Chapter 2

Before the composition of _Strafford_ Browning had begun a long poem, _Sordello_, which he completed after his first visit to Italy in 1838, and published in 1840. No one of his poems is more difficult to read, and many are the stories told of the dismay occasioned by its various perplexities. The effect of this poem on Browning's fame was disastrous. In fact, after _Sordello_ there began a period, twenty years long, of almost complete indifference in England to Browning's work. The enthusiasm over the promise of his early poems died quite away. Late in life Mr. Browning commented on this period of his literary career as a time of "prolonged desolateness." Yet the years 1841-1846 are the years in which he attained his poetic maturity, and years in which he did some of his best work. During this period he brought out the series somewhat fancifully called _Bells and Pomegranates_. The phrase itself comes from _Exodus_ xxviii, 33, 34. As a title Browning explained it to mean "something like a mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought." This cheap serial edition, the separate numbers of which sold at first at sixpence and later at half a crown, included _Pippa Passes_, _King Victor and King Charles_, _Dramatic Lyrics_, _The Return of the Druses_, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, _Colombe's Birthday_, _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_, _Luria_, and _A Soul's Tragedy_.

All of Browning's plays except _Strafford_ and _In a Balcony_ came out of this series. The most beautiful of them all, _Pippa Passes_, appeared in 1841. It is hardly a drama at all in the conventional sense, though it has one scene, that between Ottima and Sebald, of the highest dramatic power; but it has always been a favorite with readers. When it was published Miss Barrett wrote to Mr. Browning that she found it in her heart to covet the authorship of this poem more than any other of his works, and he said in answer that he, too, liked _Pippa_ better than anything else he had yet done. Mr. Sharp, while emphasizing the undramatic quality of the play, counts it "the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of Browning's dramatic poems." "It seems to me," he adds, "like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the sinking plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that _symmetria prisca_ recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air.... Everyone who knows Browning at all knows _Pippa Passes_."

Of the seven dramas published in _Bells and Pomegranates_ there is comparatively little stage history to record. In spite of occasional fairly successful productions it must be admitted that Browning's plays have never achieved, probably never will achieve, popularity in the shape of long runs in many cities.[3] They are too subjective, too analytic, too psychological, for quick or easy understanding. But to the reader they offer many delights. The stories are clear, coherent, interesting; the characters strongly individualized; the crises of experience stimulating; the interaction of personalities subtly analyzed; the poetry noble and beautiful.

The two non-dramatic numbers of _Bells and Pomegranates_ were _Dramatic Lyrics_ (No. 3, 1842) and _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (No. 7, 1845). The first included such poems as "Cavalier Tunes," "In a Gondola," "Porphyria," and "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"; the second included "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," "The Lost Leader," "The Tomb at St. Praxed's," "The Flight of the Duchess," "The Boy and the Angel," and the first part of "Saul." These poems, together with the dramas, make a remarkably rich body of poetry to be produced in the short space of five years. And the character of the work, its variety and beauty and strength and originality, were such that its meager and grudging acceptance seems now inexplicable.

The most important event in the life of Browning during this period was his acquaintance with Miss Elizabeth Barrett. In 1844 she brought out a new volume of poems which he saw and greatly admired. He wrote to her expressing delight in her work and asking permission to call; but Miss Barrett, owing to long-continued invalidism, had lived in almost entire seclusion, and she was not at first willing to receive Mr. Browning. This was in January, 1845, and many letters passed between them before the first interview in the following May. Mr. Browning's love for Miss Barrett found almost immediate expression and she was soon conscious of an equally strong love for him, but for a considerable time she persistently refused to marry him. To her mind the obstacles were almost insurmountable. Of these her ill-health was chief. She could not consent, she said, to dim the prosperities of his career by a union with her future, which she characterized as a precarious thing, a thing for making burdens out of--but not for his carrying. In exchange for the "noble extravagancies" of his love she could bring him only "anxiety and more sadness than he was born to." This obstacle of ill-health was unexpectedly modified by a very mild winter and by the new physical vigor brought in the train of new happiness. From this point of view the marriage, though hazardous, was practicable by the end of the summer of 1846. A second obstacle lay in the nature and opinions of Miss Barrett's father, who governed even his grown-up children by "an incredible system of patriarchal absolutism." By what was variously termed an obliquity of the will, an eccentricity, a monomania, he had decided that none of his children should marry, and on this point he demanded "passive obedience." It was perfectly clear that Miss Barrett could not gain his consent to her marriage, and so, after long hesitation and much unhappiness, she decided to marry Mr. Browning without that consent. In order to save her family and close friends from the blame sure to fall upon them for the remotest sanction of her marriage, her plans were kept an absolute secret. She met Mr. Browning at Marylebone Church on September 12, 1846, and they were married there, Mrs. Browning returning at once to her own home, where she remained till a week later, when she started for Italy with her husband. The wedding was then announced. Throughout her father's life Mrs. Browning endeavored to placate him, for she devotedly loved him and she had been his favorite child, but in vain. He would never see her again, he returned her letters unopened, and he would not allow her to be spoken of in his presence.

