The Brownings Part 9

"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 compa.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances ... 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, G.o.d 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 n.o.blest, 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, G.o.d, 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 n.o.bleness 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 n.o.bleness 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 n.o.blest 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 G.o.d, 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), a.s.serted 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 circ.u.mstances peculiarly interesting, and such as render imprudence the height of prudence. Both excellent; but G.o.d 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 n.o.ble 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 "doc.u.ment," 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 n.o.ble 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 Sh.e.l.ley; 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 gra.s.s, 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 ma.s.s 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.