Already Browning had in view the collected edition of his Poetical Works which did not appear until 1849. The poems were to be made so lucid, "that everyone who understood them hitherto" was to "lose that mark of distinction." Paracelsus and Pippa were to be revised with special care. The sales reported by Moxon were considered satisfactory; but of course the profits as yet were those of his wife's poems. "She is," he wrote to his publisher, "there as in all else, as high above me as I would have her."

It was at Pisa that the highest evidence of his wife's powers as a poet came as an unexpected and wonderful gift to her husband. In a letter of December 1845—more than a year since—she had confessed that she was idle; and yet "silent" was a better word she thought than "idle." Her apology was that the apostle Paul probably did not work hard at tent-making during the week that followed his hearing of the unspeakable things. At the close of a letter written on July 22, 1846, she wrote: "You shall see some day at Pisa what I will not show you now. Does not Solomon say that 'there is a time to read what is written?' If he doesn't, he ought." The time to read had now come. "One day, early in 1847," as Mr Gosse records what was told to him by Browning, "their breakfast being over, Mrs Browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table should be cleared. He was presently aware of someone behind him, although the servant was gone. It was Mrs Browning who held him by the shoulder to prevent his turning to look at her, and at the same time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his coat. She told him to read that, and to tear it up if he did not like it; and then she fled again to her own room." The papers were a transcript of those ardent poems which we know as "Sonnets from the Portuguese." Some copies were printed at Reading in 1847 for private circulation with the title "Sonnets by E.B.B." The later title under which they appeared among Mrs Browning's Poems in the edition of 1850 was of Browning's suggestion. His wife's proposal to name them "Sonnets from the Bosnian" was dismissed with words which allude to a poem of hers, "Catarina to Camoens," that had long been specially dear to him: "Bosnian, no! that means nothing. From the Portuguese: they are Catarina's sonnets!"

Pisa with all its charm lacked movement and animation. It was decided to visit Florence in April, and there enjoy for some days the society of Mrs Jameson before she left Italy. The coupe of the diligence was secured, and on April 20th Mrs Jameson's "wild poets but wise people" arrived at Florence. An excellent apartment was found in the Via delle Belle Donne near the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and for Browning's special delight a grand piano was hired. When Mrs Browning had sufficiently recovered strength to view the city and its surroundings her pleasure was great: "At Pisa we say, 'How beautiful!' here we say nothing; it is enough if we can breathe." They had hoped for summer wanderings in Northern Italy; but Florence held them throughout the year except for a few days during which they attempted in vain to find a shelter from the heat among the pines of Vallombrosa. Provided with a letter of recommendation to the abbot they set forth from their rooms at early morning by vettura and from Pelago onwards, while Browning rode, Mrs Browning and Wilson in basket sledges were slowly drawn towards the monastery by white bullocks. A new abbot, a little holy man with a red face, had been recently installed, who announced that in his nostrils "a petticoat stank." Yet in the charity of his heart he extended the three days ordinarily permitted to visitors in the House of Strangers to five; during which period beef and oil, malodorous bread and wine and passages from the "Life of San Gualberto" were vouchsafed to heretics of both sexes; the mountains and the pinewoods in their solemn dialect spoke comfortable words.

"Rolling or sliding down the precipitous path" they returned to Florence in a morning glory, very merry, says Mrs Browning, for disappointed people. Shelter from the glare of August being desirable, a suite of comparatively cool rooms in the Palazzo Guidi were taken; they were furnished in good taste, and opened upon a terrace—"a sort of balcony terrace which ... swims over with moonlight in the evenings." From Casa Guidi windows—and before long Mrs Browning was occupied with the first part of her poem—something of the life of Italy at a moment of peculiar interest could be observed. Europe in the years 1847 and 1848 was like a sea broken by wave after wave of Revolutionary passion. Browning and his wife were ardently liberal in their political feeling; but there were differences in the colours of their respective creeds and sentiments; Mrs Browning gave away her imagination to popular movements; she was also naturally a hero-worshipper; she hoped more enthusiastically than he was wont to do; she was more readily depressed; the word "liberty" for her had an aureole or a nimbus which glorified all its humbler and more prosaic meanings. Browning, although in this year 1847 he made a move towards an appointment as secretary to a mission to the Vatican, at heart cared little for men in groups or societies; he cared greatly for individuals, for the growth of individual character. He had faith in a forward movement of society; but the law of social evolution, as he conceived it, is not in the hands of political leaders or ministers of state. He valued liberty chiefly because each man here on earth is in process of being tested, in process of being formed, and liberty is the condition of a man's true probation and development. Late in life he was asked to give his answer to the question: "Why am I a Liberal?" and he gave it succinctly in a sonnet which he did not reprint in any edition of his Works, although it received otherwise a wide circulation. It may be cited here as a fragment of biography:

"Why?" Because all I haply can and do, All that I am now, all I hope to be,— Whence comes it save from fortune setting free Body and soul the purpose to pursue, God traced for both? If fetters, not a few, Of prejudice, convention, fall from me, These shall I bid men—each in his degree Also God-guided—bear, and gladly too?

But little do or can the best of us: That little is achieved through Liberty. Who then dares hold—emancipated thus— His fellow shall continue bound? Not I Who live, love, labour freely, nor discuss A brother's right to freedom. That is "Why."[40]

This is an excellent reason for the faith that was in Browning; he holds that individual progress depends on individual freedom, and by that word he understands not only political freedom but also emancipation from intellectual narrowness and the bondage of injurious convention. But Browning in his verse, setting aside the early Strafford, nowhere celebrates a popular political movement; he nowhere chaunts a paean, in the manner of Byron or Shelley, in honour of the abstraction "Liberty." Nor does he anywhere study political phenomena or events except as they throw light upon an individual character. Things and persons that gave him offence he could summarily dismiss from his mind—"Thiers is a rascal; I make a point of not reading one word said by M. Thiers"; "Proudhon is a madman; who cares for Proudhon?" "The President's an ass; he is not worth thinking of."[41] This may be admirable economy of intellectual force; but it is not the way to understand the course of public events; it does not indicate a political or a historical sense. And, indeed, his writings do not show that Browning possessed a political or a historical sense in any high degree, save as a representative person may be conceived by him as embodying a phase of civilisation. When Mrs Trollope called at Casa Guidi, Browning was only reluctantly present; she had written against liberal institutions and against the poetry of Victor Hugo, and that was enough. Might it not have been more truly liberal to be patient and understand the grounds of her prejudice? "Blessed be the inconsistency of men!" exclaimed Mrs Browning, for whose sake he tolerated the offending authoress until by and by he came to like in her an agreeable woman.

On the anniversary of their wedding day Browning and his wife saw from their window a brilliant procession of grateful and enthusiastic Florentines stream into the Piazza. Pitti with banners and vivas for the space of three hours and a half It was the time when the Grand Duke was a patriot and Pio Nono was a liberal. The new helmets and epaulettes of the civic guard proclaimed the glories of genuine freedom. The pleasure of the populace was like that of children, and perhaps it had some serious feeling behind it. The incomparable Grand Duke had granted a liberal constitution, and was led back from the opera to the Pitti by the torchlights of a cheering crowd—"through the dark night a flock of stars seemed sweeping up the piazza." A few months later, and the word of Mrs Browning is "Ah, poor Italy"; the people are attractive, delightful, but they want conscience and self reverence.[42] Browning and she painfully felt that they grew cooler and cooler on the subject of Italian patriotism. A revolution had been promised, but a shower of rain fell and the revolution was postponed. Now it was the Grand Duke out, and the bells rang, and a tree of liberty was planted close to the door of Casa Guidi; six weeks later it was the Grand Duke in, and the same bells rang, and the tree of liberty was pulled down. The Pope is well-meaning but weak; and before long honorific epithets have to be denied him—he is merely a Pope; his prestige and power over souls is lost. The liberal Grand Duke is transformed into a Duke decorated with Austrian titles. As for France, Mrs Browning had long since learnt from the books she read with so much delight to feel a debt to the country of Balzac and George Sand. She thought that the unrest and the eager hopes of the French Revolution, notwithstanding its errors, indicated at least the conception of a higher ideal than any known to the English people. Browning did not possess an equal confidence in France; he did not accept her view that the French occupation of Rome was capable of justification; nor did he enter into her growing hero-worship—as yet far from its full development—of Louis Napoleon. Her admiration for Balzac he shared, and it is probable that the death of the great novelist moved him to keener regret than did the death, at no considerable distance of time, of Wordsworth. With French communism or socialism neither husband nor wife, however republican in their faith, had sympathy; they held that its tendency is to diminish the influence of the individual, and that in the end the progress of the mass is dependent on the starting forth from the mass and the striding forward of individual minds. They believed as firmly as did Edmund Burke in the importance of what Burke styles a natural aristocracy.

For four years—from 1847 to 1851—Browning never crossed the confines of Italy. No duties summoned him away, and he was happy in his home. "We are as happy," he wrote in December 1847, "as two owls in a hole, two toads under a tree-stump; or any other queer two poking creatures that we let live after the fashion of their black hearts, only Ba is fat and rosy; yes indeed." In spring they drove day by day through the Cascine, passing on the way the carven window of the Statue and the Bust, and "the stone called Dante's," whereupon

He used to bring his quiet chair out, turned To Brunelleschi's church.[43]

And after tea there was the bridge of Trinita from which to watch the sunsets turning the Arno to pure gold while the moon and the evening-star hung aloft. It was a life of retirement and of quiet work. Mrs Browning mentions to a friend that for fifteen months she could not make her husband spend a single evening out—"not even to a concert, nor to hear a play of Alfieri's," but what with music and books and writing and talking, she adds, "we scarcely know how the days go, it's such a gallop on the grass." The "writing" included the revision and preparation for the press of Browning's Poems, in two volumes, which Chapman & Hall, more liberal than Moxon, had undertaken to publish at their own risk, and which appeared in 1849. Some care and thought were also given by Browning to the alterations of text made in the edition of his wife's Poems of the following year; and for a time his own Christmas Eve and Easter Day was an absorbing occupation. As to the "reading," the chief disadvantage of Florence towards the middle of the last century was the difficulty of seeing new books of interest, whether French or English. Yet Vanity Fair and The Princess, Jane Eyre and Modern Painters somehow found their way to Casa Guidi.[44]

Casa Guidi proper, the Casa Guidi which held the books and pictures and furniture and graceful knick-knacks chosen by its occupants, who were lovers of beauty, dates only from 1848. Previously they had been satisfied with a furnished apartment. Not long before the unfurnished rooms were hired, a mistake in choosing rooms which suffered from the absence of sunshine and warmth gave Browning an opportunity of displaying what to his wife's eyes appeared to be unexampled magnanimity. The six months' rent was promptly paid, and chambers on the Pitti "yellow with sunshine from morning to evening" were secured. "Any other man, a little lower than the angels," his wife assured Miss Mitford, "would have stamped and sworn a little for the mere relief of the thing, but as to his being angry with me for any cause, except not eating enough dinner, the sun would turn the wrong way first." It seemed an excellent piece of economy to take the spacious suite of unfurnished rooms in the Via Maggio, now distinguished by the inscription known to all visitors to Florence, which were to be had for twenty-five guineas a year, and which, when furnished, might be let during any prolonged absence for a considerable sum. The temptation of a ground-floor in the Frescobaldi Palace, and a garden bright with camellias, to which Browning for a time inclined, was rejected. At Casa Guidi the double terrace where orange-trees and camellias also might find a place made amends for the garden with its threatening cloud of mosquitoes, "worse than Austrians"; every need of space and height, of warmth and coolness seemed to be met; and it only remained to expend the welcome proceeds of the sale of books in the recreation of gathering together "rococo chairs, spring sofas, carved bookcases, satin from cardinals' beds and the rest." Before long Browning amused himself in picking up for a few pauls this or that picture, on seeing which an accomplished connoisseur, like Kirkup, would even hazard the name of Cimabue or Ghirlandaio, or if not that of Giotto, then the safer adjective Giottesque.

Although living the life of retirement which his wife's uncertain state of health required, Browning gradually obtained the acquaintance of several interesting persons, of whom Kirkup, who has just been mentioned, was one. "As to Italian society," wrote Mrs Browning, "one may as well take to longing for the evening star, for it seems quite inaccessible." But the name of Elizabeth Barrett, if not yet that of Robert Browning, was a sufficient introduction to cultivated Englishmen and Americans who had made Florence their home. Among the earliest of these acquaintances were the American sculptor Powers, Swedenborgian and spiritualist (a simple and genial man, "with eyes like a wild Indian's, so black and full of light"), and Hillard, the American lawyer, who, in his Six months in Italy, described Browning's conversation as "like the poetry of Chaucer," meaning perhaps that it was hearty, fresh, and vigorous, "or like his own poetry simplified and made transparent." "It seems impossible," Hillard goes on, "to think that he can ever grow old." And of Mrs Browning: "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl." A third American friend was one who could bring tidings of Emerson and Hawthorne—Margaret Fuller of "The Dial," now Countess d'Ossoli, "far better than her writings," says Mrs Browning, "... not only exalted but exaltee in her opinions, yet calm in manner." Her loss, with that of her husband, on their voyage to America deeply affected Mrs Browning. "Was she happy in anything?" asks her sorrowing friend. The first person seen on Italian soil when Browning and his wife disembarked at Leghorn was the brilliant and erratic Irish priest, "Father Prout" of Fraser's Magazine, who befriended them with good spirits and a potion of eggs and port wine when Browning was ill in Florence, and chided Mrs Browning as a "bambina" for her needless fears. Charles Lever "with the sunniest of faces and cordialest of manners"—animal spirits preponderating a little too much over an energetic intellect—called on them at the Baths of Lucca, but the acquaintance did not ripen into friendship. And little Miss Boyle, one of the family of the Earls of Cork, would come at night, at the hour of chestnuts and mulled wine, to sparkle as vivaciously as the pine-log that warmed her feet. These, with the Hoppners, known to Shelley and Byron, a French sculptress of royalist sympathies, Mlle. de Fauveau, much admired by Browning, and one of the grandsons of Goethe, who flits into and out of the scene, were a compensation for the repulsiveness of certain English folk at Florence who gathered together only for the frivolities, and worse than frivolities, of foreign wayfaring.

In March 1849 joy and sorrow met and mingled in the lives of Browning and his wife. On the ninth of that month a son was born at Casa Guidi, who six weeks later was described by his mother as "a lovely, fat, strong child, with double chin and rosy cheeks and a great wide chest." He was baptised, with the simple Lutheran rites, Robert Wiedemann Barrett—the "Wiedemann" in remembrance of the maiden name of Browning's mother. From the first, Browning and his wife, to adopt a phrase from one of her letters, caught up their parental pleasures with a sort of passion.[45] Mrs Browning's letters croon with happiness in the beauty, the strength, the intelligence, the kind-hearted disposition of her boy. And the boy's father, from the days when he would walk up and down the terrace of Casa Guidi with the infant in his arms to the last days of his life, felt to the full the gladness and the repose that came with this strong bondage of his heart. When little Wiedemann could frame imperfect speech upon his lips he transformed that name into "Penini," which abbreviated to "Pen" became serviceable for domesticities. It was a fantastic derivation of Nathaniel Hawthorne which connected Penini with the colossal statue in Florence bearing the name of "Apeninno." Flush for a time grew jealous, and not altogether without cause.

But the joy was pursued and overtaken by sorrow. A few days after the birth of his son came tidings of the death of Browning's mother. He had loved her with a rare degree of passion; the sudden reaction from the happiness of his wife's safety and his son's birth was terrible; it almost seemed a wrong to his grief to admit into his consciousness the new gladness of the time. In this conflict of emotions his spirits and to some extent his health gave way. He could not think of returning to his father's home without extreme pain—"It would break his heart," he said, "to see his mother's roses over the wall, and the place where she used to lay her scissors and gloves." He longed that his father and sister should quit the home of sorrow, and hasten to Florence; but this was not to be. As for England, it could not be thought of as much on his wife's account as his own. Her father held no communication with her; supplicating letters remained unnoticed; her brothers were temporarily estranged. Her sister Henrietta had left her former home; having "insulted" her father by asking his consent to her marriage with Captain Surtees Cook, she had taken the matter into her own hands; the deed was done, and the name of his second undutiful daughter—married to a person of moderate means and odiously "Tractarian views"—was never again to be mentioned in Mr Barrett's presence. England had become for Mrs Browning a place of painful memories, and a centre of present strife which she did not feel herself as yet able to encounter.

The love of wandering, however, when successive summers came, and Florence was ablaze with sunshine, grew irresistible, and drove Browning and his household to seek elsewhere for fresh interests or for coolness and repose. In 1848, beguiled by the guide-book, they visited Fano to find it quivering with heat, "the very air swooning in the sun." Their reward at Fano was that picture by Guercino of the guardian angel teaching a child to pray, the thought of which Browning has translated into song:

We were at Fano, and three times we went To sit and see him in his chapel there, And drink his beauty to our soul's content —My angel with me too.

Ancona, where the poem was written, if its last line is historically true, followed Fano, among whose brown rocks, "elbowing out the purple tides," and brown houses—"an exfoliation of the rock"—they lived for a week on fish and cold water. The tour included Rimini and Ravenna, with a return to Florence by Forli and a passage through the Apennines. Next year—1849—when Pen was a few months old, the drop of gipsy blood in Browning's veins, to which his wife jestingly refers, tingled but faintly; it was Mrs Browning's part to compel him, for the baby's sake and hers, to seek his own good. They visited Spezzia and glanced at the house of Shelley at Lerici; passed through olive woods and vineyards, and rested in "a sort of eagle's nest" at the highest habitable point of the Baths of Lucca. Here the baby's great cheeks grew rosier; Browning gained in spirits; and his wife was able "to climb the hills and help him to lose himself in the forests." When they wandered at noon except for some bare-footed peasant or some monk with the rope around his waist, it was complete solitude; and on moonlit nights they sat by the waterfalls in an atmosphere that had the lightness of mountain air without its keenness. On one occasion they climbed by dry torrent courses five miles into the mountains, baby and all, on horseback and donkeyback—"such a congregation of mountains; looking alive in the stormy light we saw them by." It was certainly a blessed transformation of the prostrate invalid in the upper room at Wimpole Street. Setting aside his own happiness, Browning could feel with regard to her and his deep desire to serve her, that he had seen of the travail of his soul, and in this matter was satisfied.

The weeks at Siena of the year 1850 were not quite so prosperous. During that summer Mrs Browning had been seriously ill. When sufficiently recovered she was carried by her husband to a villa in the midst of vines and olives, a mile and a half or two miles outside Siena, which commanded a noble prospect of hills and plain. At first she could only remain seated in the easy-chair which he found for her in the city. For a day there was much alarm on behalf of the boy, now able to run about, who lay with heavy head and glassy eyes in a half-stupor; but presently he was astir again, and his "singing voice" was heard in the house and garden. Mrs Browning in the fresh yet warm September air regained her strength. Before returning to Florence, they spent a week in the city to see the churches and the pictures by Sodoma. Even little Wiedemann screamed for church-interiors and developed remarkable imitative pietisms of a theatrical kind. "It was as well," said Browning, "to have the eyeteeth and the Puseyistical crisis over together."

This comment, although no more than a passing word spoken in play, gives a correct indication of Browning's feeling, fully shared in by his wife, towards the religious movement in England which was altering the face of the established Church. "Puseyism" was for them a kind of child's play which unfortunately had religion for its play-ground; they viewed it with a superior smile, in which there was more of pity than of anger. Both of them, though one was a writer for the stage and the other could read Madame Bovary without flinching and approved the morals of La Dame aux Camelias, had their roots in English Puritanism.[46] And now the time had come when Browning was to embody some of his Puritan thoughts and feelings relating to religion in a highly original poem.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: "Why am I a Liberal?" Edited by Andrew Reid. London, 1885.]

[Footnote 41: Letters of E.B.B., i. 442.]

[Footnote 42: To Miss Mitford, August 24, 1848.]

[Footnote 43: Casa Guidi Windows, i.]

[Footnote 44: "Jane Eyre" was lent to E.B.B. by Mrs Story.]

[Footnote 45: To Miss Mitford, Feb. 18, 1850.]

[Footnote 46: In January 1859, Pen was reading an Italian translation of Monte Cristo, and announced, to his father's and mother's amusement, that after Dumas he would proceed to "papa's favourite book, Madame Bovary".]



Chapter VII

Christmas Eve and Easter Day

Christmas Eve and Easter Day was published by Chapman & Hall in the year 1850. It was reported to the author that within the first fortnight two hundred copies had been sold, with which evidence of moderate popularity he was pleased; but the initial success was not maintained and subsequently the book became, like Sordello, a "remainder." As early as 1845, in the opening days of the correspondence with Miss Barrett, when she had called upon her friend to speak as poet in his own person and to speak out, he assured her that whereas hitherto he had only made men and women utter themselves on his behalf and had given the truth not as pure white light but broken into prismatic hues, now he would try to declare directly that which was in him. In place of his men and women he would have her to be a companion in his work, and yet, he adds, "I don't think I shall let you hear, after all, the savage things about Popes and imaginative religions that I must say." We can only conjecture as to whether the theme of the poem of 1850 was already in Browning's mind. His wife's influence certainly was not unlikely to incline him towards the choice of a subject which had some immediate relation to contemporary thought. She knew that poetry to be of permanent value must do more than reflect a passing fashion; that in a certain sense it must in its essence be out of time and space, expressing ideas and passions which are parts of our abiding humanity. Yet she recognised an advantage in pressing into what is permanent through the forms which it assumes in the world immediately around the artist. And even in 1845 the design of such a poem as her own Aurora Leigh was occupying her thoughts; she speaks of her intention of writing a sort of "novel-poem, running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, 'where angels fear to tread'; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly." Browning's poem did not rush into drawing-rooms, but it stepped boldly into churches and conventicles and the lecture-rooms of theological professors.

The spiritual life individual and the spiritual life corporate—these, to state it in a word, are the subjects dealt with in the two connected poems of his new volume; the spiritual life individual is considered in Easter Day; the spiritual life corporate in Christmas Eve. Browning, with the blood of all the Puritans in him, as his wife expressed it, could not undervalue that strain of piety which had descended from the exiles at Geneva and had run on through the struggles for religious liberty in the nonconformist religious societies of the seventeenth century and the Evangelical revival of times less remote. Looking around him he had seen in his own day the progress of two remarkable movements—one embodying, or professing to embody, the Catholic as opposed to the Puritan conception of religion, the other a free critical movement, tending to the disintegration of the traditional dogma of Christianity, yet seeking to preserve and maintain its ethical and even in part its religious influence. The facts can be put concisely if we say that one and the same epoch produced in England the sermons of Spurgeon, the Apologia pro vita sua of Newman, and the Literature and Dogma of Matthew Arnold. To discuss these three conceptions of religion adequately in verse would have been impossible even for the argumentative genius of Dryden, and would have converted a work of art into a theological treatise. But three representative scenes might be painted, and some truths of passionate feeling might be flung out by way of commentary. Such was the design of the poet of Christmas Eve.

To topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult. But the presence of humour might save the sublimities from a fall, and Browning had hitherto in his art made but slight and occasional use of a considerable gift of humour which he possessed. It was humour not of the highest or finest or subtlest kind; it was very far from the humour of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, which felt so profoundly all the incongruities, majestic, pathetic, and laughable, of human nature. But it had a rough vigour of its own; it was united with a capacity for exact and shrewd observation; and if it should ever lead him to play the part of a satirist, the satire must needs be rather that of love than of malice. One who esteemed so highly the work of Balzac and of Flaubert might well be surmised to have something in his composition of what we now call the realist in art; and the work of the realist might serve to sustain and vindicate the idealist's ventures of imaginative faith. The picture of the lath-and-plaster entry of "Mount Zion" and of the pious sheep—duly indignant at the interloper in their midst—who one by one enter the fold, if not worthy of Cervantes or of Shakespeare, is hardly inferior to the descriptive passages of Dickens, and it is touched, in the manner of Dickens, with pity for these rags and tatters of humanity. The night, the black barricade of cloud, the sudden apparition of the moon, the vast double rainbow, and He whose sweepy garment eddies onward, become at once more supernatural and more unquestionably real because sublimity springs out of grotesquerie. Is the vision of the face of Christ an illusion?

The whole face turned upon me full, And I spread myself beneath it, As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it In the cleansing sun, his wool,— Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness Some defiled, discoloured web— So lay I saturate, with brightness.

Is this a phantom or a dream? Well, at least it is certain that the witness has seen with his mortal eyes the fat weary woman, and heard the mighty report of her umbrella, "wry and flapping, a wreck of whalebones." And the fat woman of Mount Zion Chapel, with Love Lane at the back of it, may help us to credit the awful vision of the Lord.

Thus the poem has the imaginative sensuousness which art demands; it is not an argument but a series of vivid experiences, though what is sensuous is here tasked in the service of what is spiritual, and a commentary is added. The central idea of the whole is that where love is, there is Christ; and the Christ of this poem is certainly no abstraction, no moral ideal, no transcendental conception of absolute charity, but very God and very man, the Christ of Nazareth, who dwelt among men, full of grace and truth. Literary criticism which would interpret Browning's meaning in any other sense may be ingenious, but it is not disinterested, and some side-wind blows it far from the mark.

Love with defective knowledge, he maintains, is of more spiritual worth than knowledge with defective love. Desiring to give salience to this idea, he deprives his little pious conventicle of every virtue except one—"love," and no other word is written on each forehead of the worshippers. Browning, the artist and student of art, was not insensible to the spiritual power of beauty; and beauty is conspicuously absent from the praise and prayer that went up from Mount Zion chapel; its forms of worship are burlesque and uncouth. Browning, the lover of knowledge, was not insensible to the value of intelligence in things of religion; and the congregation of Mount Zion sit on "divinely flustered" under

the pig-of-lead-like pressure Of the preaching man's immense stupidity.

The pastor, whose words so sway his enraptured flock, mangles the Holy Scriptures with a fine irreverence, and pours forth his doctrine with an entirely self-satisfied indifference to reason and common sense. Nor has love accomplished its perfect work, for the interloper who stands at the entry is eyed with inquisitorial glances of pious exclusiveness—how has a Gallio such as he ventured to take his station among the elect? Matthew Arnold, had he visited Mount Zion, might have discoursed with a charmingly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in English dissent, and the supreme need of bringing a current of new ideas to play upon the unintelligent use of its traditional formulae. And Matthew Arnold would have been right. These are the precise subjects of Browning's somewhat rough-and-ready satire. But Browning adds that in Mount Zion, love, at least in its rudiments, is present, and where love is, there is Christ.

Of English nonconformity in its humblest forms Browning can write, as it were, from within; he writes of Roman Catholic forms of worship as one who stands outside; his sympathy with the prostrate multitude in St. Peter's at Rome is of an impersonal kind, founded rather upon the recognition of an objective fact than springing from an instinctive feeling. For a moment he is carried away by the tide of their devout enthusiasms; but he recovers himself to find indeed that love is also here and therefore Christ is present, but the worshippers fallen under "Rome's gross yoke," are very infants in their need of these sacred buffooneries and posturings and petticoatings; infants

Peevish as ever to be suckled, Lulled with the same old baby-prattle With intermixture of the rattle.

And this, though the time has come when love would have them no longer infantile, but capable of standing and walking, "not to speak of trying to climb." Such a short and easy method of dealing with Roman Catholic dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite possible to be on the same side as Browning without being as crude as he in misconception. He does not seriously consider the Catholic idea which regards things of sense as made luminous by the spirit of which they are the envoys and the ministers. It is enough for him to declare his own creed which treats any intermediary between the human soul and the Divine as an obstruction or a veil:

My heart does best to receive in meekness That mode of worship, as most to his mind, Where earthly aids being left behind, His All in All appears serene With the thinnest human veil between, Letting the mystic lamps, the seven, The many motions of his spirit, Pass as they list to earth from heaven.

This was the creed of Milton and of Bunyan; and yet with both Milton and Bunyan the imagery of the senses is employed as the means not of concealing but revealing the things of the spirit.

From the lecture-room of Goettingen, with its destructive and reconstructive criticism, Browning is even farther removed than he is from the ritualisms of the Roman basilica. Yet no caricature can be more amiable than his drawing of the learned Professor, so gentle in his aspect, so formidable in his conclusions, who, gazing into the air with a pure abstracted look, proceeds in a grave sweet voice to exhibit and analyse the sources of the myth of Christ. In the Professor's lecture-room Browning finds intellect indeed but only the shadow of love. He argues that if the "myth" of Christ be dissolved, the authority of Christ as a teacher disappears; Christ is even inferior to other moralists by virtue of the fact that He made personal claims which cannot be sustained. And whatever may be Christ's merit as a teacher of the truth, the motive to action which His life and words supplied must cease to exist if it be shown that the divine sacrifice of God manifest in the flesh is no more than a figment of the devout imagination. At every point the criticism of Browning is as far apart as it is possible to conceive from the criticism set forth in the later writings of Matthew Arnold. The one writer regards the "myth" as no more than the grave-clothes of a risen Christ whose essential virtue lies in his sweet reasonableness and his morality touched with enthusiasm. The other believes that if the wonderful story of love be proved a fable, a profound alteration—and an alteration for the worse—has been made in the religious consciousness of Christendom. And undoubtedly the difference between the supernatural and the natural theories of Christianity is far greater than Arnold represented it to be. But Browning at this date very inadequately conceived the power of Christ as a revealer of the fatherhood of God. In that revelation, whether the Son of God was human or divine, lay a truth of surpassing power, and a motive of action capable of summoning forth the purest and highest energies of the soul. That such is the case has been abundantly evidenced by the facts of history. Browning finds only much learning and the ghost of dead love in the Goettingen lecture-room; and of course it was easy to adapt his Professor's lecture so as to arrive at this conclusion. But the process and the conclusion are alike unjust.

Having traversed the various forms of Christian faith and scepticism, the speaker in Christmas Eve declines into a mood of lazy benevolence and mild indifferentism towards each and all of these. Has not Christ been present alike at the holding-forth of the poor dissenting son of thunder, who tore God's word into shreds, at the tinklings and posturings and incense-fumes of Roman pietism, and even at the learned discourse which dissolved the myth of his own life and death? Why, then, over-strenuously take a side? Why not regard all phases of belief or no-belief with equal and serene regard? Such a mood of amiable indifferentism is abhorrent to Browning's feelings. The hem of Christ's robe passes wholly at this point from the hand of the seer of visions in his poem. One best way of worship there needs must be; ours may indeed not be the absolutely best, but it is our part, it is our probation to see that we strive earnestly after what is best; yes, and strive with might and main to confer upon our fellows the gains which we have found. It may be God's part—we trust it is—to bring all wanderers to the one fold at last. As for us, we must seek after Him and find Him in the mode required by our highest thought, our purest passion. Here Browning speaks from his central feeling. Only, we may ask, what if one's truest self lie somewhere hidden amid a thousand hesitating sympathies? And is not the world spacious enough to include a Montaigne as well as a Pascal or a Browning? Assuredly the world without its Montaigne would be a poorer and a less hospitable dwelling-place for the spirits of men.

Mrs Browning complained to her husband of what she terms the asceticism of Easter Day, the second part of his volume of 1850; his reply was that it stated "one side of the question." "Don't think," Mrs Browning says, "that he has taken to the cilix—indeed he has not—but it is his way to see things as passionately as other people feel them." Easter Day has nothing to say of religious life in Churches and societies, nothing of the communities of public worship. For the writer of this poem only three things exist—God, the individual soul, and the world regarded as the testing place and training place of the soul. Browning has here a rigour of moral or spiritual earnestness which may be called, by any one who so pleases, Puritan in its kind and its intensity; he feels the need, if we are to attain any approximation to the Christian ideal, of the lit lamp and the girt loin. Two difficulties in the Christian life in particular he chooses to consider—first, the difficulty of faith in the things of the spirit, and especially in what he regards as the essential parts of the Christian story; and secondly, the difficulty of obeying the injunction to renounce the world. That we cannot grow to our highest attainment by the old method enjoined by pagan philosophy—that of living according to nature, he regards as evident, for nature itself is warped and marred; it groans and travails, and from its discords how shall we frame a harmony? It was always his habit of mind, he tells us, from his childhood onwards, to face a danger and confront a doubt, and if there were anywhere a lurking fear, to draw this forth from its hiding-place and examine it in the light, even at the risk of some mortal ill. Therefore he will press for an answer to his present questionings; he will try conclusions to the uttermost.

As to the initial difficulty of faith, Browning with a touch of scorn, assures us that evidences of spiritual realities, evidences of Christianity—as they are styled—external and internal will be readily found by him who desires to find; convincing enough they are for him who wants to be convinced. But in truth faith is a noble venture of the spirit, an aspiring effort towards what is best, even though what is best may never be attained. The mole gropes blindly in unquestionably solid clay; better be like the grasshopper "that spends itself in leaps all day to reach the sun." A grasshopper's leap sunwards—that is what we signify by this word "faith."

But the difficulties of the Christian life only shift their place when faith by whatever means has been won. We are bidden to renounce the world: what does the injunction mean? in what way shall it be obeyed? "Ascetic" Mrs Browning named this poem; and ascetic it is if by that word we understand the counselling and exhorting to a noble exercise and discipline; but Browning even in his poem by no means wears the cilix, and no teaching can be more fatal than his to asceticism in the narrower sense of the word. To renounce the world, if interpreted aright, is to extinguish or suppress no faculty that has been given to man, but rather to put each faculty to its highest uses:

"Renounce the world!"—Ah, were it done By merely cutting one by one Your limbs off, with your wise head last, How easy were it!—how soon past, If once in the believing mood.

The harder and the higher renunciation is this—to choose the things of the spirit rather than the things of sense, and again in accepting, as means of our earthly discipline and development, the things of sense to press through these to the things of the spirit which lie behind and beyond and above them.

Such, and such alone, is the asceticism to which Browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue. A certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy. And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of the spirit shines through with only a fuller potency? In the choice between sense and spirit, or, to put it more generally, in the choice between what is higher and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also its means of growth. And what is the meaning of this mortal life—this strange phenomenon otherwise so unintelligible—if it be not the moment in which a soul is proved, the period in which a soul is shaped and developed for other lives to come?

To forget that Browning is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of criticism which detaches the idea of beauty from the total of our humanity addressed by the greater artists. But the solemn thoughts that are taken up by beauty in such work, for example, as that of Michael Angelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its peculiar character as a thing of beauty. And armour, we know, may be as lovely to the mere senses as a flower. Browning's doctrine may sometimes protrude gauntly through his poetry; but at his best—as in Rabbi ben Ezra or Abt Vogler—the thought of the poem is needful in the dance of lyrical enthusiasm, as the male partner who takes hands with beauty, and to separate them would bring the dance to a sudden close. Both are present in Easter Day, and we must watch the movement of the two. In a passage already quoted from Christmas Eve the face of Christ is nobly imagined as the sun which bleaches a discoloured web. Here the poet's imagination is as intense in its presentation of Christ the doomsman:

He stood there. Like the smoke Pillared o'er Sodom, when day broke— I saw Him. One magnific pall Mantled in massive fold and fall His head, and coiled in snaky swathes About His feet; night's black, that bathes All else, broke, grizzled with despair, Against the soul of blackness there. A gesture told the mood within— That wrapped right hand which based the chin,— That intense meditation fixed On His procedure,—pity mixed With the fulfilment of decree. Motionless thus, He spoke to me, Who fell before His feet, a mass, No man now.

The picture of the final conflagration of the Judgment Day is perhaps over-laboured, a descriptive tour de force, horror piled upon horror with accumulative power,—a picture somewhat too much in the manner of Martin; and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublimity of terror. The glow of Milton's hell is intenser, and Milton's majestic instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames. The real awfulness of Browning's Judgment Day dwells wholly in the inner experiences of a solitary soul. The speaker finds of a sudden that the doom is upon him, and that in the probation of life his choice was earth, not heaven. The sentence pronounced upon him is in accordance with the election of his own will—let earth, with all its beauty of nature, all its gifts of human art, all its successes of the intellect, as he had conceived and chosen them, be his. To his despair, he finds that what he had prized in life, and what is now granted to him cannot bring him happiness or even content. The plenitude of beauty, of which all partial beauty was but a pledge, is forever lost to him. The glory of art, which lay beyond its poor actual attainments, is lost. The joy of knowledge, with all those

grasps of guess Which pull the more into the less,

is lost. And as to earth's best possession—love—had he ever made a discovery through human love of that which it forthshadows—the love that is perfect and divine? Earth is no longer earth to the doomed man, but the star of the god Rephan of which we read in one of Browning's latest poems; in the horror of its blank and passionless uniformity, untroubled by any spiritual presences, he cowers at the Judge's feet, and prays for darkness, hunger, toil, distress, if only hope be also granted him:

Then did the form expand, expand— knew Him through the dread disguise As the whole God within his eyes Embraced me.

The Doomsman has in a moment become the Saviour. In all this, if Browning has the burden of a prophecy to utter, he utters it, after the manner of earlier prophets, as a vision. His art is sensuous and passionate; his argument is transformed into a series of imaginative experiences.

Mrs. Browning's illness during the summer and early autumn of 1850 left her for a time more shaken in health than she had been since her marriage. But by the spring of the following year she had recovered strength; and designs of travel were formed, which should include Rome, North Italy, Switzerland, the Rhine, Brussels, Paris and London. Almost at the moment of starting for Rome at the end of April, the plans were altered; the season was too far advanced for going south; ways and means must be economised; Rome might be postponed for a future visit; and Venice would make amends for the present sacrifice. And Venice in May and early June did indeed for a time make amends. "I have been between heaven and earth," Mrs. Browning wrote, "since our arrival at Venice." The rich architecture, the colour, the moonlight, the music, the enchanting silence made up a unity of pleasures like nothing that she had previously known. When evening came she and her husband would follow the opera from their box hired for "two shillings and eightpence English," or sit under the moon in the piazza of St Mark sipping coffee and reading the French papers. But as the month went by, Browning lost appetite and lost sleep. The "soothing, lulling, rocking atmosphere" which suited Mrs. Browning made him, after the first excitement of delight, grow nervous and dispirited. They hastened away to Padua, drove to Arqua, "for Petrarch's sake," passed through Brescia in a flood of white moonlight, and having reached Milan climbed—the invalid of Wimpole Street and her husband—to the topmost point of the cathedral. From the Italian lakes they crossed by the St Gothard to Switzerland, and omitting part of their original scheme of wandering, journeyed in twenty-four hours without stopping from Strasburg to Paris.

In Paris they loitered for three weeks. Mrs. Browning during the short visit which followed her marriage had hardly seen the city. Bright shop-windows, before which little Wiedemann would scream with pleasure, restaurants and dinners a la carte, full-foliaged trees and gardens in the heart of the town were a not unwelcome exchange for Italian church-interiors and altar-pieces. Even "disreputable prints and fascinating hats and caps" were appreciated as proper to the genius of the place, and the writer of Casa Guidi Windows had the happiness of seeing her hero, M. le President, "in a cocked hat, and with a train of cavalry, passing like a rocket along the boulevards to an occasional yell from the Red." By a happy chance they lighted in Paris upon Tennyson, now Poet-laureate, whom Mrs. Browning had hitherto known only through his poems; he was in the friendliest mood, and urged that they should make use of his house and servants during their stay in England, an offer which was not refused, though there was no intention of actually taking advantage of the kindness. As for England, the thought of it, with her father's heart and her father's door closed against her, was bitter as wormwood to Mrs. Browning. "It's only Robert," she wrote, "who is a patriot now, of us two."

English soil as they stepped ashore was a puddle, and English air a fog. London lodgings were taken at 26 Devonshire Street, and, although Mrs. Browning suffered from the climate, they were soon dizzied and dazzled by the whirl of pleasant hospitalities. An evening with Carlyle ("one of the greatest sights in England"), a dinner given by Forster at Thames Ditton, "in sight of the swans," a breakfast with Rogers, daily visits of Barry Cornwall, cordial companionship of Mrs. Jameson, a performance by the Literary Guild actors, a reading of Hamlet by Fanny Kemble—with these distractions and such as these the two months flew quickly. It was in some ways a relief when Pen's faithful maid Wilson went for a fortnight to see her kinsfolk, and Mrs. Browning had to take her place and substitute for social racketing domestic cares. The one central sorrow remained and in some respects was intensified. She had written to her father, and Browning himself wrote—"a manly, true, straight-forward letter," she informs a friend, "... everywhere generous and conciliating." A violent and unsparing reply was made, and with it came all the letters that his undutiful daughter had written to Mr. Barrett; not one had been read or opened. He returned them now, because he had not previously known how he could be relieved of the obnoxious documents. "God takes it all into his own hands," wrote Mrs. Browning, "and I wait." Something, however, was gained; her brothers were reconciled; Arabella Barrett was constant in kindness; and Henrietta journeyed from Taunton to London to enjoy a week in her company.

It was at Devonshire Street that Bayard Taylor, the distinguished American poet and critic, made the acquaintance of the Brownings, and the record of his visit gives a picture of Browning at the age of thirty-nine, so clearly and firmly drawn that it ought not to be omitted here: "In a small drawing-room on the first floor I met Browning, who received me with great cordiality. In his lively, cheerful manner, quick voice, and perfect self-possession, he made the impression of an American rather than an Englishman. He was then, I should judge, about thirty-seven years of age, but his dark hair was already streaked with gray about the temples. His complexion was fair, with perhaps the faintest olive tinge, eyes large, clear, and gray, nose strong and well cut, mouth full and rather broad, and chin pointed, though not prominent. His forehead broadened rapidly upwards from the outer angle of the eyes, slightly retreating. The strong individuality which marks his poetry was expressed not only in his face and head, but in his whole demeanour. He was about the medium height, strong in the shoulders, but slender at the waist, and his movements expressed a combination of vigour and elasticity." Mrs Browning with her slight figure, pale face, shaded by chestnut curls, and grave eyes of bluish gray, is also described; and presently entered to the American visitor Pen, a blue-eyed, golden-haired boy, who babbled his little sentences in Italian.

When, towards the close of September, Browning and his wife left London for Paris, Carlyle by his own request was their companion on the journey. Mrs Browning feared that his irritable nerves would suffer from the vivacities of little Pen, but it was not so; he accepted with good humour the fact that the small boy had not yet learned, like his own Teufelsdroeckh, the Eternal No: "Why, sir," exclaimed Carlyle, "you have as many aspirations as Napoleon!"[47] At Dieppe, Browning, as Carlyle records, "did everything, fought for us, and we—that is, the woman, the child and I—had only to wait and be silent." At Paris in the midst of "a crowding, jangling, vociferous tumult, the brave Browning fought for us, leaving me to sit beside the woman." An apartment was found on the sunny side of the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, "pretty, cheerful, carpeted rooms," far brighter and better than those of Devonshire Street, and when, to Browning's amusement, his wife had moved every chair and table into the new and absolutely right position, they could rest and be thankful. Carlyle spent several evenings with them, and repaid the assistance which he received in various difficulties from Browning's command of the language, by picturesque conversations in his native speech: "You come to understand perfectly," wrote Mrs Browning, "when you know him, that his bitterness is only melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." A little later Browning's father and sister spent some weeks in Paris. Here, at all events, were perfect relations between the members of a family group; the daughter here was her father's comrade with something even of a maternal instinct; and the grandfather discovered to his great satisfaction that his own talent for drawing had descended to his grandchild.

The time was one when the surface of life in Paris showed an unruffled aspect; but under the surface were heavings of inward agitation. On the morning of December 2nd the great stroke against the Republic was delivered; the coup d'etat was an accomplished fact. Later in the day Louis Napoleon rode under the windows of the apartment in the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, from the Carrousel to the Arc de l'Etoile. To Mrs Browning it seemed the grandest of spectacles—"he rode there in the name of the people after all." She and her husband had witnessed revolutions in Florence, and political upheavals did not seem so very formidable. On the Thursday of bloodshed in the streets—December 4th—Pen was taken out for his usual walk, though not without certain precautions; as the day advanced the excitement grew tense, and when night fell the distant firing on the boulevards kept Mrs. Browning from her bed till one o'clock. On Saturday they took a carriage and drove to see the field of action; the crowds moved to and fro, discussing the situation, but of real disturbance there was none; next day the theatres had their customary spectators and the Champs-Elysees its promenaders. For the dishonoured "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite," as Mrs. Browning heard it suggested, might now be inscribed "Infanterie, Cavallerie, Artillerie."

Such may have been her husband's opinion, but such was not hers. Her faith in the President had been now and again shaken; her faith in the Emperor became as time went on an enthusiasm of hero-worship. The display of force on December 2nd impressed her imagination; there was a dramatic completeness in the whole performance; Napoleon represented the people; a democrat, she thought, should be logical and thorough; the vote of the millions entirely justified their chief. Browning viewed affairs more critically, more sceptically. "Robert and I," writes his wife jestingly, "have had some domestic emeutes, because he hates some imperial names." He detested all Buonapartes, he would say, past, present, and to come,—an outbreak explained by Mrs Browning to her satisfaction, as being only his self-willed way of dismissing a subject with which he refused to occupy his thoughts, a mere escapade of feeling and known to him as such. When all the logic and good sense were on the woman's side, how could she be disturbed by such masculine infirmities? Though only a very little lower than the angels, he was after all that humorous being—a man.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 47: "Mrs Orr's Life and Letters of R.B.," 173.]



Chapter VIII

1851 to 1855

It was during the month of the coup d'etat that Browning went back in thought to the poet of his youthful love, and wrote that essay which was prefixed to the volume of forged letters published as Shelley's by Moxon in 1852. The essay is interesting as Browning's only considerable piece of prose, and also as an utterance made not through the mask of any dramatis persona, but openly and directly from his own lips. Though not without value as a contribution to the study of Shelley's genius, it is perhaps chiefly of importance as an exposition of some of Browning's own views concerning his art. He distinguishes between two kinds or types of poet: the poet who like Shakespeare is primarily the "fashioner" of things independent of his own personality, artistic creations which embody some fact or reality, leaving it to others to interpret, as best they are able, its significance; and secondly the poet who is rather a "seer" than a fashioner, who attempts to exhibit in imaginative form his own conceptions of absolute truth, conceptions far from entire adequacy, yet struggling towards completeness; the poet who would shadow forth, as he himself apprehends them, Ideas, to use the word of Plato, "seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand"—which Ideas he discovers not so often in the external world as in his own soul, this being for him "the nearest reflex of the absolute Mind." What a poet of this second kind produces, as Browning finely states it, will be less a work than an effluence. He is attracted among external phenomena chiefly by those which summon forth his inner light and power, "he selects that silence of the earth and sea in which he can best hear the beating of his individual heart, and leaves the noisy, complex, yet imperfect exhibitions of nature in the manifold experience of man around him, which serve only to distract and suppress the working of his brain." To this latter class of poets, although in The Cenci and Julian and Maddalo he is eminent as a "fashioner," Shelley conspicuously belongs. Mankind cannot wisely dispense with the services of either type of poet; at one time it chiefly needs to have that which is already known interpreted into its highest meanings; and at another, when the virtue of these interpretations has been appropriated and exhausted, it needs a fresh study and exploration of the facts of life and nature—for "the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned." The truest and highest point of view from which to regard the poetry of Shelley is that which shows it as a "sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal."

For Browning the poet of Prometheus Unbound was not that beautiful and ineffectual angel of Matthew Arnold's fancy, beating in the void his luminous wings. A great moral purpose looked forth from Shelley's work, as it does, Browning would add, from all lofty works of art. And it may be remarked that the criticism of Browning's own writings which considers not only their artistic methods and artistic success or failure, but also their ethical and spiritual purport, is entirely in accord with his thoughts in this essay. Far from regarding Shelley as unpractical, he notes—and with perfect justice—"the peculiar practicalness" of Shelley's mind, which in his earlier years acted injuriously upon both his conduct and his art. His power to perceive the defects of society was accompanied by as precocious a fertility to contrive remedies; but his crudeness in theorising and his inexperience in practice resulted in not a few youthful errors. Gradually he left behind him "this low practical dexterity"; gradually he learnt that "the best way of removing abuses is to stand fast by truth. Truth is one, as they are manifold; and innumerable negative effects are produced by the upholding of one positive principle." Browning urges that Shelley, before the close, had passed from his doctrinaire atheism to what was virtually a theistic faith. "I shall say what I think," he adds—"had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians.... The preliminary step to following Christ is the leaving the dead to bury their dead." Perhaps this hypothetical anticipation is to be classed with the surmise of Cardinal Wiseman (if Father Prout rightly attributed to that eminent ecclesiastic a review of Men and Women in The Rambler) that Browning himself would one day be found in the ranks of converts to Catholicism. In each case a wish was father to the thought; Browning recognised the fact that Shelley assigned a place to love, side by side with power, among the forces which determine the life and development of humanity, and with Browning himself "power" was a synonym for the Divine will, and "love" was often an equivalent for God manifest in Jesus Christ. One or two other passages of the essay may be noted as illustrating certain characteristics of the writer's modes of thought and feeling: "Everywhere is apparent Shelley's belief in the existence of Good, to which Evil is an accident"—it is an optimist here, though of a subtler doctrine than Shelley's, who is applauding optimism. "Shelley was tender, though tenderness is not always the characteristic of very sincere natures; he was eminently both tender and sincere." Was Browning consulting his own heart, which was always sincere, and could be tender, but whose tenderness sometimes disappeared in explosions of indignant wrath? The principle, again, by which he determined an artist's rank is in harmony with Browning's general feeling that men are to be judged less by their actual achievements than by the possibilities that lie unfolded within them, and the ends to which they aspire, even though such ends be unattained: "In the hierarchy of creative minds, it is the presence of the highest faculty that gives first rank, in virtue of its kind, not degree; no pretension of a lower nature, whatever the completeness of development or variety of effect, impeding the precedency of the rarer endowment though only in the germ." And, last, of the tardy recognition of Shelley's genius as a poet, Browning wrote in words which though, as he himself says, he had always good praisers, no doubt express a thought that helped to sustain him against the indifference of the public to his poetry: "The misapprehensiveness of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to remedy: and the interval between his operation and the generally perceptible effect of it, is no greater, less indeed than in many other departments of the great human effort. The 'E pur si muove' of the astronomer was as bitter a word as any uttered before or since by a poet over his rejected living work, in that depth of conviction which is so like despair." The volume in which Browning's essay appeared was withdrawn from circulation on the discovery of the fraudulent nature of its contents. He had himself no opportunity of inspecting the forged manuscripts, and no question of authenticity was raised until several copies of the book had passed into circulation.[48]

During the nine months spent in Paris, from September 1851 to June 1852, Browning enlarged the circle of his friends and made some new and interesting acquaintances. Chief among friendships was that with Joseph Milsand of Dijon, whose name is connected with Sordello in the edition of Browning's "Poetical Works" of the year 1863. Under the title "La Poesie Anglaise depuis Byron," two articles by Milsand were contributed to the "Revue des Deux Mondes," the first on Tennyson, the second (published 15th August 1851) a little before the poet's arrival in Paris, on Robert Browning. "Of all the poets known to me," wrote his French critic, "he is the most capable of summing up the conceptions of the religion, the ethics, and the theoretic knowledge of our period in forms which embody the beauty proper to such abstractions." Such criticism by a thoughtful student of our literature could not but prepare the way pleasantly for personal acquaintance. Milsand, we are told by his friend Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc), having hesitated as to the propriety of printing a passage in an article as yet unpublished, in which he had spoken of the great sorrow of Mrs Browning's early life—the death of her brother, went straight to Browning, who was then in Paris, and declared that he was ready to cancel what he had written if it would cause her pain. "Only a Frenchman," exclaimed Browning, grasping both hands of his visitor, "would have done this." So began a friendship of an intimate and most helpful kind, which closed only with Milsand's death in 1886. To his memory is dedicated the volume published soon after his death, Parleyings with certain People of Importance. "I never knew or shall know his like among men," wrote Browning; and again: "No words can express the love I have for him." And in Red Cotton Nightcap Country it is Milsand who is characterised in the lines:

He knows more and loves better than the world That never heard his name and never may, ... What hinders that my heart relieve itself, O friend! who makest warm my wintry world, And wise my heaven, if there we consort too.

In the correction of Browning's proof-sheets, and especially in regulating the punctuation of his poems, Milsand's friendly services were of high value. In 1858 when Browning happened to be at Dijon, and had reason to believe, though in fact erroneously, that his friend was absent in Paris, he went twice "in a passion of friendship," as his wife tells a correspondent, to stand before Maison Milsand, and muse, and bless the threshold.[49]

Browning desired much to know Victor Hugo, but his wish was never gratified. After December 2nd Paris could not contain a spirit so fiery as Hugo's was in hostility to the new regime and its chief representative. Balzac, whom it would have been a happiness even to look at, was dead. Lamartine promised a visit, but for a time his coming was delayed. By a mischance Alfred de Musset failed to appear when Browning, expecting to meet him, was the guest of M. Buloz. But Beranger was to be seen "in his white hat wandering along the asphalte." The blind historian Thierry begged Browning and his wife to call upon him. At the house of Ary Scheffer, the painter, they heard Mme. Viardot sing; and receptions given by Lady Elgin and Mme. Mohl were means of introduction to much that was interesting in the social life of Paris. At the theatre they saw with the deepest excitement "La Dame aux Camelias," which was running its hundred nights. Caricatures in the streets exhibited the occupants of the pit protected by umbrellas from the rain of tears that fell from the boxes. Tears, indeed, ran down Browning's cheeks, though he had believed himself hardened against theatrical pathos. Mrs Browning cried herself ill, and pronounced the play painful but profoundly moral.

Mrs Browning's admiration of the writings of George Sand was so great that it would have been a sore disappointment to her if George Sand were to prove inaccessible. A letter of introduction to her had been obtained from Mazzini. "Ah, I am so vexed about George Sand," Mrs Browning wrote on Christmas Eve; "she came, she has gone, and we haven't met." In February she again was known to be for a few days in Paris; Browning was not eager to push through difficulties on the chance of obtaining an interview, but his wife was all impatience: "' No,' said I, 'you shan't be proud, and I won't be proud, and we will see her. I won't die, if I can help it, without seeing George Sand.'" A gracious reply and an appointment came in response to their joint-petition which accompanied Mazzini's letter. On the appointed Sunday Browning and Mrs Browning—she wearing a respirator and smothered in furs—drove to render their thanks and homage to the most illustrious of Frenchwomen. Mrs Browning with beating heart stooped and kissed her hand. They found in George Sand's face no sweetness, but great moral and intellectual capacities; in manners and conversation she was absolutely simple. Young men formed the company, to whom she addressed counsel and command with the utmost freedom and a conscious authority. Through all her speech a certain undercurrent of scorn, a half-veiled touch of disdain, was perceptible. At their parting she invited the English visitors to come again, kissed Mrs Browning on the lips, and received Browning's kiss upon her hand. The second call upon her was less agreeable. She sat warming her feet in a circle of eight or nine ill-bred men, representatives of "the ragged Red diluted with the lower theatrical." 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 passionate 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 assures a correspondent that he could not be other than "good and noble 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 manuscript 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 fashionable 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 sunshine, which glorified much military and civic pomp, the reception of the new Emperor. Mrs Browning's handkerchief waved frantically while she prayed that God might bless the people in this the chosen representative of a democracy. What were Browning's thoughts on that memorable Saturday 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 passed 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 emancipator, 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 friendships. 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 embassy, 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 nobleness," 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 Ambassador 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 amassed 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 multitude 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 shivering 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 assured, "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 assumed 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 assisting 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 accumulated 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 coarse 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 attitudes, absolutely the best possible under the circumstances, 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 passivity 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, impassible, 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 superstition, 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?