicted to rhyme rather than mathematics, and his penalty in the
form of exile to Concord, the haunt of Emerson and the Muses, may have
made Pan laugh. But, at all events, Miss Barrett was as naturally a
scholar, in the fullest significance of the term, as she was a poet. This
splendid equipment was a tremendous factor in that splendor of
achievement, and in that universally recognized success, that has made the
name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning immortal in all ages, as the greatest
woman poet the world has ever known.
The professional literary life is a drama in itself,--comedy, or tragedy,
as may be, and usually a mixture of both. It ranges over wide areas of
experience, from that of the author of "Richard Feverel," who is said to
have written that novel on a diet of oatmeal and cold water, to that of
the luxurious author whose _séances_ with the Muses are decorously
conducted in irreproachable interiors, with much garnishing, old rose and
ivory, ebony carvings, and inlaid desks, at which the marvelous being who
now and then condescends to "dictate" a "best seller," is apt to be
surprised by a local photographer. But as a noted educator defined a
University as "a log,--with Mark Hopkins sitting on the other end," so the
"real thing" in a literary career may not inaptly be typified by Louisa
Alcott sitting on the back stairs, writing on an old atlas; and it was
into actualities somewhat like these that Elizabeth Barrett desired to
plunge. The question that she voiced in later years, in "Aurora Leigh,"--
"My own best poets, am I one with you,
That thus I love you,--or but one through love?
Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours?"--
this question, in substance, stirred now in her life, and insisted upon
reply. She must, like all real poets, proceed to "hang her verses in the
wind," and watch if perchance there are
"... the five
Which five hundred will survive."
Elizabeth Barrett was of a simplicity that had no affinities with the
_poseur_ in any respect, and she had an inimitable sense of humor that
pervaded all her days. Wit and pathos are, indeed, so closely allied that
it would be hardly possible that the author of the "De Profundis," a poem
that sounds the profoundest depths of the human soul, should not have the
corresponding quality of the swiftest perception of the humorous. It was
somewhere about this time that Poe sent to her a volume of his poems with
an inscription on the fly-leaf that declared her to be "the noblest of her
sex."
"And what could I say in reply," she laughingly remarked, "but 'Sir, you
are the most discerning of yours!'"
The first poem of hers that was offered in a purely professional way was
"The Romaunt of Margret." It appeared in the _New Monthly Magazine_, then
edited by Bulwer, who was afterward known as the first Lord Lytton. At
this time Richard Hengist Horne was basking in the fame of his "Orion,"
and to him Miss Barrett applied, through a mutual friend, as to whether
her enclosed poem had any title to that name, or whether it was mere
verse. "As there could be no doubt in the mind of the recipient on that
point," said Mr. Horne, "the poem was forwarded to Bulwer, and duly
appeared. The next one sent," continues Mr. Horne, "started the poetess at
once on her bright and noble career." This "next one" appears to have been
"The Poet's Vow," and a confirmation of this supposition is seen in a
letter of hers at this date to Mr. Boyd, in which she explains her not
having at hand a copy of the _Athenæum_ that he had wished to see, and
adds:
"I can give you, from memory, the _Athenæum's_ review in that number.
The critic says 'It is rich in poetry ... including a fine, although
too dreamy, ballad, The Poet's Vow. We are almost tempted to pause and
criticise the work of an artist of so much inspiration and promise as
the author of this poem, and to exhort him to a greater clearness of
expression, and less quaintness in the choice of his phraseology, but
this is not the time or place for digression.'
"You see my critic has condemned me with a very gracious countenance.
Do put on yours."
Again, under date of October, 1836, she writes to Mr. Boyd:
"... But what will you say to me when I confess that in the face of
all your kind encouragement, my Drama of the Angels (The Seraphim)
has not been touched until the last three days? It was not out of pure
idleness on my part, nor of disregard to your admonition; but when my
thoughts were distracted with other things, books just began enclosing
me all around, a whole load of books upon my conscience, and I could
not possibly rise to the gate of heaven and write about my angels. You
know one can't sometimes sit down to the sublunary occupation of even
reading Greek, unless one feels free to it. And writing poetry
requires a double liberty, and an inclination which comes only of
itself....
"... I have had another note from the editor--very flattering, and
praying for farther supplies. The 'Angels' were not ready, and I was
obliged to send something else."
A discussion arises in the family regarding the taking of a house in
Wimpole Street, and Elizabeth remarks that for her part she would rather
go on inhabiting castles in the air than to live in that particular house,
"whose walls look so much like Newgate's turned inside out." She
continues, however, that if it is decided upon, she has little doubt she
will wake and sleep very much as she would anywhere else. With a strong
will, and an intense, resistless kind of energy in holding any conviction,
and an independence of character only equalled by its preeminent justice
and generous magnanimity, she was singularly free from any tenacious
insistence upon the matters of external life. She had her preferences; but
she always accommodated herself to the decision or the necessity of the
hour, and there was an end of it. She had that rare power of instantaneous
mental adjustment; and if a given thing were right and best, or if it were
not best but was still inevitable, she accepted it and did not make life a
burden to every one concerned by endless discussion.
London itself did not captivate her fancy. "Did Dr. Johnson in his
paradise in Fleet Street love the pavements and the walls?" she
questioned. "I doubt that," she added; "the place, the privileges, don't
mix in one's love as is done by the hills and the seaside."
The privileges, however, became more and more interesting to her. One of
these was when she met Wordsworth, whom she describes as being "very
kind," and that he "let her hear his conversation."
This conversation she did not find "prominent," for she saw at the same
time Landor, "the brilliant Landor," she notes, and felt the difference
"between great genius and eminent talent." But there was a day on which
she went to Chiswick with Wordsworth and Miss Mitford, and all the way she
thought she must be dreaming. It was Landor, though, who captivated her
fancy at once, as he already had that of her future poet-lover and
husband, who was yet unrevealed to her. Landor, "in whose hands the ashes
of antiquity burn again," she writes, gave her two Greek epigrams he had
recently written. All this time she is reading everything,--Sheridan
Knowles's play of "The Wreckers," which Forrest had rejected, "rather for
its unfitness to his own personal talent than for its abstract demerit,"
she concludes; and "Ion," which she finds beautiful morally rather than
intellectually, and thinks that, as dramatic poetry, it lacks power,
passion, and condensation. Reading Combe's "Phrenology," she refers to his
theory that slowness of the pulse is a sign of the poetical impulse. If
this be true, she fears she has no hope of being a poet, "for my pulse is
in a continual flutter," she notes; and she explains to Mr. Boyd that the
line
"One making one in strong compass"
in "The Poet's Vow," which he found incomprehensible, really means that
"the oneness of God, 'in Whom are all things,' produces a oneness, or
sympathy, with all things. The unity of God preserves a unity in man."
All in all, Miss Barrett is coming to enjoy her London life. There was
the Royal Academy, "and real live poets, with their heads full of the
trees and birds, and sunshine of Paradise"; and she has "stood face to
face with Wordsworth and Landor"; Miss Mitford has become a dear friend,
but she visits London only at intervals, as she lives--shades of benighted
days!--thirty miles from London. A twentieth century residence across the
continent could hardly seem more remote.
The removal to Wimpole Street was decided upon, and to that house (No.
50), gloomy or the reverse, the Barretts migrated. Miss Barrett's new
book, under the title of "The Seraphim and Other Poems," was published,
marking her first professional appearance before the public over her own
name. "I feel very nervous about it," she said; "far more than I did when
my 'Prometheus' crept out of the Greek."
Mr. Kenyon was about to go to Rydal Mount on a visit to Wordsworth, and
Miss Barrett begs him to ask, as for himself, two garden cuttings of
myrtle or geranium, and send to her--two, that she may be sure of saving
one.
Autographs had value in those days, and in a note to Mr. Bray Miss Barrett
alludes to one of Shakespeare's that had been sold for a hundred pounds
and asks if he feels sure of the authenticity of his own Shakespearean
autograph.
A new poetic era had dawned about the time that "The Seraphim" appeared.
Tennyson had written "Audley Court," and was beginning to be known in
America, owing this first introduction to Emerson, who visited Landor in
Florence and made some sojourn afterward in England. The Boston publishing
house of C. C. Little and Company (now Little, Brown, and Company) had
written to Tennyson (under date of April 27, 1838) regarding a
republishing of his volume, as the future laureate was already recognized
for the musical quality and perfection of art in his work. Browning had
published only "Pauline," "Paracelsus," and "Strafford." Shelley and Keats
were dead, their mortal remains reposing in the beautiful English cemetery
in Rome, under the shadow of the tall cypresses, by the colossal pyramid
of Caius Cestus. Byron and Scott and Coleridge had also died. There were
Landor and Southey, Rogers and Campbell; but with Miss Barrett there came
upon the scene a new minstrelsy that compelled its own recognition. Some
of her shorter poems had caught the popular ear; notably, her "Cowper's
Grave," which remains, to-day, one of her most appealing and exquisite
lyrics.
"It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart's decaying;
It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying."
The touching pathos of the line,
"O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!"
moves every reader. And what music and touching appeal in the succeeding
stanza:
"And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,
How discord on the music fell and darkness on the glory,
And how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted."
In seeing, "on Cowper's grave,... his rapture in a vision," Miss Barrett
pictured his strength--
"... to sanctify the poet's high vocation."
Her reverence for poetic art finds expression in almost every poem that
she has written.
Among other shorter poems included with "The Seraphim" were "The Poet's
Vow," "Isobel's Child," and others, including, also, "The Romaunt of
Margret." _The Athenæum_ pronounced the collection an "extraordinary
volume,--especially welcome as an evidence of female genius and
accomplishment,--but hardly less disappointing than extraordinary. Miss
Barrett's genius is of a high order," the critic conceded; but he found
her language "wanting in simplicity." One reviewer castigated her for
presuming to take such a theme as "The Seraphim" "from which Milton would
have shrank!" All the critics agree in giving her credit for genius of no
ordinary quality; but the general consensus of opinion was that this
genius manifested itself unevenly, that she was sometimes led into errors
of taste. That she was ever intentionally obscure, she denied.
