Chapter 23
"I am named and known by that hour's feat, There took my station and degree. So grew my own small life complete As Nature obtained her best of me-- One born to love you, sweet!
"And to watch you sit by the fireside now, Back again, as you mutely sit Musing by fire-light, that great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it Yonder, my heart knows how!
"So the earth has gained by one man more, And the gain of earth must be Heaven's gain too, And the whole is well worth thinking o'er When the autumn comes; as I mean to do One day, as I said before."
The autumn time has come now to Browning, and he has had ample time to think it o'er; for the "perfect wife," the "Leonor," has lain under the grasses and violets of the English burying-ground in Florence for twenty-five years. In the same poem from which we have quoted, he says:--
"How well I know what I mean to do When the long dark autumn evenings come! And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue? With the music of all thy voices dumb In life's November, too!
"I shall be found by the fire, suppose, O'er a great wise book as beseemeth age, While the shutters flap as the cross wind blows, And I turn the page, and I turn the page, Not verse now, only prose!"
It is sad to think that he should be left solitary by his fire and with his books, but he has much that is beautiful to look back upon,--much, too, that is beautiful to look forward to, let us hope; and he is surrounded by many friends, and devotedly attached to the one son who was the only fruit of this royal marriage of genius.
The house where the poets lived together for fourteen years in Florence has been thus described:--
"Those who have known 'Casa Guidi' as it was can never forget the square anteroom with its great picture and piano-forte at which the boy Browning passed many an hour,--the little dining-room covered with tapestry, and where hung medallions of Tennyson, Carlyle, and Robert Browning,--the long room filled with plaster casts and studies, which was Mr. Browning's retreat,--and dearest of all, the large drawing-room where _she_ always sat. It opens upon a balcony filled with plants, and looks out upon the old iron-gray church of Santa Felice.
"There was something about this room which seemed to make it a proper and especial haunt for poets. The dark shadows and subdued light gave it a dreamy look, which was enhanced by the tapestry-covered walls and the old pictures of saints that looked out sadly from their carved frames of black wood. Large bookcases constructed of specimens of Florentine carving were brimming over with wise-looking books. Tables were covered with more gayly-bound volumes, the gifts of brother authors. Dante's grave profile, a cast of Keats's face and brow taken after death, a pen-and-ink sketch of Tennyson, little paintings of the boy Browning, all attracted the eye in turn, and gave rise to a thousand musings. A quaint mirror, easy-chairs and sofas, and a hundred nothings, which always add an indescribable charm, were all massed in this room. But the glory of all, and that which sanctified all, was seated in a low arm-chair near the door. A small table strewn with writing-materials, books, and newspapers, was always by her side."
Here Mrs. Browning held her small court, and here she entertained in the course of these years many of the most famous men and women of her time. Almost all visitors to Florence, especially English and American, sought her acquaintance, and all were kindly received by her. The conversation was always earnest there; she demanded a great deal of a person,--one felt it instinctively; and few came to waste her time upon trifles. Her own conversation was especially earnest, sometimes vivid, and lighted up by a humor peculiarly her own. She cared nothing for talk about people. Books and humanity, great deeds, and the great questions of the day, were the staple of her conversation. Religion, too, was an ever present topic. She was one of the most religious women of her day, and she interwove it in all her conversation, as she did in her writings. Indeed, her religion was a part of herself, and whoever knew her must know of this strong, deep feeling. One cannot conceive of Mrs. Browning apart from her religion. She would not have been herself, but another. It was a rare sight, indeed, to see this frail, spiritual-looking woman, when she talked upon some phase of her favorite theme, with her great expressive eyes fairly glowing with the intensity of her feeling, and a light shining through her face, as from the soul beyond. Her other great theme was Italy, and upon this she was always eloquent. Indeed, both Mr. and Mrs. Browning may almost be said to have adopted Italy for their home, and to have transferred their home affections to her soil. Many great Englishmen have loved Italy, but none more warmly than the Brownings. They suffered with her through all those dark hours which preceded her final emancipation from the foreign yoke, and they aided by their strong, brave words in bringing about that emancipation. Their pens were used in her behalf, perhaps too much for their own fame, because many of the subjects on which they wrote were of somewhat transient interest and more political than poetical. They were both friends and helpers to the great statesman Cavour in all his labors for the reconstruction of Italy, and one of the deepest interests of their lives was that reconstruction. Mrs. Browning's frail health was really injured at times by the serious grief she felt for temporary reverses, and by the absorbing interest she took in the cause.
