Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Penini had a choice diversion in that the Duchesse de Grammont, of the French Embassy, gave a “matinée d’enfants,” to which he received a card, and went, resplendent in a crimson velvet blouse, and was presented to small Italian princes of the Colonna, the Doria, Piombiono, and others, and played leap-frog with his titled companions.

  Mrs. Browning reads with eager interest a long speech of their dear friend, Milsand, which filled seventeen columns of the Moniteur, a copy of which his French friend sent to Browning.

  The Brownings had planned to join the poet’s father and sister in Paris that summer, but a severe attack of illness in which for a few days her life was despaired of made Mrs. Browning fear that she would be unable to take the journey. Characteristically, her only thought was for the others, never for herself, and she writes to Miss Browning how sad she is in the thought of her husband’s not seeing his father, and “If it were possible for Robert to go with Pen,” she continues, “he should, but he wouldn’t go without me.”

  When she had sufficiently recovered to start for Florence, they set out on June 4, resting each night on the way, and reaching Siena four days later, where they lingered. From there Mr. Browning wrote to the Storys that they had traveled through exquisite scenery, and that Ba had borne the journey fairly well. But on arriving in Florence and opening their apartment again in Casa Guidi, it was apparent that the poet had decided rightly that there was to be no attempt made to visit Paris. During these closing days of Mrs. Browning’s stay on earth, her constant aim was “to keep quiet, and try not to give cause for trouble on my account, to be patient and live on God’s daily bread from day to day.”

  “O beauty of holiness,

  Of self-forgetfulness, of lowliness!”

  It is difficult to read unmoved her last words written to Miss Sarianna Browning. “Don’t fancy, dear,” she said, “that this is the fault of my will,” and she adds:

  “Robert always a little exaggerates the difficulties of traveling, and there’s no denying that I have less strength than is usual to me.... What does vex me is that the dearest nonno should not see his Peni this year, and that you, dear, should be disappointed, on my account again. That’s hard on us all. We came home into a cloud here. I can scarcely command voice or hand to name Cavour. That great soul, which meditated and made Italy, has gone to the diviner country. If tears or blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine. I feel yet as if I could scarcely comprehend the greatness of the vacancy.”

  For a week previous to her transition to that diviner world in which she always dwelt, even on earth, she was unable to leave her couch; but she smilingly assured them each day that she was better, and in the last afternoon she received a visit from her beloved Isa, to whom she spoke with somewhat of her old fire of generous enthusiasm of the new Premier, who was devoted to the ideals of Cavour, and in whose influence she saw renewed hope for Italy. The Storys were then at Leghorn, having left Rome soon after the departure of the Brownings, and they were hesitating between Switzerland for the summer, or going again to Siena, where they and the Brownings might be together. The poet had been intending to meet the Storys at Leghorn that night, but he felt that he could not leave his wife, though with no prescience of the impending change. She was weak, but they talked over their summer plans, decided they would soon go to Siena, and agreed that they would give up Casa Guidi that year, and take a villa in Florence, instead. They were endeavoring to secure an apartment in Palazzo Barberini for the winter, the Storys being most anxious that they should be thus near together, and Mrs. Browning discussed with him the furnishing of the rooms in case they decided upon the Palazzo. Only that morning Mr. Lytton had called, and while Mrs. Browning did not see him, her husband talked with him nearly all the morning. Late in the evening she seemed a little wandering, but soon she slept, waking again about four, when they talked together, and she seemed to almost pass into a state of ecstasy, expressing to him in the most ardent and tender words her love and her happiness. The glow of the luminous Florentine dawn brightened in the room, and with the words “It is beautiful!” she passed into that realm of life and light and loveliness in which she had always seemed to dwell.

  “And half we deemed she needed not

  The changing of her sphere,

  To give to heaven a Shining One,

  Who walked an angel here.”

  The English Cemetery, Florence, in which Mrs. Browning is Buried.

  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 noble 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.

  ······

  God 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 anticipate 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 Personæ” — 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 pass 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 passing 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.

  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, — God 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 pass 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 shore;

  And in my heart a name

  My lips shall speak no more.”

  To Story he wrote with assurances 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 canal 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 circumstances, 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!”

  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 Personæ” 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, père, who would write out long imaginary conversations regarding the facts, representing various persons in discussion, the individual views of each being brought out. The analogy 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:

  “An
d 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 Personæ” had already been written: “Gold Hair” and “James Lee’s Wife” at Pornic, 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 pass, approved

  A man, for aye removed

  From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.

  ······

  He fixed thee ‘mid this dance

  Of plastic circumstance,

  This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest.”

  How keen the sense of humor and of the sharp contrasts of life in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and what power of character analysis. The intellectual vigor and the keen insight into the play of mental action in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” — a poem that occasioned great discussion on its appearance (from a real or fancied resemblance of the “Bishop” to Cardinal Wiseman) — are almost unsurpassed in poetic literature. Many of the poems in the “Dramatis Personæ” are aglow with the romance of life, as in the “Eurydice to Orpheus,” and “A Face,” which refers to Emily Patmore. There are studio traces as well in these, and in the “Deaf and Dumb,” suggested by a group of Woolner. The crowning power of all is revealed in the noble faith and the exquisite tenderness of “Prospice,” especially in those closing lines when all of fear and pain and darkness and cold, —