Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Mrs. Browning was deeply attached to Fanny Kemble. She describes her, at this time, as “looking magnificent, with her black hair and radiant smile. A very noble creature, indeed,” added Mrs. Browning; “somewhat unelastic, attached to the old modes of thought and convention, but noble in qualities and defects.... Mrs. Sartoris is genial and generous ... and her house has the best society in Rome, and exquisite music, of course.”

  Mrs. Browning often joined her husband in excursions to galleries, villas, and ruins; and when in the Sistine Chapel, on a memorable festival, they heard “the wrong Miserere,” she yet found it “very fine, right or wrong, and overcoming in its pathos.” M. Goltz, the Austrian Minister, was an acquaintance whom the Brownings found “witty and agreeable,” and Mrs. Browning called the city “a palimpsest Rome,” with its records written all over the antique.

  The sorrow of the Storys over the death of a little son shadowed Mrs. Browning, and she feared for her own Penini, but as the winter went on she joyfully wrote of him that he “had not dropped a single rose-leaf from his cheeks,” and with her sweet tenderness of motherly love she adds that he is “a poetical child, really, and in the best sense. He is full of sweetness and vivacity together, of imagination and grace,” and she pictures his “blue, far-reaching eyes, and the innocent face framed in golden ringlets.” Mrs. Kemble came to them two or three times a week, and they had long talks, “we three together,” records Mrs. Browning. Mr. Page occupied the apartment just over that of the Brownings, and they saw much of him. “His portrait of Miss Cushman is a miracle,” exclaimed Mrs. Browning. Page begged to paint a portrait of the poet, of which Mrs. Browning said that he “painted a picture of Robert like an Italian, and then presented it to me like a prince.” The coloring was Venetian, and the picture was at first considered remarkable, but its color has entirely vanished now, so that it seems its painter was not successful in surprising the secret of Titian. In the spring of 1910 Mr. Barrett Browning showed this picture to some friends in his villa near Florence, and its thick, opaque surface hardly retained even a suggestion of color.

  Not the least of Mrs. Browning’s enjoyment of that winter was the pleasure that Rome gave to her little son. “Penini is overwhelmed with attentions and gifts of all kinds,” she wrote, and she described a children’s party given for him by Mrs. Page, who decorated the table with a huge cake, bearing “Penini” in sugar letters, where he sat at the head and did the honors. Browning all this time was writing, although the social allurements made sad havoc on his time. They wandered under the great ilex trees of the Pincio, and gazed at the Monte Mario pine. Then, as now, every one drove in that circular route on the Pincian hill, where carriages meet each other in passing every five minutes. With the Storys and other friends they often went for long drives and frequent picnics on the wonderful Campagna, that vast green sea that surrounds Rome, the Campagna Mystica. On one day Mr. Browning met “Hatty” Hosmer on the Spanish Steps, and said to her: “Next Saturday Ba and I are going to Albano on a picnic till Monday, and you and Leighton are to go with us.” “Why this extravagance?” laughingly questioned Miss Hosmer. “On account of a cheque, a buona grazia, that Ticknor and Fields of Boston have sent — one they were not in the least obliged to send,” replied the poet.

  In those days there was no international copyright, but Mr. Browning’s Boston publishers needed no legal constraint to act with ideal honor. So on the appointed morning, a partie carré of artists — two poets, one sculptor, one painter — drove gayly through the Porta San Giovanni, on that road to Albano, with its wonderful views of the Claudian aqueducts in the distance, through whose arches the blue sky is bluer, and beyond which are the violet-hued Alban hills. Then, as now, the road led by the Casa dei Spirite, with its haunting associations, and its strange mural decorations of specters and wraiths. Past that overhanging cliff, with its tragic legend, they drove, encountering the long procession of wine carts, with their tinkling bells, and the dogs guarding the sleeping padrones. Passing the night in Albano, the next day they mounted donkeys for their excursion into the Alban hills, past lonely monasteries, up the heights of Rocca di Papa, where the traveler comes on the ancient camping-ground of Hannibal, and where they see the padres and acolytes sunning themselves on the slopes of Monte Cavo; on again, to the rocky terraces from which one looks down on Alba Longa and the depths of Lago di Nemi, beneath whose waters is still supposed to be the barque of Caligula, and across the expanse of the green Campagna to where Æneas landed.

  The Campagna and Ruins of the Claudian Aqueducts, Rome.

  “There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,

  Some old tomb’s ruin....”

  Two in the Campagna.

  Miss Hosmer is the authority on this poetic pilgrimage, and she related that they all talked of art, of the difficulties of art, — those encountered by the poet, the sculptor, and the painter, — each regarding his own medium of expression as the most difficult. Mrs. Browning’s “Hatty” had bestowed in her bag a volume of Mr. Browning’s, and on the homeward journey from Albano to Rome he read aloud to them his “Saul.” At the half-way house on the Campagna, the Torre di Mezza, they paused, to gaze at the “weird watcher of the Roman Campagna,” the monument to Apuleia, whose ruins are said to have assumed her features.

