Robert and Elizabeth Browning

I REMEMBER to have heard a very interesting discussion, in Oxford, in the spring of 1883, apropos of the Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle, which had just appeared. The editor of the correspondence was criticised with extreme severity, many of the warmest friends of the Carlyles feeling it no less than an outrage that the deepest privacies of the Chelsea household should have been so ruthlessly laid bare to the gaze of the vulgar. Somewhat to my surprise, the Master of Balliol, the late Dr. Jowett, — “the Master” par excellence to all who knew the Oxford of his day, — did not altogether go with the censors. I wish I could recall his exact words, which were surely the best possible and the simplest; but he said in substance that there were certain people so distinguished by nature, so original in type, so indispensable to the student of human character and its possible variations, that their fellow beings needed, and had a right, to know all that could be known about them after their death, even to the most trivial details. Judged by this rule, the shades of Robert and Elizabeth Browning have forfeited, by sheer preeminence, the privilege of privacy in the grave. Morally no less than intellectually, these were two very remarkable persons, — the most remarkable, so far as we know, ever made one flesh in holy wedlock. The secrets of that rare communion of kindred spirits, guarded so fastidiously while either lived, are now the legal property of the reading world; and the legacy having been made over freely and with businesslike dispatch, the public may at least enter without scruple upon its enjoyment.

The time seems appropriate, therefore, for a review of the whole series of memoirs, which began with the appearance of Mrs. Sutherland Orr’s Life and Letters of Robert Browning in 1891, was continued by that of the letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1897, and concludes with the publication in full of the almost daily and sometimes bi-daily correspondence which passed between the two poets from January 10, 1845, to September 12, 1846, the date of their ever memorable and most romantic marriage. A small volume also appeared in 1877, containing the letters of Miss Barrett to Richard Horne, the author of Orion and A New Spirit of the Age, through whose influence she first, in 1835, became a contributor to periodical literature. Robert Browning’s home letters, and as many more as he could easily recover of those addressed before his marriage to other familiares, he himself destroyed about four years before his death ; but the Browning annals are so voluminous without them that their absence is hardly felt.

Mrs. Sutherland Orr’s Life of Robert Browning is neither a very thorough nor a very pleasing performance. A great deal too much space is given to her own criticisms of his various works in the order of their publication ; she strangely misjudges the relative merit of his later and his greater poems, and her tone toward Mrs. Browning is unsympathetic, from first to last. Her memoir is now valuable chiefly through furnishing the data which enable us to compare, step by step, the converging careers of the predestined pair, and to note some curious coincidences between them of time, home atmosphere, and accidental influence.

It was one effect of the ingenuous modesty and lasting youthfulness of the woman’s spirit that the six full years of seniority on her side barely counted. Elizabeth Barrett Moulton - Barrett — the correct form of her unwieldy maiden name may be given in extenso for once, but the simpler and more familiar one will suffice for the future — was born March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall, the estate of a maternal uncle, a few miles from the ancient cathedral town of Durham. Robert Browning was born May 7, 1812, in the remote London suburb of Camberwell. The parents of both were Dissenters, in easy circumstances. Mr. Moulton-Barrett was, indeed, at one time, very wealthy; and the elder Robert Browning, the father of the poet, might have been so but for the honorable disgust he came to feel, after serving a year’s apprenticeship in the West Indies, for the system of slave labor under which the fortunes of both families were accumulated.

It is a pity to endeavor to minimize, as Mrs. Sutherland Orr does in the case of Robert Browning, the influence upon the mental and moral development of a very clever child of being born and bred, in a country like England, outside the privileged circles of the state Church, and, by consequence, of the great world. It is only an accident, but it is an accident, so to say, of astrological moment. It is not thus that one would choose to be born in England ; but it is astonishing what a proportion of those who have most profoundly influenced the thought and the conduct of serious English readers during the last fifty years have labored under this apparent disadvantage, and had this invisible and yet “ invidious bar ” to break before finding their true place. Ruskin, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and, in a lesser degree, the Martineaus and the whole circle of sober-minded East Anglian heretics, Quakers, Unitarians, and others, are instances which will readily occur to the memory of all. There are names enough to build an induction after Mill’s own most approved pattern. Moral earnestness, the species of angularity which ever belongs to an untrained and unsupported but vigorous conscience, a kind of other-worldliness in early life, which may become a noble unworldliness with advancing years, but may also become the exact reverse, intellectual independence, and a certain racy provincialism of spirit are more or less characteristic of them all.

There can be no doubt, I think, that the similarity of their early traditions had much to do with the instinctive and complete comprehension of each other’s mental processes which the Brownings always evinced.