After resting a week in Paris Mr. and Mrs. Browning went on to Pisa, where they remained nearly seven months. The "miracle" of the Pisa life was Mrs. Browning's gain in health. "You are not _improved_, you are _transformed_," was Mrs. Jameson's exclamation. It was at Pisa that Mr. Browning came to know of the sonnets his wife had written during the progress of their courtship and engagement. In _Critical Kit-Kats_ (1896) Mr. Gosse tells the story as Mr. Browning gave it to him: "One day, early in 1847, their breakfast being over, Mrs. Browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table could be cleared. He was presently aware of someone behind him, although the servant had 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 room." Mr. Browning felt at once that he had no right to keep such poetry as a private possession. "I dared not," he said, "reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." They were accordingly published in 1850, under the intentionally mystifying title, _Sonnets from the Portuguese_.

The Brownings reached Florence April 20, 1847. After several changes they were, in May, 1848, established in the home in which they remained during Mrs. Browning's life. It was a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Palazzo Guidi. Of the practical side of this early Florentine life, Mrs. Browning wrote, "My dear brothers have the illusion that nobody should marry on less than two thousand a year. Good heavens! how preposterous it does seem to me! We scarcely spend three hundred, and I have every luxury I ever had, and which it would be so easy to give up, at need; and Robert wouldn't sleep, I think, if an unpaid bill dragged itself by any chance into another week. He says that when people get into pecuniary difficulties his sympathies always go with the butchers and the bakers." In accordance with this horror of owing five shillings five days, the furnishings of the new home, "the rococo chairs, spring sofas, carved bookcases, satin from cardinals' beds, and the rest," were accumulated at a pace dictated by the bank account, but for all that it was not long before the rooms began to take on an aspect as beautiful as it was homelike.

By preference the Brownings lived very quietly. At the end of fifteen months Mrs. Browning wrote, "Robert has not been out an evening of the fifteen months; but what with music and books and writing and talking, we scarcely know how the days go, it's such a gallop on the grass." March 9, 1849, was born Wiedemann, later known as "Penini" or "Pen" Browning. Coincident with this joy was the grief caused by the death of Browning's mother, a sorrow from which he rallied but slowly. The Florentine life was occasionally varied by summers at Bagni di Lucca, winters in Paris or Rome, and several visits to England. There was also an increasing social life. Americans were especially welcome to the Brownings because, while England was still indifferent to Browning's work, America had given it an appreciative welcome. In March, 1861, Mrs. Browning wrote, "I don't complain for myself of an unappreciative public. _I have no reason_. But just for _that_ reason I complain more about Robert.... In America he is a power, a writer, a poet--he is read, he lives in the hearts of the people."[4]

Among the Americans associated with the Brownings for longer or shorter periods during their life in Florence were two distinguished women, Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1847, George William Curtis spent two days with the Brownings at Vallombrosa, a visit later described in his _Easy Chair_. Mr. Field, who had brought out the American reprint of the two-volume edition of Browning's poems in 1849, was a guest at Casa Guidi in 1852. Charles Sumner writes of "delicious Tuscan evenings" with the Brownings and the Storys in 1859. Mr. Browning's interests in art led to friendships with American artists, among whom were Mr. Page, who painted a successful portrait of Browning; Miss Harriet Hosmer, to whom Mr. and Mrs. Browning finally consented to sit for the "Clasped Hands"; and Hiram Powers. The dearest American friends were, however, Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne and Mr. and Mrs. Story.