"Unfortunately obscure" she admitted that she might be, but "willingly
so,--never."
Of the personal friends of Elizabeth Barrett one of the nearest was Mary
Russell Mitford, who was nineteen years her senior. Miss Mitford describes
her at the time of their meeting as having "such a look of youthfulness
that she had some difficulty in persuading a friend that Miss Barrett was
old enough to be introduced into society." Miss Mitford added that she was
"certainly one of the most interesting persons" she had ever seen; "of a
slight, delicate figure,... large, tender eyes, and a smile like a
sunbeam."
Mr. Kenyon brought Andrew Crosse, a noted electrician of the day, to see
Miss Barrett; and in some reminiscences[4] written by Mrs. Andrew Crosse
there is a chapter on "John Kenyon and his Friends" that offers the best
comprehension, perhaps, of this man who was so charming and beloved a
figure in London society,--a universal favorite. Born in 1784 in Jamaica,
the son of a wealthy land-owner, he was sent to England as a lad, educated
there, and in 1815 he set out for a tour of the continent. In 1817, in
Paris, he met and became intimate with Professor George Ticknor of
Harvard University, the Spanish historian; and through this friendship Mr.
Kenyon came to know many of the distinguished Americans of the day,
including Emerson, Longfellow, and Willis. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth,
and Landor were among Kenyon's most intimate circle; and there is a record
of one of his dinners at which the guests were Daniel Webster, Professor
and Mrs. Ticknor, Dickens, Montalembert, and Lady Mary Shepherd. In 1823
Kenyon married Miss Curteis, and they lived for some years in Devonshire
Place, with frequent interludes of travel on the continent. Mrs. Kenyon
died in 1835, but when the Barretts came up to London Kenyon had resumed
his delightful hospitalities, of which he made fairly a fine art.
Professor Ticknor has left an allusion to another dinner at Kenyon's where
he met Miss Barrett. In the autumn of 1839 Miss Barrett, accompanied by
her brother Edward, went to Torquay, for the warmer climate, and Mr.
Kenyon also had gone there for the winter. Around him were gathered a
group of notable friends, with whom Miss Barrett, his cousin (with one
remove), was constantly associated,--Landor, Andrew Crosse, Theodosia
Garrow (afterwards the wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope), and Bezzi, an
accomplished Italian, who was afterward associated with Seymour Kirkup in
discovering Dante's portrait concealed under the whitewash applied to the
walls of the Bargello in Florence. Miss Barrett was at this time entering
into that notable correspondence with Richard Hengist Horne, many of these
letters containing passages of interest. For instance, of poetry we find
her saying:
"If poetry under any form be exhaustible, Nature is; and if Nature is,
we are near a blasphemy, and I, for one, could not believe in the
immortality of the soul.
'_Si l'âme est immortelle,_
_L'amour ne l'est-il-pas?_'
Extending _l'amour_ into all love of the ideal, and attendant power of
idealizing.... I don't believe in mute, inglorious Miltons, and far
less in mute, inglorious Shakespeares."
Referring to some correspondence with Miss Martineau, Miss Barrett
characterizes her as "the noblest female intelligence between the seas,"
and of Tennyson, in relation to some mention of him, she wrote that "if
anything were to happen to Tennyson, the whole world should go into
mourning."
A project (said to have originated with Wordsworth) was launched to
"modernize" Chaucer, in which Miss Barrett, Leigh Hunt, Monckton Milnes,
Mr. Horne, and one or two others enthusiastically united, the only
dissenter being Landor, who characteristically observed that any one who
was fit to read Chaucer at all could read him in the original. Later on
the co-operation of Browning, Tennyson, Talfourd, Bulwer, Mary Howitt, and
the Cowden Clarkes was solicited and in part obtained. But Landor held
firm, and of his beloved Chaucer he said: "I will have no hand in breaking
his dun, but rich-painted glass, to put in thinner (if clearer) panes." A
great deal of correspondence ensued in connection with this Herculean
labor, most of which is of less interest to the general reader than it
might well be to the literary antiquarian.
The next special literary enthusiasm of Mr. Horne and Miss Barrett was the
projection of a work of criticism, to be issued anonymously, and entitled
"The New Spirit of the Age." They collaborated on the critique on
Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, and for the one on Landor Miss Barrett was
mainly responsible, in which she says he "writes poetry for poets, and
criticism for critics;... and as if poetry were not, in English, a
sufficiently unpopular dead language, he has had recourse to writing
poetry in Latin." She speaks of his "Pericles and Aspasia" and his
"Pentameron" as "books for the world and for all time, complete in beauty
of sentiment and subtlety of criticism." Two of Landor's works, very
little known, the "Poems from the Arabic and Persian" and "A Satire upon
Satirists," are here noted. "It will be delightful to me to praise
Tennyson,--although, by Saint Eloy, I never imitated him," she writes to
Mr. Horne; "and I take that oath because the _Quarterly_ was sure that if
it had not been for him I should have hung a lady's hair 'blackly' instead
of 'very blackly.'" Miss Mitford was somewhat concerned with this
hazardous venture, but she had no desire to discuss Dickens, as she "could
not admire his love of low life!" Miss Barrett's appreciation of Tennyson
is much on record. She finds him "a divine poet." Monckton Milnes, whose
first work she liked extremely, seemed to her in his later poems as
wanting in fire and imagination, and as being too didactic. Barry
Cornwall's lyrics impressed her "like embodied music." Mr. Horne finally
wrote the critique on Dickens, and of it Miss Barrett said: "I think the
only omission of importance in your admirable essay is the omission of the
influence of the French school of imaginative literature upon the mind of
Dickens, which is manifest and undeniable.... Did you ever read the
powerful _Trois Jours d'un Condamné_, and will you confront that with the
tragic saliences of 'Oliver Twist'?... We have no such romance writer as
Victor Hugo ... George Sand is the greatest female genius of the world, at
least since Sappho." (At this time George Eliot had not appeared.) Miss
Barrett appreciatively alludes to Sir Henry Taylor (the author of "Philip
van Artevelde") as "an infidel in poetry," and to the author of "Festus"
as "a man of great thoughts." She finds part of the poem "weak," but,
"when all is said," she continues, "what poet-stuff remains! what power!
what fire of imagination, worth the stealing of Prometheus!"
In relation to some strictures on Carlyle, Miss Barrett vivaciously
replies that his object is to discover the sun, not to specify the
landscape, and that it would be a strange reproach to bring against the
morning star that it does not shine in the evening.
The idea of a lyrical drama, "Psyche Apocalypte," was entertained by Mr.
Horne and Miss Barrett, but, fortunately, no fragment of it was
materialized into public light. There was a voluminous correspondence
between them concerning this possible venture. Meanwhile Miss Barrett's
poems won success past her "expectation or hope. _Blackwood's_ high help
was much," she writes, "and I continue to have the kindest letters from
unknown readers.... The American publisher has printed fifteen hundred
copies. If I am a means of ultimate loss to him, I shall sit in
sackcloth."
In another of her letters to Mr. Horne we read that Wordsworth is in a
fever because of a projected railroad through the Lake Country, and that
Carlyle calls Harriet Martineau "quite mad," because of her belief in
Mesmerism. "For my own part," adds Miss Barrett, "I am not afraid to say
that I almost believe in Mesmerism, and quite believe in Harriet
Martineau." She is delighted that Horne's "Orion" is to be published in
New York. "I love the Americans," she asserts, "a noble and cordial
people."
Miss Barrett remained for three years in Torquay, the climate being
regarded as better for her health. But the tragedy of her life took place
there in the drowning of her brother Edward, who went out one day with two
friends in a boat and never returned. Three days later the boat was found
floating, overturned, and the bodies of the three young men were
recovered. This sad event occurred in the August of 1840, and it was more
than a year before she was able to resume her literary work and her
correspondence. In the September of 1841 she returned to London, and in a
letter to Mr. Boyd soon after she replied to his references to Gregory as
a poet, saying she has not much admiration even for his grand _De
Virginitate_, and chiefly regards him as one who is only poetical in
prose.
Miss Barrett's delicacy of health through all these years has been so
universally recorded (and, according to her own words, so exaggerated)
that it needs no more than passing allusion here. So far as possible she
herself ignored it, and while it was always a factor to be reckoned with,
yet her boundless mental energy tided her over illness and weakness to a
far greater degree than has usually been realized. "My time goes to the
best music when I read or write," she says, "and whatever money I can
spend upon my own pleasures flows away in books."
Elizabeth Barrett was the most sympathetic and affectionate of friends,
and her devotion to literature resulted in no mere academic and abnormal
life. Her letters are filled with all the little inquiries and interests
of household affection and sweetness of sympathy with the personal matters
of relatives and friends, and if those are not here represented, it is
simply that they are in their nature colloquial, and to be taken for
granted rather than repeated for reading, when so long separated by time
from the conditions and circumstances that called them forth. She was glad
to return from Torquay to her family again. "Papa's domestic comfort is
broken up by the separation," she said, "and the associations of Torquay
lie upon me, struggle against them as I may, like a nightmare.... Part of
me is worn out; but the poetical part--that is, the love of poetry--is
growing in me as freshly every day. Did anybody ever love poetry and stop
in the middle? I wonder if any one ever could?... besides, I am becoming
better. Dear Mr. Boyd," she entreats, "do not write another word about my
illness either to me or to others. I am sure you would not willingly
disturb me. I can't let ... prescribe anything for me except her own
affection." These words illustrate the spirit in which Miss Barrett
referred to her own health. No one could be more remote from a morbid
invalidism too often associated with her.
One of her first efforts after her return from Torquay was to send to the
_Athenæum_ some Greek translations, which, to her surprise, were accepted,
and she writes to Mr. Boyd that she would enclose to him the editor's
letter "if it were legible to anybody except people used to learn reading
from the Pyramids." It must have been due to a suggestion from the editor
of the _Athenæum_ at this time that she wrote her noble and affluent essay
on "The Greek Christian Poets," which is perhaps her finest work in prose.
Something in the courteous editorial note suggested this to her, and she
discusses the idea with Mr. Boyd.