If the childhood of both had not been so sequestered, — the girl’s on the beautiful estate of Hope End, among the Malvern Hills, which her father bought in 1809, the boy’s in the social desert of Camberwell, — they would have incurred less danger of being set up and admired as infant phenomena. Both were so admired to a somewhat appalling degree, but they were creatures too fine to be spoiled. While Elizabeth Barrett paced, in ankle-tied shoes, the garden alleys of Hope End, meditating her Epic on the Battle of Marathon, which was printed at her father’s expense when she was thirteen, Robert Browning was measuring off heroic couplets on the edge of the family dining table, which he could just reach with the tips of his outstretched hands, or having his curly hair brushed, as he used long afterward humorously to relate, to the tune of Watts’s hymns, with a heavier stroke on every strongly accented syllable: —

The boy’s home was less opulent than the girl’s, but his education, in the best sense of the word, was more liberal and his environment more stimulating. His mother was so sweet and wise a saint that she suffered in prayerful silence even her boy’s brief lapse into religious infidelity. It came of reading the poems of Shelley, which she herself, in the simplicity of her heart, had bought for him at his request, and it passed before he was twenty, never to return. His father, on the other hand, was a man of great native distinction of mind, a discriminating lover of good books, good pictures, and good music, with all of which young Robert was on terms of easy familiarity from his earliest remembrance.

Elizabeth Barrett’s mother seems to have left no trace whatever upon her daughter’s mind; while her father, though a man of astounding force of character, was so flagrantly what is now called a degenerate that one is driven to doubt whether the lambent pearl of his daughter’s unique genius could have been secreted under conditions of health. All the more certain is it, as her lover and husband invariably averred, that her native endowment, her simple God-given ingenium, was more signal and surprising than his own.

Properly speaking, neither had any regular mental training. Robert Browning went, as a lad, to an insignificant private school. From fourteen to sixteen he had a French tutor at home, who taught him the French language thoroughly, but little beside. For one year, his eighteenth, he was a member of the London University, and he was well instructed in music, for which he had a great natural gift. He had a circle of musical friends in Camberwell, too: his cousins, the Silverthorne brothers, gay fellows, who both died young, and whose mother paid for the printing of Pauline in 1833 ; and Alfred Domett, afterward premier of New Zealand, and immortalized by the poet as Waring. This was the period at which Robert Browning, with his fond father’s full consent, gravely adopted poetry as a profession, — a thing one cannot conceive of his doing, at that age, had he been a public school and university man. Yet Wisdom was justified of her child, and nobly. The first notable fruit of that resolve was Paracelsus ; and Paracelsus lives, and will continue to live, not so much through the subtlety of its metaphysical speculations, and through certain scattered passages of the narrative, which are instinct with the highest kind of imaginative beauty, nor even through the rich and haunting music of the superb song, “ Over the sea our galleys went; ” but because in it the youth of twenty - three discovered his own distinctive and surpassing gift, — the divination of individual human character as an organic whole. Nobody had known for several hundred years, nor cared particularly to know, what manner of man Paracelsus was. The callow youth at Camberwell resuscitated and evoked him out of the past; not without patient research, to be sure, yet still by a species of magic. The dry and laborious investigations of later students have all gone to confirm the main truth to historic fact of what then seemed the creation of an audacious fancy.

Paracelsus, in the nature of things, could never have won more than a success of esteem ; but incidentally it brought its author the acquaintance of Wordsworth, Carlyle, Talfourd, Horne, and Landor, and fairly launched him among men of letters.

His practical sponsor and first warm public eulogist, however, was W. J. Fox, the editor of the Monthly Repository. The very name of the periodical excites an involuntary smile in those who remember Harriet Martineau’s description of her own first appearance in print, which was made there. Her contribution was anonymous, and she awaited with some natural excitement the comments thereon of her clever family circle, where Mr. Fox’s paper was, of course, taken in. “ The best thing in the Monthly Repository for some time,” she had the tempered satisfaction of hearing. “ But no one,” she dryly adds, “ not acquainted with the pages of the Monthly Repository can realize how slight the encouragement was!” At Mr. Fox’s house in Bayswater Robert Browning also met Macready, with whom he was for some years very intimate, and for whom he wrote Strafford ; and at Macready’s country seat, Elm Place, he met Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, — the Eyebright of Sordello, — his lifelong friend, who, as he afterward confessed to Elizabeth Barrett, had so nearly been something more than a friend.

During all this period of the poet’s early expansion and recognition the life of the poetess was becoming every year more narrow, solitary, and externally sad. An active girl until she was fifteen, though far from robust, she received at that age an injury to the spine, one of whose results was the pulmonary disorder which made her an invalid for life, and of which she had almost died before the world ever heard of her name. She never grew in bodily stature after that time, but nothing could arrest the growth of the mind which her fragile frame barely sufficed to contain. She absorbed knowledge, in her seclusion, as naturally as a plant absorbs moisture and aliment from the most unlikely-looking soil ; transmuting what she appropriated, with plantlike unconsciousness, into color, fragrance, and wonderful intricacies of form. She became a prodigy of learning without knowing that she was learned. The modern European languages and Latin came to her without effort. Greek she snatched from her brother’s tutor, and felt it like a living language; extracting from it much of the essence of that “ Greek spirit ” of which there was less chatter in those days than now, though — to quote her own “ plea of confession and avoidance,” in Aurora Leigh — she never wrote anything more pretentious than “ lady’s Greek without the accents.” Her one literary associate and guide, in the earlier of these days, was the blind and very cranky old scholar, Hugh Stuart Boyd. To him, in her girlish voice, “ somewhat low for αις and οις,” she read aloud her unaccented Greek; not Homer, Pindar, and Æschylus alone, but the hymns and homilies of the Greek Fathers of the Church. Even then, and all inexperienced and undisciplined as she was, the exquisite quality of her intelligence made her literary judgments far keener and surer than her teacher’s ; and when he pronounced Ossian superior to Homer, she knew he was talking nonsense, though her sweet humility and respect prevented her saying so in any but the most diffident and deprecatory manner.

In 1832 heavy pecuniary losses compelled Mr. Moulton-Barrett to sell Hope End, and remove his family, first to a hired house at Sidmouth in Devonshire, which came near tumbling down over their heads, and later to that most featureless quarter of London, the neighborhood of the Regent’s Park and the northern squares, which has served as the nursery of so much genius, from the days of Mrs. Siddons to our own.

Mayfair is not to be mentioned as a place of pious pilgrimage, beside this gaunt but ever sacred and beloved Philistia.

It was plain from the first that London was the worst residence which could have been chosen for the fragile creature, who was nevertheless to wear out a ten years’ captivity there, in her room and upon her couch, with only the one tragical interruption of the visit to Torquay during which her favorite brother Edward was drowned. But the fiat of her father, instans tyrannus, had gone forth, and there was no power within her little sphere strong enough to stay it. He had devoted his brilliant child to death, — unwillingly, we must suppose, but as unflinchingly as Agamemnon devoted Iphigenia; and though he had parental vanity enough to pay for the printing of some of her faulty and yet astonishing first essays in authorship, he made no secret of his conviction that her thoughts “ ought to be in the next world.”

Her sleepless thought, indeed, was in both worlds and in all worlds. The four walls of her dingy and conventional London chamber were no barrier to her shifting but ever splendid vision of Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind.” She possessed within her own luminous consciousness the irrefragable evidence of things unseen. No other woman, before or since her day, has been endowed with anything like her sustained imaginative power. Her sense of form and her sense of rhythm were both defective, but the faculty which we call original, or creative, was hers ; and the mere fact that her precocious debauch of ill-regulated study did not smother and extinguish it altogether shows in what a preëminent degree it had been bestowed.

Little by little, however, the rays of that divine spark that was in her pierced the thick vapors in which her life was involved. One by one, appreciative and congenial friends from without found courage to surmount the artificial and absurdly accumulated barriers by which she was hemmed in. She had always written a great number of letters, and very long ones. An educated lady was expected to do so, at that time, and some old-fashioned ladies keep up the practice. But now the list of her regular correspondents begins to include people of some note, like Richard Horne, Miss Mitford, Theodore Hook, Henry Chorley and other editors and publishers, to whom her compositions are formally submitted. Her letters of this period have been before the world for some years ; and very delightful reading they are, and will always remain. If ever there was a schöne Seele, it was hers. The invincible amiability, the graceful mingling of intelligence, docility, and sweet independence with which she receives criticism, whether of her bizarre phraseology and lawless rhymes or of her too effusive and, so to say, personal and “ evangelical ” religiosity, are only to be surpassed by her sympathetic appreciation of the work of others, and the fine exactitude with which she estimates its value. She says, from her sofa, the last word, almost upon the first occasion, concerning Miss Mitford’s Rienzi and Talfourd’s Ion, and many another favorite of the moment, and the youthful Tennyson is “ divine ” to her, while the world of letters is yet ringing with the contemptuous pronunciamento of the great titular autocrat of criticism that his stuff “ will never do.”

It was in 1838 that Miss Barrett first began to see intimately and to love, as he so well deserved, her elderly kinsman, John Kenyon, who had also been a schoolmate of Robert Browning’s father, and who was destined not merely to bring the two poets together, but to smooth their pathway through life, in so signal a manner. Her first small volume of collected verses, The Seraphim and Other Poems, appeared in the spring of that year ; and almost at the same time the disease under which she labored received an all but fatal impulse by the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs. She faced the doubtful issue with surpassing serenity, discussing it freely and cheerfully with her ever loving sisters and her other friends. An inner voice, it may be, told her that she was not then to die, and that the instinctive and universal prayer, so often mysteriously denied, had in her case mysteriously been granted : —

But the sharpest bereavement that ever befell her — her brother Edward’s untimely death—had yet to be endured, and the darkest passage of an existence of more than half a century traversed, before she escaped from the bonds that confined her, and came to her ideal fruition of singular and exalted happiness.

All this while the young author of Paracelsus was growing, and producing. Sordello belongs to this time, and almost the entire series of Bells and Pomegranates, which began with Pippa Passes in 1841, and includes the greater part of the songs, dramas, romances, and dramatic lyrics by which the poet is most widely known, and will probably be longest remembered. This is not the place to speak of the force and passion, the depth of human understanding, the breadth of human sympathy, and the mastery of human speech which these works disclose. There are Browning societies, if not Browning colleges, which exist for the sole purpose of studying critically what Robert Browning has written. My purpose is to follow, as closely as may be, the development in sun and air of the man’s genius, side by side with the hothouse growth of the woman’s.

During this period Robert Browning had passed a winter in Russia, and had been twice to Italy. The former experience was to serve him incidentally — as every experience must serve a great mind — in after years ; but the latter had a decisive influence upon his fate. He fell instantly under the spell, and received the seal, of the enchantress land, and became one of the foremost interpreters to men of her magnificent humanism. He even fell in love, at first sight, with his own latest home, in Titian’s country, and received the first suggestions for that long line of astute and illuminating studies of Italian character which, beginning rather turgidly with Sordello, was to include Pippa, the Gondola, the Bishop at Saint Praxed’s, and scores beside of memorable numbers in Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, and Dramatis Personæ ; culminating a quarter of a century later in that monumental work, The Ring and the Book. In these years between twenty and thirty-five, Robert Browning was exceedingly handsome, and, like Bulwer, Charles Dickens, Disraeli, and other his young contemporaries of the full-blown romantic period, he had a florid taste in dress and was decidedly muscadin. Still unknown to the world of high fashion, he went much into the society of the literary clique which had adopted him, and was especially adored, as was but natural, by its women.

In 1844 the poems of Elizabeth Barrett were collected and published by Moxon in the two well-known volumes which established her fame, and which took their title from The Drama of Exile. Cowper’s Grave, The Cry of the Children, The Lost Bower, Sleep, The Dead Pan, and the Rhyme of the Duchess May were all there; nevertheless, the publisher found the volumes too thin, materially, and requested something more to increase their bulk. She responded to this appeal by sending him the ballad of Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, one hundred and forty of whose fifteen-syllable lines were composed in one day.

Assuredly the poem is not one of Mrs. Browning’s best. For all its verve and volubility, it is even one of her worst, in the wild irregularity of some of its rhymes — virtues and certes — and in the broad and glad contempt for common sense and common probability which characterizes the plot, and which is made the more conspicuous by its modern mise en scène. But it was this poem which won Robert Browning’s heart, and led him to importune Mr. Kenyon for an introduction to its author. Was it the ardent though rather awkward compliment to himself in Lady Geraldine which he found irresistible ?

Five months, at all events, after the forced production of Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, on January 10, 1845, Robert Browning writes his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett from Hatcham in Surrey, whither his father had now removed, and it begins on this wise : —

“ I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett — and this is no offhand, complimentary letter that I shall write — whatever else, no prompt, matter-of-fact recognition of your genius, and there a graceful and natural end of the thing. . . . Even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, — the fresh, strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos, and true, new, brave thought; but in thus addressing myself to you, your own self and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart, and I love you too.” ¹

She is by no means moved from her delicate poise, the slight creature in her sick-room, by this energy of attacco. She replies the next day, frankly, gracefully ; a little more temperately than he had written, and with unaffected humility :—

“ I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure by your letter ; and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand ! Sympathy is dear, very dear to me ; but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me. Will you take back my gratitude for it ? — agreeing, too, that of all the commerce done in the world, from Tyre to Carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most princely thing?”

She then begs for his criticism, — that he will tell her what seem to him her most salient faults as a writer; for she will not presume to request that he will “ tease ” himself by naming them in detail. She adds an earnest word concerning what she has long owed to Mr. Kenyon, who has now brought her this best gift of all.

Is it possible that a correspondence begun in so high a key should be long maintained at the same pitch, without let or stay, occasional anti - climax or serious lapse into bathos ? It is thus maintained, to the tune of some two hundred and fifty letters on either side ; and it shows no intellectual or emotional decline, but rather a slow and steady increase of intensity, until it ends in the union of the writers.

Robert Browning paid his first visit to Wimpole Street on May 21 of the same annus mirabilis. They prepared their souls for that meeting as for a first communion, and meditated on it afterward in the same rapt and solemn spirit. The most intimate of their inter-devotional exercises are, in very truth, too sacred for quotation. One is abashed even to have read them. Let us take the lady in her charming lighter mood, in one of her lucid intervals —more frequent, it must be confessed, with her than with him, at that time — of exquisite common sense. An admirer had written her a letter from America (it will be wholesome for us to observe that all the most glaring absurdities come from America), addressed to “ Miss Barrett, Poetess, London,” and it had actually arrived.

“ Think,” she says, “ of the simplicity of those wild Americans in ‘ calculating’ that people in general here in England know what a poetess is ! . . . And if you promised never to tell Mrs. Jameson nor Miss Martineau, I would confide to you, perhaps, my secret profession of faith — which is — which is — that, let us say and do what we please and can, there is a natural inferiority of mind in women, — of the intellect, not by any means of the moral nature; and that the history of art and of genius testifies to this fact openly. Oh, I would not say so to Mrs. Jameson for the world! I believe I was a coward to her altogether, for when she denounced carpet-work as ‘ injurious to the mind,’ because it led the workers into ‘ fatal habits of reverie,’ I defended the carpet-work as though I were striving pro aris et focis, and said not a word for the poor reveries which have frayed away so much of silken time for me.” ²

Love doubtless could “ find out a way ” through the tangled phrases which follow, and which were written when the poet first learned, to his surprise, how much “ more elder ” was his lady “ than her looks ” or her lover : —

“Do you understand, my own friend, — with that superiority in years, too ! For I confess to that — you need not throw that in my teeth — as soon as I read your Essay on Mind, from preface to the vision of Fame at the end, and reflected on my doings about that time, 1826, — I did indeed see and wonder at your advance over me in years. What then ? I have got nearer to you considerably — if only nearer — since then, and prove it by the remark I make at favorable times, such as this, for instance, which occurs in a poem you are to see, which advises nobody who thinks nobly of the Soul to give, if he or she can help, such a good argument to the materialist as the owning that any great choice of that Soul, which it is born to make, and which (in its determining, as it must, the whole future course and impulses of that Soul) — which must endure forever, even though the object which induced that choice should disappear, — owning, I say, that such a course may be scientifically determined.” ³

But we need not pursue the writer through the page or so more of parentheses and sub - parentheses which he takes to complete his thought. One thing at least is clear from this dense passage, namely, that the involved and obscure style, which has often gone near to maddening some of Robert Browning’s most willing disciples, was indeed a part of the man. His mood, at this time, was one of noble candor; the sentiment which possessed him was elementary in its simplicity ; but it was natural to him to express himself thus. Severe mental discipline in early years might have mitigated the fault, but could never wholly have eradicated it.