Music and art were among Browning's chief delights in Florence. George William Curtis in describing the trip to Vallombrosa says that it was part of their pleasure to sit in the dusky convent chapel while Browning at the organ "chased a fugue of Master Hughes of Saxe Gotha, or dreamed out upon twilight keys a faint throbbing toccata of Galuppi's." Modeling in clay was even more satisfying as a personal resource. In the autumn of 1860 Mrs. Browning wrote, "Robert has taken to modeling under Mr. Story (at his studio) and is making extraordinary progress, turning to account his studies in anatomy. He has copied already two busts, the young Augustus and the Psyche, and is engaged on another, enchanted with his new trade, working six hours a day." Some months later she added, "The modeling combines body-work and soul-work, and the more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow, the more he has exulted and been happy--'_no, nothing ever made him so happy before_.'" He found, also, an unfailing pleasure in the study of great pictures. And he was a buyer of pictures with a collector's delight in hunting out the work of the unappreciated early Tuscan artists. Mrs. Orr says that he owned at least one picture by each of the obscure artists mentioned in "Old Pictures in Florence."

Mrs. Browning sometimes expressed regret that Browning should give himself so unreservedly in so many directions, because she felt that he had thus too little time and energy left for poetry. Her fear was not without justification, for after the richly productive period from 1841 to 1846, we come upon a space of nine years the only publications of which are, in 1850, _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_, a long poem in two parts giving the arguments in favor of Christianity; and, in 1852, an introduction to a collection of letters then supposed to be by Shelley, but since found to be spurious. The essay is nevertheless of importance as an exposition of Browning's theory of poetry, and as an interesting study of Shelley.

In 1855, at the close of this period of nine years, there appeared a collection of fifty-one poems entitled _Men and Women_. In "fundamental brain power," insight, beauty, and mastery of style, these poems show Browning at the highest level of his poetic achievement. It is in these remarkable poems that he brought to perfection a poetic form which he practically invented, the dramatic monologue, a form in which there is but one speaker but which is essentially dramatic in effect. The dramatic quality arises partly from the implied presence of listeners whose expressions of assent or dissent determine the progress or the abrupt changes of direction of the speaker's words. In "Andrea del Sarto," for example, Lucrezia's smiles and frowns and gestures of impatience are a constant influence, and the poem presents as vivid an interplay of personalities as any scene in a drama. But the implied listener is hardly more than a secondary dramatic element, the chief one being that the speaker talks, as do the characters in a play, out of the demands of the immediate experience, gradually and casually disclosing all the tangled web of influence, all the clashes of will with destiny, of desire with convention, that have led to the crisis depicted. Fra Lippo Lippi gives no consecutive history of his life, only such snatches of it as partially account for his present mad freak, but the strife between his own nature and instinct on the one hand and the conventions and traditions of religious art on the other could hardly be more vividly presented. _In a Balcony_, the one drama in _Men and Women_, has but a fragment of a plot, but in intensity, reality, and passion it excels most of Browning's dramas, and, in spite of its long speeches, has proved effective on the stage.[5] In variety of theme, subject-matter, and verse-form, the poems of _Men and Women_ defy classification. Whatever page one turns, there is something novel, stimulating, captivating. All of Browning's Florentine interests are represented here--his love of old pictures and little-known music, his delight in Florence, Venice, Rome, in all Italy, her skies and her landscapes, the vagrants of her streets, her religious ceremonies, her church dignitaries, her scholars. Then there are love-poems in all tones and tempers, the noblest of them all, "One Word More," being Browning's most direct and personal tribute to his wife. And we see in its keenest form his intellectual delight in subtle disquisition. The doctrine of immortality as it appeals to the mind of the cultured, dissatisfied pagan Cleon; the miracle of Lazarus as it is brooded over by the Arab physician Karshish; the balancing of faith and doubt in the clever casuistry of Bishop Blougram--these are topics to Browning's taste and are treated with skill and mastery. Taken all in all these poems give to the reader a full impression of Browning's characteristic force, the darting, penetrating power of his phrase, the rush and energy and leap of his thought. It is by _Men and Women_, the somewhat similar _Dramatis Personae_, and the earlier _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Dramatic Romances_, that Browning is most widely and most favorably known.

During the first ten years that the Brownings were in Florence Mrs. Browning's health was so good that she was able to enjoy social and outdoor pleasures to a degree that would have been thought impossible before her marriage. She had also kept up her literary work. A new edition of her poems appeared in 1849; in 1851 she published _Casa Guidi Windows_, poems illustrative of her ardent interest in all that pertained to the fight for Italian freedom; and in 1856 her long-planned verse novel _Aurora Leigh_ was completed and published. But soon after this her strength began insensibly to fail and during the last three years of her life she suffered much from repeated bronchial attacks. However, her death, in June, 1861, was entirely unexpected. The Florentines had loved her deeply and had appreciated her utterances in behalf of a free Italy. She was, accordingly, buried in Florence, with "extraordinary demonstrations of respect," and the house where she had lived was marked by the municipality with a commemorative tablet.

