Robert Browning Part 7

If any other mistress of a house had behaved so unceremoniously, Browning declared that he would have walked out of the room; and Mrs Browning left with the impression--"she does not care for me." They had exerted themselves to please her, but felt that it was in vain; "we couldn't penetrate, couldn't really _touch_ her." Once Browning met her near the Tuileries and walked the length of the gardens with her arm upon his. If nothing further was to come of it, at least they had seen a wonderful piece of work, which not to have been blest withal would have discredited their travel. Only to Mrs Browning's mortification the spectacle wanted one detail indispensable to its completeness--the characteristic cigarette was absent: "Ah, but I didn't see her smoke."

Life leaves us always something to desire.

Before the close of June 1852 they were again in London, and found comfortable rooms at 58 Welbeck Street. When the turmoil of the first days had subsided, they visited "Kenyon the Magnificent"--so named by Browning--at Wimbledon, at whose table Landor, abounding in life and pa.s.sionate energy as in earlier days, was loud in his applause of the genius of Louis Napoleon. Mazzini, his "intense eyes full of melancholy illusions," called at their lodgings in company with Mrs Carlyle, who seemed to Mrs Browning not only remarkable for her play of ideas but attaching through her feelings and her character.[50] Florence Nightingale was also a welcome visitor, and her visit was followed by a gift of flowers. Invitations from country houses came in sheaves, and the thought of green fields is seductive in a London month of July; but to remain in London was to be faithful to Penini--and to the much-travelled Flush. Once the whole household, with Flush included, breathed rural air for two days with friends at Farnham, and Browning had there the pleasure of meeting Charles Kingsley, whose Christian Socialism seemed wild and unpractical enough, but as for the man himself, brave, bold, original, full of a genial kindliness, Mrs Browning a.s.sures a correspondent that he could not be other than "good and n.o.ble let him say or dream what he will." It is stated by Mr W.M.

Rossetti that Browning first became acquainted with his brother Dante Gabriel in the course of this summer. Coventry Patmore gave him the ma.n.u.script of his unpublished poems of 1853 to read. And Ruskin was now added to the number of his personal acquaintances. "We went to Denmark Hill yesterday, by agreement," wrote Mrs Browning in September, "to see the Turners--which, by the way, are divine. I like Mr Ruskin much, and so does Robert. Very gentle, yet earnest--refined and truthful." At Lord Stanhope's they were introduced to the latest toy of fas.h.i.+onable occultism, the crystal ball, in which the seer beheld Oremus, the spirit of the sun; the supernatural was qualified for the faithful with luncheon and lobster salad; "I love the marvellous," Mrs Browning frankly declares. And of terrestrial wonders, with heaven lying about them, and also India muslin and Brussels lace, two were seen in the babies of Monckton Milnes and Alfred Tennyson. Pen, because he was "troppo grande," declined to kiss the first of these new-christened wonders, but Pen's father, who went alone to the baptism of Hallam Tennyson, distinguished himself by nursing for some ten minutes and with accomplished dexterity, the future Governor-General of Australia.

Yet with all these distractions, perhaps in part because of them, the visit to England was not one of Browning's happiest times. The autumn weather confined Mrs Browning to her rooms. He was anxious, vexed, and worn.[51] It was a happiness when Welbeck Street was left behind, and they were on the way by Paris to their resting-place at Casa Guidi. From a balcony overlooking one of the Paris boulevards they witnessed, in a blaze of autumnal suns.h.i.+ne, which glorified much military and civic pomp, the reception of the new Emperor. Mrs Browning's handkerchief waved frantically while she prayed that G.o.d might bless the people in this the chosen representative of a democracy. What were Browning's thoughts on that memorable Sat.u.r.day is not recorded, but we may be sure that they were less enthusiastic. Yet he enjoyed the stir and animation of Paris, and after the palpitating life of the boulevards found Florence dull and dead--no change, no variety. The journey by the Mont Cenis route had not been without its trying incidents. At Genoa, during several days he was deeply depressed by the illness of his wife, who lay on the sofa and seemed to waste away. But Casa Guidi was reached at last, where it was more like summer than November; the pleasant nest had its own peculiar welcome for wanderers; again they enjoyed the sunsets over the Arno, and Mrs Browning was able to report herself free from cough and feeling very well and very happy: "You can't think how we have caught up our ancient traditions just where we left them, and relapsed into our former soundless, stirless, hermit life. Robert has not pa.s.sed an evening from home since we came--just as if we had never known Paris."[52]

The political condition of Italy was, indeed, a grief to both husband and wife. It was a state of utter prostration--on all sides "the unanimity of despair." The Grand Duke, the emanc.i.p.ator, had acquired a respect and affection for the bayonets of Austria. The Pope was "wriggling his venom into the heart of all possibilities of free-thought and action." Browning groaned "How long, O Lord, how long?" His home-thoughts of England in contrast with Italy were those of patriotism and pride. His wife was more detached, more critical towards her native land. The best symptom for Italian freedom was that if Italy had not energy to act, she yet had energy to hate. To be happy now they both must turn to imaginative work, and gain all the gains possible from private friends.h.i.+ps. Browning was already occupied with the poems included afterwards in the volumes of _Men and Women_. Mrs Browning was already engaged upon _Aurora Leigh_. "We neither of us show our work to one another," she wrote, "till it is finished. An artist must, I fancy, either find or _make_ a solitude to work in, if it is to be good work at all." But as her husband's poems, one by one, were completed, she saw them, and they seemed to her as fine as anything he had done. Away in England _Colombe's Birthday_ was given on the stage, with Helen Faucit in the leading part. It was at least an indication that the public had not forgotten that Browning was a poet. Here in Florence, although the hermit life was happy, new friends--the gift of England--added to its happiness. Frederick Tennyson, the Laureate's brother, and himself a true poet in his degree, "a dreamy, shy, speculative man," simple withal and truthful, had married an Italian wife and was settled for a time in Florence. To him Browning became attached with genuine affection. Mrs Browning was a student of the writings of Swedenborg, and she tells much of her new friend in a single Swedenborgian word--"selfhood, the _proprium_, is not in him." Frederick Tennyson, though left in a state of bewilderment by Browning's poetry, found the writer of the poetry "a man of infinite learning, jest and bonhommie, and moreover a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness."[53] Another intimate who charmed them much was one of the attaches of the English emba.s.sy, and a poet of unquestionable faculty, very young, very gentle and refined, delicate and excitable, full of sensibility, "full of all sorts of goodness and n.o.bleness," but somewhat dreamy and unpractical, "visionary enough,"

writes Mrs Browning, "to suit me," interested moreover in spiritualism, which suited her well, "never," she unwisely prophesied, "to be a great diplomatist." It was hardly, Mr Kenyon, the editor of her letters, observes, a successful horoscope of the destiny of Lord Lytton, the future Amba.s.sador at Paris and Viceroy of India.[54]

Early in 1853 Mrs Browning became much interested in the reports which reached her--many of these from America--of the "rapping spirits," who in the 'fifties were busy in instructing chairs and tables to walk in the way they should not go. "You know I am rather a visionary," she wrote to Miss Mitford, "and inclined to knock round at all the doors of the present world to try to get out." Her Swedenborgian studies had prepared her to believe that there were communities of life in the visible and the invisible worlds which did not permit of the one being wholly estranged from the other. A clever person who loves the marvellous will soon find by the sheer force of logic that marvels are the most natural things in the world. Should we not credit human testimony? Should we not evict prejudice from our understandings? Should we not investigate alleged facts? Should we not keep an open mind? We cannot but feel a certain sympathy with a woman of ardent nature who fails to observe the bounds of intellectual prudence. Browning himself with all his audacities was pre-eminently prudent. He did not actively enter into politics; he did not dabble in pseudo-science; he was an artist and a thinker; and he made poems, and amused himself with drawing, modelling in clay, and the study of music. Mrs Browning squandered her enthusiasms with less discretion. A good dose of stupidity or an indignant energy of common-sense, impatient of the nonsense of the thing, may be the salvation of the average man. It is often the clever people who would be entirely rational and unprejudiced that best succeed in duping themselves at once by their reason and their folly. A fine old crusted prejudice commonly stands for a thousand acts of judgment ama.s.sed into a convenient working result; a single act of an individual understanding, or several of such acts, will seldom contain an equal sum of wisdom. Scientific discovery is not advanced by a mult.i.tude of curious and ingenious amateurs in learned folly. Whether the claims of spiritualism are warrantable or fallacious, Mrs Browning, gifted as she was with rare powers of mind, was not qualified to investigate those claims; it was a waste of energy, from which she could not but suffer serious risks and certain loss.