Miss Barrett’s physicians had said, clearly and repeatedly, that the climate of London was deadly to her, but that a winter in the south might benefit her greatly ; and the lovers, all through that first summer, had permitted themselves to look forward to a meeting in Italy, in the autumn. But Elizabeth was now definitively forbidden, by her father, to dream of such a journey ; and she submitted, for the moment, to the seemingly brutal decision with her accustomed resignation, while even Robert was not immediately roused by it from his trance of content with their exquisite actual relation.

“ Do not be angry with me,” she writes. “ Do not think it my fault, but I do not go to Italy. . . . Am I wrong in the decision ? Could I do otherwise ? I had courage and to spare, but you see the decision did not rest with myself. ... For the rest, the unforbidden country lies within these four walls. Madeira was proposed in vain, and any part of England would be as objectionable as Italy, and not more advantageous to me than Wimpole Street. To take courage and be cheerful, as you say, is left as an alternative ; and — (the winter may be mild !) to fall into the hands of God rather than of man.” ⁴

His answer runs thus : —

“ Be sure, my dearest love, that this is for the best, and will be seen for the best in the end. It is hard to bear now, but you have to bear it. Any other person could not. And you will — I know, knowing you — will be well this one winter, if you can, and then — since I am not selfish in this love to you, my own conscience tells me — I desire, more earnestly than I ever knew what desiring was, to be yours, and with you, and, as far as may be in this life and world, YOU.” ⁵

The correspondence of the months immediately succeeding this crisis is, again, so intimate that one reads by snatches, and turns the pages fast, ashamed, when all is said, of having been betrayed into violating the privacy of two such hearts. There is a dazzling purity and unworldliness about it all, a swift kindling of responsive thought, a passion of mutual faith, a rivalry in self-abasement of these two élite creatures, which is at once fantastic and very touching. As though Heaven itself were moved to indulgence by so rare a spectacle, the winter of 1845—46 proved one of almost unheardof mildness in England ; and the invalid, under the combined stimulus of that ver perpetuum and of her own great happiness, gained surprisingly in physical strength. The sacred and quintessential personalities of which I have spoken form, after all, but a small part of the voluminous communications which continue to pass between them, even though Robert Browning was now fully established on the footing of a calling acquaintance in Wimpole Street, and saw his lady regularly twice or thrice a week. The fuller understanding of the world and of real life which Elizabeth gained through him, and the strong and heretofore untried tonic of hope for herself, imparted a new sparkle to her comments on men and books and things. The sweetness of her disposition is invincible, but she indulges in a good deal of playful satire ; and it must be owned that this famous pair, after the manner of lesser lovers, discern a striking inferiority in all the rest of the world to their own highly favored and hardly to be idealized selves. “ Dear Miss Mitford comes to-morrow,” writes Elizabeth on February 5, “ and I am not glad enough. Shall I have a letter to make me glad ? ” While Robert replies on February 7: “And Miss Mitford yesterday, and has she fresh fears, for you, of my evil influence, and Origenic power of raying out darkness, like a swart star ? ” The poet’s antipathy to Miss Martineau may well have been a matter of temperament, but he cannot even allow her to extol the virtuous frugality of the Laureate’s life at Ambleside, — that Laureate who was also, it must be remembered, Robert Browning’s Lost Leader.

“ I am very glad to hear so much good of a very good person, and so well told. She plainly sees the proper use and advantage of a country life, and that knowledge gets to seem a high point of attainment, doubtless, beside the Wordsworth she speaks of; for mine he shall not be, so long as I am able. Was ever such a ‘great’ poet before . . . dissertating with style of the ‘ utmost grandeur that even you can conceive ’ ? (Speak for yourself, Miss Martineau !)”

One pardons the note of bitterness here, because the slaughter of an early moral ideal — even a fictitious one — is always a tragic thing. But when the lovers bemoan, as they do freely, later on, the occasional interruption of their high tête-à-tête by Mrs. Jameson⁶ and Mr. Kenyon, our sympathies lean a little to the side of the intruders. For, if conventional use and common prudence were to be defied, — as it became more and more evident they would eventually have to be, — these were unquestionably the two among their common friends on whom odium, so far as there was odium, would principally fall. Yet it was Mrs. Jameson who was to act as balia to the helpless bride on her precarious wedding journey ; while the devoted John Kenyon, who had introduced these two, was their strong defense always against the world’s criticism, and their perpetual benefactor. He made them an allowance from the time of their son’s birth, and left them in his will a sum which delivered them forever from all sordid anxieties.