Browning's wish was to leave Florence at once and to make the new life as unlike the old as possible. He went to London, and after some delay established himself in a house at Warwick Crescent, where he lived till 1887. The first portion of his life in England was one of "unbearable loneliness." He took care of his son, busied himself with a new edition of his wife's poems, read and studied and wrote with feverish intensity, and avoided people. But with the spring of 1863, says Mr. Gosse, "a great change came over Browning's habits. He had shunned all invitations into society, but ... it suddenly occurred to him that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy," and thereupon he entered into the social, literary, musical, and artistic life of London.

The nine years following 1855 were again a period of small productivity. _Dramatis Personae_ was a slender volume to represent so many years, even though it contained such great poems as "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "A Death in the Desert," and "Abt Vogler." But during this period a long poem, _The Ring and the Book_, had been maturing. In 1860, while still at Casa Guidi, Browning had found at a book-stall the now famous "square old yellow Book," containing the legal record of a famous Roman murder case. He read the account on the way home, and before night had so mastered the details that, as he paced up and down on the terrace in the darkness, he saw the tragedy unfold before him in picture after picture. It was not, however, till 1864 that he definitely set to work on the composition of the poem. It was published in four volumes of three parts each, in the winter and spring of 1868-9. The poem has a novel structure. The story is retold ten times by different persons and with such variations of fact and opinions and style as are dictated by the knowledge and the character of the speaker. The monologues of Count Guido, who murdered his wife, of Pompilia the young wife, of Caponsacchi the "soldier saint" who endeavored to save her, and of the old Pope, are by far the most interesting portions of the poem, but the whole of it is remarkable, and it justly takes rank as one of England's greatest poems. With the appearance of this book Browning's genius received adequate recognition in high places. _The Athenaeum_ called it "the _opus magnum_ of the generation, not merely beyond all parallel the supremest poetic achievement of the time, but the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has possessed since the days of Shakespeare."

The last ten or twelve years of Browning's life were so crowded with interests, occupations, publications, friends, honors, that not even a summary of them can be undertaken here. Mr. Sharp says of this period:

"Everybody wished him to come and dine; and he did his best to gratify Everybody. He saw everything; read all the notable books; kept himself acquainted with the leading contents of the journals and magazines; conducted a large correspondence; read new French, German, and Italian books of mark; read and translated Euripides and AEschylus; knew all the gossip of the literary clubs, the salons, and the studios; was a frequenter of afternoon tea parties; and then, over and above it, he was Browning--the most profoundly subtle mind that has exercised itself in poetry since Shakespeare."

Mr. Henry James in commenting on Browning's rich and ample London period with "its felicities and prosperities of every sort," says that in contemplating "the wonderful Browning ... the accomplished, saturated, sane, sound man of the London world and the world of culture," it was impossible not to believe that "he had arrived somehow, for his own deep purposes, at the enjoyment of a double identity," so dissociated were the poet and the "member of society." Phillips Brooks, who met Browning in England in 1865-6, was impressed by his fullness of life and said he was "very like some of the best of Thackeray's London men." In public and on ordinary social occasions Browning is said to have been frank, charming, friendly--"more agreeable," Mary Anderson said, "than distinguished." With intimate friends, however, the poet had quite another sort of charm. "To a single listener," says Mr. Gosse, with whom he was on familiar terms, "the Browning of his own study was to the Browning of a dinner party as a tiger cat is to a domestic cat. In such conversation his natural strength came out. His talk assumed the volume and the tumult of a cascade. His voice rose to a shout, sank to a whisper, ran up and down the gamut of conversational melody. Those whom he was expecting will never forget his welcome, the loud trumpet-note from the other end of the passage, the talk already in full flood at a distance of twenty feet. Then, in his own study or drawing-room, what he loved was to capture his visitor in a low armchair's 'sofa-lap of leather,' and from a most unfair vantage of height to tyrannize, to walk around the victim, in front, behind, on this side, on that, weaving magic circles, now with gesticulating arms thrown high, now groveling on the floor to find some reference in a folio, talking all the while, a redundant turmoil of thoughts, fancies, and reminiscences flowing from those generous lips."

Elsewhere Mr. Gosse summed up his personal impressions of Mr. Browning, as follows: