 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton. Section 8, Chapter 3, Browning and His Marriage, Part 1. Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years before his death. But anyone who wishes to understand how deep was the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly worth he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study one, most striking and determining element in the question. Browning's simple, heartfelt and unlimited admiration for other people. He was one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlisle, Tennyson, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold were all alike in being children of a very strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness and error of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other influences. Browning alone had no fear. He welcomed evidently without the least effectation all the influences of his day, a very interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure in a university dinner. Praise, he says in effect, was given very deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of Oxford man, Clow. The really striking thing about these three names is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne a young pseudo-shelly who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarized Clow in a contemptuous rhyme. There was a bad poet named Clow, whom his friends all united to puff, but the public, though dull, has not quite such a skull as belongs to believers in Clow. The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlisle, who sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin, who rebelled against Mill. He excused Napoleon III and Lander, who hurled interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of great men, who all condemned each other. To say that he had no streak of envy in his nature would be true but unfair. For there is no justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He admired another poet, as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the literal sense of that sublime word. His mind was so great that it rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his times and had been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady poet, Miss Barrett. That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very weakest end, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was open to literary objection as too heady and too high-colored. When she aired, it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxurience, gaining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a certain element which had not been present in it since the last days of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels while the logical end of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit as distinct from the cold wit of the school of Pope in the puns and buffooneries of Shakespeare. We find it lingering in hudabras, and we do not find it again until we come to set strange and strong lines as those of Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon. Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise soothe, but glittered do like in the covenanted and high-rayed light. He was a despot, granted, but the Greek autos of his autocratic mouths said, yea, I, the people's French. He magnified the image of the freedom he denied. Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes and the peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but to take this step one must reach the sublime. Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert what still needs, but then urgently needed, assertion. The fact that womanliness, whether in life or poetry, was a positive thing and not the negative of manliness. Her verse, at its best, was quite as strong as Browning's own and very nearest clever. The difference between their natures was the difference between two primary colors, not between dark and light shades of the same color. Browning had often heard not only of the public but of the private life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, who was one of those rare and valuable people, who have a talent for establishing definite relationships with people after comparatively short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her fairy godfather. He spoke much about her to Browning and of Browning to her with a certain courtly guerrilla which was one of his talents, and there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long before had it not been for certain peculiarities of the position of Miss Barrett. She was an invalid and an invalid of somewhat unique kind and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances. Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West Indies, and thus by a somewhat curious coincidence had borne a part of that same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt and renunciation. The parts, played by Edward Barrett, however, though little or nothing as known of it, was probably very different. He was a man, conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation and the family, and in doubt with some facilities for making his conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But selfishness of the most perilous sort and unconscious selfishness was eating away his moral foundations as it tended to eat away those of old despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad ones. He had what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism. Not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill temper, but that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must be absolutely at his beck and call whether it was to be browbeaten or caressed. During the early years Elizabeth Barrett's life, the family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak and almost moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her spine, however, will be found the more we study her history, to be only one of the influences which were to darken those bed-ridden years and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole Street, and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time went on. He mounted guard over his daughter's sick bed in a manner compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a death bed. She was surrounded by the most poisonous and degrading of all atmospheres, a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere has nothing to do with the actual nature of prolongation of disease. I may have passed through three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, and yet, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household was the curse of considering ill health the natural condition of a human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally and aesthetically like some detestable decadent poet upon his daughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes, explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat for which he hungered. And when the cloud was upon his spirit he would lash out at all things and everyone with the insatiable cruelty of the sentimentalist. It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made thoroughly morbid and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did of course suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to be dying, but she was a high-spirited woman full of that silent and quite unfathomable kind of courage, which is only found in women, and she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of loneliness, and the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a spirit which was swift and had longed to a fault. She could still own the truth, the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatient. Tearing open parcels instead of untieing them, looking at the end of books before she had read them, was, she said, incurable with her. It is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the achievement of this woman who thus contrived while possessing all the excuses of an invalid to retain some of the faults of a tomboy. Impetuousity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. In after years when Browning had experimentally shaved off his beard, she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again that minute. There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open parcels, not in vain or as a mere phrase, that her husband after death describe her as all a wonder and a wild desire. She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments, almost as monotony they relieved, nor were they colored in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which she breathed. She used her brains seriously. She was a good Greek scholar and read Echelaus and Eropides unceasingly with her blind friend Mr. Boyd, and she had and retained, even to the hour of her death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the personality which was shrouded from the world by such somber curtains. In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former occasion on which they had nearly met and compared it to the sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvelous illumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase it is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external appearance solidify. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with charming sincerity and humor, and with much of that leisurely self-revelation which is possible for a woman who has nothing else to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of her life if their relations had always remained a learned and delightful correspondence. But she must have known very little of Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy and bloodless tie. All the times of his life he was sufficiently fond of his own way. This time he was especially prompt and impulsive, and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling people, a love of the physical presence of friends which made him slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy and the Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he calls. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her health and the season of the year and the east winds. If my truest heart swishes avail, replied Browning obscenately, you shall laugh at the east winds yet, as I do. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton Section 9 Chapter 3 Browning and His Marriage Part 2 Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. This correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many profound questions. It is impossible to deal at any lengths with the picture given in these remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two spirits of great natural potency and independence without saying at least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. All of such a question should be tested by one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am not prepared to admit that there is or can be properly speaking in the world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable and that they should be communicated is a principle which lies at the root of every conceivable religion. This was crucified upon a hill and not in a cavern and the word gospel itself involves the same idea as the ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever therefore a poet or any similar type of man can or conceives that he can make all men partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart I can imagine nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. The man in the question believes that he can make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him and he chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressions which have one value and significant value, he does not know what the man is doing. The man in the question believes that he can make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him and he chooses his words to that end. The expressions which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom they were addressed and an entirely different value and significance when read by anyone else then the element of the violation of sanctity does arise. It is not because there are many things in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife I see no reason why he should not. The objection to letters which begin my dear Ba is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far as any third person is concerned Browning might as well have been expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that in short is not the fact that they tell us about the love of the Brownings but that they do not tell us about it. Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a selection among the letters but not a selection which would exclude anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of each other they would not have written and published one word more or the sonnets from the Portuguese. Nay, they would not have been married in a public church of love of absolutely national publicity and tacitly therefore repudiates any idea that such confessions are too sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should have known noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed to make private life holy and undefiled but it has had very little actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the English marriage service which are as fine as many poems is a language dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If the bride and bridegroom in church instead of uttering these words were to utter a poem compounded of private illusions to the foibles of Aunt Matilda or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a lane it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the Browning's letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and unmeaning, it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom whether expressed in private or public belongs to the world but our folly belongs to those we love. There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning letters which tends to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine interviews will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the most extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seems to be only two main rules for this form of letter writing. The first is that if a sentence can begin with a parenthesis, it always should. And second is that if you have written from a third to a half of a sentence, you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to watch anyone who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and secrets of lovers opening the Browning letters. He would probably come upon such simple and lucid passage as the following. I ought to wait say a week at least having killed all your mules for you before I shot down your dogs. But not being foibles, a pollen, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, Greek Gamoi, let me get out of this slaw of assembly, never mind with what dislocated ankles. What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one that Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and of demolishing the livestock on those somewhat unpromising premises. Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of Miss Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letter following the above. But if it could be possible that you should mean to say you would show me dots, can it be, or am I reading this attic contraction quite the wrong way? You see I am afraid of the difference between flattering myself and being flattered dots, the fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too overjoyed to have revelations from the portfolio dots, however incarnated with blots and pen scratches to be able to ask impudently of them now? Is that plain? Most probably she thought it was. With regard to Browning himself, this characteristic is comparatively natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible to gather where the appointment was, or when it was or what was its object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend six pence for the pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation of his own plans. The fact was that it was part of the machinery of his brain that things came out of it as it were backwards. The words tale for most express Browning's style with something more than a conventional accuracy. The tale, the most insignificant part of an animal is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards who flourishes a tale with such energy that everyone takes it for his head. He was, in other words, at least in his prose and practical utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian secret society, one local branch of which Bohr as a badge and olive green ribbon had entered his house and in some sensational interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the color of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life upon the principle of the X-speed Herculum. And at the beginning of his description of Hercules, the foot appears some sizes larger than the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it is somewhat more difficult to understand for she at least had beyond all question a quite simple and loosened vein of humor, which does not easily reconcile itself with his subtlety. But she was partly under the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional wit, of which we have already taken note in dealing with her poems, and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning. Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sword very much by the outside public. Their letters may be published a hundred times over. They still remain private. They write to each other in a language of their own, and almost exasperatingly impressionistic language, a language chiefly consisting of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes of interrogation. Words worth when he heard afterwards of their eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always used in speaking of Browning. So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett have gone off together. I hope they understand each other. No one else would. It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in their lives and in their correspondence. I have a convenient theory to account for Mr. Kenyon, writes Browning mysteriously, and his otherwise unaccountable kindness to me. For Mr. Kenyon's kindness retorts Elizabeth Barrett. No theory will account. I class it with mesmerism for that reason. There is something very dignified and beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each other in giving adequate praise to the old delante of whom the world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him was indeed especially strong and typical. There, he said pointing after the old man as he left the room, there goes one of the most blended men living. A man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as Kenyon, the Magnificent. There is something clearly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling. Not merely of the use of sociability or of the charm of sociability but of the magnificence. The heroic largeness of real sociability. Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of the society, he saw in Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth that a man may actually be great yet not in the least able. Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as has been stated with a variety of objections. The chief of these was the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth seeing. A point on which the seeker for an interview might be permitted to form his own opinion. There is nothing to see in me nor to hear in me. I never learn to talk as you do in London, though I can't admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colors. The rest of me is nothing but a root fit for the ground and dark. The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect I will call it to on Tuesday. They met on May 20th, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen in love with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in the domestic atmosphere the incident would appear to have been paralyzing. I will tell you what I once said in jest, she writes. If a Prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of lineal descent from some sanatory in the moon on one hand and a ticket of good behavior from the nearest independent chapel in the other why even then, said my sister Erbel, it would not do. And she was right. We all agreed that she was right. This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject. It is illustrative of the very best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human mind. Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton Section 10 Chapter 3 Browning and His Marriage Part 3 Browning's proposals were, of course, as matter stood, of a character to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of her family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved to say nothing of being married. And that a life passed between a bed and a sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almost alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous view of her condition stood Browning himself. But you are better, he would say. You look, so, and speak, so. Which of the two opinions of right, of course, is a complex medical matter into which a book like this has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may be stated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846, Elizabeth Barrett was still living under the Great Family Convention which provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later in Italy as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged uphill in a wine hamper, toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls an inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars. It is perfectly incredible how one so ill as her family believed her to be should have lived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed for the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But such exultations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browning lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than she had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is not very difficult or presumptuous of us to guess that she had been in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the absence of disease but which is in truth the most terrible of all diseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett suffered. Lest still of the nervous condition they create and least of all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered air and sunlight and activity and all the things the mere idea of which chilled the barrets with terror. In our day in short it would have been recognized that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin. That strange possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those who surrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this and Browning knew nothing of it and probably if he knew anything knew less than they did. Mrs. Orr says probably with a great deal of truth that of ill health and its sensations he remained pathetically ignorant to his dying day. But devoid as he was a like of expert knowledge and personal experience without a shadow of medical authority almost without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion he was and remained right. He at least saw he indeed alone saw to the practical center of the situation. He did not know anything about hysteria or neurosis or the influence of surroundings but he knew that the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fifth thing for any human being alive, dying or dead. His stand upon this matter has really a certain human interest since it is an example of a thing which will from time to time occur the interposition of the average man to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly right nine times out of ten but the tenth time comes and we find in military matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake known to strategy and yet win all his battles in medical matters, Robert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and are entirely correct. But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of all the sanities and respectabilities there came suddenly a new development destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed and to weigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon further examination of Miss Barrett's condition the physician had declared that it was absolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy. This may without any exaggeration be called the turning point and the last earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not originally been an evil man. Only a man who, being stoical in practical things, permitted himself to his great detriment a self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the universe and as long as the great mass of authorities were on his side his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when the authorities changed their front and with one accord asked his permission to send his daughter abroad. It was his crisis and he refused. He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and somewhat detestable way of refusing. Once when his daughter had asked a perfectly simple favor in a matter of expediency, permission that is to keep her favored brother with her during an illness, her singular parent remarked that she might keep him as she liked, but that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice. These were the weapons with which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear. The worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who have discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the fine verse of Swinburne. The racks of the earth and the rods are weak as the foam on the sands. The heart is the prey for the gods who crucify hearts, not hands. He with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciousness of women was with regard to one of them very near to the end of his reign. When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey together. Many other persons had taken cognizance of the fact and were active in the matter. Canyon, the gentlest and most universally complementary of mortals, had marched into the house of an Arabela Barrett, the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs. Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thus removing all questions of expense or arrangement. She would appear to have stood in the matter with splendid persistence and magnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a change of mind and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. At length, when it became evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett's consent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour of Europe alone. She went to Paris and had not been there many days when she received a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Browning, who had been married for some days. Her astonishment is rather a picturesque thing to think about. The manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course, the talk of the whole literary world, had been affected, is narrated as everyone knows in the Browning letters. Browning had decided that an immediate marriage was the only solution, and having put his hand to the plow did not decline even when it became necessary that it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really exasperating, but everyone with any imagination or chivalry will rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had the courage to tell the truth, and now it was demanded of him to have the greater courage to tell a lie, and he told it with perfect cheerfulness and lucidity. In thus disappearing surreptitiously with an invalid woman he was doing something against which there were undoubtedly a hundred things to be said. Only it happened that the most cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it. It is very amusing and very significant in the matter of Browning's character to read the accounts which he writes to Elizabeth Barrett of his attitude towards the approaching coup de theater. In one place he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the least trouble about the disapproval of her father, the man whom he fears as a frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could only walk into the room and fly into a passion and this Browning could have received with perfect equanimity. But, he says, if Kenyon knows of the matter, I shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations with his arm on my shoulder of how I am ruining my sexual position, destroying your health, etc., etc. This touch is very suggestive of the power of the old worlding who could maneuver with young people as well as Major Ben Dennis. Kenyon had indeed long been perfectly aware of the way in which things were going and the method he adopted in order to comment on it is rather entertaining. In a conversation with Elizabeth Barrett he asked carelessly whether there was anything between her sister and a certain cook. On receiving a surprise to reply in the negative he remarked apologetically that he had been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the house. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he meant, but the logical elusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some meridithian comedy. The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute and necessarily dubious position is perhaps more thoroughly to his credit than anything else in his career. He never came out so well in all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one act of deception. Having made up his mind to that act he is not ashamed to name it. Neither on the other hand does he rant about it and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the sight of God after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was breaking a social law and he was not declaring a crusade against social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power of giving dispensation to themselves. We feel that men without meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and end by being thoroughly antisocial. One of the best and most striking things to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did this thing, considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave it really exceptional. He did not in the least degree break the rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. It did not in the least degree weaken the sanctity of the school. At a supreme crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and died conventional. It would be hard to say whether he appears the more thoroughly sane in having performed the act or not having allowed it to affect him. Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost monotonous assertion of Browning that this allotment was the only possible course of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she did something which, in its curious and impulsive symbolism belongs almost to a more primitive age. The sullen system of medical seclusion to which she had long been subjected has already been described. The most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her somber room on the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject Browning's proposal. She called her sister to her and to the amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. In this she drove into Regent's Park, alighted, walked on to the grass and stood leaning against the tree for some moments, looking round her at the leaves in the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home and agreed to the allotment. This was possibly the best poem that she ever produced. Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of prudence and knowledge of human nature. Early one morning in September 1846, Miss Barrett walk quietly out of her father's house became Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marleybone and returned home again as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showed some of the real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a poet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature of things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife in spite of the truly miraculous courage with which she supported it, and he desired therefore to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquilizing effect of familiar scenes and faces. One trifling incident is worth mentioning, which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. It has already been remarked in these pages that he was preeminently one of those men whose expanding opinions never altered by a hair's breath the actual ground plan of their moral sense. Browning would have felt the same things right and the same things wrong whatever views he had held. During the brief and most trying period between his actual marriage and his actual elopement it is most significant that he would not call at the house in Wimpole Street because he would have been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting a lie. He was deceiving a father. He was putting a sick woman to a terrible risk and these things he did not disguise from himself for a moment. But he could not bring himself to say two words to a maid servant. Here there may be partly the feelings of the literary man for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a certain traditional morality which it is impossible either to describe or justify. Browning's respectability was an older and more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of other men. If we wish to understand him we must always remember that in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the action contains the highest morality but whether we should have felt inclined to do it ourselves. At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs. Browning went for the second time, almost on tiptoe out of her father's house accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just successfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in all probability Barrett had discovered that his dying daughter had fled with Browning do idly. They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to them of the domestic earthquake which they had left behind them. They do not appear to have had many hopes or to have made many attempts at her reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that her father was in truth not a man to be treated with. Hardly perhaps even a man to be blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that she had grown up in the house of a madman. End of Chapter 3 End of Section 10 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton Section 11 Chapter 4 Browning in Italy Part 1 The married pair went to Pisa in 1846 and moved soon afterward to Florence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there is much perhaps to be said in the way of description and analysis. Little to be said in the way of actual narrative. Each of them had passed through the one incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett's life had before her marriage been uneventfully somber, it was uneventfully happy. A succession of splendid landscapes. A succession of brilliant friends. A succession of high and ardent intellectual interests they experienced. But their life was of the kind that if it were told at all would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous intellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far into the country eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of the peasants. They were the strangest and most picturesque figures of Italian society. How they climbed mountains and red books and modeled in clay and played on musical instruments. How Browning was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards. How he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymn brought the knocking of the Austrian police. These are the things of which his life is full. Trifling and picturesque things. A beautiful and happy story. Beginning and ending. Nowhere. The only incidents perhaps were the birth of their son and the death of Browning's mother in 1849. It is well known that Browning loved Italy. That it was his adopted country. That he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the name of it would be found written on his heart. But the particular character of this love of Browning and Italy needs to be understood. There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy. Who live in it. Who visit it annually. Who come across a continent to see it. Who hunt out its darkest picture and its most moldering carving. But they are all united in this that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is a branch. Their Universal Museum. A department of dry bones. There are rich and cultivated persons particularly Americans. Who seem to think that they keep Italy as they might keep an aviary or a hot house into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner. He was intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a nation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation he would not have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything on earth from Middle Ages to the Amoeba who is discussed at such length in Mr. Sludge the Medium he is interested in the life of things. He was interested in the life of Italian art and in the life in Italian politics. Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this matter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurably fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture. And his sojourn in Italy gave him of course innumerable and perfect opportunities for the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian cities. Thousands of such visitors for example study those endless lines of magnificent pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all the Italian galleries and museums and admire them and talk about them and note them in their catalogs and describe them in their diaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described very suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes herself as longing for her husband to write poems beseeching him to write poems but finding all her petitions useless because her husband was engaged all day in modeling busts in clay and breaking them as fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art. The interest in a living thing. The interest in a growing thing. The insatiable interest in how things are done. Everyone who knows his admirable poems on painting Fralippo Lippi and Andrea Del Sarto and Pictor Ignotus will remember how fully they deal with technicalities. How they are concerned with canvas with a mess of colors. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of Lady I once knew who had merely read the title of Pasciarato and how he worked in distemper and thought that Pasciarato was the name of a dog whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfillment of his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting. They smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art. A thing accomplished. A valley of bones. To him it is a field of crops continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was interested like some scientific man in the obstetrics of art. There is a large army of educated men but Browning could not merely talk art with artists. He could talk shop with them. Personally, he may not have known enough about painting to be more than a fifth-rate painter or enough about the organ to be more than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said and done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate art critic does not know. There are some things which a sixth-rate organist knows but does not know. And these were the things that Browning knew. He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word. The actual characteristic of these nameless dillante a man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame or money but even practices it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was, in this strict sense, a strenuous amateur. He tried and practiced in the course of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for a moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurd little ingenuities such as the discovery of a way of making pictures by roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit of fruitless vivacity he made himself, to a very considerable extent, a technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a technical expert in music. In his old age he shows traces of being a power thing as an abstract police detective writing at length in letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian town. Indeed, his own ring and the book is merely a sublime detective story. He was in a hundred things, this type of man. He was precisely in the position, with the touch of a greater technical success of the admirable figure in Stevenson's story who said, I can play the fiddle well enough to earn a living in an orchestra of a penny-gaff, but not quite. The love of browning for Italian art therefore was anything but an antiquarian fancy. It was the love of a living thing. We see the same phenomena in an even more important manner, the essence and individuality of the country itself. Italy, to Browning and his wife, was not by any means merely that sculpture than Ornate sepulcher that it is used so many of those cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and admire and despise it. To them it was a living nation. The heart and center of the religion and politics of a continent, the ancient and flaming heart of western history, the very Europe of Europe, and they lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas, the making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that they are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, with every circumstances of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama of the unification of Italy with the bold and romantic militarism of Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They lived at a time when affairs of state had almost the air of works of art, and it is not strange that these two poets should have become politicians in one of those great creative epics when even the politicians have to be poets. Rounding was on this question and on all the questions of continental and English politics, a very strong liberal. This fact is not a mere detail of purely biographical interest like any view he might take of the authorship of the Icyan Basilic or the authenticity of the tick-borne claimant. Liberalism was so incredibly involved in the poet's whole view of existence that even a thoughtful and imaginative conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a liberal. His mind was possessed, perhaps, even to access, by a belief in growth and energy and in the ultimate utility of error. He held the great central liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit beyond and perhaps even independent religious and serious convictions. The world was going right, he felt, most probably in his way, but certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in later years entitled Why I Am a Liberal expresses admirably this philosophical root of his politics. It asks, in effect, how he who had found truth in so many strange forms, after so many strange wanderings can be expected to stifle with or the eccentricities of others. A liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by waving his hand in a dark room stop the mouths of all the deceivers of mankind forever would not wave his hand. Browning was a liberal in this sense. And just as the great liberal movement which followed the French Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It attached, indeed, to the independence of a nation, something of the same holy transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems attached to the life of a man. The grounds were, indeed, much the same. No one could say absolutely that a live man was useless and no one could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or must remain of the world. Man remembered how often barbarous tribes or strange and alien scriptures had been called in to revive the blood of decaying empires and civilizations. And this sense of the personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all other nations, did not involve, in the case of these old liberals, international bitterness. For it is too often forgotten that friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as Carlisle in love with Germany and so thorough an Englishman as Browning in love with Italy. And while on the one side of the struggle, this was the great ideal of energy and variety, on the other side of something which we now find difficult to realize or describe. We have seen in our own time a great reaction in favor of monarchy, aristocracy and ecclesiasticism. A reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct and dwelling almost entirely on the best periods and the best qualities of the old regime. Bought the modern man full of admiration for the great virtue of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies and the great virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, is not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unshivaled how astonishingly irreverent how utterly mean and material and devoid of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe which survived and, for a time, conquered the revolution. The case against church in Italy in the time of Pionono was not the case which a rationalist would urge against the church of the time of St. Louis, but diametrically the opposite case. Against the medieval church it might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic about the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but the devotional side of the soul. Against the church of Pionono the main thing to be said was that it was simply and supremely cynical, that it was not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life but on the worldly counsel to leave life as it is, that it was not the inspirer of insane hopes of reward and miracle but the enemy, the cool and skeptical enemy of hope of any kind or description. The same was true of the monarchial systems of Prussia and Austria and Russia at this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy of the Cavaliers who wrote after Charles I or Louis XIII. It was the philosophy of the typical city uncle, advising everyone and especially the young to avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear. That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the Napoleon legend, while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did something and defied the pessimism of Europe and erased the word impossible. One does not need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of the First Empire shouting their songs and jesting with their kernels smoked and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane. The End of Section 11 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton Section 12 Chapter 4 Browning in Italy Part 2 Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the breakup of one part of this frozen continent of the non-possimist. Austria's hold in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and holy cowardly and unmeaning compromise which the Holy Alliance had established. And which, if believed without doubt in its solid unbelief, would last until the day of judgment, though it's difficult to imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almost of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely and the despotic princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. In an age of ugliness and routine in a time when diplomatists and philosophers alike had a list of all human types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the world, men whose movements have a national breath and beauty who act symbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort calling to the coachman to drive slower and not a man dared to fire a shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of humanity and liberty and was willing, like some passionate Jesuit of the 16th century to become in its cause either a philosopher or a criminal. Kevora rose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and picturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an age of the impossible. They have passed their theories along with them as all things pass. But since then we have had no men of their type precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordon was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes. When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible to live in a common world like ours to understand how a small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on something personal and essentially free. A tyranny like this is not the worst tyranny but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men not in the most serious matters but precisely in those matters in which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient system of life, and yet to resent a bearing up of a telegram or a postcard. But the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a strange and localized thing and there is hardly a man in the world who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a city like a medieval ghetto than be forbidden by a policeman to smoke another cigarette or sit up a quarter an hour later. Hardly a man who would not feel inclined in such case to raise a rebellion for a caprice for which he did not really care his straw. Unmeaning and muddleheaded tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if extended over many years, is hardest to bear and hope through than the massacres of September and that was the nightmare of vexatious triviality which was lying over all cities of Italy that were ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history of the time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles struggles about the humming of a tune or the wearing of a color the arrest of a journey or the opening of a letter and there can be little doubt that Browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kind to become more indulgent and they ruined him a hatred of the imperial and ducal and papal systems of Italy which sometimes passed the necessities of liberalism and sometimes even transgressed its spirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy was extraordinary full and varied when we consider the restrictions under which one at least of them had always lain they met and took delight notwithstanding their exile in some of the most interesting people of their time Ruskin, Cardinal Manning and Lord Lytton Browning in a most characteristic way enjoyed the society of all of them arguing with one agreeing with another sitting up all night by the bedside of a third it has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon the question of spiritualism that statement must of course be modified and even contradicted if it means that they never differed that Mr. Browning never thought an act of parliament good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad that Mr. Browning never thought bread stale and thought it new such unanimity is not only inconceivable it is a moral and as a matter of fact there is an abundant evidence that their marriage constituted something like that ideal marriage an alliance between too strong and independent forces they differed in truth about a great many things for example about Napoleon III whom Mrs. Browning regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the desserts of Sir Gallahead and whom Browning with his emphatic liberal principles could never pardon for the coup d'etat if they differed on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this the reason must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in both their characters than any mere matter of opinion Mrs. Orr in her excellent life of Browning states that the difficulty arose from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena was an absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility another writer who met them at this time says Browning cannot believe and Mrs. Browning cannot help believing this theory that Browning's aversion to the spiritualist cycle arose from an absolute denial of the tenability of such a theory of life and death has in fact often been repeated but it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with Browning's character he was the last man in the world to be intellectually deaf to hypotheses merely because it was odd he had friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the French legitimateism of D. Rupert Moncler to the republicanism of Landor intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies it is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of Caliban and the morality of times' revenges it is true that at this time of the first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many people of a practical turn of mind which could only be called a superstition against believing in ghosts but intellectually speaking Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant and curious in regard to the new theories whereas the popular version of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for that time the fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion to the spiritualist had little or nothing to do with spiritualism it arose from quite a different side of his character his uncompromising dislike of what is called bohemianism of eccentric or slovenly cliques of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit dubious manners and dubious morals of all abnormality and of all irresponsibility anyone in fact who wishes to see what it was that Browning disliked need only to do two things first he should read the memoirs of David Holm the famous spiritualist medium with whom Browning came in contact these memoirs constitute a more thorough and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever wrote the ghosts, the wraps the flying hands the phantom voices are infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part of the narrative but the bragging the sentimentalism the moral and intellectual phoppery of the composition is everywhere culminating perhaps in the disgusting passage in which Holm describes Mrs. Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband's actions in the matter have been adopted against her will it is in this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of Browning he did not dislike spiritualism but spiritualists the second point on which anyone wishing to be just in the matter should cast an eye is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George Sand Browning felt and to some extent expressed exactly the same aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which he afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Holm the society was of the ragged red diluted with a low theatrical men who worshiped George Sand hajan au baz between an oath and an ejection of saliva when we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or atheists but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early occulist mediums as friends for his wife we shall surely be fairly right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion but to a social tone the truth was that Browning had a great many admirably Philistine feelings and one of them was a great relish for his responsibilities toward his wife he enjoyed being a husband this is quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover though it will scarcely be found apart from it but like all good feelings it has its possible exaggerations and one of them is this almost morbid healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife David Holm the medium came to Florence about 1857 Mrs. Browning undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardor at first and Browning equally undoubtedly opposed and at length forbade the enterprise he did not do so however until he had attended one séance at least yet which a somewhat ridiculous event occurred which is described in Holm's memoirs with a gravity even more absurd than the incident toward the end of the proceedings a wreath was placed in the center of the table and the lights being lowered it was caused to rise slowly into the air and after hovering for some time it moved towards Mrs. Browning and at length to a light upon her head as the wreath was floating in her direction her husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her one would think it was sufficiently a natural action on the part of the man whose wife was the center of a weird and disturbing experiment genuine or otherwise but Mr. Holm gravely asserts that it was generally believed that Browning had crossed the room and a wreath would alight on his head and that from the hour of its disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and malignant aversion to spiritualism the idea of the very conventional and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a wreath in the hope of putting his head into it is one of the genuine gleams of humor in this rather foolish affair Browning could be fairly violent as we know both in poetry and in conversation but it would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and said if Mr. Holm's wreath had alighted on his head next day according to Holm's account he called on the hostess of the previous night in what the writer calls a ridiculous state of excitement and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he and his wife did not attend any more gatherings of the kind what actually occurred is not, of course quite easy to ascertain for the account in Holm's memoirs principally consists of noble speeches made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to a pulverized silence or else to have failed to attract his attention but there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was that Browning put his foot down and the experiment ceased there can be little doubt that he was justified in this indeed he was probably even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical mysteries than if they were the hocus pocus of a charlatan he knew his wife better than posterity can be expected to do but even posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to the purposes of men like Holm as to exhibit almost invariably either a great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them like many geniuses but not all she lived naturally upon something like a borderland and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not at her post when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended in an asylum the whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning but the real characteristic note in it as above suggested has been to some extent missed when some seven years afterwards Mr. Sludge the medium everyone suppose that it was an attack upon spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena as we shall see when we come to that poem this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of it but what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a dislike of Holmes investigations implies a theoretic disbelief in spiritualism it might of course imply a very firm and serious belief in it as a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted the reasonableness of such things Paul was infinitely less dangerous as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in possession of unknown or ill comprehended powers it is surely curious to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few conjuring tricks but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose and nameless energies of the universe Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was therefore in all probability quite open and unbiased his was a peculiar