The Brownings Part 20

Curiously, Miss Blagden had not slept at all that night. After her return from her visit to Mrs. Browning the previous afternoon, "every trace of fatigue vanished," she wrote to a friend, "and all my faculties seemed singularly alert. I was unable to sleep, and sat writing letters till dawn, when a cabman came to tell me '_La Signora della Casa Guidi e morte!_'"

The Storys came immediately from Leghorn, and Miss Blagden took Edith Story and Penini to her villa. It was touching to see his little friend's endeavor to comfort the motherless boy. Mr. and Mrs. Story stayed with Browning in the rooms where everything spoke of her presence: the table, strewn with her letters and books; her little chair, a deep armchair of dark green velvet, which her son now holds sacred among his treasures, was drawn by the table just as she had left it, and in her portfolio was a half-finished letter to Madame Mario, speaking of Cavour, and her n.o.ble aspirations for Italy.

In the late afternoon of July 1, 1861, a group of English and American, with many Italian friends gathered about the little casket in the lovely cypress-shaded English cemetery of Florence, and as the sun was sinking below the purple hills it was tenderly laid away, while the amethyst mountains hid their faces in a misty veil.

"What would we give to our beloved?

The hero's heart to be unmoved, The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep.

G.o.d strikes a silence through you all, And giveth His beloved, sleep."

Almost could the friends gathered there hear her poet-voice saying:

"And friends, dear friends, when it shall be That this low breath is gone from me, And round my bier ye come to weep, Let One, most loving of you all, Say 'Not a tear must o'er her fall!

He giveth His beloved, sleep.'"

CHAPTER IX

1861-1869

"Think, when our one soul understands The great Word which makes all things new, When earth breaks up and heaven expands, How will the change strike me and you In the house not made with hands?

"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine, Your heart antic.i.p.ate my heart, You must be just before, in fine, See and make me see, for your part, New depths of the divine!"

THE COMPLETED CYCLE--LETTERS TO FRIENDS--BROWNING'S DEVOTION TO HIS SON-- WARWICK CRESCENT--"DRAMATIS PERSONae"--LONDON LIFE--DEATH OF THE POET'S FATHER--SARIANNA BROWNING--OXFORD HONORS THE POET--DEATH OF ARABEL BARRETT--AUDIERNE--"THE RING AND THE BOOK."

"The cycle is complete," said Browning to the Storys, as they all stood in those desolate rooms and gazed about. The salon was just as she had left it; the table covered with books and magazines, her little chair drawn up to it, the long windows open to the terrace, and the faint chant of nuns, "made for midsummer nights," in San Felice, on the air. "Here we came fifteen years ago," continued Mr. Browning; "here Ba wrote her poems for Italy; here Pen was born; here we used to walk up and down this terrace on summer evenings." The poet lingered over many tender reminiscences, and after the Storys had taken leave, he and his son yielded to the entreaties of Isa Blagden to stay with her in her villa on Bellosguardo during the time that he was preparing to leave Florence, which he never looked upon again.

When all matters of detail were concluded, Miss Blagden, "perfect in all kindness," accompanied them to Paris, continuing her own journey to England, while Browning with his son, his father, and sister, proceeded to St. Enogat, near St. Malo, on the Normandy coast. Before Mrs. Browning's illness there had been a plan that all the Brownings and Mr. and Mrs. W.

J. Stillman should pa.s.s the summer together at Fontainebleau.

There was something about St. Enogat singularly restful to Browning, the sea, the solitude, the "unspoiled, fresh, and picturesque place," as he described it in a letter to Madame Du Quaire. The mystic enchantment of it wrought its spell, and Penini had his pony and was well and cheerful, and Browning realized too well that the change called death is but the pa.s.sing through "the gates of new life," to be despairing in his sorrow. The spirit of one

"... who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,"

breathes through all the letters that he wrote at this time to friends.

"Don't fancy I am prostrated," he wrote to Leighton; "I have enough to do for myself and the boy, in carrying out her wishes." Somewhat later he expressed his wish that Mr. (later Sir Frederick) Leighton should design the memorial tomb, in that little Florence cemetery, for his wife; and the marble with only "E. B. B." inscribed on it, visited constantly by all travelers in Florence and rarely found without flowers, is the one Sir Frederick designed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOMB OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING IN THE ENGLISH CEMETERY, FLORENCE

Designed by Sir Frederick Leighton, R.A.]

In a letter to his boyhood's friend, Miss Haworth, Browning alluded to the future, when Penini would so need the help of "the wisdom, the genius, the piety" of his mother; and the poet adds: "I have had everything, and shall not forget." In reply to a letter of sympathy from Kate Field, he wrote:

"DEAR FRIEND,--G.o.d bless you for all your kindness which I shall never forget. I cannot write now except to say this, and beside, that I have had great comfort from the beginning."

In the early autumn Browning took his son to London. The parting of the ways had come, and already he dimly perceived that the future would not copy fair the past. There are "reincarnations," in all practical effect, that are realized in this life as well as, speculatively, hereafter; and his days of Italian terraces and oleander blooms, of enchanting hours on Bellosguardo, and lingerings in old palaces and galleries, and saunterings down narrow streets crowded with _contadini_,--these days were as entirely past as if he had been transported to another planet.

"Not death; we do not call it so, Yet scarcely more with dying breath Do we forego; We pa.s.s an unseen line, And lo! another zone."