  Nothing in all the classic atmosphere of Rome, filled with the most impressive associations of its mighty past, appealed more strongly to the Brownings than the glorious Campagna, with its apparently infinite open space, brilliant with myriads of flowers, and the vast billowing slopes that break like green waves against the purple hills, in their changeful panorama of clouds and mists and snow-crowned heights dazzling under a glowing sun.

  Fascinating as this winter in Rome had been to them, rich in friendships and in art, the Brownings were yet glad to return to their Florence with the May days, to give diligence and devotion to their poetic work, which nowhere proceeded so felicitously as in Casa Guidi.

  Browning was now definitely engaged on the poems that were to make up the “Men and Women.” Mrs. Browning was equally absorbed in “Aurora Leigh.” Each morning after their Arcadian repast of coffee and fruit, he went to his study, and she to the salotto, whose windows opened on the terrace looking out on old gray San Felice where she always wrote, to devote themselves to serious work. “Aurora Leigh” proceeded rapidly some mornings, and again its progress would remind her of the web of Penelope. During this summer Browning completed “In a Balcony,” and wrote the “Holy Cross Day,” the “Epistle of Karnish,” and “Ben Karshook’s Wisdom.” Like his wife, Browning held poetry to be above all other earthly interests; he was a poet by nature and by grace, and his vast range of scholarship, his “British-Museum-Library memory,” and his artistic feeling and taste, all conserved to this one end. But poetry to him was not outside, but inclusive of the very fullest human life. Mrs. Browning’s lines,

  “... No perfect artist is developed here

  From any imperfect woman,...”

  embodied his convictions as well, for man and woman alike. He had that royal gift of life in its fullness, an almost boundless capacity of enjoyment, and to him life meant the completest development and exercise of all its powers.

  The Brownings found their Florentine circle all in evidence. Mr. Lytton, a favorite and familiar visitor at Casa Guidi; Frederick Tennyson (and perhaps his “forty fiddlers” as well), and the Trollopes, Isa Blagden, and various wandering minstrels. They passed evenings with Mr. Lytton in his villa, and would walk home “to the song of nightingales by starlight and firefly light.” To Mrs. Browning Florence looked more beautiful than ever after Rome. “I love the very stones of it,” she said. Limitations of finance kept them in Florence all that summer. “A ship was to have brought us in something, and brought us in nothing,” she explained to a friend in England, “and the nothing had a discount, beside.” But she took comfort in the fact that Penini was quite as well and almost as rosy as ever, despite the intense heat; and the starlig
ht and the song of the nightingales were not without consolation. A letter from Milsand (“one of the noblest and most intellectual men,” says Mrs. Browning of him) came, and they were interested in his arraignment of the paralysis of imagination in literature. In September she hears from Miss Mitford of her failing health, and tenderly writes: “May the divine love in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ shine upon you day and night, with His ineffable tenderness.” Mrs. Browning’s religious feeling was always of that perfect reliance on the Divine Love that is the practical support of life. “For my own part,” she continues, “I have been long convinced that what we call death is a mere incident in life.... I believe that the body of flesh is a mere husk that drops off at death, while the spiritual body emerges in glorious resurrection at once. Swedenborg says some people do not immediately realize that they have passed death, which seems to me highly probable. It is curious that Frederick Denison Maurice takes this precise view of the resurrection, with apparent unconsciousness of what Swedenborg has stated, and that I, too, long before I had ever read Swedenborg, or had even heard the name of Maurice, came to the same conclusion.... I believe in an active, human life, beyond death, as before it, an uninterrupted life.” Mrs. Browning would have found herself in harmony with that spiritual genius, Dr. William James, who said: “And if our needs outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that the invisible universe is there? Often our faith in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.” Faith is the divine vision, and no one ever more absolutely realized this truth than Elizabeth Browning.

  “Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!

  My spirit beats her mortal bars,

  As down dark tides the glory slides,

  And star-like mingles with the stars.”

  At another time Mrs. Browning remarked that she should fear for a revealed religion incapable of expansion, according to the needs of man; while Dr. James has said, “Believe what is in the line of your needs.” Many similarities of expression reveal to how wonderful a degree Mrs. Browning had intuitively grasped phases of truth that became the recognized philosophy of a succeeding generation, and which were stamped by the brilliant and profound genius of William James, the greatest psychologist of the nineteenth century. “What comes from God has life in it,” said Mrs. Browning, “and certainly from the growth of all living things, spiritual growth cannot be excepted.”

  The summer passed “among our own nightingales and fireflies,” playfully said Mrs. Browning, and in the autumn Mrs. Sartoris stopped to see them, on her way to Rome, “singing passionately and talking eloquently.”

  Notwithstanding some illness, Mrs. Browning completed four thousand lines of “Aurora Leigh” before the new year of 1855, in which were expressed all her largest philosophic thought, and her deepest insight into the problems of life. Fogazzaro, whose recent death has deprived Italy of her greatest literary inspirer since Carducci, said of “Aurora Leigh” that he wished the youth of Italy might study this great poem,— “those who desire poetic fame that they might gain a high conception of poetry; the weak, in that they might find stimulus for strength; the sad and discouraged, in that they might find comfort and encouragement.” It was this eminent Italian novelist and Senator (the King of Italy naming a man as Senator, not in the least because of any political reasons, but to confer on him the honor of recognition of his genius in Literature, Science, or Art, and a very inconvenient, however highly prized, honor he often finds it), — Senator Antonio Fogazzaro, who contributed, to an Italian biography of the Brownings by Fanny Zampini, Contessa Salazar, an “Introduction” which is a notable piece of critical appreciation of the wedded poets from the Italian standpoint. The Senator records himself as believing that few poets can be read “with so much intellectual pleasure and spiritual good; for if the works of Robert and Elizabeth Browning surprise us by the vigorous originality of their thought,” he continues, “they also show us a rare and salutary spectacle, — two souls as great in their moral character as in their poetic imagination. ‘Aurora Leigh’ I esteem Mrs. Browning’s masterpiece.... The ideal poet is a prophet, inspired by God to proclaim eternal truth....”

  The student of Italian literature will find a number of critical appreciations of the Brownings, written within the past forty or fifty years, some of which offer no little interest. “Every man has two countries, his own and Italy,” and the land they had made their own in love and devotion returned this devotion in measure overflowing.

  Robert and Elizabeth Browning would have been great, — even immortally great, as man and woman, if they had not been great poets. They both lived, in a simple, natural way, the essential life of the spirit, the life of scholarship and noble culture, of the profound significance of thought, of creative energy, of wide interest in all the important movements of the day, and of beautiful and sincere friendships.

  “O life, O poetry,

  Which means life in life,”

  wrote Mrs. Browning.

  The character of Mrs. Browning has been so often portrayed as that of some abnormal being, half-nervous invalid, half-angel, as if she were a special creation of nature with no particular relation to the great active world of men and women, that it is quite time to do away with the category of nonsense and literary hallucination. One does not become less than woman by being more. Mrs. Browning fulfilled every sweetest relation in life as daughter, sister, friend, wife, and mother; and her life was not the less normal in that it was one of exceptional power and exaltation. She saw in Art the most potent factor for high service, and she held that it existed for Love’s sake, for the sake of human co-operation with the purposes of God.

  CHAPTER VIII. 1855-1861

  “Inward evermore

  To outward, — so in life, and so in art

  Which still is life.”

  “... I love thee with the breath,

  Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,

  I shall but love thee better after death.”

  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!”

  The Florentine winter is by no means an uninterrupted dream of sunshine and roses; the tramontana sweeps down from the encircling Apennines, with its peculiarly piercing cold that penetrates the entire system with the unerring precision of the Röentgen ray; torrents of icy rains fall; and the purple hills, on whose crest St. Domenico met St. Benedict, are shrouded in clouds and mist. All the loveliness of Florence seems to be utterly effaced, till one questions if it existed except as a mirage; but when the storm ceases, and the sun shines again, there is an instantaneous transformation. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the spell of enchantment resumes its sway over the Flower Town, and all is forgiven and forgotten.

  The winter of 1855 was bitterly cold, and by January the Brownings fairly barricaded themselves in two rooms which could best be heated, and in these fires were kept up by day as well as night. In April, however, the divine days came again, and the green hillslope from the Palazzo Pitti to the Boboli Gardens was gay with flowers. Mr. Browning gave four hours every day to dictating his poems to a friend who was transcribing them for him. Mrs. Browning had completed some seven thousand lines of “Aurora Leigh,” but not one of these had yet been copied for publication. Various hindrances beset them, but finally in June they left for England, their most important impedimenta being sixteen thousand lines of poetry, almost equally divided between them, comprising his manuscript for “Men and Women,” and hers for “Aurora Leigh,” complete, save for the last three books. The change was by no means unalloyed joy. To give up, even temporarily, their “dream-life of Florence,” leaving the old tapestries and pre-Giotto pictures, for London lodgings, was not exhilarating; but after a week in Paris they found themselves in an apartment in No. 13 Dorset Stree
t, Manchester Square, where they remained until October, every hour filled with engagements or work. Proof-sheets were coming in at all hours; likewise friends, with the usual contingent of the “devastators of a day,” and all that fatigue and interruption and turmoil that lies in wait for the pilgrim returning to his former home, beset and entangled them. Mrs. Browning’s youngest brother, Alfred Barrett, was married that summer to his cousin Lizzie, the “pretty cousin” to whom allusion has already been made as the original of Mrs. Browning’s poem, “A Portrait.” They were married in Paris at the English Embassy, and passed the summer on the Continent. Mrs. Browning’s sister Henrietta (Mrs. Surtees Cook) was unable to come up to London, so that the hoped-for pleasure of seeing this brother and sister was denied her; but Miss Arabel Barrett was close at hand in the Wimpole Street home, and the sisters were much together. Mr. Barrett had never changed his mental attitude regarding the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth, nor that of any of his children, and while this was a constant and never-forgotten grief with Mrs. Browning, there seems no necessity for prolonged allusion to it. The matter can only be relegated to the realms of non-comprehension as the idiosyncrasy of an otherwise good man, of intelligence and much nobility of nature.