hospitable intellect if anyone had told him of the spiritualist theory or theories a hundred times more insane as things held by some sect of Gnostics in Alexandria or of heretical Talmudus at Antwerp would have delighted in those theories and would have very likely adopted them but Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round a man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoon and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific it was simply the stirrings in Browning of a certain primal masculine feelings far beyond the reach of argument things that lie so deep that if they are hurt they will blame and no anger there is always pain Browning did not like spiritualism to be mentioned for many years and of section 12 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton section 13 Chapter 4 Browning in Italy Part 3 Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man there are many who think this element of conventionality altogether regrettable and disgraceful they have established, as it were a convention of the unconventional but this hatred of the conventional element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do not remember the meaning of words convention means only a coming together an agreement and as every poet must base his work upon an emotional agreement among men so every poet must base his work upon a convention every art is of course based on a convention an agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objection shall not be raised the most realistic art in the world is open to realistic objection against the most exact and everyday drama that ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise the objection that the hero who starts the subject and drops it who runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat is all the time behaving in a most eccentric manner considering that he is doing these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken clean away and had been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of strangers against the most accurate black and white artists that human imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a black line round a man's nose and that that line is a lie and in precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be conventional unless he is describing an emotion which others share with him his labors will be utterly in vain if a poet really had an original emotion if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with the buffers of a railway train it would take him considerably more time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his feelings poetry deals with primal and conventional things the hunger for bread the love of a woman the desire for immortal life if men really had new sentiments poetry could not deal with them if, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat bread but did, by way of substitute feel a fresh original craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables poetry could not express him if a man instead of falling in love with a woman fell in love with a fossil or a sea anemone poetry could not express him poetry can only express what is original in one sense the sense in which we speak of original sin it is original, not in the paltry sense of being new but in the deeper sense of being old it is original in the sense that it deals with origins all artists who have any experience of the arts will agree so far that a poet is bound to be conventional to matters of art unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in matters of conduct it is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of revolt of isolation, of disagreement the larger poet sees the poetry of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of civilization just as an agreement between the dramatist and the audience is necessary to every play just as an agreement between the painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture so an agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great figures of mortality the hero, the saint, the average man the gentleman Browning had, it must be thoroughly realized, a real pleasure in these great agreements these great conventions with a true poetic delight in being conventional being by birth an Englishman he took pleasure in being an Englishman being by rank a member of the middle class he took pride in its ancient scruples and its everlasting boundaries he was everything that he was with a definite and conscious pleasure a man, a liberal, an Englishman an author, a gentleman, a lover a married man always be remembered as a general characteristic of Browning this ardent and headlong conventionality he exhibited it preeminently in the affair of his elopement at marriage during and after the escape of himself and his wife to Italy he seems to have forgotten everything except the splendid worry of being married he showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a responsibility which had its practical side he came finally and entirely out of his dreams since he had himself enough money to live on he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing poetry poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head day and night but when the problem of the elopement arose he threw himself with an energy of which it is pleasant to read into every kind of scheme for solidifying his position he wrote to Mockden Milne's and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a post in the British Museum I will work like a horse he said with that boyish note which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes it is more poetical than all his poems all his language in this matter is emphatic he would be glad and proud he says to have any minor post his friend could obtain for him he offered to read for the bar he began doing so but all this rigorous and very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth Barrett she declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry probably she was right and Browning was wrong but it was an error which every man would desire to have made one of the qualities again which make Browning most charming is the fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction about his own achievements as a lover and husband particularly in relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife if he is vain of anything writes Mrs. Browning it is of my restored health later she adds with admirable humor and suggestiveness and I have to tell him that he really must not go on telling everybody how his wife walked here with him or walk there with him as if a wife with two feet were a miracle in nature when a lady in Italy said on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the day of a picnic that he was the only man who behaved like a Christian to his wife Browning was elated to an almost infantile degree but there could scarcely be a better test of the essential manliness and decency of the man than this test of his vanities Browning boasted of being domesticated there are half a hundred men everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated bad men are almost without exception conceited but they are commonly conceited of their defects one picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the Browning's life in Italy is Walter Savage Lander Browning found him living with some of his wife's relations and engaged in a continuous and furious quarrel with him which was indeed not uncommonly the condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings he had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and stately but almost extinct blend the aristocratic Republican like an old Roman senator or like a gentleman of the southern states of America he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those above the only person who appeared to have been able to manage him and bring out his more agreeable side was Browning it is by the way one of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be described by the elementary and old fashioned word goodness that he always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of savage and capricious temperament attached and erratic genius who could get on with no one else Carlisle who could not get a bitter taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries was fond of Browning Lander who could hardly conduct an ordinary business interview without beginning to break the furniture was fond of Browning these are the things which speak more for a man than many people will understand it is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle of admirers especially feminine admirers who have a peculiar talent for discipleship and the absorption of ideas but when a man is loved by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different type and order of eminence we may be certain that there was something genuine about him and something far more important than anything intellectual men do not like another man because he is a genius at least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves this general truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous beauty in a city and who is at the same time adored and confided in by all the women who live there Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman and helped by Seymour Kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course of very generous conduct he was fully repaid in his own mind for his trouble by the mere presence and friendship of Lander for whose quaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration compounded of the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero it is somewhat amusing and characteristic that Mrs. Browning did not share this unlimited enjoyment of the company of Mr. Lander and expressed her feelings in her own humorous manner she writes Dear darling Robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness a most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course and very affectionate to Robert as he ought to be but of self-restraint he has