The sea and the sands and the sky prefigured themselves in those days to Browning as all indistinguishably blended in an unreal world, from which the past had receded and on which the Future had not yet dawned.

"Gray rocks and grayer sea, And surf along the sh.o.r.e; And in my heart a name My lips shall speak no more."

To Story he wrote with a.s.surances of affection, but saying, "I can't speak about anything. I could, perhaps, if we were together, but to write freezes me." Miss Blagden, in London, had taken rooms in Upper Westbourne Terrace, and when in the late autumn Browning and his son went on to England, he took an apartment in Chichester Road, almost opposite the house where Miss Blagden was staying. But she had lived too long in enchanted Florence to be content elsewhere, and she soon returned to her villa on the heights of Bellosguardo, from which the view is one of the most beautiful in all Europe. Browning soon took the house, No. 19 Warwick Crescent, which for nearly all the rest of his life continued to be his home. Here he was near Mrs. Browning's sister, Arabel Barrett, of whom he was very fond, and whose love for her sister's little son was most grateful to them both. Mr. Browning had his old tapestries, pictures, and furniture of old Florentine carving, some of it black with age, sent on from Casa Guidi, and he proceeded to transform a prim London house into an interior of singular charm. He lined the staircase with Italian pictures; books overflowed in all the rooms, and the glimpse of water in the ca.n.a.l near reflected the green trees of the Crescent, giving the place a hint of sylvan Arcadias. There was the grand piano on which Penini practiced, and a tutor was engaged to prepare the lad for the university. The poet felt that this was the critical time to give his son "the English stamp," in "whatever it is good for," he added. But as a matter of fact the young Florentine had little affinity with English ways. He was the child of poets; a linguist from his infancy, an omnivorous reader, and with marked talent for art, distinguishing himself later in both painting and sculpture, but he had little inclination for the exact sciences.

In his London home Browning was soon again launched on a tide of work,--the dearest of which was in preparing the "Last Poems" of his wife for publication. He gave it a dedication to "Grateful Florence, and Tommaseo, her spokesman." He was also preparing a new edition of his own works to be issued in three volumes. The tutor he had secured for his son was considered skillful in "grammatical niceties," which, he said, "was much more to my mind than to Pen's." But he, as well as the boy, was homesick for Italy, and he wrote to Story that his particular reward would be "just to go back to Italy, to Rome"; and he adds:

"Why should I not trust to you what I know you will keep to yourselves, but which will certainly amuse you as nothing else I could write is like to do? What good in our loving each other unless I do such a thing? So, O Story, O Emelyn, (dare I say, for the solemnity's sake?) and O Edie, the editorship has, under the circ.u.mstances, been offered to me: me! I really take it as a compliment because I am, by your indulgence, a bit of a poet, if you like, but a man of the world and able editor hardly!"[8]

The editorship in question was that of _Cornhill_, left vacant by the death of Thackeray.

Browning was too great of spirit to sink into the recluse, and first beguiled into Rossetti's studio, he soon met Millais, and by degrees he responded again to friends and friendships, and life called to him with many voices. In the late summer of 1862 the poet and his son were at "green, pleasant little Cambo," and then at Biarritz. He was absorbed in Euripides; and the supreme work of his life, "The Ring and the Book," the Roman murder story, as he then called it, was constantly in his thought and beginning to take shape. The sudden and intense impression that the Franceschini tragedy had made on him, on first reading it, rushed back and held him as under a spell. But the "Dramatis Personae" and "In a Balcony"

were to be completed before the inauguration of this great work.

For more than four years the thrilling tragedy had lain in his mind, impressing that subconscious realm of mental action where all great work in art acquires its creative vitality. It is said that episodes of crime had a great fascination for Browning, _pere_, who would write out long imaginary conversations regarding the facts, representing various persons in discussion, the individual views of each being brought out. The a.n.a.logy of this to the treatment of the Franceschini tragedy in his son's great poem is rather interesting to contemplate. With the poet it was less dramatic interest in the crime, _per se_, than it was that the complexities of crime afforded the basis from which to work out his central and controlling purpose, his abiding and profound conviction that life here is simply the experimental and preparatory stage for the life to come; that all its events, even its lapses from the right, its fall into terrible evil, are--

"Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent,"

a part of the mechanism to "try the soul's stuff on"; that man lives in an environment of spiritual influences which act upon him in just that degree to which he can recognize and respond to them; and that he must sometimes learn the ineffable blessedness of the right through tragic experiences of the wrong. In the very realities of man's imperfection Browning sees his possibilities of

"Progress, man's distinctive work alone."

When Browning asks:

"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fullness of the days?..."

he condenses in these lines his philosophy of life.

Many of the poems appearing in the "Dramatis Personae" had already been written: "Gold Hair" and "James Lee's Wife" at p.o.r.nic, and others at green Cambo. In the splendor and power of "Abt Vogler," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and "A Death in the Desert," the poet expressed a philosophy that again suggests his intuitive agreement with the Hegelian. "Rabbi Ben Ezra" holds in absolute solution the Vedanta philosophy. To the question as to what all this enigma of life means, the poet answers:

"Thence shall I pa.s.s, approved A man, for aye removed From the developed brute; a G.o.d though in the germ.

He fixed thee 'mid this dance Of plastic circ.u.mstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest."