Robert Browning

Once more the July heat in Florence—"a composition of Gehenna and Paradise"—drove the Brownings to the Baths of Lucca. Miss Blagden followed them, and also young Lytton came, ailing, it was thought, from exposure to the sun. His indisposition soon grew serious and declared itself as a gastric fever. For eight nights Isa Blagden sat by his bedside as nurse; for eight other nights Browning took her place. His own health remained vigorous. Each morning he bathed in a rapid mountain stream; each evening and morning he rode a mountain pony; and in due time he had the happiness of seeing the patient, although still weak and hollow cheeked, convalescent and beginning to think of "poems and apple puddings," as Mrs Browning declares, "in a manner other than celestial." It had been a summer, she said in September, full of blots, vexations, anxieties. Three days after these words were written a new and grave anxiety troubled her and her husband, for their son, who had been looking like a rose—"like a rose possessed by a fairy" is his mother's description—was attacked in the same way as Lytton. "Don't be unhappy for me" said Pen; "think it's a poor little boy in the street, and be just only a little sorry, and not unhappy at all." Within less than a fortnight he was well enough to have "agonising visions of beefsteak pies and buttered toast seen in mirage"; but his mother mourned for the rosy cheeks and round fat little shoulders, and confessed that she herself was worn out in body and soul.

The winter at Florence was the coldest for many years; the edges of the Arno were frozen; and in the spring of 1858 Mrs Browning felt that her powers of resistance, weakened by a year of troubles and anxieties, had fallen low. Browning himself was in vigorous health. When he called in June on Hawthorne he looked younger and even handsomer than he had looked two years previously, and his gray hairs seemed fewer. "He talked," Hawthorne goes on, "a wonderful quantity in a little time." That evening the Hawthornes spent at Casa Guidi. Mrs Browning is described by the American novelist as if she were one of the singular creatures of his own imagination—no earthly woman but one of the elfin race, yet sweetly disposed towards human beings; a wonder of charm in littleness; with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice; "there is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster into her neck, and make her face look whiter by their sable perfection." Browning himself was "very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment; a most vivid and quick-thoughted person—logical and common-sensible, as, I presume, poets generally are in their daily talk." "His conversation," says Hawthorne, speaking of a visit to Miss Blagden at Bellosguardo, "has the effervescent aroma which you cannot catch even if you get the very words that seem to be imbued with it.... His nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child."

When summer came it was decided to join Browning's father and sister in Paris, and accompany them to some French seaside resort, where Mrs Browning could have the benefit of a course of warm salt-water baths. To her the sea was a terror, but railway-travelling was repose, and Browning suggested on the way from Marseilles to Paris that they might "ride, ride together, for ever ride" during the remainder of their lives in a first-class carriage with for-ever renewed supplies of French novels and Galignanis. They reached Paris on the elder Mr Browning's birthday, and found him radiant at the meeting with his son and grandson, looking, indeed, ten years younger than when they had last seen his face. Paris, Mrs Browning declares, was her "weakness," Italy her "passion"; Florence itself was her "chimney-corner," where she "could sulk and be happy." The life of the brilliant city, which "murmurs so of the fountain of intellectual youth for ever and ever," quickened her heart-beats; its new architectural splendours told of the magnificence in design and in its accomplishment of her hero the Emperor. And here she and her husband met their helpful friend of former days, Father Prout, and they were both grieved and cheered by the sight of Lady Elgin, a paralytic, in her garden-chair, not able to articulate a word, but bright and gracious as ever, "the eloquent soul full and radiant, alive to both worlds." The happiness in presence of such a victory of the spirit was greater than the pain.

Having failed to find agreeable quarters at Etretat, where Browning in a "fine phrenzy" had hired a wholly unsuitable house with a potato-patch for view, and escaped from his bad bargain, a loser of some francs, at his wife's entreaty, they settled for a short time at Havre—"detestable place," Mrs Browning calls it—in a house close to the sea and surrounded by a garden. On a bench by the shore Mrs Browning could sit and win back a little strength in the bright August air. The stay at Havre, depressing to Browning's spirits, was for some eight weeks. In October they were again in Paris, where Mrs Browning's sister, Arabel, was their companion. The year was far advanced and a visit to England was not in contemplation. Towards the middle of the month they were once more in motion, journeying by slow stages to Florence. A day was spent at Chambéry "for the sake of les Charmettes and Rousseau." When Casa Guidi was at length reached, it was only a halting-place on the way to Rome. Winter had suddenly rushed in and buried all Italy in snow; but when they started for Rome in a carriage kindly lent by their American friends, the Eckleys, it was again like summer. The adventures of the way were chiefly of a negative kind—occasioned by precipices over which they were not thrown, and banditti who never came in sight; but in a quarrel between oxen-drivers, one of whom attacked the other with a knife, Browning with characteristic energy dashed between them to the terror of the rest of the party; his garments were the only serious sufferers from his zeal as mediator.

The apartment engaged at Rome was that of the earlier visit of 1853-54, in the Via Bocca di Leone, "rooms swimming all day in sunshine." On Christmas morning Mrs Browning was able to accompany her husband to St Peter's to hear the silver trumpets. But January froze the fountains, and the north wind blew with force. Mrs Browning had just completed a careful revision of Aurora Leigh, and now she could rest, enjoy the sunshine streaming through their six windows, or give herself up to the excitement of Italian politics as seen through the newspapers in the opening of a most eventful year. "Robert and I," she wrote on the eve of the declaration of war between Austria and Victor Emmanuel, "have been of one mind lately on these things, which comforts me much." She had also the satisfaction of health enjoyed at least by proxy, for her husband had never been more full of vigour and the spirit of enjoyment. In the freezing days of January he was out of his bed at six o'clock, and away for a brisk morning walk with Mr Eckley. The loaf at breakfast diminished "by Gargantuan slices." Into the social life of Rome he threw himself with ardour. For a fortnight immediately after Christmas he was out every night, sometimes with double and treble engagements. "Dissipations," says Mrs Browning, "decidedly agree with Robert, there's no denying that, though he's horribly hypocritical, and 'prefers an evening with me at home.'" He gathered various coloured fragments of life from the outer world and brought them home to brighten her hours of imprisonment.

When they returned to Florence in May the Grand Duke had withdrawn, the city was occupied by French troops, and there was unusual animation in the streets. Browning shared to some extent in his wife's alienation from the policy of England, and believed, but with less than her enthusiastic confidence, in the good intentions towards Italy of the French Emperor. He subscribed his ten scudi a month to the Italian war-fund, and rewarded Pen for diligence in his lessons with half a paul a day, which the boy might give as his own contribution to the cause of Italian independence. The French and the Italian tricolour flags, displayed by Pen, adorned the terrace. In June the sun beat upon Florence with unusual fierceness, but it was a month of battles, and with bulletins of the war arriving twice a day they could not bear to remove to any quiet retreat at a distance from the centre. It was not curiosity that detained them but the passion for Italy, the joy in generous effort and great deeds. In the rebound, as Mrs Browning expresses it, from high-strung hopes and fears for Italy they found themselves drawn to the theatre, where Salvini gave his wonderful impersonation of Othello and his Hamlet, "very great in both, Robert thought," so commented Mrs Browning, "as well as I."72 The strain of excitement was indeed excessive for Mrs Browning's failing physical strength; there was in it something almost febrile. Yet the fact is noteworthy that the romantic figures secured much less of her interest than the men of prudent statesmanship. She esteemed Cavour highly; she wholly distrusted Mazzini. She justified Louis Napoleon in concessions which she regarded as an unavoidable part of diplomacy directed to ends which could not be immediately attained. Garibaldi was a "hero," but somewhat alarming in his heroisms—a "grand child," "not a man of much brain." After the victories of Magenta and Solferino came what seemed to many the great betrayal of Villafranca. For a day the busts and portraits of the French Emperor suddenly disappeared from the shop-windows of Florence, and even Mrs Browning would not let her boy wear his Napoleon medal. But the busts returned to their places, and Mrs Browning's faith in Napoleon sprang up anew; it was not he who was the criminal; the selfish powers of Europe had "forced his hand" and "truncated his great intentions." She rejoiced in the magnificent spectacle of dignity and calm presented by the people of Italy. And yet her fall from the clouds to earth on the announcement of peace with Austria was a shattering experience. Sleep left her, or if she slept her dreams were affected by "inscrutable articles of peace and endless provisional governments." Night after night her husband watched beside her, and in the day he not only gave his boy the accustomed two hours' lesson on the piano, but replaced the boy's mother as teacher of those miscellaneous lessons, which had been her educational province. "Robert has been perfect to me," expressed Mrs Browning's feelings in a word.

Another anxiety gave Browning an opportunity which he turned to account in a way that renders honour and gratitude his due from all lovers of English letters. At a great old age Landor, who resided with his family at Fiesole, still retained his violent and intractable temper; in his home there was much to excite his leonine wrath and sense of intolerable wrong. Three times he had quitted his villa, with vows never to return to it, and three times he had been led back. When for a fourth time—like a feeble yet majestic Lear—one hot summer day, toward noon, he flung himself, or was flung, out of doors with only a few pauls in his pocket, it was to Casa Guidi that he made his way broken-hearted, yet breathing forth wrath.73 Browning had often said, as his wife tells her sister-in-law, that he owed more as a writer to Landor than to any other contemporary.74 He resolved to set things right, if possible; and if not, to make the best of a case that could not be entirely amended. A visit to the villa assured him that reconciliation was out of the question. He provided for Landor's immediate wants; communicated with Landor's brothers in England, who were prompt in arranging for a regular allowance to be administered by Browning; became the old man's guide and guardian; soothed his wounded spirit, although, according to Mrs Browning, not often happy when he attempted compliments, with generous words and ready quotations from Landor's own writings; and finally settled him in Florence under the care of Mrs Browning's faithful maid Wilson, who watched over him during the remainder of his life.75 To his incredulous wife Browning spoke of Landor's sweetness and gentleness, nor was he wrong in ascribing these qualities to the old lion. She admitted that he had generous impulses, but feared that her husband would before long become, like other friends of Landor, the object of some enraged suspicion. "Nothing coheres in him," she writes, "either in his opinions, or, I fear, affections." But Landor, whose courtesy and refinement she acknowledges, had also a heart that was capable of loyal love and gratitude. After the first burst of rage against the Fiesole household had spent itself, he beguiled the time in perpetuating his indignations in an innocent and classical form—that of Latin alcaics directed against one private and one public foe—his wife and the Emperor Louis Napoleon.76

Lander's affairs threatened to detain the Brownings in Florence longer than they desired, now that peace had come and it was not indispensable to run out of doors twice a day in order to inspect the bulletins. But after three weeks of very exhausting illness, Mrs Browning needed change of air. As soon as her strength allowed, she was lifted into a carriage and they journeyed, as in the year 1850, to the neighbourhood of Siena. She reached the villa which had been engaged by Story's aid, with the sense of "a peculiar frailty of being." Though confined to the house, the fresher air by day and the night winds gradually revived her strength and spirits. The silence and repose were "heavenly things" to her: the "pretty dimpled ground covered by low vineyards" rested her eyes and her mind; and for excitements, instead of reports of battle-fields there were slow-fading scarlet sunsets over purple hills. A kind Prussian physician, Gresonowsky, who had attended Mrs Browning in Florence, and who entered sympathetically into her political feelings, followed her uninvited to Siena and gave her the benefit of his care, declining all recompense. The good friends from America, the Storys, were not far off, and Landor, after a visit to Story, was placed in occupation of rooms not a stone's-cast from their villa. With Pen it was a time of rejoicing, for his father had bought the boy a Sardinian pony of the colour of his curls, and he was to be seen galloping through the lanes "like Puck," to use Browning's comparison, on a dragon-fly's back.77

The gipsy instinct, the desire of wandering, had greatly declined with both husband and wife since the earlier days in Italy. Yet when they returned to Casa Guidi it was only for six weeks. Even at the close of the visit to Siena Mrs Browning had recovered but a slender modicum of strength; she did not dare to enter the cathedral, for there were steps to climb. At Florence she felt her old vitality return and her spirits rose. But the climate of Rome was considered by Dr Gresonowsky more suitable for winter, and towards the close of November they took their departure, flying from the Florentine tramontana. The carriage was furnished with novels of Balzac, and Pen's pony was of the party. The rooms taken in the Via del Tritone were bright and sunny; but a rash visit to the jeweller Castellani, to see and touch the swords presented by Roman citizens to Napoleon III. and Victor Emmanuel, threw back Mrs Browning into all her former troubles of a delicate chest and left her "as weak as a rag." Tidings of the death of Lady Elgin seemed to tell only of a peaceful release from a period of imprisonment in the body, but the loss of Mrs Jameson was a painful blow. Rome at a time of grave political apprehensions was almost empty of foreigners; but among the few Americans who had courage to stay were the sculptor Gibson and Theodore Parker—now near the close of his life—whose tête-à-têtes were eloquent of beliefs and disbeliefs. As the spring advanced the authoress of "The Mill on the Floss" was reported to be now and again visible in Rome, "with her elective affinity," as Mrs Browning puts it, "on the Corso walking, or in the Vatican musing. Always together." A grand-daughter of Lord Byron—"very quiet and very intense"—was among the visitors at the Via del Tritone, and Lady Marion Alford, "very eager about literature and art and Robert," for all which eagernesses Mrs Browning felt bound to care for her. The artists Burne-Jones and Prinsep had made Browning's acquaintance at Siena; Prinsep now introduced him to some of the by-ways of popular life in Rome. Together they witnessed the rivalry of two improvisatori poetic gamecocks, whose efforts were stimulated by the announcement that a great poet from England was present; together they listened to the forbidden Hymn to Garibaldi played in Gigi's osteria, witnessed the dignified blindness of the Papal gendarmes to the offence, while Gigi liberally plied them with drink; and together, to relieve the host of all fear of more revolutionary airs, they took carriages with their musicians and drove to see the Coliseum by moonlight.78

The project of a joint volume of poems on the Italian question by Browning and his wife, which had made considerable progress towards realisation, had been dropped after Villafranca, when Browning destroyed his poem; but Mrs Browning had advanced alone and was now revising proofs of her slender contribution to the poetry of politics, Poems before Congress. She wrote them, she says, simply to deliver her soul—"to get the relief to my conscience and heart, which comes from a pent-up word spoken or a tear shed." She can hardly have anticipated that they would be popular in England; but she was not prepared for one poem which denounced American slavery being misinterpreted into a curse pronounced upon England. "Robert was furious" against the offending Review, she says; "I never saw him so enraged about a criticism;" but by-and-by he "didn't care a straw." His wife, on the other hand, was more deeply pained by the blindness and deafness of the British public towards her husband's genius; nobody "except a small knot of pre-Rafaelite men" did him justice; his publisher's returns were a proof of this not to be gainsaid—not one copy of his poems had for six months been sold, while in America he was already a power. For the poetry of political enthusiasm he had certainly no vocation. When Savoy was surrendered to France Mrs Browning suffered some pain lest her Emperor's generosity might seem compromised. Browning admitted that the liberation of Italy was a great action, adding cynically of his future Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, "But he has taken eighteen-pence for it, which is a pity." During the winter he wrote much. "Robert deserves no reproaches," his wife tells her friend Miss Haworth in May, "for he has been writing a good deal this winter—working at a long poem, which I have not seen a line of, and producing short lyrics which I have seen, and may declare worthy of him." Mr F.G. Kenyon conjectures that the long poem is not unlikely to have been Mr Sludge the Medium, for Home's performances, as he says, were at this time rampant.79 As hitherto, both husband and wife showed their poems each to the other only when the poems were complete; thus like a pair of hardy friends they maintained their independence. Even when they read, there was no reading aloud; Mrs Browning was indefatigable in her passion for books; her husband, with muscular energy impatient for action, found it impossible to read for long at a single sitting.

On June 4th 1860 they left Rome, travelling by vettura through Orvieto and Chiusi to their home in Florence.80 The journey fatigued Mrs Browning, but on arriving they had the happiness of finding Landor well; he looked not less than magnificent, displaying "the most beautiful sea-foam of a beard … all in a curl and white bubblement of beauty." Wilson had the old man under happy control; only once had he thrown his dinner out of the window; that he should be at odds with all the world was inevitable, and that all the world should be in the wrong was exhilarating and restorative. The plans for the summer were identical with those of the preceding year; the same "great lonely villa" near Siena was occupied again; the same "deep soothing silence" lapped to rest Mrs Browning's spirits; Landor, her "adopted son"—a son of eighty-six years old—was hard by as he had been last summer. The neighbourhood of Miss Blagden was this year an added pleasure. "The little eager lady," as Henry James describes her, "with gentle, gay black eyes," had seen much, read much, written already a little (with more to follow), but better than all else were her generous heart and her helpful hand. The season was one of unusual coolness for Italy. Pen's pony, as before, flashed through the lanes and along the roads. Browning had returned from Rome in robust health, and looking stouter in person than six months previously. Now, while a tenant of the Villa Alberti, he spent his energies in long rides, sometimes rides of three or four continuous hours. On returning from such careers on horseback little inclination, although he had his solitary room in which to work, remained for the pursuit of poetry.

The departure for Rome was early—about September; in the Via Felice rooms were found. A new and great sorrow had fallen upon Mrs Browning—her sister Henrietta, Mrs Surtees Cook, was dead, leaving behind her three young children. Mrs Browning could not shed tears nor speak of her grief: she felt tired and beaten by the pain; and tried to persuade herself that for one who believed the invisible world to be so near, such pain was but a weakness. Her husband was able to do little, but he shared in his degree in the sense of loss, and protected her from the intrusion of untimely visitors. Sir John Bowring was admitted because he presented a letter of introduction and had intimate relations with the French Emperor; his ridicule of the volunteer movement in England, with its cry of "Riflemen, form!" was grateful to Mrs Browning's political feelings. French troops were now in Rome; their purpose was somewhat ambiguous; but Pen had fraternised with the officers on the Pincio, had learnedly discussed Chopin and Stephen Heller with them, had been assured that they did not mean to fight for the Holy Father, and had invited "ever so many of them" to come and see mamma—an invitation which they were too discreet to accept. Mrs Browning's excitement about public affairs had somewhat abated; yet she watched with deep interest the earlier stages of the great struggle in America; and she did not falter in her hopes for Italy; by intrigues and smuggling the newspapers which she wished to see were obtained through the courteous French generals. But her spirits were languid; "I gather myself up by fits and starts," she confesses, "and then fall back."

Apart from his anxieties for his wife's health and the unfailing pleasure in his boy, whom a French or Italian abbé now instructed, Browning was wholly absorbed in one new interest. He had long been an accomplished musician; in Paris he had devoted himself to drawing; now his passion was for modelling in clay, and the work proceeded under the direction and in the studio of his friend, the sculptor Story. His previous studies in anatomy stood him in good stead; he made remarkable progress, and six hours a day passed as if in an enchantment. He ceased even to read; "nothing but clay does he care for," says Mrs Browning smilingly, "poor lost soul." The union of intellectual energy with physical effort in such work gave him the complete satisfaction for which he craved. His wife "grudged a little," she says, the time stolen from his special art of poetry; but she saw that his health and spirits gained from his happy occupation. Of late, he had laboured irregularly at verse; fits of active effort were followed by long intervals during which production seemed impossible. And some vent was necessary for the force coiled up within him; if this were not to be obtained, he wore himself out with a nervous impatience—"beating his dear head," as Mrs Browning describes it, "against the wall, simply because he sees a fly there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some Saurian monster." Now he was well and even exultant—"nothing ever," he declared, "made him so happy before." Of advancing years—Browning was now nearly forty-nine—the only symptoms were that he had lost his youthful slightness of figure, and that his beard and hair were somewhat blanched by time. "The women," his wife wrote to his sister, "adore him everywhere far too much for decency," and to herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him. On the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot. Afterwards, in his days of sorrow in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness of a year; he longed for the smell of the wet clay in Story's studio, where the songs of the birds, and the bleat of a goat coming through the little door to the left, were heard.81