Mr. Dilke was then the editor of the _Athenæum_. He quite entered into the
idea of this essay, only begging Miss Barrett to keep away from theology.
Mr. Dilke also suggests that she write a review of English poetical
literature, from Chaucer to contemporary times, and this initiated her
essay called "The Book of the Poets." For her Greek review she desired a
copy of the _Poetæ Christiani_, but found the price (fourteen guineas)
ruinous. But whether she had all the needful data or not, the first paper
was a signal success, and she fancied that some _bona avis_, as good as a
nightingale, had shaken its wings over her. Of the three Greek tragedians,
Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, Elizabeth Barrett had read every line.
Plato she loved and read exhaustively; of Aristotle at this time she had
read his Ethics, Poetics, and his work on Rhetoric, and of Aristophanes a
few, only, of his plays. But Miss Barrett was also a great novel-reader,
keeping her "pillows stuffed with novels," as she playfully declared. Her
room, in the upper part of the house, revealed the haunt of the scholar.
Upon a bracket the bust of Homer looked down; her bookcase showed one
entire shelf occupied by the Greek poets; another relegated wholly to the
English poets; and philosophy, ethics, science, and criticism were
liberally represented. A bust of Chaucer companioned that of Homer. By her
sofa nestled Flush, her dog, Miss Mitford's gift.
It was in this year of 1841 that there penetrated into her atmosphere and
consciousness the first intimation of Robert Browning. "Pippa Passes" had
just been published, and John Kenyon, ever alert to bring any happiness
into the lives of his friends (Kenyon, "the joy-giver," as he was well
termed), suggested introducing the young poet to her, but on the plea of
her ill-health she declined. A little later, in a letter to Mr. Boyd, she
mentions one or two comments made on her essay, "The Greek Christian
Poets,"--that Mr. Horne, and also "Mr. Browning, the poet," had both, as
she was told, expressed approval. "Mr. Browning is said to be learned in
Greek," she adds, "especially the dramatists." So already the air begins
to stir and tremble with the coming of him of whom in later days she
wrote:
"I yield the grave for thy sake, and resign
My near sweet view of heaven for earth with thee."
The entrancing thrill of that wonderful Wagner music that ushers in the
first appearance of the knight in the music-drama of "Lohengrin" is
typical of the vibrations that thrill the air in some etherial
announcement of experiences that are on the very threshold, and which are
recognized by a nature as sensitive and impressionable as was that of
Elizabeth Barrett. A new element with its transfiguring power awaited her,
and some undefined prescience of that
"... most gracious singer of high poems"
whose music was to fall at her door
"... in folds of golden fulness"
haunted her like "an odor from Dreamland sent."
She pondered on
"... how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,"
but she dared not dream that the "mystic Shape" that drew her backward,
and whose voice spoke "in mastery," had come to lead her,--not to Death,
but Love.
CHAPTER V
1841-1846
"... If a man could feel,
Not one day in the artist's ecstasy,
But every day,--feast, fast, or working-day,
The spiritual significance burn through
The hieroglyphic of material shows,
Henceforward he would paint the globe with wings."
"BELLS AND POMEGRANATES"--ARNOULD AND DOMETT--"A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON"--
MACREADY--SECOND VISIT TO ITALY--MISS BARRETT'S POETIC WORK--
"COLOMBE'S BIRTHDAY"--"LADY GERALDINE'S COURTSHIP"--"ROMANCES AND
LYRICS"--BROWNING'S FIRST LETTER TO MISS BARRETT--THE POETS MEET--
LETTERS OF ROBERT BROWNING AND ELIZABETH BARRETT--"LOVES OF THE
POETS"--VITA NUOVA.
The appearance of "Bells and Pomegranates" made a deep impression on
Elizabeth Barrett, as the numbers, opening with "Pippa Passes,"
successively appeared between 1841 and 1846. Of "Pippa" she said she could
find it in her heart to covet the authorship, and she felt all the
combinations of effect to be particularly "striking and noble." In a paper
that Miss Barrett wrote in these days for the _Athenæum_, critically
surveying the poetic outlook of the time, she referred to Browning and
Tennyson as "among those high and gifted spirits who would still work and
wait." When this London journal reviewed (not too favorably) Browning's
"Romances and Lyrics," Miss Barrett took greatly to heart the injustice
that she felt was done him, and reverted to it in a number of personal
letters, expressing her conviction that "it would be easier to find a more
faultless writer than a poet of equal genius." An edition of Tennyson, in
two volumes, came out, including the "Ulysses," "Morte d'Arthur,"
"Locksley Hall," and "OEnone," of which she says no one quite appeals to
her as does "OEnone," and she expresses her belief that philosophic
thinking, like music, is always involved in high ideality of any kind.
Wordsworth she insisted upon estimating from his best, not from his
poorest work, and his "Ode" was to her so grand as to atone for a
multitude of poetic sins. "I confess," she wrote to Boyd, "that he is not
unfrequently heavy and dull, and that Coleridge has an intenser genius."
To her cousin, Kenyon, Miss Barrett sent the manuscript of her poem, "The
Dead Pan," which he showed to Browning, who wrote of it to Kenyon with
ardent admiration. This note was sent to Miss Barrett, who displayed it to
Horne that he might see the opinion of the poet whom they both admired.
Still later, Horne published in his "New Spirit of the Age" sketches of
several writers with their portraits; and those of Carlyle, Miss
Martineau, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, Miss Barrett had framed for
her own room. She asked Kenyon if that of Browning were a good one.
"Rather like," he replied. So here and there the Fates were invisibly at
work, forging the subtle threads that were drawing the poets unconsciously
nearer.
It was the suggestion of Browning's publisher, Moxon, that "Bells and
Pomegranates" might be issued in pamphlet form, appearing at intervals, as
this plastic method would be comparatively inexpensive, and would also
permit the series to be stopped at any time if its success was not of a
degree to warrant continuance. The poet found his title, as he afterward
explained in a letter to Miss Barrett, in Exodus, "... upon the hem of the
robe thou shalt make pomegranates of blue and of purple, and of scarlet,
and bells of gold between them round about." After "Pippa Passes" there
followed "King Victor and King Charles," a number of Lyrics, "The Return
of the Druses," "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," "Luria," and "A Soul's
Tragedy." On each of the title-pages the author was named as the writer of
"Paracelsus," "Sordello" being ignored. Among the dedications of these
several numbers those so honored included John Kenyon, Proctor, and
Talfourd.
Browning offered "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon" to Macready (whose stage
fortunes at this period were not brilliant), with the remark that "The
luck of the third venture is proverbial." The actor consulted Forster, who
passed the play on to Dickens, to whom it deeply appealed. Under date of
November 25, 1842, Dickens wrote of it to Forster in the most enthusiastic
words, saying the reading of it had thrown him "into a perfect passion of
sorrow," and that it was "full of genius, natural, and great thoughts,...
and I swear it is a tragedy that must be played, and played by Macready,"
continued the novelist. "And tell Browning that I believe from my soul
there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work."
Forster did not, however, administer this consolation to the young author,
who was only to learn of Dickens's admiration thirty years later, when
Forster's biography of him appeared. The story of the production of the
play is told in a letter from Joseph Arnould to Alfred Domett (then in New
Zealand), written under date of May, 1843, dated from Arnould's home in
Victoria Square, Pimlico:
"As one must begin somewhere, suppose we take Browning.... In February
his play, 'A Blot in the 'Scutcheon,' was announced as forthcoming at
Drury Lane.... Meantime, judicious friends had a habit of asking when
the play was coming out...."[5]
A long chapter of vexations is humorously described by Domett, who
concludes his letter with this tribute to the play.
"... With some of the finest situations and grandest passages you can
conceive, it does undoubtedly want a sustained interest to the end of
the third act; in fact the whole of that act on the stage is a falling
off from the second, which I need not tell you is, for purposes of
performance, the most unpardonable fault. Still, it will no
doubt--nay, it must--have done this, viz., produced a higher opinion
than ever of Browning's genius and the great things he is yet to do,
in the minds not only of a clique, but of the general world of
readers. This man will go far yet...."
While this vexation cancelled the friendly relations that had existed
between Browning and Macready, it fostered the friendship between the poet
and Helen Faucit (later Lady Martin), who remembered Browning's attitude
"as full of generous sympathy" for the actors of the cast; while he
recalled Miss Faucit's "perfect behavior as a woman, and her admirable
playing, as the one gratifying factor" in the affair. But Browning was too
noble by nature for any lasting resentment, and meeting Macready soon
after the death of both his own wife, in Italy, and of Mrs. Macready, he
could only grasp his old friend's hand and exclaim with emotion, "Oh,
Macready!"
In the autumn of 1844 Browning set forth for Italy on his second visit.
Two years before his friend Domett had left England for New Zealand,
commemorated by the poet in the lines,--
"How, forsooth, was I to know it
If Waring meant to glide away
Like a ghost at break of day."
Browning landed at Naples, and there, according to Mrs. Orr, he became
acquainted with a young Neapolitan, Signor Scotti, who took the
bargaining of their tour upon himself, after they had agreed to travel
together, "and now as I write," said Mr. Browning in a letter from his
Naples hotel to his sister Sarianna, "I hear him disputing our bill. He
does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only
two." The pair wandered over the enchanting shores of all the Naples
region, lingered in Sorrento, drove over the picturesque road to Amalfi,
and listened to the song of the sirens along the shore. Their arrival in
Rome was Browning's first sight of the Eternal City. Here Mr. Browning
found an old friend, the Contessa Carducci, with whom the two passed most
of their evenings. He made his poetic pilgrimage to the graves of Shelley
and Keats, as do all later pilgrims, and he visited the grotto of Egeria
in memory of Byron. He loitered in the old _chiesa_ near Santa Maria
Maggiore, where the sixteenth century Bishop "ordered his tomb," and he
visited Trelawney in Leghorn. There exists little record of this trip save
in the poem "The Englishman in Italy," and his return to England through
Germany is alike unrecorded.
