Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Browning teaches in this poem that faith is an adventure of the spirit, the aspiration felt, even if unnamed. But as to renunciation, —

  “‘Renounce the world!’ — Ah, were it done

  By merely cutting one by one

  Your limbs off, with your wise head last,

  How easy were it!”

  The renunciation that the poet sees is not so simple. It is not to put aside all the allurements of life, but to use them nobly; to persist in the life of the spirit, to offer love for hatred, truth for falsehood, generous self-sacrifice rather than to grasp advantages, — to live, not to forsake the common daily lot. It is, indeed, the philosophy amplified that is found in the words of Jesus, “I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.”

  The Brownings remained till late in the summer in their Casa Guidi home, detained at first by the illness of Mrs. Browning, after which they decided to postpone going to England until another year. In the late summer they went for a few weeks to Siena, where, two miles outside the walls, they found a seven-roomed villa with a garden and vineyard and olive orchard, and “a magnificent view of a noble sweep of country, undulating hills and verdure, and on one side the great Maremma extending to the foot of the Roman mountains.” They were located on a little hill called Poggia dei venti, with all the winds of the heavens, indeed, blowing about them, and with overflowing quantities of milk and bread and wine, and a loggia at the top of the villa. Mrs. Browning found herself rapidly recovering strength, and their comfort was further extended by finding a library in Siena, where, for three francs a month, they had access to the limited store of books which seem so luxurious in Italy. The boy Browning was delighted with his new surroundings, his sole infelicity being his inability to reach the grapes clustering over the trellises; he missed the Austrian band that made music (or noise) for his delectation in Florence, although to compensate for this privation he himself sang louder than ever. In after years Mr. Browning laughingly related this anecdote of his son’s childhood: “I was one day playing a delicate piece of Chopin’s on the piano, and hearing a loud noise outside, hastily stopped playing when my little boy ran in, and my wife exclaimed: ‘How could you leave off playing when Penini brought three drums to accompany you?’”

  For all this bloom and beauty in Siena they paid a little less than fifteen francs a week. Soon after their arrival they learned of the shipwreck in which the Marchese and Marchesa d’Ossoli and the little Angelino all perished, and the tragedy deeply impressed Mrs. Browning. “The work that the Marchesa was preparing upon Italy would have been more equal to her faculties than anything she has ever produced,” said Mrs. Browning, “her other writings being curiously inferior to the impression made by her conversation.”

  Before returning to Florence the Brownings passed a week in the town of Siena to visit the pictures and churches, but they found it pathetic to leave the villa, and especially harrowing to their sensibilities to part with the pig. There is consolation, however, for most mortal sorrows, and the Brownings found it in their intense interest in Sienese art. The wonderful pulpit of the Duomo, the work of Niccola Pisano; the font of San Giovanni; the Sodomas, and the Libreria (the work of Pius III, which he built when he was Cardinal, and in which, at the end of the aisle, is a picture of his own elevation to the Papal throne, painted after his death) fascinated their attention. The Brownings found it dazzling to enter this interior, all gold and color, with the most resplendent decorative effects. They followed in the footsteps of Saint Catherine, as do all pilgrims to Siena, and climbed the hill to the Oratorio di Santa Caterina in Fontebranda, and read that inscription: “Here she stood and touched that precious vessel and gift of God, blessed Catherine, who in her life did so many miracles.” They lingered, too, in the Cappella Santa Caterina in San Domenico, where Catherine habitually prayed, where she beheld visions and received her mystic revelations. They loitered in the piazza, watching the stars hang over that aerial tower, “Il Mangia,” and drove to San Gimignano, with its picturesque medieval atmosphere.

  Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence,

  known as the Duomo.

  “The most to praise and the best to see

  Was the startling bell-tower Giotto raised.”

  Old Pictures in Florence.

  It was in the autumn of 1850 that Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” first privately and then anonymously printed, was acknowledged by the poet. The Brownings read extracts from it in the Examiner, and they were deeply moved by it. “Oh, there’s a poet!” wrote Mrs. Browning. At last, “by a sort of miracle,” they obtained a copy, and Mrs. Browning was carried away with its exquisite touch, its truth and earnestness. “The book has gone to my heart and soul,” she says, “I think it full of deep pathos and beauty.”

  An interesting visitor dropped in at Casa Guidi in the person of a grandson of Goethe; and his mission to Florence, to meet the author of “Paracelsus” and discuss with him the character of the poem, was a tribute to its power. Mrs. Browning, whose poetic ideals were so high, writing to a friend of their guest, rambled on into some allusions to poetic art, and expressed her opinion that all poets should take care to teach the world that poetry is a divine thing. “Rather perish every verse I ever wrote, for one,” she said, “than help to drag down an inch that standard of poetry which, for the sake of humanity as well as literature, should be kept high.”

  In “Aurora Leigh” she expresses the same sentiment in the lines:

  “I, who love my art,

  Would never wish it lower to suit my stature.”

  Full of affection and interest are Mrs. Browning’s letters to her husband’s sister, Sarianna, who, with her father, is now living in Hatcham, near London. In the spring of 1852, after passing the winter in Florence, the Brownings set out for England; the plan at first being to go south to Naples, pause at Rome, and then go northward; but this was finally abandoned, and they proceeded directly to Venice, where Mrs. Browning was enchanted with life set in a scenic loveliness of “music and stars.”

  “I have been between heaven and earth since our arrival in Venice,” she writes. “The heaven of it is ineffable. Never have I touched the skirts of so celestial a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water between all that gorgeous color and carving, the enchanting silence, the moonlight, the music, the gondolas, — I mix it all up together....”

  In the divine beauty of Venetian evenings they sat in the white moonlight in the piazza of San Marco, taking their coffee and the French papers together. Or they would go to the opera, where for a ridiculously small sum they had an entire box to themselves. But while Mrs. Browning longed “to live and die in Venice, and never go away,” the climate did not agree with Mr. Browning, and they journeyed on toward Paris, stopping one night at Padua and driving out to Arqua for Petrarca’s sake. In Milan Mrs. Browning climbed the three hundred and fifty steps, to the topmost pinnacle of the glorious cathedral. At Como they abandoned the diligence for the boat, sailing through that lovely chain of lakes to Flüelen, and thence to Lucerne, the scenery everywhere impressing Mrs. Browning as being so sublime that she “felt as if standing in the presence of God.” From Lucerne they made a détour through Germany, pausing at Strasburg, and arriving in Paris in July. This journey initiated an absence of almost a year and a half from Italy. They had let their apartment, so they were quite free to wander, and they were even considering the possibility of remaining permanently in Paris, whose brilliant intellectual life appealed to them both. After a brief sojourn in the French capital, they went on to England, and they had rather an embarrassment of riches in the number of houses proffered them, for Tennyson begged them to accept the loan of his house and servants at Twickenham, and Joseph Arnould was equally urgent that they should occupy his town house. But they took lodgings, instead, locating in Devonshire Street, and London life proceeds to swallow them up after its own absorbing fashion. They breakfast with Rogers, a
nd pass an evening with the Carlyles; Forster gives a “magnificent dinner” for them; Mrs. Fanny Kemble calls, and sends them tickets for her reading of “Hamlet”; and the Proctors, Mrs. Jameson, and other friends abound. They go to New Cross, Hatcham, to visit Mr. Browning’s father and sister, where the little Penini “is taken into adoration” by his grandfather. Mrs. Browning’s sisters show her every affection, and her brothers come; but her father, in reply to her own and her husband’s letter, simply sends back to her, with their seals unbroken, all the letters she had written to him from Italy. “So there’s the end,” she says; “I cannot, of course, write again. God takes it all into His own hands, and I wait.” The warm affection of her sisters cheered her, Mrs. Surtees Cook (Henrietta Barrett) coming up from Somersetshire for a week’s visit, and her sister Arabel being invited with her. It was during this sojourn in London that Bayard Taylor, poet and critic, and afterward American Minister Plenipotentiary to Germany, called upon the Brownings, bringing a letter of introduction from Hillard.

  The poet’s wife impressed Taylor as almost a spirit figure, with her pallor and slender grace, and the little Penini, “a blue-eyed, golden-haired boy, babbling his little sentences in Italian,” strayed in like a sunbeam. While Taylor was with them, Mr. Kenyon called, and after his departure Browning remarked to his guest: “There goes one of the most splendid men living, — a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as Kenyon the Magnificent.”

  The poets were overwhelmed with London hospitalities, and as Mrs. Browning gave her maid, Wilson, leave of absence to visit her own family, the care of little Pen fell upon her. He was in a state of “deplorable grief” for his nurse, “and after all,” laughed Mrs. Browning, “the place of nursery maid is more suitable to me than that of poetess (or even poet’s wife) in this obstreperous London.”

  In the late September the Brownings crossed to Paris, Carlyle being their traveling companion, and after an effort to secure an apartment near the Madeleine, they finally established themselves in the Avenue des Champs Élysées (No. 128), where they had pretty, sunny rooms, tastefully furnished, with the usual French lavishness in mirrors and clocks, — all for two hundred francs a month, which was hardly more than they had paid for the dreary Grosvenor Street lodgings in London. Mrs. Browning was very responsive to that indefinable exhilaration of atmosphere that pervades the French capital, and the little Penini was charmed with the gayety and brightness. Mrs. Browning enjoyed the restaurant dining, à la carte, “and mixing up one’s dinner with heaps of newspapers, and the ‘solution’ by Émile de Girardin,” who suggested, it seems, “that the next President of France should be a tailor.” Meantime she writes to a friend that “the ‘elf’ is flourishing in all good fairyhood, with a scarlet rose leaf on each cheek.” They found themselves near neighbors of Béranger, and frequently saw him promenading the avenue in a white hat, and they learned that he lived very quietly and “kept out of scrapes, poetical and political.” Mrs. Browning notes that they would like to know Béranger, were the stars propitious, and that no accredited letter of introduction to him would have been refused, but that they could not make up their minds to go to his door and introduce themselves as vagrant minstrels. To George Sand they brought a letter from Mazzini, and although they heard she “had taken vows against seeing strangers,” Mrs. Browning declared she would not die, if she could help it, without meeting the novelist who had so captivated her. Mazzini’s letter, with one from themselves, was sent to George Sand through mutual friends, and the following reply came:

  Madame, j’aurai l’honneur de vous recevoir Dimanche prochain, rue Racine, 3. C’est le seul jour que je puisse passer chez moi; et encore je n’en suis pas absolument certaine — mais je ferai tellement mon possible, que ma bonne étoile m’y aidera peut-être un peu. Agréez mille remerciments de cœur ainsi que Monsieur Browning, que j’espère voir avec vous, pour la sympathie que vous m’accordez.

  George Sand.

  Paris, 12 fevrier, 1852.

  The visit must have been mutually satisfactory, for it was repeated two or three times, and they found her simple, “without a shade of affectation or consciousness.” Another pleasure they had was in meeting Lamartine, who took the initiative in asking to be allowed to call on them. After their arrival in Paris Carlyle passed several evenings with them, and Mrs. Browning felt, with her husband, that he was one of the most interesting of men, “highly picturesque” in conversation. Her sympathetic insight gave her always the key and the clue to character, and perhaps no one ever read Carlyle more truly than she, when she interpreted his bitterness only as melancholy, and his scorn as sensibility.