The dream of her life, a free and united Italy, was fulfilled in Napoleon's formal recognition of Italian freedom and unity, the very week she died. It is given to few in this world thus to see the fruition of their fondest desires, and to pass away just as the clear morning light is dispelling the shadows of a long night of watching and waiting. The Napoleonic poems added nothing to her reputation as a poet, and were much regretted by some of her friends; but her literary reputation was nothing to her compared with her love for Italy, and she at least had faith in Napoleon's promises.
Mr. Hilliard, in his "Six Months in Italy," says of the home behind the Casa Guidi windows:--
"A happier home and a more perfect union than theirs it is not easy to imagine; and this completeness arises not only from the rare qualities which each possesses, but from their perfect adaptation to each other. . . . As he is full of manly power, so she is a type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. . . . 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. . . . Nor is she more remarkable for genius and learning than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of heart, depth of feeling, and purity of spirit. It is a privilege to know such beings singly and separately; but to see their powers quickened and their happiness rounded by the sacred tie of marriage, is a cause for peculiar and lasting gratitude."
The boy Browning was very beautiful in his childhood, and occupied a large place in the lives of his parents, who felt great pride in showing him to their visitors. It is a pleasant story told of the street beggars who walked through the Via Maggio in those days, under the windows of Casa Guidi, that they always spoke of Mrs. Browning, simply and touchingly, as "the mother of the beautiful child." But her love for this one beautiful darling taught her the whole possibility of motherhood. It made her heart go out in deepest sympathy to all mothers, as "to the friends unknown, and a land unvisited over the sea," to whom she writes:--
"Shall I speak like a poet, or run Into weak woman's tears for relief? Ah, children! I never lost one,-- Yet my arm's round my own little son, And love knows the secret of grief."
In the Italian poem "Mother and Poet," she has expressed a mother's feelings as truthfully and vividly as any writer who has ever touched that great theme. She can describe, too, in language that almost blisters the page on which it is written, that other class of mothers which it is bitter to feel that the earth does contain,--the monsters who would sell their daughters for gold. In that most powerful story of Marian in "Aurora Leigh," she writes thus:--
"The child turned round And looked up piteous in the mother's face (Be sure that mother's death-bed will not want Another devil to damn, than such a look). 'Oh, mother!' then with desperate glance to heaven, 'God free me from my mother,' she shrieked out, 'These mothers are too dreadful.' And with force As passionate as fear, she tore her hands, Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his, And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep, Away from both, away if possible, As far as God--away. They yelled at her As famished hounds at a hare, She heard them yell, And felt her name hiss after her from the hills Like shot from guns."
The whole of that wonderful poem of "Aurora Leigh" is full of such impassioned sympathy with womanhood, and shows the great heart of the poet as perhaps none of her other poems do. Written in the maturity of her powers, and after she had learned much of life in all its intricate depths, it contains perhaps more passion and power and fiery-burning eloquence than any other poem in the English language. Only an inspired womanly hand, which had sounded all the deeps of the world's scanty wisdom, could have penned it.
But Mrs. Browning shows great wealth of human sympathy in all her poems. Oppression and wrong sink into the very depths of her nature, and she cannot bear that they shall go unreproved in the universe while she exists. Her sympathy with our labors for the emancipation of the slaves was well known, in a time when little sympathy was to be found among the English, and her feeling for the poor and oppressed of her native land was always deep and strong. Her "Cry of the Children" will never be forgotten while there are suffering children in the world, and while there are human hearts to listen to their wail. It is as sacred a piece of inspiration as the Psalms of David; and the need for such an expression of the woe of the outcast poor of England is almost as great to-day as when the immortal poem was written. Still can we ask of the English people:--
"Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years? They are leaning their heads against their mothers, And that cannot stop tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows; The young birds are chirping in their nest; The young fawns are playing with the shadows; The young flowers are blowing toward the west. But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly; They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free."
This poem, Hood's "Song of the Shirt," and a few others, have added their mite to the influence of Dickens in benefiting a little the poorest of England's poor; yet how much remains to be done is shown in the present deplorable condition of the lower orders in that country. What might not such a poet as Robert Browning have done, could he have emancipated himself from his involved and difficult style, and written in a manly and straightforward way of the world of men and women around him, instead of going off in his exasperating manner into the Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, to tell us of Prince Hohenstiel Tebwangan Saviour of Society. The pity of it is beyond expression, when so great a poet as Browning makes himself so needlessly unintelligible, and loses the vast influence he might exert over the minds of his generation and the minds of posterity. But the thoughts hidden in his rugged verse are worth delving for, and already societies are being formed in England and America to study them. These societies will do something to popularize him, but he can never be made what he was really capable of being, the poet of the people. His circle of readers will always be small, but it will be of the world's best. The thinkers will never make a vast throng in this world, while the highways of folly will always swarm with a great multitude which no man can number. But there is a day after to-day, and sometime, when the thought of the world shall have risen to a higher level, the name of Robert Browning will be oftener than now upon the lips of men.