Six years had passed since the publication of "The Seraphim and Other
Poems," and on Mr. Browning's arrival at home again, he found two new
volumes of Miss Barrett's, entitled simply "Poems," in which were "A Drama
of Exile," "Bertha in the Lane," "Catarina to Camoens," "A Vision of
Poets," nearly all of the sonnets that she ever wrote save that immortal
sequence, "Sonnets from the Portuguese," and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship."
These volumes absolutely established her poetic rank with that of Tennyson
and Browning. She "heard the nations praising her far off." While she had
many expressions of grateful gladness for all this chorus of praise with
hardly a dissenting voice, the verdict did not affect her own high
standards. "I have written these poems as well as I could," she says, "and
I hope to write others better. I have not reached my own ideal ... but I
love poetry more than I love my own successes in it."
Her love of absolute truth, and the absence of any petty self-love in her
character, stand out in any study of her life. "Why, if you had told me
that my books were without any value in your eyes, do you imagine that I
should not have valued you, reverenced you ever after for your truth, so
sacred a thing in friendship?" she writes to a friend.
The reviews are eminently appreciative and satisfying. _Blackwood's_ gave
a long critique in a special article, frankly pointing out faults, but
asserting that her merits far outweighed her defects, and that her genius
"was profound, unsullied, and without a flaw." The long poem, "A Drama of
Exile" was pronounced the least successful of all, and the prime favorite
was "Lady Geraldine's Courtship." Of this poem of ninety-two stanzas, with
eleven more in its "Conclusion," thirty-five of the stanzas, or one
hundred and forty-four lines, were written in one day.
Though lack of health largely restricted Miss Barrett to her room, her
sympathies and interests were world-wide. She read the reviews of the
biography of Dr. Arnold, a work she desired to read, entire, and records
that "Dr. Arnold must have been a man in the largest and noblest sense."
She rejoices in the refutation of Puseyism that is offered in the
_Edinburgh Review_; she reads "an admirable paper by Macaulay" in the same
number; she comments on the news that Newman has united himself with the
Catholic Church; and in one letter she writes that Mr. Horne has not
returned to England and adds: "Mr. Browning is not in England, either, so
that whatever you send for him must await his return from the east, or
west, or south, wherever he is; Dickens is in Italy; even Miss Mitford
talks of going to France, and the 'New Spirit of the Age' is a wandering
spirit."
In her "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" had occurred the lines:
"Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the
middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."
A certain consciousness of each other already stirred in the air for
Browning and Miss Barrett, and still closer were the Fates drawing the
subtle threads of destiny.
It was in this November that Mrs. Jameson first came into Miss Barrett's
life, coming to the door with a note, and "overcoming by kindness was let
in." This initiated a friendship that was destined in the near future to
play its salient part in the life of Elizabeth Barrett. In what orderly
sequence the links of life appear, viewed retrospectively!
She "gently wrangles" with Mr. Boyd for addressing her as "Miss Barrett,"
deprecating such cold formality, and offering him his choice of her little
pet name "Ba" or of Elizabeth.
She reads Hans Christian Andersen's "Improvisatore," and in reply to some
expressed wonder at her reading so many novels she avows herself "the most
complete and unscrupulous romance reader" possible; and adds that her love
of fiction began with her breath, and will end with it; "and it goes on
increasing. On my tombstone may be written," she continued, "'_Ci gît_ the
greatest novel reader in the world,' and nobody will forbid the
inscription."
And so the prelude of her life draws to a close, and the future is to be
no more the mere living "with visions for her company," for now, in this
January of 1845, she has a letter from Browning, and she writes: "I had a
letter from Browning, the poet, last night, which threw me into
ecstasies,--Browning, the author of 'Paracelsus,' and king of the
mystics." Not long after she writes that she is getting deeper and deeper
into correspondence with Robert Browning, and that they are growing to be
the truest of friends. Lowell writes to Miss Barrett regarding her poems,
though the letter does not seem to be anywhere on record, and she writes
to Mr. Westwood that in her view Mr. Browning's power is of a very high
order, and that he must read "Paracelsus." In its author she finds one who
"speaks true oracles." She finds "Colombe's Birthday" exquisite, and
"Pippa Passes" she "kneels to, with deepest reverence."
The first letter of Browning to Miss Barrett was written on January 10 of
this year (1845), and he began with the words: "I love your verses with
all my heart, dear Miss Barrett." He enters into the "fresh strange music,
the exquisite pathos, and true, brave thought" of her work; and reminds
her that Kenyon once asked him if he would like to see Miss Barrett, but
that she did not feel able, and he felt as if close to some world's
wonder, but the half-opened door shut. Her reply, which is dated the next
day, thanks him for his sympathy and offers him her gratitude, "agreeing
that of all the commerce from Tyre to Carthage, the exchange of sympathy
for gratitude is the most princely thing." And she craves a lasting
obligation in that he shall suggest her master-faults in poetry. She does
not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism, and possibly
might not be at all obedient to it, but she has such high respect for his
power in Art, and his experience as an artist. She refers to Mr. Kenyon as
her friend and helper, and her books' friend and helper, "critic and
sympathizer, true friend at all hours!" and she adds that "while I live to
follow this divine art of poetry ... I must be a devout student and
admirer of your works."
Browning is made very happy by her words, and he feels that his poor
praise "was nearly as felicitously brought out as a certain tribute to
Tasso, which amused me in Rome some weeks ago," he says. "In a neat
penciling on the wall by his tomb at Sant' Onofrio--'_Alla cara
memoria--di--Torquato Tasso--il Dottore Bernardini--offriva--il sequente
Carme--tu_'--and no more; the good man, it would seem, breaking down with
the over-load of love here! But my '_O tu_' was breathed out most
sincerely, and now you have taken it in gracious part, the rest will come
after." And then he must repeat (to himself) that her poetry must be
infinitely more to him than his could be to her, "for you do what I have
only hoped to do." And he hopes she will nevermore talk of "the honor" of
his acquaintance, but he will joyfully wait for the delight of her
friendship. And to his fear that she may hate letter-writing she replies
suggesting that nobody likes writing to everybody, but it would be strange
and contradictory if she were not always delighted to hear from and to
write to him; and she can read any manuscript except the writing on the
pyramids, and if he will only treat her _en bon camarade_ "without
reference to the conventionalities of 'ladies and gentlemen'"; taking no
thought for his sentences (or hers), "nor for your badd speling nor for
mine," she is ready to sign and seal the contract of correspondence. And
while she throws off the ceremony, she holds faster to the kindness. She
is overjoyed with this cordial sympathy. "Is it true," she asks, "that I
know so little of you? And is it true that the productions of an artist do
not partake of his real nature? It is not true to my mind,--and therefore
it is not true that I know little of you, except in so far as it is true
that your greatest works are to come.... I think--if I may dare name
myself with you in the poetic relation--that we both have high views of
the Art we follow and steadfast purpose in the pursuit of it.... And that
neither of us would be likely to be thrown from the course by the casting
of any Atalanta ball of speedy popularity.
"And after all that has been said and mused upon the anxiety experienced
by the true artist,--is not the good immeasurably greater than the evil?
For my part I sometimes wonder how, without such an object and purpose of
life, people contrive to live at all."
And her idea of happiness "lies deep in poetry and its associations." And
he replies that what he has printed "gives no knowledge of me," and that
he has never begun what he hopes he was born to begin and end--"R. B. a
poem."
"Do you know Tennyson?" she asks, "that is, with a face to face knowledge?
I have great admiration for him," she continues. "In execution he is
exquisite,--and in music a most subtle weigher out to the ear of fine
airs." And she asks if he knows what it is to covet his neighbor's
poetry,--not his fame, but his poetry. It delights her to hear of his
garden full of roses and his soul full of comforts. She finds the
conception of his Pippa "most exquisite, and altogether original."
In one of Miss Barrett's letters a few weeks later there seems discernible
a forecast of "Aurora Leigh," when she writes that her chief intention is
the writing "of a sort of novel-poem," and one "as completely modern as
'Geraldine's Courtship,' 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." She is waiting for
a story; she will not take one, because she likes to make her own. Here is
without doubt the first conception of "Aurora Leigh."
Touching on Life in another letter, she records her feeling that "the
brightest place in the house is the leaning out of the window."
Browning replies: "And pray you not to lean out of the window when my own
foot is only on the stair."...
"But I did not mean to strike a tragic chord," she replies; "indeed I did
not. As to 'escaping with my life,' it was just a phrase ... for the rest
I am essentially better ... and feel as if it were intended for me to live
and not to die." And referring to a passage relating to Prometheus she
asks: "And tell me, if Æschylus is not the divinest of all the divine
Greek souls?" She continues:
"But to go back to the view of Life with the blind Hopes; you are not
to think--whatever I may have written or implied--that I lean either
to the philosophy or affectation which beholds the world through
darkness instead of light ... and after a course of bitter mental
discipline and long bodily seclusion I come out with two lessons
learned--the wisdom of cheerfulness and the duty of social
intercourse. Anguish has instructed me in joy, and solitude in
society.... What we call life is a condition of the soul, and the soul
must improve in happiness and wisdom, except by its own fault.... And
I do like to hear testimonies like yours, to happiness, and I feel it
to be a testimony of a higher sort than the obvious one.... Remember,
that as you owe your unscathed joy to God, you should pay it back to
His world. I thank you for some of it already."
And she feels how kind he is,--how gently and kindly he speaks to her. In
his next letter he alludes with much feeling to her idea of the
poem-novel:
"The Poem you propose to make; the fresh, fearless, living work you
describe, is the only Poem to be undertaken now by you or any one who
is a poet at all; the only reality, only effective piece of service to
be rendered God or man; it is what I have been all my life intending
to do, and now shall be much nearer doing since you will be along with
me. And you can do it, I know and am sure,--so sure that I could find
it in my heart to be jealous of your stopping on the way even to
translate the Prometheus...."
The lovers, for such they already are, however unconsciously to both, fall
into a long discussion of Prometheus, and the Greek drama in general, and
in another letter, with allusion to his begging her to take her own good
time in writing, she half playfully proffers that it is her own bad time
to which she must submit. "This implacable weather!" she writes; "this
east wind that seems to blow through the sun and the moon!... There will
be a May and June if we live to see such things," and then she speaks of
seeing him besides, and while she recognizes it is morbid to shrink and
grow pale in the spirit, yet not all her fine philosophy about social
duties quite carries her through. But "if he thinks she shall not like to
see him, he is wrong, for all his learning." What pathos of revelation of
this brave, celestial spirit, tenanting the most fragile of bodies, is
read in the ensuing passage:
"What you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of
your life and mine. You seem to have drunken of the cup of life full
with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly, or with sorrow
for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness I was
secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world
who have not seen more, known more, of society, than I, who am hardly
to be called young now. I grew up in the country, had no social
opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in
reveries.... Books and dreams were what I lived in--and domestic life
seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass.... Why,
if I live on and escape this seclusion, do you not perceive that I
labor under signal disadvantages, that I am, in a manner, a blind
poet?... I have had much of the inner life ... but how willingly would
I exchange some of this ponderous, helpless knowledge of books for
some experience of life.... But grumbling is a vile thing, and we
should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them
enough.... Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live
while I write--it is life for me. Why, what is it to live? Not to eat
and drink and breathe,--but to feel the life in you down all the
fibers of being, passionately and joyfully....
"Ah, you tempt me with a grand vision of Prometheus!... I am inclined
to think that we want new forms.... The old gods are dethroned. Why
should we go back to the antique moulds? If it is a necessity of Art
to do this, then those critics are right who hold that Art is
exhausted.... I do not believe this; and I believe the so-called
necessity of Art to be the mere feebleness of the artist. Let us all
aspire rather to Life.... For there is poetry everywhere...."
Miss Barrett writes to him, continuing the discussion of poetry as an Art,
that she does not want "material as material, but that every life requires
a full experience," and she has a profound conviction that a poet is at a
lamentable disadvantage if he has been shut from most of the outer aspects
of life. And he, replying, deprecates a little the outward life for a
poet, with amusing references to a novel of D'Israeli's, where, "lo,
dinner is done, and Vivian Grey is here, and Violet Fane there, and a
detachment of the party is drafted off to catch butterflies." But still he
partly agrees, and feels that her Danish novel ("The Improvisatore") must
be full of truth and beauty, and "that a Dane should write so, confirms me
in a belief that Italy is stuff for the use of the North and no more--pure
Poetry there is none, as near as possible none, in Dante, even;... and
Alfieri,... with a life of travel, writes you some fifteen tragedies as
colorless as salad grown under a garden glass...." But she--if she asks
questions about novels it is because she wants to see him by the refracted
lights, as well as by the direct ones; and Dante's poetry--"only material
for northern rhymers?" She must think of that before she agrees with him.
As for Browning, he bids her remember that he writes letters to no one but
her; but there is never enough of telling her.... And she, noting his
sitting up in the morning till six, and sleeping only till nine, wants to
know "how 'Lurias' can be made out of such ungodly imprudences? And what
is the reasonableness of it," she questions, "when we all know that
thinking, dreaming, creative people, like yourself, have two lives to bear
instead of one, and therefore ought to sleep more than others"; and he is
anticipating the day when he shall see her with his own eyes, and now a
day is named on which he will call, and he begs her not to mind his coming
in the least, for if she does not feel able to see him he will come again,
and again, as his time is of no importance.
It was on the afternoon of May 20 (1845) that Robert Browning and
Elizabeth Barrett first met, and of them it could almost have been said,
in words ascribed to Michael Angelo for Vittoria Colonna,--
"We are the only two, that, face to face,
Do know each other, as God doth know us both."
It is said that the first letter of Browning's to her after this meeting
is the only one destroyed of all this wonderful correspondence; and this
was such a letter as could only be interpreted into a desire for marriage,
which she, all tender thoughtfulness always for others, characteristically
felt would be fatal to his happiness because of her invalid state. He
begged her to return the letter, and he then destroyed it; and again
pleaded that their friendship and intellectual comradeship should
continue. "Your friendship and sympathy will be dear and precious to me
all my life, if you indeed leave them with me so long, or so little," she
writes; and she utterly forbids any further expression or she must do this
"to be in my own eyes and before God a little more worthy, or a little
less unworthy, of a generosity...." And he discreetly veils his ardors for
the time, and the wonderful letters run on.
[Illustration: MONUMENT TO MICHAEL ANGELO, BY VASARI
CHURCH OF SANTA CROCE.
"_They are safe in heaven...._
_The Michaels and Rafaels...._"
Old Pictures in Florence.]
He is writing "The Flight of the Duchess," and sending it to her by
installments; she finds it "past speaking of," and she also refers to
"exquisite pages" of Landor's in the "Pentameron." And poems which he has
left with her,--she must have her own gladness from them in her own way.
And did he go to Chelsea, and hear the divine philosophy?
Apparently he did, for he writes:
"Yes, I went to Chelsea and found dear Carlyle alone--his wife is in
the country where he will join her as soon as the book's last proof
sheets are corrected.... He was all kindness, and talked like his own
self while he made me tea--and would walk as far as Vauxhall Bridge
with me on my way home."
She writes:
"I had a letter yesterday from Charles Hemans, the son of Felicia, ...
who says his mother's memory is surrounded to him 'with almost a
divine lustre,'... and is not that better than your tradition about
Shelley's son? and is it not pleasant to know that the noble,
pure-hearted woman, the Vittoria Colonna of our country, should be so
loved and comprehended by one, at least, of her own house?"
Under date of August 25, Miss Barrett has been moved to write out the
pathetic story of her brother Edward's death. He had accompanied her to
Torquay,--he, "the kindest, the noblest, the dearest, and when the time
came for him to return I, weakened by illness, could not master my spirits
or drive back my tears," and he then decided not to leave her. "And ten
days from that day," she continued, "the boat left the shore which never
returned--and he had left me! For three days we waited,--oh, that awful
agony of three days!... Do not notice what I have written to you, my
dearest friend. I have never said so much to a living being--I never could
speak or write of it...."
But he writes her that "better than being happy in her happiness, is it
to participate in her sorrow." And the very last day of that August he
writes that he has had such power over himself as to keep silent ... but
"Let me say now--this only once,--that I loved you from my soul, and gave
you my life, as much of it as you would take, and all that ... is
independent of any return on your part." She assures him that he has
followed the most generous of impulses toward her, "yet I cannot help
adding that, of us two, yours has not been quite the hardest part." She
confesses how deeply she is affected by his words, "but what could I
speak," she questions, "that would not be unjust to you?... Your life! if
you gave it to me and I put my whole heart into it, what should I put in
but anxiety, and more sadness than you were born to? What could I give you
which it would not be ungenerous to give?"
There was a partial plan that Miss Barrett should pass that next winter in
Pisa, but owing to the strange and incalculable disposition of her father,
who, while he loved her, was singularly autocratic in his treatment, the
plan was abandoned. All this sorrow may have contributed to her confession
to Browning that no man had ever been to her feelings what he was; and
that if she were different in some respects she would accept the great
trust of his happiness.... "But we may be friends always," she continues,
"and cannot be so separated that the knowledge of your happiness will not
increase mine.... Worldly thoughts these are not at all, there need be no
soiling of the heart with any such;... you cannot despise the gold and
gauds of the world more than I do,... and even if I wished to be very
poor, in the world's sense of poverty, I could not, with three or four
hundred a year, of which no living will can dispossess me. And is not the
chief good of money, the being free from the need of thinking of it?" But
he, perfect in his beautiful trust and tenderness, was "joyfully
confident" that the way would open, and he thanks God that, to the utmost
of his power, he has not been unworthy of having been introduced to her.
He is "no longer in the first freshness of his life" and had for years
felt it impossible that he should ever love any woman. But he will wait.
That she "cannot dance like Cerito" does not materially disarrange his
plan! And by the last of those September days she confesses that she is
his "for everything but to do him harm," he has touched her so profoundly,
and now "none, except God and your own will, shall interpose between you
and me." And he answered her in such words as these:
"When I come back from seeing you and think over it all, there is
never a least word of yours I could not occupy myself with...."
In a subsequent letter Elizabeth Barrett questions: "Could it be that
heart and life were devastated to make room for you? if so it was well
done." And she sends thanks to Browning's sister, Sarianna, for a copy of
Landor's verses.
And with all these gracious and tenderly exquisite personal matters, the
letters are yet brilliant in literary allusion and criticism.
During these three years from 1844 to 1847 were written the greater number
of Miss Barrett's finest lyrics. Those two remarkable poems, "A Rhapsody
of Life's Progress" and "Confessions"; "Loved Once"; "The Sleep" (the poem
which was read at her burial in the lovely, cypress-crowned cemetery in
Florence, and whose stanzas, set to music, were chanted by the choir in
Westminster Abbey when the body of her husband was laid in the "Poets'
Corner"), "The Dead Pan," and that most exquisite lyric of all, "Catarina
to Camoens," were all written during this period.
The title of the latter was but a transparent veil for her own feelings
toward Robert Browning, and had she died in his absence, as Catarina did
in that of Camoens, the words would have expressed her own feeling. What
profound pathos is in the line,
"Death is near me,--and not _you_,"
and how her own infinite sweetness of spirit is mirrored in the stanza,
"I will look out to his future;
I will bless it till it shine,
Should he ever be a suitor
Unto sweeter eyes than mine."
And read her own self-revelation again in "A Denial,"
"We have met late--it is too late to meet,
O friend, not more than friend!"
But the denial breaks down, and the last lines tell the story:
"Here's no more courage in my soul to say
'Look in my face and see.'"
And in that last line of "Insufficiency,"
"I love thee so, Dear, that I only can leave thee."
In "Question and Answer," in "Proof and Disproof," "A Valediction," "Loved
Once," and "Inclusions," he who reads between the lines and has the magic
of divination may read the story of her inner life.
In the poem "Confessions" is touched a note of mystical, spiritual
romance, spiritual tragedy, wholly of the inner life, that entirely
differentiates from any other poetic expression of Mrs. Browning. In one
stanza occur these lines:
"The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day and
by night;
Their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through me,
if ever so light."
Even with all allowance for the imagination of the poet, these lines
reveal such feeling, such tremulous susceptibility, that with less
intellectual balance than was hers, combined with such lack of physical
vigor, would almost inevitably have resulted in failure of poise. The
current of spiritual energy was so strong with Elizabeth Barrett as to
largely take the place of greater physical strength. That she never
relapsed into the conditions of morbid invalidism is a marvel, and it is
also an impressive testimony to the power of spiritual energy to control
and determine physical conditions.
All through that summer the letters run on, daily, semi-daily. Of his work
Browning writes that he shall be "prouder to begin one day,--may it be
soon!--with your hand in mine from the beginning." Miss Barrett, referring
to the Earl of Compton, who is reported from Rome as having achieved some
prominence as a painter, proceeds to say:
"People in general would rather be Marquises than Roman artists,
consulting their own wishes and inclination. I, for my part, ever
since I could speak my mind and knew it, always openly and inwardly
preferred the glory of those who live by their heads, to the opposite
glory of those who carry other people's arms. So much for glory.
Happiness goes the same way to my fancy. There is something
fascinating to me in that Bohemian way of living.... All the
conventions of society cut so close and thin, that the soul can see
through.... Beyond, above. It is real life as you say ... whether at
Rome or elsewhere. I am very glad that you like simplicity in habits
of life--it has both reasonableness and sanctity.... I am glad that
you--who have had temptation enough, more than enough, I am sure, in
every form--have lived in the midst of this London of ours, close to
the great social vortex, yet have kept so safe, and free, and calm,
and pure from the besetting sins of our society."
Browning, in one letter, alluding to the prevailing stupidity of the idea
that genius and domestic happiness are incompatible, says: "We will live
the real answer, will we not?... A man of genius mistreats his wife; well,
take away the genius,--does he so instantly improve?"
Of the attitude of his family toward their marriage he writes:
"My family all love you, dearest,--you cannot conceive my father's and
mother's childlike faith in goodness--and my sister is very
high-spirited, and quick of apprehension--so as to seize the true
point of the case at once.... Last night I asked my father, who was
absorbed over some old book, if he should not be glad to see his new
daughter?--to which he, starting, replied, 'Indeed I shall'; with such
a fervor as to make my mother laugh,--not abated by his adding: 'And
how I should be glad of her seeing Sarianna!'"
And she writes:
"Shall we go to Greece, then, Robert? Let us, if you like it. When we
have used a little the charm of your Italy,... I should like to see
Athens with my living eyes.... Athens was in all the dreams I dreamed,
before I knew you. Why should we not see Athens, and Egypt, too, and
float down the mystical Nile, and stand in the shadow of the Pyramids?
All of it is more possible now, than walking up the street seemed to
me last year."
And he writes that he always felt her "Wine of Cyprus" poem to fill his
heart "with unutterable desires."
To book-lovers the question as to how many books may be taken on a
journey, or what volumes, indeed, may be left behind, is a vital one. The
reader will smile sympathetically at Miss Barrett's consultation with
Browning as to whether, if they do "achieve the peculiar madness of going
to Italy," they could take any books? And whether it would be well to so
arrange that they should not take duplicates? He advises the narrowest
compass for luggage. "We can return for what we want, or procure it
abroad," he says, made wise by his two Italian journeys; and he adds:
"I think the fewer books we take the better; they take up room,--and
the wise way always seemed to me to read at home, and open one's eyes
and see abroad. A critic somewhere mentioned that as my
characteristic--there were two other poets he named placed in novel
circumstances ... in a great wood, for instance, Mr. Trench would
begin opening books to see how woods were treated ... the other man
would set to writing poetry forthwith,--and R. B. would sit still and
learn how to write after! A pretty compliment, I thought that. But,
seriously, there must be a great library at Pisa (with that
University) and abroad they are delighted to facilitate such
matters.... I have read in a chamber of the Doges' palace at Venice
painted all over by Tintoretto, walls and ceiling, and at Rome there
is a library with a learned priest always kept ready 'to solve any
doubts that may arise.'"
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were married on September 12, 1846,
in the church of St. Pancras, Marylebone, the only witnesses being his
cousin, James Silverthorne, and her maid, Wilson. To have taken her
sisters into her confidence would have been to expose them to the fairly
insane wrath of her father. "I hate and loathe everything which is
clandestine--we both do, Robert and I," said Mrs. Browning later; but this
was the only possible way. Had Mr. Browning spoken to her father in the
usual manner, "he would have been forbidden the house without a moment's
scruple," she explained to a friend; "and I should have been incapacitated
from any after exertion by the horrible scenes to which, as a thing of
course, I should have been exposed.... I cannot bear some words. In my
actual state of physical weakness, it would have been the sacrifice of my
whole life--of my convictions, of my affections, and, above all, of what
the person dearest to me persisted in calling his life, and the good of
it--if I had observed that 'form.' Therefore I determined not to observe
it, and I consider that in not doing so, I sinned against no duty. That I
was _constrained_ to act clandestinely, and did not _choose_ to do so, God
is my witness. Also, up to the very last, we stood in the light of day for
the whole world, if it please, to judge us. I never saw him out of the
Wimpole Street house. He came twice a week to see me, openly in the sight
of all."
In no act of her life did Mrs. Browning more impressively reveal her good
sense than in this of her marriage. "I had long believed such an act," she
said, "the most strictly personal of one's life,--to be within the rights
of every person of mature age, man or woman, and I had resolved to
exercise that right in my own case by a resolution which had slowly
ripened. All the other doors of life were shut to me, and shut me as in a
prison, and only before this door stood one whom I loved best and who
loved me best, and who invited me out through it for the good's sake he
thought I could do him."... To a friend she explained her long refusal to
consent to the marriage, fearing that her delicate health would make it
"ungenerous" in her to yield to his entreaty; but he replied that
"he would not tease me, he would wait twenty years if I pleased, and
then, if life lasted so long for both of us, then, when it was ending,
perhaps, I might understand him and feel that I might have trusted
him.... He preferred, he said, of free and deliberate choice, to be
allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the fulfillment of
the brightest dream which should exclude me, in any possible world."
She continues:
"I tell you so much that you may see the manner of man I had to do
with, and the sort of attachment which for nearly two years has been
drawing and winning me. I know better than any in the world, indeed,
what Mr. Kenyon once unconsciously said before me, that 'Robert
Browning is great in every thing.'... Now may I not tell you that his
genius, and all but miraculous attainments, are the least things in
him, the moral nature being of the very noblest, as all who ever knew
him admit."
After the marriage ceremony Mrs. Browning drove with her maid to the home
of Mr. Boyd, resting there, as if making a morning call on a familiar
friend, until joined by her sisters, who took her for a little drive on
Hampstead Heath. For five days she remained in her father's house, and
during this time Browning could not bring himself to call and ask for his
wife as "Miss Barrett," so they arranged all the details of their journey
by letter. On September 19 they left for Paris, and the last one of these
immortal letters, written the evening before their departure, from Mrs.
Browning to her husband, contains these words:
"By to-morrow at this time I shall have you, only, to love me, my
beloved! You, only! As if one said, God, only! And we shall have Him
beside, I pray of Him!"
With her maid, Mrs. Browning walked out of her father's house the next
day, meeting her husband at a bookseller's around the corner of the
street, and they drove to the station, leaving for Southampton to catch
the night boat to Havre.
Never could the world have understood the ineffable love and beauty and
nobleness of the characters of both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
had these letters been withheld from the public. Quite aside from the
deeper interest of their personal revelation,--the revelation of such
nobleness and such perfect mutual comprehension and tenderness of sympathy
as are here revealed,--the pages are full of interesting literary allusion
and comment, of wit, repartee, and of charm that defies analysis. It was a
wise and generous gift when the son of the poets, Robert Barrett
Browning, gave these wonderful letters to the reading public. The supreme
test of literature is that which contributes to the spiritual wealth of
the world. Measured by this standard, these are of the highest literary
order. No one can fail to realize how all that is noblest in manhood, all
that is holiest in womanhood, is revealed in this correspondence.
Edmund Clarence Stedman, after reading these letters, said: "It would have
been almost a crime to have permitted this wonderful, exceptional
interchange of soul and mind, between these two strong, 'excepted' beings,
to leave no trace forever."
Robert Barrett Browning, in referring to his publication of this
correspondence in a conversation with the writer of this volume, remarked
that he really had no choice in the matter, as the Apochryphal legends and
myths and improvisations that had even then begun to weave themselves
about the remarkable and unusual story of the acquaintance, courtship, and
marriage of his parents, could only be dissipated by the simple truth, as
revealed in their own letters.
Their love took its place in the spiritual order; it was a bond that made
itself the mystic force in their mutual development and achievement; and
of which the woman, whose reverence for the Divine Life was the strongest
element in her nature, could yet say,--
"And I, who looked for only God, found thee!"
Life, as well as Literature, would have been the poorer had not Mr.
Barrett Browning so wisely and generously enriched both by the publication
of this correspondence.
Not the least among the beautiful expressions that have been made by those
spirits so touched to fine issues as to enter into the spiritual
loveliness of these letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, is
a sonnet by a New England poet, Rev. William Brunton,--a poet who "died
too soon," but whose love for the poetry of the Brownings was as ardent as
it was finely appreciative:
"Oh! dear departed saints of highest song,
Behind the screen of time your love lay hid,
Its fair unfoldment was in life forbid--
As doing such divine affection wrong,
But now we read with interest deep and strong,
And lift from off the magic jar the lid,
And lo! your spirit stands the clouds amid
And speaks to us in some superior tongue!
"Devotion such as yours is heavenly-wise,
And yet the possible of earth ye show;
Ye dwellers in the blue of summer skies,
Through you a finer love of love we know;
It is as if the angels moved with men,
And key of Paradise were found again!"
CHAPTER VI
1846-1850
"And on her lover's arm she leant
And round her waist she felt it fold,
And far across the hills they went
To that new world which is the old.
Across the hills, and far away,
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
Beyond the night, beyond the day,
Through all the world she followed him."