  The Brownings had not been long in Paris before they were invited to a reception at Lady Elgin’s, where they met Madame Mohl, who at once cordially urged their coming to her “evenings,” to meet her French celebrities. Lady Elgin was domiciled in the old Faubourg Saint Germain, and received every Monday evening from eight to twelve, sans façon, people being in morning dress, and being served with simple refreshment of tea and cakes. Lady Elgin expressed the hope that the Brownings would come to her on every one of these evenings, Mrs. Browning said that she had expected “to see Balzac’s duchesses and hommes de lettres on all sides,” but she found it less notable, though very agreeable. The elder Browning and his daughter pay a visit to them, greatly to Mrs. Browning’s enjoyment. At this time they half contemplated living permanently in Paris, if it seemed that Mrs. Browning could endure the climate, and she records, during the visit of her husband’s father and sister, that if they do remain in Paris they hope to induce these beloved members of the family to also establish themselves there. As it turned out, the Brownings passed only this one winter in the French capital, but the next spring Mr. Browning (père) and his daughter Sarianna took up their residence in Paris, where they remained during the remainder of his life. Mrs. Browning was always deeply attached to her husband’s sister. “Sarianna is full of accomplishment and admirable sense,” she wrote of her, and the visit of both gave her great pleasure. The coup d’état took place early in December, but they felt no alarm. Mrs. Browning expressed her great faith in the French people, and declared the talk about “military despotism” to be all nonsense. The defect she saw in M. Thiers was “a lack of breadth of view, which helped to bring the situation to a dead lock, on which the French had no choice than to sweep the board clean and begin again.”

  It was during this early winter, with French politics and French society and occasional spectacles and processions extending from the Carrousel to the Arc de l’Étoile, that Browning wrote that essay on Shelley, which his publisher of that time, Mr. Moxon, had requested to accompany a series of Shelley letters which had been discovered, but which were afterward found to be fraudulent. The edition was at once suppressed; but a few copies had already gone out, and, as Professor Dowden says, “The essay is interesting as Browning’s only considerable piece of prose;... for him the poet of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ was not that beautiful and ineffectual angel of Matthew Arnold’s fancy, beating in the void his luminous wings. A great moral purpose looked forth from Shelley’s work, as it does from all lofty works of art.” It was “the dream of boyhood,” Browning tells us, to render justice to Shelley; and he availed himself of this opportunity with alluring eagerness. His interpretation of Shelley is singularly noble and in accord with all the great spiritual teachings of his own poetic work. Browning’s plea that there is no basis for any adequate estimate of Shelley, who “died before his youth was ended,” cannot but commend its justice; and he urges that in any measurement of Shelley as a man he must be contemplated “at his ultimate spiritual stature” and not judged by the mistakes of ten years before when in his entire immaturity of character.

  How all that infinite greatness of spirit and almost divine breadth of comprehension that characterize Robert Browning reveal themselves in this estimate of Shelley. It is seein
g human errors and mistakes as God sees them, — the temporary faults, defects, imperfections of the soul on its onward way to perfection. This was the attitude of Browning’s profoundest convictions regarding human life.

  “Eternal process moving on;

  From state to state the spirit walks.”

  This achievement of the divine ideal for man is not within the possibilities of the brief sojourn on earth, but what does the transition called death do for man but to

  “Interpose at the difficult moment, snatch Saul, the mistake,

  Saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now, — and bid him awake

  From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set

  Clear and safe in new light and new life, — a new harmony yet

  To be run, and continued, and ended — who knows? — or endure!

  The man taught enough by life’s dream, of the rest to make sure.”

  Browning’s message in its completeness was invariably that which is imaged, too, in these lines from Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”:

  “And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,

  Its shifting fancies and celestial lights.”

  For it is only in this drama of the infinite life that the spiritual man can be tested. It was from the standpoint of an actor on this celestial stage that Browning considered Shelley. In the entire range of Browning’s art the spiritual man is imaged as a complex and individualized spark of the divine force. He is seen for a flitting moment on his way toward a divine destiny.