Life and Letters of Robert Browning Part 10

Chapter 9

1844-1849

Introduction to Miss Barrett--Engagement--Motives for Secrecy--Marriage--Journey to Italy--Extract of Letter from Mr. Fox--Mrs. Browning's Letters to Miss Mitford--Life at Pisa--Vallombrosa--Florence; Mr. Powers; Miss Boyle--Proposed British Mission to the Vatican--Father Prout--Palazzo Guidi--Fano; Ancona--'A Blot in the 'Scutcheon' at Sadler's Wells.

During his recent intercourse with the Browning family Mr. Kenyon had often spoken of his invalid cousin, Elizabeth Barrett,* and had given them copies of her works; and when the poet returned to England, late in 1844, he saw the volume containing 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship', which had appeared during his absence. On hearing him express his admiration of it, Mr. Kenyon begged him to write to Miss Barrett, and himself tell her how the poems had impressed him; 'for,' he added, 'my cousin is a great invalid, and sees no one, but great souls jump at sympathy.'

Mr. Browning did write, and, a few months, probably, after the correspondence had been established, begged to be allowed to visit her. She at first refused this, on the score of her delicate health and habitual seclusion, emphasizing the refusal by words of such touching humility and resignation that I cannot refrain from quoting them. 'There is nothing to see in me, nothing to hear in me. I am a weed fit for the ground and darkness.' But her objections were overcome, and their first interview sealed Mr. Browning's fate.

* Properly E. Barrett Moulton-Barrett. The first of these surnames was that originally borne by the family, but dropped on the annexation of the second. It has now for some years been resumed.

There is no cause for surprize in the pa.s.sionate admiration with which Miss Barrett so instantly inspired him. To begin with, he was heart-whole. It would be too much to affirm that, in the course of his thirty-two years, he had never met with a woman whom he could entirely love; but if he had, it was not under circ.u.mstances which favoured the growth of such a feeling. She whom he now saw for the first time had long been to him one of the greatest of living poets; she was learned as women seldom were in those days. It must have been apparent, in the most fugitive contact, that her moral nature was as exquisite as her mind was exceptional. She looked much younger than her age, which he only recently knew to have been six years beyond his own; and her face was filled with beauty by the large, expressive eyes. The imprisoned love within her must unconsciously have leapt to meet his own. It would have been only natural that he should grow into the determination to devote his life to hers, or be swept into an offer of marriage by a sudden impulse which his after-judgment would condemn. Neither of these things occurred. The offer was indeed made under a sudden and overmastering impulse. But it was persistently repeated, till it had obtained a conditional a.s.sent. No sane man in Mr. Browning's position could have been ignorant of the responsibilities he was incurring. He had, it is true, no experience of illness. Of its nature, its treatment, its symptoms direct and indirect, he remained pathetically ignorant to his dying day. He did not know what disqualifications for active existence might reside in the fragile, rec.u.mbent form, nor in the long years lived without change of air or scene beyond the pa.s.sage, not always even allowed, from bed-room to sitting-room, from sofa to bed again. But he did know that Miss Barrett received him lying down, and that his very ignorance of her condition left him without security for her ever being able to stand. A strong sense of sympathy and pity could alone entirely justify or explain his act--a strong desire to bring sunshine into that darkened life. We might be sure that these motives had been present with him if we had no direct authority for believing it; and we have this authority in his own comparatively recent words: 'She had so much need of care and protection. There was so much pity in what I felt for her!'

The pity was, it need hardly be said, at no time a subst.i.tute for love, though the love in its full force only developed itself later; but it supplied an additional incentive.

Miss Barrett had made her acceptance of Mr. Browning's proposal contingent on her improving in health. The outlook was therefore vague.

But under the influence of this great new happiness she did gain some degree of strength. They saw each other three times a week; they exchanged letters constantly, and a very deep and perfect understanding established itself between them. Mr. Browning never mentioned his visits except to his own family, because it was naturally feared that if Miss Barrett were known to receive one person, other friends, or even acquaintances, would claim admittance to her; and Mr. Kenyon, who was greatly pleased by the result of his introduction, kept silence for the same reason.

In this way the months slipped by till the summer of 1846 was drawing to its close, and Miss Barrett's doctor then announced that her only chance of even comparative recovery lay in spending the coming winter in the South. There was no rational obstacle to her acting on this advice, since more than one of her brothers was willing to escort her; but Mr.

Barrett, while surrounding his daughter with every possible comfort, had resigned himself to her invalid condition and expected her also to acquiesce in it. He probably did not believe that she would benefit by the proposed change. At any rate he refused his consent to it. There remained to her only one alternative--to break with the old home and travel southwards as Mr. Browning's wife.

When she had finally a.s.sented to this course, she took a preparatory step which, in so far as it was known, must itself have been sufficiently startling to those about her: she drove to Regent's Park, and when there, stepped out of the carriage and on to the gra.s.s. I do not know how long she stood--probably only for a moment; but I well remember hearing that when, after so long an interval, she felt earth under her feet and air about her, the sensation was almost bewilderingly strange.

They were married, with strict privacy, on September 12, 1846, at St.

Pancras Church.

The engaged pair had not only not obtained Mr. Barrett's sanction to their marriage; they had not even invoked it; and the doubly clandestine character thus forced upon the union could not be otherwise than repugnant to Mr. Browning's pride; but it was dictated by the deepest filial affection on the part of his intended wife. There could be no question in so enlightened a mind of sacrificing her own happiness with that of the man she loved; she was determined to give herself to him.

But she knew that her father would never consent to her doing so; and she preferred marrying without his knowledge to acting in defiance of a prohibition which, once issued, he would never have revoked, and which would have weighed like a portent of evil upon her. She even kept the secret of her engagement from her intimate friend Miss Mitford, and her second father, Mr. Kenyon, that they might not be involved in its responsibility. And Mr. Kenyon, who, probably of all her circle, best understood the case, was grateful to her for this consideration.

Mr. Barrett was one of those men who will not part with their children; who will do anything for them except allow them to leave the parental home. We have all known fathers of this type. He had nothing to urge against Robert Browning. When Mr. Kenyon, later, said to him that he could not understand his hostility to the marriage, since there was no man in the world to whom he would more gladly have given his daughter if he had been so fortunate as to possess one,* he replied: 'I have no objection to the young man, but my daughter should have been thinking of another world;' and, given his conviction that Miss Barrett's state was hopeless, some allowance must be made for the angered sense of fitness which her elopement was calculated to arouse in him. But his att.i.tude was the same, under the varying circ.u.mstances, with all his daughters and sons alike. There was no possible husband or wife whom he would cordially have accepted for one of them.

* Mr. Kenyon had been twice married, but he had no children.

Mr. Browning had been willing, even at that somewhat late age, to study for the Bar, or accept, if he could obtain it, any other employment which might render him less ineligible from a pecuniary point of view.

But Miss Barrett refused to hear of such a course; and the subsequent necessity for her leaving England would have rendered it useless.

For some days after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Browning returned to their old life. He justly thought that the agitation of the ceremony had been, for the moment, as much as she could endure, and had therefore fixed for it a day prior by one week to that of their intended departure from England. The only difference in their habits was that he did not see her; he recoiled from the hypocrisy of asking for her under her maiden name; and during this pa.s.sive interval, fortunately short, he carried a weight of anxiety and of depression which placed it among the most painful periods of his existence.

In the late afternoon or evening of September 19, Mrs. Browning, attended by her maid and her dog, stole away from her father's house.

The family were at dinner, at which meal she was not in the habit of joining them; her sisters Henrietta and Arabel had been throughout in the secret of her attachment and in full sympathy with it; in the case of the servants, she was also sure of friendly connivance. There was no difficulty in her escape, but that created by the dog, which might be expected to bark its consciousness of the unusual situation. She took him into her confidence. She said: 'O Flush, if you make a sound, I am lost.' And Flush understood, as what good dog would not?--and crept after his mistress in silence. I do not remember where her husband joined her; we may be sure it was as near her home as possible. That night they took the boat to Havre, on their way to Paris.

Only a short time elapsed before Mr. Barrett became aware of what had happened. It is not necessary to dwell on his indignation, which at that moment, I believe, was shared by all his sons. Nor were they the only persons to be agitated by the occurrence. If there was wrath in the Barrett family, there was consternation in that of Mr. Browning. He had committed a crime in the eyes of his wife's father; but he had been guilty, in the judgment of his own parents, of one of those errors which are worse. A hundred times the possible advantages of marrying a Miss Barrett could never have balanced for them the risks and dangers he had incurred in wresting to himself the guardianship of that frail life which might perish in his hands, leaving him to be accused of having destroyed it; and they must have awaited the event with feelings never to be forgotten.

It was soon to be apparent that in breaking the chains which bound her to a sick room, Mr. Browning had not killed his wife, but was giving her a new lease of existence. His parents and sister soon loved her dearly, for her own sake as well as her husband's; and those who, if in a mistaken manner, had hitherto cherished her, gradually learned, with one exception, to value him for hers. It would, however, be useless to deny that the marriage was a hazardous experiment, involving risks of suffering quite other than those connected with Mrs. Browning's safety: the latent practical disparities of an essentially vigorous and an essentially fragile existence; and the time came when these were to make themselves felt. Mrs. Browning had been a delicate infant. She had also outgrown this delicacy and developed into a merry, and, in the harmless sense, mischief-loving child. The accident which subsequently undermined her life could only have befallen a very active and healthy girl.*

Her condition justified hope and, to a great extent, fulfilled it. She rallied surprisingly and almost suddenly in the sunshine of her new life, and remained for several years at the higher physical level: her natural and now revived spirits sometimes, I imagine, lifting her beyond it. But her ailments were too radical for permanent cure, as the weak voice and shrunken form never ceased to attest. They renewed themselves, though in slightly different conditions; and she gradually relapsed, during the winters at least, into something like the home-bound condition of her earlier days. It became impossible that she should share the more active side of her husband's existence. It had to be alternately suppressed and carried on without her. The deep heart-love, the many-sided intellectual sympathy, preserved their union in rare beauty to the end. But to say that it thus maintained itself as if by magic, without effort of self-sacrifice on his part or of resignation on hers, would be as unjust to the n.o.ble qualities of both, as it would be false to a.s.sert that its compensating happiness had ever failed them.

* Her family at that time lived in the country. She was a constant rider, and fond of saddling her pony; and one day, when she was about fourteen, she overbalanced herself in lifting the saddle, and fell backward, inflicting injuries on her head, or rather spine, which caused her great suffering, but of which the nature remained for some time undiscovered.

Mr. Browning's troubles did not, even for the present, exhaust themselves in that week of apprehension. They a.s.sumed a deeper reality when his delicate wife first gave herself into his keeping, and the long hours on steamboat and in diligence were before them. What she suffered in body, and he in mind, during the first days of that wedding-journey is better imagined than told. In Paris they either met, or were joined by, a friend, Mrs. Anna Jameson (then also en route for Italy), and Mrs.

Browning was doubly cared for till she and her husband could once more put themselves on their way. At Genoa came the long-needed rest in southern land. From thence, in a few days, they went on to Pisa, and settled there for the winter.

Even so great a friend as John Forster was not in the secret of Mr.

Browning's marriage; we learn this through an amusing paragraph in a letter from Mr. Fox, written soon after it had taken place:

'Forster never heard of the Browning marriage till the proof of the newspaper ('Examiner') notice was sent; when he went into one of his great pa.s.sions at the supposed hoax, ordered up the compositor to have a swear at him, and demanded to see the MS. from which it was taken: so it was brought, and he instantly recognised the hand of Browning's sister.