Robert Browning had twice proposed marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, during the first year of their acquaintance, and she had sorrowfully, but decidedly, refused him. It was not until the last day of January, 1846, a year and three weeks from the date of their first interview, that she wrote : —

“ Let it be this way, ever dearest. If, in the time of fine weather, I am not ill, then —not now—you shall decide, and your decision shall be duty and desire to me both. I will make no difficulties.” ⁷

Her wholly natural and noble fluctuations of feeling were being silently recorded all this while in the series of incomparable sonnets afterward published as from the Portuguese. It is the finest love poetry ever written by a woman,⁸ at once the most impassioned and the most immaculate. The husband paid high poetic tribute to the wife, after marriage, in By the Fireside, in One Word More, in the heroic Prospice, which has sustained so many fainting hearts, and in frequent incidental appeals or brief invocations to his “ Lyric love, half Angel and half Bird,” which we all tenderly remember. But he wrote nothing to compare, for concentrated emotion and sheer intensity of white fire, with these beautiful sonnets.

As the summer of 1846 — the “time of fine weather,” for which Elizabeth’s promise had been given — wore away, the now affianced pair addressed themselves fitfully, and with a curiously childlike inadequacy and inconsequence, to the question of ways and means for their marriage. The man will borrow a hundred pounds from his doting father for their wedding journey, but feels within himself the power abundantly to provide for all their needs, after the deed is done, by the labor of his own pen. Or he will apply to Mr. Spring-Rice (afterward Lord Mounteagle) for a literary pension, if she approves. But the high - spirited wraith, when consulted, most emphatically does not approve ; and then she goes on, diffidently and much afraid of wounding his feelings, to mention that she has between three and four hundred pounds a year of her own, which nobody can take from her. He will none of that, of course, and is shocked, as well he may be, when the lifelong invalid apologetically suggests that she will perhaps have still to keep her maid, Wilson, — “a very expensive servant, sixteen pounds a year.” In the end it proved a matter of some importance that the small income of the poetess was inalienable ; for it furnished the main support of the unworldly pair during all the enchanted first years of their life in Italy. That histrionic old anachronism Mr. Moulton-Barrett continued obdurate, as all the world now knows, until his own latest breath, and literally disinherited his daughter for disobedience in marrying at the age of exactly forty ! On the other hand, though the ripest and soundest fruit of Robert Browning’s virile genius was all either produced or prepared in the fifteen years of his wedded life, his popularity in England did not increase during that period, — hardly passed, indeed, beyond the restricted limits of his first circle of personal admirers ; and his noble work was destined to bring him no great remuneration, either in fame or in money, until his wife lay sleeping in her Florentine grave.⁹

Meanwhile, the accord of these two spirits on all high and immaterial things appears to grow more perfect, if this were possible, as the last weeks of their probation pass away. When it comes to discussing the religious form under which the clandestine marriage, now fully resolved upon, shall be celebrated. “ The truth, as God sees it,” writes Elizabeth, — and it is upon the feast of the Assumption that she unconsciously so writes, — “ the truth, as God sees it, must be something so different from these opinions about truth, — these systems which fit different classes of men like their coats, and wear brown at the elbows always ! . . . Still, you go quickest there where your sympathies are least ruffled and disturbed, and I like beyond comparison best the simplicity of the Dissenters, the unwritten prayer, the sacraments administered quietly and without charlatanism ! And the principle of a church as they hold it, I hold it too, quite apart from state necessities, — pure from the law.”¹⁰

And Robert replies : —

“ Dearest, I know your very meaning in what you said of religion, and responded to it with my whole soul. What you express now is for us both ; those are my own feelings, my convictions beside, — instinct confirmed by reason. Look at that injunction to “ love God with all the heart and soul and strength,’ and then imagine yourself bidding any faculty which arises toward the love of him be still ! If, in a meeting house with the blank white walls and a simple doctrinal exposition, all the senses should turn from where they lie neglected to all that sunshine in the Sistine with its music and painting, which would lift them at once to heaven, why should you not go forth, to return just as quickly when they are nourished into a luxuriance that extinguishes ? ”

All summer the invalid had been timidly trying her new strength by pathetic little walks about the London squares and streets, with only her maid and her beloved spaniel Flush in attendance ; and it is quaint to hear her say that she always looked for her lover at every corner, and to compare this naïf confession with his own of the almost hyper-refined scruple which had forbidden him even to glance down Wimpole Street during the interval when, having already declared his love for her soul, he was entreating permission to pay his homage to her in person. Thus time slipped away, until the morning in early autumn, September 12, 1846, when they met at the parish church of St. Marylebone (of all unromantic places!), and were united, after all, by the Anglican rite ; the bride accomplishing her final evasion about a week later, by gliding out of the Wimpole Street house, under the escort still of the faithful Wilson and the immortal Flush, while the stage father and the sympathetic but trembling sisters were at dinner. Husband and wife took the boat, that night, from Southampton to Havre: three weeks later, in memory of Petrarch and Laura, he had carried her in his arms up the valley of the Sorgue to the fountain of Vaucluse; and before the end of November they were settled in Pisa for their first Italian winter.

The manner of life upon which they now entered was to be theirs, with but few interruptions, while Mrs. Browning lived. Their winters were passed chiefly in Florence, at that Casa Guidi which is so peculiarly associated with her name ; where a tablet has been set to her memory by the affectionate people she loved so well and served with her pen so gallantly. In the summer they went to the baths of Lucca or to Siena, and occasionally to England ; though these latter visits were always painful on account of the stubborn alienation of the men of the Barrett family, while the damp summer climate of her birthplace was as dangerous to her as it had always been. She ceased for a time, indeed, to own herself an invalid. Mrs. Jameson had said of her, in the first winter after her marriage, that she was not so much improved as transformed ; and a miracle of healing did really seem, at first, to have been wrought upon her, by removal to a kindlier clime and by her own rare domestic felicity. But the physical taint remained, congenital and incurable ; and now that Mrs. Browning had attained her full intellectual stature, and had come up, though late, with her own limitations, the mental taint which inevitably accompanied it was to become increasingly conspicuous in all her published utterances. It was not that her eccentricities of manner and language grew more marked; on the contrary, they diminished for a time, and very noticeably. She had never before, except in the most inspired of the Portuguese sonnets, written verse as limpid, as harmonious, and as nearly classical in form as that of Casa Guidi Windows, her first important production after marriage. It is a curious fact that both the Brownings wrote more intelligibly during the period of their married life than either had ever done before, or than Robert Browning ever did afterward. They wrote quite independently. They rarely, if ever, confided their literary projects to each other, compared notes, or asked advice about unfinished work. Yet the style of both improved after they wrote side by side.

But the woman’s voice, ever soft, sympathetic, and musical by the fireside, sounded thin and shrill when uplifted in high argument upon the political and social questions which more and more solicited her muse. Even in her generous advocacy of the cause of Italian independence she was fitful and flighty ; now uplifted by extravagant hope, now plunged into unreasonable despair. In her cloistered early days, Elizabeth Barrett, as we have seen, had given evidence of a singularly fine and correct judgment in books; but the faculty seemed strangely to desert her when she turned her attention to the march of public events and the responsible actions of living men. She became a prey to prepossessions as passionate as they were fickle. Pio Nono was an angel of deliverance ; he was a demon of deceit. Carlo Alberto was a traitor; he was a martyr. Only Louis Napoleon, third of his line, was invariably disinterested, broad-minded, and beneficent! Cavour, the true sponsor of united Italy, the one great creative statesman of our time, “ shown by the fates,” and then so tragically withdrawn, — Cavour she never comprehended until the all-illuminating hour of her own death, which so nearly coincided with his.

The Poems before Congress, from which these astonishingly bad verses are taken, were one sustained shriek of poignant disappointment and helpless wrath on Italy’s behalf. Only a great cantatrice, one may say an historic voice, could have held so high a note so long ; and it is but fair to offset against the above lines the last stanza of Mrs. Browning’s poem on the First News from Villafranca, which, though it be but an hysterical woman’s cry, yet furnishes a signal instance of the sheer might of human language when launched by simple emotion : —

The hysterical note does indeed mar the effect of the most moving songs with which she was inspired by Italian political themes ; even of Mother and Poet, and the brilliant but slightly meretricious Court Lady. Nor is it, alas, at any time quite absent from Mrs. Browning’s longest, and in some respects most considerable poem ; the fruit of her best married years, and the work, as she herself says in her preface, which embodied her “ most mature convictions on art and life.” The modern subject and setting and the socialistic purpose of Aurora Leigh (it upheld the so-called Christian socialism of the fifties, which was then in the dawn of its brief day) gave the book instant and wide popularity, and seemed to bring its author more closely in touch with the actual world than she had ever been before. Reviewed after the lapse of forty years, however, it seems both sensational and ineffective. The old fervor and abundance are here, the generous purpose, the unflagging imagination, the wealth of simile and allusion, together with something more than the writer’s early sharpness of occasional epigram. But poise, proportion, tem perance, unity of conception, and sanity of spirit, — these things are painfully absent. Those “ mature convictions ” of hers availed to make the metrical romance on which so much of her bes power was lavished neither an epitome of art nor a reflection of life. Involuntarily, we recall the profane ejaculation of Edward Fitzgerald when he heard of Mrs. Browning’s death, “ Thank Heaven, there will be no more Aurora Leighs ! ” And while we love the aged Browning all the better for the furious defense he made of his wife’s genius against the shade of her incorrigible censor, we know that Fitzgerald was right. More Aurora Leighs would have been a heavy misfortune to letters.

The bells were in truth jangled beyond repair which had rung so thrilling a peal above Cowper’s grave, so sweetly in the Portuguese sonnets. The altered balance, or rather the fatal overbalance, of Mrs. Browning’s fine faculties, appears yet more plainly in the enthusiasm with which she embraced spiritism, and her credulous interest in the palpable charlatanry of its most vulgar “ manifestations.” She had never been strong enough to go into general society, and her husband, who was formed to enjoy it, renounced it gladly for her sake. For a time the very best of the transient company of Florence came naturally to them ; but now Mrs. Browning, though always and invincibly true to early friends, was inclined to admit no new pretenders to her intimacy, save fanatics and visionaries who shared her freshly adopted views of things occult. What her husband really thought of some of the idols of her later worship he was to tell the world, long after, in Mr. Sludge, “the Medium,” and Prince HohenstielSchwangau. For the present, he was content to sit apart and pursue his own subtle and penetrating studies of typical men and women.

