Then Mr. Browning and Mr. Kenyon had a nice little visit, talking about
books and art. And Mr. Kenyon told Mr. Browning that Miss Elizabeth
Barrett, the poetess, was a cousin of his--he was a bit boastful of the
fact.
And Mr. Browning nodded and said he had often heard of her, and admired
her work.
Then Mr. Kenyon suggested that Mr. Browning write and tell her so--"You
see she has just gotten out a new book, and we are all a little nervous
about how it is going to take. Miss Barrett lives in a darkened room, you
know--sees no one--and a letter from a man like you would encourage her
greatly."
Mr. Kenyon wrote the address of Miss Barrett on a card and pushed it
across the table.
Mr. Browning took the card, put it in his pocketbook and promised to write
Miss Barrett, as Mr. Kenyon requested.
And he did.
Miss Barrett replied.
Mr. Browning answered, and soon several letters a week were going in each
direction.
Not quite so many missives were being received by Fanny Haworth; and as
for Lizzie Flower, I fear she was quite forgotten. She fell into a
decline, drooped and died in a year.
Mr. Browning asked for permission to call on Miss Barrett.
Miss Barrett explained that her father would not allow it, neither would
the doctor or nurse, and added: "There is nothing to see in me. I am a
weed fit for the ground and darkness."
But this repulse only made Mr. Browning want to see her the more. He
appealed to Mr. Kenyon, who was the only person allowed to call, besides
Miss Mitford--Mr. Kenyon was her cousin.
Mr. Kenyon arranged it--he was an expert at arranging anything of a
delicate nature. He timed the hour when Mr. Barrett was down town, and the
nurse and doctor safely out of the way, and they called on the invalid
prisoner in the darkened room.
They did not stay long, but when they went away Robert Browning trod on
air. The beautiful girl-like face, in its frame of dark curls, lying back
among the pillows, haunted him like a shadow. He was thirty-three, she was
thirty-five. She looked like a child, but the mind--the subtle,
appreciative, receptive mind! The mind that caught every allusion, that
knew his thought before he voiced it, that found nothing obscure in his
work, and that put a high and holy construction on his every sentence--it
was divine! divinity incarnated in a woman.
Robert Browning tramped the streets forgetful of meat, drink or rest.
He would give this woman freedom. He would devote himself to restoring her
to the air and sunshine. What nobler ambition! He was an idler, he had
never done anything for anybody. He was only a killer of time, a vagrant,
but now was his opportunity--he would do for this beautiful soul what no
one else on earth could do. She was slipping away as it was--the world
would soon lose her. Was there none to save?
Here was the finest intellect ever given to a woman--so sure, so vital, so
tender and yet so strong!
He would love her back to life and light!
And so Robert Browning told her all this shortly after, but before he
told, she had divined his thought. For solitude and loneliness and
heart-hunger had given her the power of an astral being; she was in
communication with all the finer forces that pervade our ether. He would
love her back to life and light--he told her so. She grew better.
And soon we find her getting up and throwing wide the shutters. It was no
longer the darkened room, for the sunlight came dancing through the
apartment, driving out all the dark shadows that lurked therein.
The doctor was indignant; the nurse resigned.
Of course, Mr. Barrett was not taken into confidence and no one asked his
consent. Why should they?--he was the man who could never understand.
So one fine day when the coast was clear, the couple went over to Saint
Marylebone Church and were married. The bride went home alone--could walk
all right now--and it was a week before her husband saw her, because he
would not be a hypocrite and go ring the doorbell and ask if Miss Barrett
was home; and of course if he had asked for Mrs. Robert Browning, no one
would have known whom he wanted to see.
But at the end of a week, the bride stole down the stairs, while the
family was at dinner, leading her dog Flush by a string, and all the time,
with throbbing heart, she prayed the dog not to bark. I have oft wondered
in the stilly night season what the effect on English Letters would have
been, had the dog really barked! But the dog did not bark; and Elizabeth
met her lover-husband there on the corner where the mail-box is. No one
missed the runaways until the next day, and then the bride and groom were
safely in France, writing letters back from Dieppe, asking forgiveness and
craving blessings.
* * * * *
"She is the Genius and I am the Clever Person," Browning used to say. And
this I believe will be the world's final judgment.
Browning knew the world in its every phase--good and bad, high and low,
society and commerce, the shop and gypsy camp. He absorbed things,
assimilated them, compared and wrote it out.
Elizabeth Barrett had never traveled, her opportunities for meeting people
had been few, her experiences limited, and yet she evolved truth: she
secreted beauty from within.
For two years after their elopement they did not write--how could they?
goodness me! They were on their wedding-tour. They lived in Florence and
Rome and in various mountain villages in Italy.
Health came back, and joy and peace and perfect love were theirs. But it
was joy bought with a price--Elizabeth Barrett Browning had forfeited the
love of her father. Her letters written him came back unopened, books
inscribed to him were returned--he declared she was dead.
Her brothers, too, discarded her, and when her two sisters wrote, they did
so by stealth, and their letters, meant to be kind, were steel for her
heart. Then her father was rich; and she had always known every comfort
that money could buy. Now, she had taken up with a poor poet, and every
penny had to be counted--absolute economy was demanded.
And Robert Browning, with a certain sense of guilt upon him, for
depriving her of all the creature comforts she had known, sought by
tenderness and love to make her forget the insults her father heaped upon
her.
As for Browning, the bank-clerk, he was vexed that his son should show so
little caution as to load himself up with an invalid wife, and he cut off
the allowance, declaring that if a man was old enough to marry, he was
also old enough to care for himself. He did, however, make his son several
"loans"; and finally came to "bless the day that his son had sense enough
to marry the best and most talented woman on earth."
Browning's poems were selling slowly, and Mrs. Browning's books brought
her a little royalty, thanks to the loyal management of John Kenyon, and
so absolute want and biting poverty did not overtake the runaways.
After the birth of her son, in Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, Mrs.
Browning's health seemed to have fully returned. She used to ride
horseback up and down the mountain passes, and wrote home to Miss Mitford
that love had turned the dial backward and the joyousness of girlhood had
come again to her.
When John Kenyon died and left them ten thousand pounds, all their own, it
placed them forever beyond the apprehension of want, and also enabled them
to do for others; for they pensioned old Walter Savage Landor, and
established him in comfortable quarters around the corner from Casa
Guidi.
I intimated a moment ago that their honeymoon continued for two years.
This was a mistake, for it continued for just fifteen years, when the
beautiful girl-like form, with her head of flowing curls upon her
husband's shoulder, ceased to breathe. Painlessly and without apprehension
or premonition, the spirit had taken its flight.
That letter of Miss Blagdon's, written some weeks after, telling of how
the stricken man paced the echoing hallways at night crying, "I want her!
I want her!" touches us like a great, strange sorrow that once pierced our
hearts.
But Robert Browning's nature was too strong to be subdued by grief. He
remembered that others, too, had buried their dead, and that sorrow had
been man's portion since the world began. He would live for his boy--for
Her child.
But Florence was no longer his Florence, and he made haste to settle up
his affairs and go back to England. He never returned to Florence, and
never saw the beautiful monument, designed by his lifelong friend,
Frederick Leighton.
When you visit the little English Cemetery at Florence, the slim little
girl that comes down the path, swinging the big bunch of keys, opens the
high iron gate and leads you, without word or question, straight to the
grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Browning was forty-nine when Mrs. Browning died.
And by the time he had reached his fiftieth meridian, England, harkening
to America's suggestion, was awakening to the fact that he was one of the
world's great poets.
Honors came slowly, but surely: Oxford with a degree; Saint Andrew's with
a Lord-Rectorship; publishers with advance payments. And when Smith and
Elder paid one hundred pounds for the poem of "Herve Riel," it seemed that
at last Browning's worth was being recognized. Not, of course, that money
is the infallible test, but even poetry has its Rialto, where the extent
of appreciation is shown by prices current.
Browning's best work was done after his wife's death; and in that love he
ever lived and breathed. In his seventy-fifth year, it filled his days and
dreams as though it were a thing of yesterday, singing in his heart a
perpetual eucharist.
"The Ring and the Book" must be regarded as Browning's crowning work.
Offhand critics have disposed of it, but the great minds go back to it
again and again. In the character of Pompilia the author sought to pay
tribute to the woman whose memory was ever in his mind; yet he was too
sensitive and shrinking to fully picture her. He sought to mask his
inspiration; but tender, loving recollections of "Ba" are interlaced and
interwoven through it all.
When Robert Browning died, in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-nine, the world of
literature and art uncovered in token of honor to one who had lived long
and well and had done a deathless work. And the doors of storied
Westminster opened wide to receive his dust.