Next day came a letter from R. B., saying he had often meant to tell him or write of it, but hesitated between the two, and neglected both.

'She was better, and a winter in Italy had been recommended some months ago.

'It seems as if made up by their poetry rather than themselves.'

Many interesting external details of Mr. Browning's married life must have been lost to us through the wholesale destruction of his letters to his family, of which mention has been already made, and which he carried out before leaving Warwick Crescent about four years ago; and Mrs.

Browning's part in the correspondence, though still preserved, cannot fill the gap, since for a long time it chiefly consisted of little personal outpourings, inclosed in her husband's letters and supplementary to them. But she also wrote constantly to Miss Mitford; and, from the letters addressed to her, now fortunately in Mr. Barrett Browning's hands, it has been possible to extract many pa.s.sages of a sufficiently great, and not too private, interest for our purpose.

These extracts--in some cases almost entire letters--indeed const.i.tute a fairly complete record of Mr. and Mrs. Browning's joint life till the summer of 1854, when Miss Mitford's death was drawing near, and the correspondence ceased. Their chronological order is not always certain, because Mrs. Browning never gave the year in which her letters were written, and in some cases the postmark is obliterated; but the missing date can almost always be gathered from their contents. The first letter is probably written from Paris.

Oct. 2 ('46).

'... and he, as you say, had done everything for me--he loved me for reasons which had helped to weary me of myself--loved me heart to heart persistently--in spite of my own will ... drawn me back to life and hope again when I had done with both. My life seemed to belong to him and to none other, at last, and I had no power to speak a word. Have faith in me, my dearest friend, till you know him. The intellect is so little in comparison to all the rest--to the womanly tenderness, the inexhaustible goodness, the high and n.o.ble aspiration of every hour.

Temper, spirits, manners--there is not a flaw anywhere. I shut my eyes sometimes and fancy it all a dream of my guardian angel. Only, if it had been a dream, the pain of some parts of it would have wakened me before now--it is not a dream... .'

The three next speak for themselves.

Pisa: ('46).

'... For Pisa, we both like it extremely. The city is full of beauty and repose,--and the purple mountains gloriously seem to beckon us on deeper into the vine land. We have rooms close to the Duomo, and leaning down on the great Collegio built by Facini. Three excellent bed-rooms and a sitting-room matted and carpeted, looking comfortable even for England. For the last fortnight, except the last few sunny days, we have had rain; but the climate is as mild as possible, no cold with all the damp. Delightful weather we had for the travelling. Mrs. Jameson says she won't call me improved but transformed rather... . I mean to know something about pictures some day. Robert does, and I shall get him to open my eyes for me with a little instruction--in this place are to be seen the first steps of Art... .'

Pisa: Dec. 19 ('46).

'... Within these three or four days we have had frost--yes, and a little snow--for the first time, say the Pisans, within five years.

Robert says the mountains are powdered towards Lucca... .'

Feb. 3 ('47).

'... Robert is a warm admirer of Balzac and has read most of his books, but certainly he does not in a general way appreciate our French people quite with my warmth. He takes too high a standard, I tell him, and won't listen to a story for a story's sake--I can bear, you know, to be amused without a strong pull on my admiration. So we have great wars sometimes--I put up Dumas' flag or Soulie's or Eugene Sue's (yet he was properly impressed by the 'Mysteres de Paris'), and carry it till my arms ache. The plays and vaudevilles he knows far more of than I do, and always maintains they are the happiest growth of the French school.

Setting aside the 'masters', observe; for Balzac and George Sand hold all their honours. Then we read together the other day 'Rouge et Noir', that powerful work of Stendhal's, and he observed that it was exactly like Balzac 'in the raw'--in the material and undeveloped conception ...

We leave Pisa in April, and pa.s.s through Florence towards the north of Italy ...'

(She writes out a long list of the 'Comedie Humaine' for Miss Mitford.)