MARRIAGE AND ITALY--"IN THAT NEW WORLD"--THE HAUNTS OF PETRARCA--THE MAGIC
LAND--IN PISA--VALLOMBROSA--"UN BEL GIRO"--GUERCINO'S ANGEL--CASA
GUIDI--BIRTH OF ROBERT BARRETT BROWNING--BAGNI DI LUCCA--"SONNETS
FROM THE PORTUGUESE"--THE ENCHANTMENT OF ITALY.
Paris, "and such a strange week it was," wrote Mrs. Browning to Miss
Mitford; "whether in the body, or out of the body, I can scarcely tell.
Our Balzac should be flattered beyond measure by my even thinking of him
at all." The journey from London to Paris was not then quite the swift and
easy affair it now is, the railroad between Paris and Havre not being then
completed beyond Rouen; still, such an elixir of life is happiness that
Mrs. Browning arrived in the French Capital feeling much better than when
she left London. Mrs. Jameson had only recently taken leave of Miss
Barrett on her sofa, and sympathetically offered to take her to Italy
herself for the winter with her niece; Miss Barrett had replied: "Not only
am I grateful to you, but happy to be grateful to you," but she had given
no hint of the impending marriage. Mrs. Jameson's surprise, on receiving
a note from Mrs. Browning, saying she was in Paris, was so great that her
niece, Geraldine Bate (afterward Mrs. MacPherson of Rome), asserted that
her aunt's amazement was "almost comical." Mrs. Jameson lost no time in
persuading the Brownings to join her and her niece at their quiet pension
in the Rue Ville l'Eveque, where they remained for a week,--this "strange
week" to Mrs. Browning.
In Paris they visited the galleries of the Louvre, but did little
sight-seeing beyond, "being satisfied with the idea of Paris," she said.
To a friend Mrs. Jameson wrote:
"I have also here a poet and a poetess--two celebrities who have run
away and married under circumstances peculiarly interesting, and such
as render imprudence the height of prudence. Both excellent; but God
help them! for I know not how the two poet heads and poet hearts will
get on through this prosaic world."
As for ways and means, however, the Brownings were sufficiently provided.
He had a modest independence, and she also had in her own right a little
fortune of some forty thousand pounds, yielding three or four hundred
pounds a year; but in the July preceding their marriage Browning, with his
sensitive honor, insisted upon her making a will bequeathing this capital
to her own family. In a letter to him dated July 27 of that summer the
story of his insistence on this is revealed in her own words: "I will
write the paper as you bid me.... You are noble in all things ... but I
will not discuss it so as to tease you.... I send you the paper therefore,
to that end, and only to that end...." The "document," by Browning's
insistence, gave her property to her two sisters, in equal division, or,
in case of their death, to the surviving brothers. Nothing less than this
would satisfy Robert Browning.
Meantime, there was the natural London comment. Wordsworth observed: "So
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together! It is to be
hoped they can understand each other, for no one else can."
Mr. Kenyon wrote "the kindest letter" to them both, and pronounced them
"justified to the uttermost," and to Mrs. Browning he said: "I considered
that you had imperiled your life upon this undertaking and I still thought
you had done wisely!" But by that magic alchemy of love and happiness Mrs.
Browning only gained constantly in strength, and Mrs. Jameson pronounced
them "wise people, whether wild poets or not."
Among the interesting comments on the marriage was Joseph Arnould's letter
to Alfred Domett, under date of November of that year. He wrote:
"... I think the last piece of news I told you of was Browning's
marriage to Miss Barrett. She is, you know, our present greatest
living English poetess: ... she has been in the most absolute and
enforced seclusion from society; cultivating her mind to a wonderful
amount of accomplishment, instructing herself in all languages,
reading Chrysostom in the original Greek, and publishing the best
metrical translation that has yet appeared of the 'Prometheus
Bound'--having also found time to write three volumes of poetry, the
last of which raised her name to a place second only to that of
Browning and Tennyson, amongst all those who are not repelled by
eccentricities of external form from penetrating into the soul and
quintessential spirit of poetry that quickens the mould into which the
poet has cast it. Well, this lady, so gifted, so secluded, so
tyrannized over, fell in love with Browning in the spirit before ever
she saw him in the flesh--in plain English, loved the writer, before
she knew the man. Imagine, you who know him, the effect which his
graceful bearing, high demeanor, and noble speech must have had on
such a mind when first she saw the man of her visions in the twilight
of her darkened room. She was at once in love as a poet-soul only can
be; and Browning, as by contagion or electricity, was no less from
the first interview wholly in love with her.... He is a glorious
fellow! Oh, I forgot to say that the _soi-disante_ invalid, once
emancipated from the paternal despotism, has had a wondrous revival,
or rather, a complete metamorphosis; walks, rides, eats, and drinks
like a young and healthy woman,--in fact, is a healthy woman of, I
believe, some five and thirty. But one word covers all; they are in
Love, who lends his own youth to everything."
The journey from Paris to Italy, if less comfortable and expeditious than
now, was certainly more romantic, and the Brownings, in company with Mrs.
Jameson and her niece, fared forth to Orleans, and thence to Avignon,
where they rested for two days, making a poetic pilgrimage to Vaucluse,
where Petrarca had sought solitude. "There at the very source of the
'_chiare, fresche e dolci acque_,'" records Mrs. MacPherson in her
biography of Mrs. Jameson, "Mr. Browning took his wife up in his arms, and
carrying her across through the shallow, curling waters, seated her on a
rock that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream. Thus Love and
Poetry took a new possession of the spot immortalized by Petrarca's
fancy."
From Marseilles they sailed to Livorno (Leghorn), the port only a few
miles from Pisa. The voyage was a delight to Mrs. Browning. She was
enchanted with the beautiful panorama of the Riviera as they sailed down
the coast, where the terraces of mountains rise, with old castles and
ruins often crowning their summits, and the white gleam of the hill-towns
against a background of blue sky. All the Spezzia region was haunted by
memories of Shelley; Lerici, where last he had lived, was plainly in view,
and they gazed sadly at Viareggio, encircled by pine woods and mountains,
where the body of the poet had been found. In Pisa they took rooms in the
Collegio Fernandino, in the Piazza del Duomo, in that corner of Pisa
wherein are grouped the Cathedral, the Baptistery, the Leaning Tower, and
the Campo Santo, all in this consummate beauty of silence and
seclusion,--a splendor of abandoned glory. All the stir of life (if,
indeed, one may dream of life in Pisa) is far away on the other side of
the city; to this corner is left the wraith-like haunted atmosphere, where
only shadows flit over the grass, and the sunset reflections linger on the
Tower. A statue of Cosimo di Medici was near; the Lanfranchi palace, where
Byron had lived, was not far away, on the banks of the Arno. They quite
preferred the Duomo and the Campo Santo to social festivities, and
Professor Ferrucci offered them all the hospitalities of the University
library. They had an apartment of four rooms, "matted and carpeted,"
coffee and rolls in the morning, dinner at the Trattoria, "thrushes and
chianti with a marvelous cheapness, no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the
prophet Elijah, or the lilies of the field, took as little thought for
their dining," writes Mrs. Browning, "and it exactly suits us. At nine we
have our supper of roast chestnuts and grapes.... My head goes round
sometimes. I was never happy before in my life.... And when I am so good
as to let myself be carried up-stairs, and so angelical as to sit still on
the sofa, and so considerate as not to put my foot into a puddle, why, my
duty is considered done to a perfection worthy all adoration.... Mrs.
Jameson and Geraldine are staying in the hotel, and we manage to see them
every day; so good and true and affectionate she is, and so much we shall
miss her when she goes.... Our present residence we have taken for six
months, but we have dreams, and we discuss them like soothsayers over the
evening grapes and chestnuts."
That in London Mrs. Jameson, on her first call on Miss Barrett, should
have so winningly insisted on being admitted to her room as to be
successful, almost to Miss Barrett's own surprise, seems, when seen in
connection with the way in which Fate was to throw them together
afterward, in Italy, to have been one of those "foreordained" happenings
of life.
They heard a musical mass for the dead in the Campo Santo; they walked
under orange trees with golden fruit hanging above their heads; they took
drives to the foot of the mountains, and watched the reflections in the
little lake of Ascuno. Mrs. Browning, from her windows, could see the
cathedral summit glitter whitely, between the blue sky and its own yellow
marble walls. Beautiful and tender letters came to them both from Mr.
Kenyon, and they heard that Carlyle had said that he hoped more from
Robert Browning, for the people of England, than from any other living
English writer. All of these things entered into the very fiber of their
Pisan days. Pisa seemed to her a beautiful town,--it could not be less,
she felt, with Arno and its palaces, and it was to her full of repose, but
not desolate. Meantime, Mr. Browning was preparing for a new edition of
his collected poems.
Curiously, all the biographers of Robert Browning have recorded that it
was during this sojourn in Pisa that the "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
were first made known to him. Dr. Dowden quotes the story as given by Mr.
Edmund Gosse, and Mr. Gosse cites Browning himself as his authority. Yet
there was some mistake, as the Sonnets were not seen by Mr. Browning till
some time later.
Robert Barrett Browning, in Florence, in the spring of 1910, in reply to a
question asked by the writer of this book in regard to the accuracy of
this impression, replied that both Mr. Gosse and Dr. Dowden were mistaken;
as his mother did not show these "Sonnets" to his father until the summer
of 1849, when they were at Bagni di Lucca. Mr. Gosse must in some way have
mistaken Mr. Browning's words, and the error has perpetuated itself
through every successive biography of the poet.
The first home of the Brownings in Florence was in an apartment near
Santa Maria Novella, where the Italian sunshine burned fiercely, and where
Mrs. Browning exclaimed that she began to comprehend the possibility of
St. Lawrence's ecstasies on the gridiron. "Yet there have been cool
intermissions," she wrote, "and as we have spacious and airy rooms, and as
we can step out of the window on a balcony terrace which is quite private,
and swims over with moonlight in the evenings, and as we live upon
watermelons, and iced water, and figs, and all manner of fruit, we bear
the heat with angelic patience."