Before she had seen anything for herself she was a believer--a believer, as she describes it, on testimony. The fact of communication with the invisible world appeared to her more important than anything that had been communicated. The spirits themselves "seem abundantly foolish, one must admit." Yet it was clear to her that mankind was being prepared for some great development of truth. She would keep her eyes wide open to facts and her soul lifted up in reverential expectation. By-and-by she felt the dumb wood of the table panting and s.h.i.+vering with human emotion. The dogmatism of Faraday in an inadequate theory was simply unscientific, a piece of intellectual tyranny. The American medium Home, she learnt from her friends, was "turning the world upside down in London with this spiritual influx." Two months later, in July 1855, Mrs Browning and her husband were themselves in London, and witnessed Home's performances during a seance at Ealing. Miss de Gaudrion (afterwards Mrs Merrifield), who was present on that occasion, and who was convinced that the "manifestations" were a fraud, wrote to Mrs Browning for an expression of her opinion. The reply, as might be expected, declared the writer's belief in the genuine character of the phenomena; such manifestations, she admitted, in the undeveloped state of the subject were "apt to be low"; but they were, she was a.s.sured, "the beginning of access from a spiritual world, of which we shall presently learn more perhaps." A letter volunteered by Browning accompanied that of his wife.

He had, he said, to overcome a real repugnance in recalling the subject; he could hardly understand how another opinion was possible than that "the whole display of 'hands,' 'spirit utterances,' etc., was a cheat and imposture." It was all "melancholy stuff," which a grain of worldly wisdom would dispose of in a minute. "Mr Browning," the letter goes on, "has, however, abundant experience that the best and rarest of natures may begin by the proper mistrust of the more ordinary results of reasoning when employed in such investigations as these, go on to an abnegation of the regular tests of truth and rationality in favour of these particular experiments, and end in a voluntary prostration of the whole intelligence before what is a.s.sumed to transcend all intelligence.

Once arrived at this point, no trick is too gross--absurdities are referred to 'low spirits,' falsehoods to 'personating spirits'--and the one terribly apparent spirit, the Father of Lies, has it all his own way." These interesting letters were communicated to _The Times_ by Mr Merrifield (_Literary Supplement_, Nov. 28, 1902), and they called forth a short additional letter from Mr R. Barrett Browning, the "Penini" of earlier days. He mentions that his father had himself on one occasion detected Home in a vulgar fraud; that Home had called at the house of the Brownings, and was turned out of it. Mr Browning adds: "What, however, I am more desirous of stating is that towards the end of her life my mother's views on 'spiritual manifestations' were much modified.

This change was brought about, in great measure, by the discovery that she had been duped by a friend in whom she had blind faith. The pain of the disillusion was great, but her eyes were opened and she saw clearly."[55] It must be added, that letters written by Mrs Browning six months before her death give no indication of this change of feeling, but she admits that "sublime communications" from the other world are "decidedly absent," and that while no truth can be dangerous, unsettled minds may lose their balance, and may do wisely to avoid altogether the subject of spiritualism.

Browning's hostility arose primarily from his conviction that the so-called "manifestations" were, as he says, a cheat and imposture. He had grasped Home's leg under the table while at work in producing "phenomena." He had visited his friend, Seymour Kirkup, had found the old man a.s.sisting at the trance of a peasant girl named Mariana; and when Kirkup withdrew for a moment, the entranced Mariana relieved herself from the fatigue of her posturing, at the same time inviting Browning with a wink to be a charitable confederate in the joke by which she profited in admiration and in pelf. Browning, who would have waged immitigable war against the London dog-stealers, and opposed all treaty with such rogues, even at the cost of an unrecovered Flush, could not but oppose the new trade of elaborate deception. But his feeling was intensified by the personal repulsiveness of the professional medium.

The vain, sleek, vulgar, emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who became the petted oracle of the dim-lighted room, was loathsome in his eyes. And his respect for his wife's genius made him feel that there was a certain desecration in the neighbourhood to her of men whom he regarded as verminous impostors. Yet he recognised her right to think for herself, and she, on the other hand, regarded his scepticism as rather his misfortune than his crime.

It was a considerable time after his wife's death that Browning's study of the impostor of the spiritualist circles, "Mr Sludge the Medium,"

appeared in the _Dramatis Personae_ of 1864; the date of its composition is Rome, 1859-60; but the observations which that study sums up were acc.u.mulated during earlier years, and if Mr Sludge is not a portrait of Home, that eminent member of the tribe of Sludge no doubt supplied suggestions for the poet's character-study. Browning evidently wrote the poem with a peculiar zest; its intellectual energy never flags; its imaginative grip never slackens. If the Bishop, who orders his tomb at St Praxed's, serves to represent the sensuous glory and the moral void of one phase of the Italian Renaissance, so, and with equal fidelity, does Mr Sludge represent a phase of nineteenth century materialism and moral grossness, which cannot extinguish the cravings of the soul but would vulgarise and degrade them with coa.r.s.e illusions. Unhappily the later poem differs from the earlier in being uglier in its theme and of inordinate length. Browning, somewhat in the manner of Ben Jonson when he wrote _The Alchemist_, could not be satisfied until he had exhausted the subject to the dregs. The writer's zeal from first to last knows no abatement, but it is not every reader who cares to bend over the dissecting-table, with its sick effluvia, during so prolonged a demonstration.

"Mr Sludge the Medium" is not a mere attack on spiritualism; it is a dramatic scene in the history of a soul; and Browning, with his democratic feeling in things of the mind, held that every soul however mean is worth understanding. If the poem is a satire, it is so only in a way that is inevitable. Browning's desire is to be absolutely just, but sometimes truth itself becomes perforce a satire. He takes an impostor at the moment of extreme disadvantage; the "medium" is caught in the very act of cheating; he will make a clean breast of it; and his confession is made as nearly as possible a vindication. The most contemptible of creatures, in desperate straits, makes excellent play with targe and dagger; the poetry of the piece is to be found in the lithe att.i.tudes, absolutely the best possible under the circ.u.mstances, by which he maintains both defence and attack. Half of the long _apologia_ is a criticism not of those who feast fools in their folly, but of the fools who require a caterer for the feast; it is a study of the methods by which dupes solicit and educate a knave. The other half is Sludge's plea that, knave though he be, he is not wholly knave; and Browning, while absolutely rejecting the doctrine of so called spiritualism, is prepared to admit that in the composition of a Sludge there enters a certain portion of truth, low in degree, perverted in kind, inoperative to the ends of truth, yet a fragment of that without which life itself were impossible even for the meanest organism in the shape of man.

Cowardly, cunning, insolent, greedy, effeminately sensual, playing upon the vanity of his patrons, playing upon their vulgar sentimentality, playing upon their vulgar pietisms and their vulgar materialism, Sludge after all is less the wronger than the wronged. Who made him what he is?

Who, keen and clear-sighted enough in fields which they had not selected as their special parade-ground for self-conceit, trained him on to knavery and self-degradation? Who helped him through his blunders with ingenious excuses--"the manifestations are at first so weak"; or "Sludge is himself disturbed by the strange phenomena"; or "a doubter is in the company, and the spirits have grown confused in their communications"?

Who proceeded to exhibit him as a lawful prize and possession, staking their vanity on the success of his imposture? Who awakened in him the artist's joy in rare invention? Who urged him forward from modest to magnificent lies? Who fed and flattered him? What ladies bestowed their soft caresses on Sludge? And now and again in his course of fraud did he not turn a wistful eye towards any reckless tatterdemalion, if only the vagrant lived in freedom and in truth?

It's too bad, I say, Ruining a soul so!