Personally, Browning is almost unknown to his countrymen; his name even has never been heard by the multitude. He is never pointed out to strangers, as are other men of letters, and never attracts any notice in a public place. But he is well known to a select circle, where he is a favorite, and he goes a good deal into society in London these later years. He is a great favorite with women everywhere; and he deserves to be, for he has always shown himself capable of sympathizing with what is truest and best in womanhood. He has been loyal to the memory of his wife during all his long years of solitude, and it still seems that she holds her old place in his heart. He is now seventy-four years old,--a fine, well-preserved man, with a light step and an easy carriage. He was a handsome man in his prime, with a charmingly expressive face and a good figure. His hair is now snow-white, but otherwise he is not old in his looks. His manners are somewhat precise, and after the old school. He is fond of admiration, and is accounted egotistical, although reserved in general society. His talk, like his writings, is a good deal upon out-of-the-way subjects, and is often deemed unintelligible by those unfamiliar with his thought. To his enthusiastic admirers it seems like inspiration. He is still busy with his pen, although his volumes of poetry now number twenty or more. He has really created a literature of his own. How life appears to him now, from the vantage-ground of his almost fourscore years, it would be interesting to know. Many years ago he wrote, a little wearily:--
"There's a fancy some lean to and others hate,-- That when this life is ended begins New work for the soul in another state, Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins,-- Where the strong and the weak this world's congeries Repeat in large what they practised in small, Through life after life in an infinite series,-- Only the scale's to be changed, that's all.
"Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen By the means of Evil that Good is best, And through earth and its noise what is heaven's serene,-- When its faith in the same has stood the test,-- Why, the child grown man, we burn the rod; The uses of labor are surely done. There remaineth a rest for the people of God, And I have had troubles enough for one."
CHARLOTTE BRONTÉ.
In the crowded little churchyard at Haworth, in the wild, bleak Yorkshire region, are eight mounds which mark the extinction of a family whose genius and sorrows have made them known the world over. In the little church there is a mural tablet which tells the names of this illustrious group, and the many visitors to this little out-of-the-way house of worship read with a melancholy interest these sad inscriptions. First we are told of Maria Bronté, the mother, who died in 1821, when only thirty-nine years old, leaving the six children whose names follow, all in the helplessness of early childhood. Next to her come Maria and Elizabeth, both of whom followed her in 1825; then Branwell and Emily, who died in 1848, and Anne, who lived one year longer. But it is to the last of the inscriptions that all eyes are turned with the greatest interest, for there we read--
CHARLOTTE, WIFE OF THE REV. ARTHUR BELL NICHOLS, A. B. AND DAUGHTER OF THE REV. E. P. BRONTÉ, A. M., INCUMBENT. SHE DIED MARCH 31ST, 1855, IN THE 39TH YEAR OF HER AGE.
There is no sadder history in all literature than the history of this gifted family and their early doom. A pathos clings about it which is really painful, so few are the gleams of light which are thrown upon the dark picture. From the time when the Rev. Patrick Bronté (himself a gifted but somewhat erratic man) brought his young wife into the solitude of this moorland parsonage and shut her up in a seclusion from which she was only removed by death, all the way down through the lonely childhood of the little motherless children, and on into their no less lonely and more afflicted womanhood, even to the deaths of all the gifted group, there is a depth of sombre gloom from which the sympathetic heart must turn away with a bitter pain and almost a feeling of hot rebellion against Fate.
The utter loneliness of that part of Yorkshire at the time when Mr. Bronté settled there can hardly be imagined to-day. In winter all communication with the outside world was cut off by almost impassable mud or entirely impassable snow. Travellers whom actual necessity compelled to start forth were often snowed in for a week or ten days within a few miles of home, and nobody thought of stirring from that shelter except through the pressure of absolute necessity. Isolated as were the little hill villages like Haworth, they were in the world, compared with the loneliness of the gray ancestral houses to be seen here and there in the dense hollows of the moors.