No shadow of serious misunderstanding ever fell between these two. They had allowed each other, from the first, the widest spiritual room, and no mere difference of speculative opinion could put them asunder now. He stood manfully between her and the attacks provoked by her violent later utterances, which appeared ill-tempered to those who did not know her, and were at least intemperate. As her strength declined, she became, what she had never been before, morbidly sensitive to hostile criticism. It astonished as well as distressed her. Charges of atheism and anarchism, founded on the wild cries on behalf of all those in any way afflicted or distressed in mind, body, or estate, which she uplifted in her strained and breaking voice, seemed to her to spring either from dense misunderstanding or from wanton malignity. She positively could not see why poems like the Summing Up in Italy and A Curse for a Nation should excite resentment and call forth stinging retort. She was deeply wounded, though she bravely tried to make light of it, when her well-intentioned but very outspoken poem Lord Walter’s Wife was most tenderly and apologetically declined by Thackeray for the Cornhill ; and it must be admitted that, for a professed philosopher and man of the world, he does appear a bit of a Philistine in this transaction. Robert Browning suffered for these things because his wife suffered, and did his loyal best to screen and comfort her. He felt a sad presentiment that she had received her deathblow in the sudden and seemingly complete frustration of her hopes for Italy in 1859 ; and as the months went by, and she did not rally from the depression of that season, the fears of all about her were confirmed. For herself, she had none. In this, at least, her mind was always healthy : that she made no study of her own sensations, and was too well used to physical pain to mind a slight increase of it. There was a sense of prostrating fatigue upon her, to which she did reluctantly own in some of her letters and in one most affecting poem, but she never dreamed that it was mortal : —

On June 7, 1861, the day after Cavour’s death, Mrs. Browning wrote to her husband’s sister, meekly praying to be forgiven because their promised visit to the home friends in England had been postponed, for that year, on her account, and adds : “ We came home into a cloud here [in Florence]. 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. A hundred Garibaldis for such a man ! ”

The clouds were breaking. The devoted guardian, and for fifteen years the true preserver of his wife’s fragile existence, might have said (in the words of his own departing Paracelsus), as he watched her now : —

Within three weeks after the date of the letter last quoted Mrs. Browning had a bronchial attack, like scores which she had had before and surmounted. But the last time was come, and in Casa Guidi, on the night of June 29, “ smilingly happy, and with a face like a girl’s,” she died in her husband’s arms.

Another life in this world of nearly thirty years was reserved for Robert Browning, after the dissolution, in the order of nature, of this rarely beautiful union. It was a life pitched in a lower key (I will not say lived upon a lower plane) than his wedded life had been; otherwise he himself would hardly have survived to the age of seventy-seven. It was an active, kindly, conspicuous, and increasingly prosperous existence; passed chiefly in his native land, whither he returned very soon after Mrs. Browning’s death, and where he did his best to transform into an English schoolboy and train to be an English citizen the child who had been born a Florentine, and, so far, bred an artist.

To one who, like his biographer, knew the poet only in that after life, it is not wonderful, perhaps, that the sequel should have seemed the more important part of the story, —demanding as much space as all the rest, — and his marriage merely a romantic episode. The world at large will not be inclined so to regard it. Robert Browning won, in the end, such recognition as is rarely accorded to a living writer. It was universally conceded that in England none but Tennyson outranked him. He had what must have been a truly inconvenient following of personal admirers and neckor-nothing disciples. He even became, in some sort, the fashion; and Mrs. Sutherland Orr feelingly enumerates the great English country houses and the historic drawing rooms of which he was made abundantly free. His late popularity, however, was in no wise due to the Fifines and the Red Cotton NightCap Countries, and still less to the spirited translations and adaptations from the Greek with which he amused his more worldly days, but to work either done in provincial obscurity before he knew Elizabeth Barrett, or produced by her side and under the stimulus of her society. He had used a lover’s pardonable hyperbole when he spoke of himself, in By the Fireside, as “ named and known ” by the “ feat ” of winning her. But the “ little more ” of her faltering and twicewithholden yes was indeed “ much ” to him, and there is a very real sense in which it may be said that her persistent refusal would have meant “ worlds away ” from his fame. We may at least thank them both for having made it clear to mankind that two individuals of extraordinary gifts can marry without either being false to their vows or incurring harrowing wretchedness. We rejoice, too, that the man should have been better than his own last word in Any Wife to Any Husband (“and yet it will not be ”), and that he should have remained faithful unto the long-delayed end, “ ’mid all who followed, flattered, sought, and sued,” to the woman’s unrivaled memory.

And there is the less need to do so, either in the Shakespearean sense or in the one which naturally occurs to a theorist of to-day, because, in the beneficent order of nature, minds of unusual calibre are seldom moved to many together. Science, physiological and psychological, may demonstrate that the woman, in this memorable case, ought never to have married at all; and that it would have been better for the race if the man had taken to himself a helpmeet, indeed, but one with no claim to rank as his intellectual equal. There is one thing, however, which has thus far escaped the dominion of any formulated law, and that is human volition ; and we may the more cheerfully dismiss from our minds any carking anxiety on behalf of the race, because the conjunction of two such stars as these will not occur again, until we have had a few more æons in which to study the proper scope of science and the exact limits of law, if any limits there be.

Harriet Waters Preston.