There was a five days' interlude at Vallombrosa, which the poets vainly
entreated the monks to prolong to two months, but the brethren would have
none of the presence of two women,--Mrs. Browning and her maid, Wilson. So
they perforce left these fascinating hills, "a sea of hills looking alive
among the clouds." Still further up above the monastery was the old
Hermitage now transformed into a hotel. It was here that Migliorotti
passed many years, asserting that he could only think of it as Paradise,
and thus it came to be known as Paradisino, the name it still bears. Far
below in a dim distance lies Florence, with her domes and towers on which
the sunshine glitters, or the white moonlight of the Val d'Arno shines;
and on every hand are the deep valleys and crevasses, the Val di Sieve,
the Val di Casentino, and the height of San Miniato in Alpe. Castles and
convents, or their ruins, abound; and here Dante passed, and there St.
Benedict, and again is the path still holy with the footsteps of St.
Francis. The murmuring springs that feed the Arno are heard in the hills;
and the vast solitudes of the wood, with their ruined chapels and shrines,
made this sojourn to the Brownings something to be treasured in memory
forever. They even wandered to that beautiful old fifteenth-century
church, Santa Maria delle Grazie Vallombrosella, "a daughter of the
monastery of Vallombrosa," where were works of Robbia, and saw the blue
hills rise out of the green forests in their infinite expanse.
[Illustration: OLD MONASTERY AT VALLOMBROSA
"_And Vallombrosa we two went to see_
_Last June beloved companion..._"
Casa Guidi Windows.]
When they fared forth for Vallombrosa, it was at four o'clock in the
morning, Mrs. Browning being all eagerness and enthusiasm for this
matutinal pilgrimage. Reaching Pelago, their route wound for five miles
along a "_via non rotabile_," through the most enchanting scenery, to
Pontassieve.
"Oh! such mountains," wrote Mrs. Browning of this
never-to-be-forgotten journey, "as if the whole world were alive with
mountains--such ravines--black in spite of flashing waters in
them--such woods and rocks--traveled in basket sledges drawn by four
white oxen--Wilson and I and the luggage--and Robert riding step by
step. We were four hours doing the five miles, so you may fancy what
rough work it was. Whether I was most tired or charmed was a _tug_
between body and soul.
"The worst was that," she continued, "there being a new abbot at the
monastery--an austere man, jealous of his sanctity and the approach of
women--our letter, and Robert's eloquence to boot, did nothing for us,
and we were ingloriously and ignominiously expelled at the end of five
days."
While the Brownings were in Vallombrosa Arnould wrote to Alfred Domett:
"Browning is spending a luxurious year in Italy--is, at this present
writing, with his poetess bride dwelling in some hermit hut in
Vallombrosa, where the Etruscan shades high overarched embower. He
never fails to ask pressingly about you, and I give him all your
messages. I would to God he would purge his style of
obscurities,--that the wide world would, and the gay world and even
the less illuminated part of the thinking world, know his greatness
even as we do. I find myself reading 'Paracelsus' and the 'Dramatic
Lyrics' more often than anything else in verse."
They descended, perforce, into Florence again, burning sunshine and all,
the abbot of the monastery having someway confounded their pleadings with
the temptation of St. Anthony, as something to be as heroically resisted.
They set up their household gods in the shades of the Via delle Belle
Donne, near the Duomo, where dinners, "unordered," Mrs. Browning said,
"come through the streets, and spread themselves on our table, as hot as
if we had smelt cutlets hours before." She found Florence "unspeakably
beautiful," both by grace of nature and of art, but they planned to go to
Rome in the early autumn, taking an apartment "over the Tarpeian rock."
Later this plan was relinquished, and with an apartment on their hands for
six months they yet abandoned it, for want of sunshine, and removed to
Casa Guidi.
"Think what we have done," wrote Mrs. Browning to Miss Mitford; "taken
two houses, that is, two apartments, each for six months, pre-signing
the contract. You will set it down to excellent poet's work in the way
of domestic economy, but the fault was altogether mine, for my
husband, to please me, took rooms with which I was not pleased for
three days, through the absence of sunshine. The consequence was that
we had to pay heaps of guineas away, for leave to go, ourselves, but
you can scarcely fancy the wonderful difference which the sun makes in
Italy. So away we came into the blaze of him into the Piazza Pitti;
precisely opposite the Grand Duke's palace; I with my remorse, and
poor Robert without a single reproach. Any other man, a little lower
than the angels, would have stamped and sworn a little for the mere
relief of the thing,--but as for his being angry with me for any cause
except not eating enough dinner, the said sun would turn the wrong way
first."
Mrs. Browning's dog, Flush, was a member of the household not to be
ignored, and her one source of consolation, in being turned away from the
Vallombrosa summer, lay in the fact that "Flush hated it," and was
frightened by the vast and somber pine forests. "Flush likes civilized
life," said Mrs. Browning laughingly, "and the society of little dogs
with turned-up tails, such as abound in Florence."
So now they bestowed themselves in "rooms yellow with sunshine from
morning till night," in Casa Guidi, where, "for good omen," they looked
down on the old gray church of San Felice. There was a large, square
anteroom, where the piano was placed, with one large picture, picked up in
an obscure street in Florence; and a little dining-room, whose walls were
covered with tapestry, and where hung medallions of Tennyson, Carlyle, and
of Robert Browning; a long, narrow room, wraith-like with plaster casts
and busts, was Mr. Browning's study, while she had her place in the large
drawing-room, looking out upon the ancient church. Its old pictures of
saints, gazing sadly from their sepulchral frames of black wood, with here
and there a tapestry, and with the lofty, massive bookcases of Florentine
carving, all gave the room a medieval look. Almost could one fancy that it
enthroned the "fairy lady of Shalott," who might weave
"... from day to day,
A magic web of colors gay."
Dante's grave profile, a cast of the face of Keats taken after death, and
a few portraits of friends, added their interest to the atmosphere of a
salon that seemed made for poets' uses. There were vast expanses of
mirrors in the old carved Florentine frames, a colossal green velvet sofa,
suggesting a catafalque, and a supernaturally deep easy-chair, in the same
green velvet, which was Mrs. Browning's favorite seat when she donned her
singing robes. Near this low arm-chair was always her little table, strewn
with writing materials, books, and newspapers. Other tables in the
_salotto_ bore gayly bound volumes, the gifts of brother authors. On the
floor of a bedroom were the arms (in scabola), of the last count who had
lived in this apartment, and there was a picturesque oil-jar, to hold
rain-water, which Mrs. Browning declared would just hold the Captain of
the Forty Thieves. All in all, the poets vowed they would not change homes
with the Grand Duke himself, who was their neighbor in the Palazzo Pitti
at the distance of a stone's throw. In the late afternoons they would
wander out to the Loggia dei Lanzi, where Mrs. Browning greatly admired
Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa, and they watched "the divine
sunsets on the Arno, turning it to pure gold under the bridges." Sometimes
they were joined by Hiram Powers, who was one of their earliest friends in
Florence, "our chief friend and favorite," Mrs. Browning said of him, and
she found him a "simple, straightforward, genial American, as simple as
the man of genius he has proved himself need be." Another friend of these
early days was Miss Boyle, a niece of the Earl of Cork, somewhat a poet,
withal, who, with her mother, was domiciled in the Villa Careggi, in which
Lorenzo il Magnifico died, and which was loaned to the Boyles by Lord
Holland. Miss Boyle frequently dropped in on them in the evening, "to
catch us at hot chestnuts and mulled wine," said Mrs. Browning, "and a
good deal of laughing she and Robert make between them." On the terrace of
Casa Guidi orange trees and camellias bloomed, and the salons with their
"rococo chairs, spring sofas, carved bookcases, and satin from Cardinals'
beds," were a picturesque haunt. The ideal and poetic life of Mrs.
Browning, so far from isolating her from the ordinary day and daylight
duties, invested these, instead, with glow and charm and playful repartee;
and, indeed, her never-failing sense of humor transformed any
inconvenience or inadvertence into amusement. She, who is conceded to have
written the finest sonnets since Shakespeare, could also mend a coat for
her husband with a smile and a Greek epigram.
[Illustration: THE GUARDIAN ANGEL.
GUERCINO. CHURCH OF SAN AGOSTINO, FANO, ITALY
"_Guercino drew this angel I saw teach_
(_Alfred, dear friend!_) _that little child to pray._"
The Guardian Angel; A Picture at Fano.]
Joseph Arnould again wrote to their mutual friend, Domett:
"Browning and his wife are still in Florence; both ravished with Italy
and Italian life; so much so, that I think for some years they will
make it the Paradise of their poetical exile. I hold fast to my faith
in 'Paracelsus.' Browning and Carlyle are my two crowning men amongst
the highest English minds of the day. Third comes Alfred Tennyson....
By-the-bye, did you ever happen upon Browning's 'Pauline'? a strange,
wild (in parts singularly magnificent) poet-biography; his own early
life as it presented itself to his own soul viewed poetically; in
fact, psychologically speaking, his 'Sartor Resartus'; it was written
and published three years before 'Paracelsus,' when Shelley was his
God."
A little later Arnould wrote again:
"Browning and his wife are still in Florence, and stay there till the
summer; he is bringing out another edition of his poems (except
'Sordello'), Chapman and Hall being his publishers, Moxon having
declined. He writes always most affectionately, and never forgets kind
inquiries about and kind messages to you."
Allured by resplendent tales of Fano, the Brownings made a trip to that
seaside hamlet, but found it uninhabitable in the late summer heat. A
statue in the Piazza commemorated the ancient _Fanum Fortunæ_ of
tradition, and in the cathedral of San Fortunato were frescoes by
Domenichino, and in the _chiesa_ of Sant' Agostino was the celebrated
painting of Sant' Angelo Custode, by Guercino, which suggested to Browning
his poem "The Guardian Angel." The tender constancy of Browning's
friendship for Alfred Domett is in evidence in this poem, and the beauty
of his reference to his wife,--
"My angel with me, too,..."
lingers with the reader.
In no poem of his entire work has Browning given so complete a revelation
of his own inner life as in this memorable lyric. The picture, dim as is
the light in which it is seen, is one of the most impressive of all
Guercino's works. In the little church of San Patern
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