The inhabitants of this rough country were themselves of wild, turbulent nature, much given to deadly feuds and really dangerous in their enmities. Their amusements were all of the lowest order, and hard riding and deep drinking were the characteristics of all the male population, while cock-fighting and bull-baiting were thought refined amusements for both sexes.
The ministers were not much above their flocks in general culture, and the incumbents of Haworth had been noted for their eccentricities for generations. Many of them attended the horse-racings and the games of football which were played on Sunday afternoons, and took as deep a part as any of the flock in the drunken carouse which always followed a funeral. Mr. Bronté was a very different man from his predecessors, but was many years in subduing his congregation to an even nominal observance of common moralities. He was, however, a man of high spirit and imperious will, and, bending himself to the task with all his powers, made a decided impression upon the life around him. The gentle mother soon passed away, and Mr. Bronté became a stern and silent man who kept his children at a distance from himself and allowed them little intercourse with the outside world. They were allowed to walk out on the wild heathery moors, but not down in the village street; and they acquired a passionate love of those purple moors, which remained with them through life. When angry, Mr. Bronté would say nothing, but they could hear him out at the door firing pistol-shots in quick succession as a relief to his feelings. The children were unnaturally quiet and well-behaved. The old nurse says:--
"You would never have known there was a child in the house, they were such noiseless, good little creatures. I used to think them spiritless, they were so different from any children I had ever seen."
They used to read the newspapers, write little stories, and act plays, and at one time conducted a magazine of their own. Like all imaginative children, they played in stories, each one taking part in the stirring romances they invented. They were great believers in the supernatural, too, and the denizens of the adjoining churchyard played quite a prominent part in their childish lives. This churchyard, which was so near the parsonage, added much to the gloom and unhealthiness of the old manse, and many people have attributed the ill health of all the girls to its close proximity. It was depressing, to say the least, to such imaginative children as those of Mr. Bronté.
It was not long after the mother's death that the two older girls, Maria and Elizabeth, were taken to a school at Cowan's Bridge, a small hamlet in the north of England, and the younger children were left more lonely than ever. This school, which had been selected on account of its cheapness, had been established for the daughters of clergymen, and the entire expenses were fourteen pounds a year. Cowan's Bridge is prettily situated, just where the Leck-fells sweep into the plain; and by the course of the beck, alders and willows and hazel bushes grow. This little shallow, sparkling stream runs through long green pastures, and has many little falls over beds of gray rocks. The school-house had been made from an old bobbin-mill, and the situation proved to be remarkably unhealthy. This is the school so realistically described by Charlotte in "Jane Eyre." "Helen Burns" is an exact transcript of Maria Bronté, and every scene is a literal description of events which took place at this school. The whole thing was burned into Charlotte's memory so indelibly that she reproduced it with photographic exactness. Emily and Charlotte had followed the other sisters there, after a year or two, so that all of them suffered to a greater or less extent from the privations and abuses they underwent in that female Dotheboys Hall. The eldest sister died, and the second became very ill; yet still Mr. Bronté, who believed in the hardening process for children, kept them there until the health of each one failed in turn, and they were permanently injured by their privations. The food, which would perhaps have been wholesome enough if properly cooked, was ruined by a dirty and careless woman, who served it up in such disgusting messes that many a time the fastidious little Brontés could not eat a mouthful, though faint with hunger. There was always the most delicate cleanliness in the frugal Bronté household, and the children had early learned to be dainty in such matters. Their fare at home was of the simplest nature, but always well cooked; and they simply fasted themselves ill at Cowan's Bridge because they could not eat what was set before them.
There was another trial of health to the girls, and that was being obliged in all kinds of weather to attend church, which was two miles away. The road was a very bleak and unsheltered one, where cutting winds blew in winter and where the snows were often deep. The church was never warmed, as there was no provision made for any heating apparatus; and when the ill-fed and half-clothed girls had reached its shelter, they were often in actual chills from the exposure, and could not hope to gain any additional warmth there. Colds were taken in this way, from which the girls never recovered. They also suffered from cold in the school itself, and from the tyranny of one of the teachers, whom Charlotte has mercilessly depicted as Miss Scatcherd in "Jane Eyre." To the day of Miss Bronté's death, she would blaze with indignation at any mention of this school; and who can wonder?
After the death of the second daughter, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily were taken from Cowan's Bridge, and spent some time at another school, where they were much happier, and where they made a few life-long friends, particularly Miss Woolner, the principal. One of her schoolmates gives this description of Charlotte's arrival at the school:--