And in the midst of gulls who persistently refuse to be undeceived cheating is so "cruel easy." The difficulty is rather that the cheating, even when acknowledged, should ever be credited for what it is. The medium has confessed! Yes, and to cheat may be part of the medium nature; none the less he has the medium's gift of acting as a conductor between the visible and the invisible worlds. Has he not told secrets of the lives of his wondering clients which could not have been known by natural means? And Sludge chuckles "could not?"--could not be known by him who in his seeming pa.s.sivity is alive at every nerve with the instinct of the detective, by him whose trade was

Throwing thus His sense out, like an ant-eater's long tongue, Soft, innocent, warm, moist, impa.s.sible, And when 'twas crusted o'er with creatures--slick, Their juice enriched his palate. "Could not Sludge!"

Haunters of the seance of every species are his aiders and abettors--the unbeliever, whom believers overwhelm or bribe to acquiescence, the fair votaries who find prurient suggestions characteristic of the genuine medium, the lover of the lie through the natural love of it, the amateur, incapable of a real conviction, who plays safely with superst.i.tion, the literary man who welcomes a new flavour for the narrative or the novel, the philosophic diner-out, who wants the chopping-block of a disputable doctrine on which to try the edge of his faculty. Is it his part, Sludge asks indignantly, to be grateful to the patrons who have corrupted and debased him?

Grat.i.tude to these?

The grat.i.tude, forsooth, of a prost.i.tute To the greenhorn and the bully.

The truculence of Sludge is not without warrant; it is indeed no other than the truculence of Robert Browning, "shaking his mane," as Dante Rossetti described him in his outbreaks against the spiritualists, "with occasional foamings at the mouth."[56]

Where then is the little grain of truth which has vitality amid the putrefaction of Sludge's nature? Liar and cheat as he is, he cannot be sure "but there was something in it, tricks and all." The spiritual world, he feels, is as real as the material world; the supernatural interpenetrates the natural at every point; in little things, as in great things, G.o.d is present. Sludge is aware of the invisible powers at every nerve:

I guess what's going on outside the veil, Just as the prisoned crane feels pairing-time In the islands where his kind are, so must fall To capering by himself some s.h.i.+ny night As if your back yard were a plot of spice.

He cheats; yes, but he also apprehends a truth which the world is blind to. Or, after all, is this cheating when every lie is quick with a germ of truth? Is not such lying as this a self-desecration, if you will; but still more a strange, sweet self-sacrifice in the service of truth? At the lowest is it not required by the very conditions of our poor mortal life, which remains so sorry a thing, so imperfect, so unendurable until it is brought into fruitful connection with a future existence? This world of ours is a cruel, blundering, unintelligible world; but let it be pervaded by an influx from the next world, how quickly it rights itself! how intelligible it all grows! And is the faculty of imagination, the faculty which discovers the things of the spirit--put to his own uses by the poet and even the historian--is this a power which cheats its possessor, or cheats those for whose advantage he gives it play?

Browning's design is to exhibit even in this Sludge the rudiments--coa.r.s.e, perverted, abnormally directed and ineffective for moral good--of that sublime spiritual wisdom, which, turned to its proper ends and aided by the highest intellectual powers, is present--to take a lofty exemplar--in his Pope of _The Ring and the Book_. It is not through spiritualism so-called that Sludge has received his little grain of truth; that has only darkened the glimmer of true light which was in him. Yet liar and cheat and coward, he is saved from a purely phantasmal existence by this fibre of reality which was part of his original structure. The epilogue--Sludge's outbreak against his corrupter and tormentor--stands as evidence of the fact that no purifying, no cleansing, no really illuminating power remains in what is now only a putrescent luminosity within him. His rage is natural and dramatically true; a n.o.ble rage would be to his honour. This is a base and poisonous pa.s.sion with no virtue in it, and the pa.s.sion, flaring for a moment, sinks idly into as base a fingering of Sludge's disgraceful gains.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE VIA BOCCA DI LEONE, ROME, IN WHICH THE BROWNINGS STAYED.

_From a photograph._]

The summer and early autumn of 1853 were spent by Browning and his wife, as they had spent the same season four years previously, at the Baths of Lucca. Their house among the hills was shut in by a row of plane-trees in which by day the cicale were shrill; at evening fireflies lit up their garden. The green rus.h.i.+ng river--"a flas.h.i.+ng scimitar that cuts through the mountain"--the chestnut woods, the sheep-walks, "the villages on the peaks of the mountains like wild eagles," renewed their former delights.

On the longer excursions Browning slackened his footsteps to keep pace with his wife's donkey; basins of strawberries and cream refreshed the wanderers after their exertion. "Oh those jagged mountains," exclaims Mrs Browning, "rolled together like pre-Adamite beasts, and setting their teeth against the sky.... You may as well guess at a lion by a lady's lap-dog as at Nature by what you see in England. All honour to England, lanes and meadowland, notwithstanding. To the great trees above all." The sculptor Story and his family, whose acquaintance they had made in Florence before Casa Guidi had become their home, were their neighbours at the Baths, and Robert Lytton was for a time their guest.

Browning worked at his _Men and Women_, of which his wife was able to report in the autumn that it was in an advanced state. _In a Balcony_ was the most important achievement of the summer. "The scene of the declaration in _By the Fireside_" Mrs Orr informs us, "was laid in a little adjacent mountain-gorge to which Browning walked or rode."

Only a few weeks were given to Florence. In perfect autumnal weather the occupants of Casa Guidi started for Rome. The delightful journey occupied eight days, and on the way the church of a.s.sisi was seen, and the falls of Terni--"that pa.s.sion of the waters,"--so Mrs Browning describes it, "which makes the human heart seem so still." They entered Rome in a radiant mood.--"Robert and Penini singing." An apartment had been taken for them by their friends the Storys in the Via Bocca di Leone, and all was bright, warm, and full of comfort. Next morning a shadow fell upon their happiness--the Storys' little boy was seized with convulsions; in the evening he was dead.[57] A second child--a girl--was taken ill in the Brownings' house, and could not be moved from where she lay in a room below their apartment. Mrs Browning was in a panic for her own boy, though his apple-red cheeks spoke of health. Rome, for a time, was darkened with grief and anxiety; nor did the city itself impress her as she had expected: "It's a palimpsest Rome," she writes, "a watering-place written over the antique." The chief gains of these Roman months were those of friends.h.i.+p and pleasant acquaintances added to those already given by Italy. In rooms under those occupied by the Brownings was Page the American artist, who painted in colours then regarded as "Venetian," now almost darkened out of existence, as a gift for Mrs Browning, the portrait of Robert Browning exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1856. Browning himself wrote to Story with enthusiasm of Page's work. "I am much disappointed in it," wrote Dante Rossetti to Allingham, "and shall advise its non-exhibition." A second portrait painted at this time--that by Fisher--is familiar to us through a reproduction in the second volume of _The Letters of Mrs Browning_. A rash act of the morning of the day on which he entered Rome had deplorably altered Browning's appearance. In what his wife calls a fit of suicidal impatience, he perpetrated the high crime and misdemeanour, and appeared before her wholly unworthy of portraiture with clean-shaven cheeks and chin. "I cried when I saw him," she tells his sister, "I was so horror-struck." To mark the sin, his beard, when once again he recovered his good looks, was gray, but Mrs Browning cherished the opinion that the argentine touch, as she terms it, gave "a character of elevation and thought to his whole physiognomy." To complete this history, it may be added that in 1859 the moustache of his later portraits was first doubtfully permitted and was presently approved with decision as picturesque.[58]

Under all disadvantages of appearance Browning made his way triumphantly in the English and American society of Rome. The studios were open to him. In Gibson's he saw the tinted Venus--"rather a grisette than a G.o.ddess," p.r.o.nounced Mrs Browning. Harriet Hosmer, the young American sculptress, working with true independence, high aims and right woman's manliness, was both admired and loved. Thackeray, with his daughters, called at the apartment in the Bocca di Leone, bringing small-talk in "handfuls of glittering dust swept out of salons." Lockhart, snow-white in aspect, snow-cold in manner, gave Browning emphatic commendation, though of a negative kind--"He isn't at all," declared Lockhart, "like a d.a.m.ned literary man." But of many interesting acquaintances perhaps the most highly valued were f.a.n.n.y Kemble and her sister Adelaide Sartoris--f.a.n.n.y Kemble magnificent, "with her black hair and radiant smile," her sympathetic voice, "her eyes and eyelids full of utterance"--a very n.o.ble creature indeed; Mrs Sartoris, genial and generous, more tolerant than f.a.n.n.y of Mrs Browning's wayward enthusiasms, eloquent in talk and pa.s.sionate in song. "The Kembles,"

writes Mrs Browning, "were our gain in Rome."

Towards the end of May 1854 farewells were said, and the Brownings returned from Rome, to Florence by vettura. They had hoped to visit England, or if this should prove impracticable, to take shelter among the mountains from the summer heat. But needful coin on which they had reckoned did not arrive; and they resolved in prudence to sit still at Florence and eat their bread and macaroni as poor sensible folk should do. And Florence looked more beautiful than ever after Rome; the nightingales sang around the olive-trees and vineyards, not only by starlight and fire-fly-light but in the daytime. "I love the very stones of Florence," exclaims Mrs Browning. Her friend Miss Mitford, now in England, and sadly failing in health, hinted at a loan of money; but the answer was a prompt, "Oh no! My husband has a family likeness to Lucifer in being proud." There followed a tranquil and a happy time, and both _Men and Women_ and _Aurora Leigh_ maintained in the writers a deep inward excitement of the kind that leaves an enduring result. A little joint publication; _Two Poems by E.B.B. and R.B_., containing _A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London_ and _The Twins_, was sold at Miss Arabella Barrett's Ragged School bazaar in 1854. It is now a waif of literature which collectors prize. There is special significance in the _Date_ and _Dabitur_, the twins of Browning's poem, when we bear in mind the occasion with which it was originally connected.

In the early weeks of 1855 Mrs Browning was seriously ill; through feverish nights of coughing, she had in her husband a devoted nurse. His sleepless hours were troubled not only by anxiety on her account but by a pa.s.sionate interest in the heroisms and miseries, of his fellow countrymen during the Crimean winter: "when he is mild _he_ wishes the ministry to be torn to pieces in the streets, limb from limb." Gradually his wife regained health, but she had not long recovered when tidings of the death of Miss Mitford came to sadden her. Not until April did she feel once more a leap into life. Browning was now actively at work in antic.i.p.ation of printing his new volumes during the approaching visit to England. "He is four hours a day," his wife tells a correspondent, "engaged in dictating to a friend of ours who transcribes for him." And a little later she reports that they will take to England between them some sixteen thousand lines of verse, "eight on one side, eight on the other," her husband's total being already completed, her own still short of the sum by a thousand lines. Allowance, as she pleads, had to be made for time spent in seeing that "Penini's little trousers are creditably frilled and tucked." On the whole, notwithstanding illness and wrath directed against English ministerial blunders, this year of life in Florence had been rich in happiness--a "still dream-life, where if one is over-busy ever, the old tapestries on the walls and the pre-Giotto pictures ... surround us, ready to quiet us again."[59] London lodgings did not look inviting from the distance of Italy; but the summons north was a summons to work, and could not be set aside.

The midsummer of 1855 found Browning and his wife in 13 Dorset Street, London, and Browning's sister was with them. The faithful Wilson, Mrs Browning's maid, had married a Florentine, Ferdinando Romagnoli, and the husband also was now in their service. The weeks until mid-October were occupied with social pleasures and close proof-reading of the sheets of _Men and Women_[60] Browning took his young friend the artist Leighton to visit Ruskin, and was graciously received. Carlyle was, as formerly, "in great force, particularly in the d.a.m.natory clauses." But the weather was drooping, the skies misty, the air oppressive, and Mrs Browning, apart from these, had special causes of depression. Her married sister Henrietta was away in Taunton, and the cost of travel prevented the sisters from meeting. Arabella Barrett--"my one light in London" is Mrs Browning's word--was too soon obliged to depart to Eastbourne. And the Barrett household was disturbed by the undutifulness of a son who had been guilty of the unpardonable crime of marriage, and in consequence was now exiled from Wimpole Street. In body and soul Mrs Browning felt strong yearnings for the calm of Casa Guidi.

The year 1855 was a fortunate year for English poetry. _Men and Women_ was published in the autumn; the beautiful epilogue, addressed to E.B.B., "There they are, my fifty men and women," was written in Dorset Street. Tennyson's _Maud_ had preceded Browning's volumes by some months. It bewildered the critics, but his brother poet did justice to Tennyson's pa.s.sionate sequence of dramatic lyrics. And though London in mid-autumn had emptied itself Tennyson happened for a few days to be in town. Two evenings he gave to the Brownings, "dined with us," writes Mrs Browning, "smoked with us, opened his heart to us (and the second bottle of port), and ended by reading _Maud_ through from end to end, and going away at half-past two in the morning." His delightful frankness and simplicity charmed his hostess. "Think of his stopping in _Maud_," she goes on, "every now and then--'There's a wonderful touch! That's very tender! How beautiful that is!' Yes and it _was_ wonderful, tender, beautiful, and he read exquisitely in a voice like an organ, rather music than speech."

One of the few persons who were invited to meet Tennyson on this occasion, Mr W.M. Rossetti, is still living, and his record of that memorable evening ought not to be omitted. "The audience was a small one, the privilege accorded to each individual all the higher: Mr and Mrs Browning, Miss Browning, my brother, and myself, and I think there was one more--either Madox Brown or else [Holman] Hunt or Woolner ...

Tennyson, seated on a sofa in a characteristic att.i.tude, and holding the volume near his eyes ... read _Maud_ right through. My brother made two pen-and-ink sketches of him, and gave one of them to Browning. So far as I remember, the Poet-Laureate neither saw what Dante was doing, nor knew of it afterwards. His deep grand voice, with slightly chaunting intonation, was a n.o.ble vehicle for the perusal of mighty verse. On it rolled, sonorous and emotional. Dante Rossetti, according to Mr Hall Caine, spoke of the incident in these terms: 'I once heard Tennyson read _Maud_; and, whilst the fiery pa.s.sages were delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can compa.s.s, the softer pa.s.sages and the songs made the tears course down his cheeks.' ... After Tennyson and _Maud_ came Browning and _Fra Lippo Lippi_--read with as much sprightly variation as there was in Tennyson of sustained continuity. Truly a night of the G.o.ds, not to be remembered without pride and pang."[61] A quotation from a letter of Dante Rossetti to Allingham gives praise to Mrs Browning of a kind which resembles Lockhart's commendation of her husband: "What a delightful unliterary person Mrs Browning is to meet! During two evenings when Tennyson was at their house in London, Mrs Browning left Tennyson with her husband and William and me (who were the fortunate remnant of the male party) to discuss the universe, and gave all her attention to some certainly not very exciting ladies in the next room."[62] Without detracting from Mrs Browning's "unliterary" merits, one may conjecture that the ladies who proved unexciting to Rossetti were Arabella Barrett and Sarianna Browning.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 48: Browning's Essay on Sh.e.l.ley was reprinted by Dr Furnivall in "The Browning Society's Papers," 1881-84, Part I.]

[Footnote 49: Letters of E.B.B. ii. 284. On Milsand, the article "A French friend of Browning," by Th. Bentzon, is valuable and interesting.]

[Footnote 50: Mrs Orr says that Browning always thought Mrs Carlyle "a hard and unlovable woman"; she adds, "I believe little liking was lost between them." Mrs Ritchie, in her "Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning" (pp. 250, 251), tells with spirit the story of Browning and Mrs Carlyle's kettle, which, on being told to "put it down," in an absent mood he planted upon her new carpet. "Ye should have been more explicit," said Carlyle to his wife.]

[Footnote 51: See Letters of E.B.B. ii. 127.]

[Footnote 52: Letters of E.B.B. ii. 99.]

[Footnote 53: Letter of F. Tennyson, in Memoir of Alfred Tennyson, by his son, chapter xviii.]

[Footnote 54: Mr Kenyon's note, vol. ii. 142 of Letters of E.B.B.]

[Footnote 55: _Times Lit. Supplement_, Dec. 5, 1902.]

[Footnote 56: Miss Cobbe's testimony is similar, and Lehmann says that at Home's name Browning would grow pale with pa.s.sion.]

[Footnote 57: See "Story and his Friends," by Henry James, 1903, vol. i.

pp. 284, 285.]

[Footnote 58: Letters of E.B.B., ii. 345.]