not a grain and of suspicion many grains what do you really say to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it? Robert succeeded in soothing him and his line is very quiet on the whole roaring softly to beguile the time in Latin alcheics against his wife and Louis Napoleon one event alone could really end this endless life of the Italian Arcadia that event happened on June 29th, 1861 Robert Browning's wife died stricken by the death of her sister and almost as hard it is a characteristic touch by the death of Kevor he is alone in the room with Browning and of what past then though much has been said little should be he closing the door of that room behind him closed the door in himself and none ever saw Browning upon Earth again but only a splendid surface End of Section 13 End of Chapter 4 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton Section 14 Chapter 5 Browning in Later Life Part 1 Browning's confidences what there were of them immediately after his wife's death were given to several women friends all his life indeed he was chiefly intimate with women the two most intimate of these were his own sister who remained with him in all his later years and the sister of his wife who seven years afterwards passed away in his presence as Elizabeth had done The other letters which number only one or two referring in any personal manner to his bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Issa Blagdon he left Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near Denard then he returned to London and took up his residence in Warwick Crescent Naturally enough the thing for which he now chiefly lived was the education of his son and it is characteristic of Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father but an indulgent father of a very conventional type he had rather the chuckling pride of the city gentlemen and the gravity of the intellectual Browning was now famous bells and pomegranates men and women Christmas Eve and dramatis persona had successively glorified his Italian period but he was already brooding half unconsciously on more famous things he has himself left on record a description of the incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest achievement in a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of material things all that power of writing of stone or metal or the fabric of drapery so that we seem to be handling and smelling them and he has described us all for the selling of odds and ends of every variety of utility and uselessness picture frames white though worn gilt mirror sconce chipped bronze angel heads once knobs chest to chest handled when ancient dames chose fourth brocade modern chalk drawings studies from the nude samples of stone, jet, brassia or fury polished and rough sundry amazing busts in baked earth broken providence be praised a wreck of tapestry proudly purposed web when reds and blues were indeed red offered as a mat to save bare feet since carpets constitute a cruel cost omission vulgarized horrors for the use of schools the life death miracles of saint somebody saint somebody else his miracles death and life with this one glance at the littered back of which and stall cried I Alira made it mine this sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of debris and comes nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and picturesqueness of a low-class pawn shop this which Robert Browning bought for Alira out of his heap of rubbish was of course the old Latin record of the criminal case of Guido Francescini tried for the murder of his wife Ampelia in the year 1698 and this again it is scarcely necessary to say was the ground motive of the ring and the book Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during his wife's lifetime in Italy but the more he studied it the more the dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen and he came at last there can be little doubt to regard it definitely as his magnum opus to which he would devote many years to come then came the great sorrow of his life he asked about him for something sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain going like some huge and automatic engine I mean to keep writing he said whether I like it or not and thus finally he took up the scheme of the Francescini story and developed it on a scale with a degree of elaboration repetition and management and inexhaustible scholarship which was never perhaps before given to an affair of two or three characters of the larger literary and spiritual significance of the work particularly in reference to its curious and original form of narration I shall speak subsequently but there is one peculiarity about the story which has more direct bearing on Browning's life and it appears singular the few if any of his critics have noticed it this peculiarity is the extraordinary resemblance and the moral problem involved in the poem if understood in its essence and the moral problem which constitute the crisis and center of Browning's own life nothing properly speaking ever happened to Browning after his wife's death and his greatest work during that time was the telling under alien symbols and the veil of a wholly different story the inner truth about his own greatest trial and hesitation he himself had in this sense the same difficulty as Cap and Sachi the supreme difficulty of having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the reward but even without the name of virtue he had like Cap and Sachi preferably what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and honorable he knew better than any other man that there is little danger of men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility seeking it too often or indulging it too much the conscientiousness of the law abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness of the conscientious lawbreaker Browning had once for what he seriously believed to be a greater good done what he himself would never have had the can't to deny ought to be called the seat and division nothing ought never to come to a man twice if he finds that necessity twice he may I think be looked at with the beginning of a suspicion to Browning it came once and he devoted his greatest poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who is worthy to live as has already been suggested any apparent danger that there may be in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils of the act since it must always be remembered that this kind of act has the immense difference from all legal acts that it can only be justified by success yet Browning had taken his wife to Paris and she had died in an hotel there we can only conceive him saying with the bitter emphasis of one of his own lines how should I have borne me please before and after this event his life was as tranquil and casual as one would be easy to imagine but there always remained upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in the after years the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came and had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted in defensible and almost along the brink of murder this great moral of Browning which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour which moves into many poems beside the ring and the book and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a whole it is of course the central idea of that fine poem the statue and the bust which has given a great deal of distress to a great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognized morality it deals as everyone knows with a Duke Ferdinand and an alohment which he planned with the bride the lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less comprehensible reasons of convenience but the habit of shrinking from the final step grows steadily upon them and they never take it but die as it were waiting for each other the objection that the act thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly answered by Browning himself his case against the dilatory couple but in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim his case is that they exhibited no virtue crime was frustrated in them by cowardice which is probably the worst immorality of the two the same idea again may be found in that delightful lyric youth and art where a successful kennetrice reproaches a successful sculptor with their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty each life unfulfilled, you see it hangs still patchy and scrappy we have not sighed deeply laughed free starved, feasted, disbared and happy and this conception of the great hour which breaks out everywhere in Browning it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal drama it is really curious that this correspondence has not been insisted on probably critics have been misled by the fact that Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic and that he has never put himself into his work a thing which no poet, good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing the enormous scope and seriousness of the ring and the book occupied Browning for some five or six years and the great epic appeared in the winter of 1868 just before it was published Smith and Elder brought out a uniform addition of Browning's works up to that time and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame the years since his wife's death that had been covered by the writing of the ring and the book had been years of an almost feverish activity and that and many other ways his travels had been restless and continued his industry immense and for the first time he began that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of him the life of what is called society a man of a shallower and more sentimental type would have professed to find the life of dinner tables and soirees vain and unsatisfying to a poet and especially to a poet in mourning but if there is one thing more than another which is stirring and honorable about Browning it is the entire absence in him of this can't his satisfaction he had the one great requirement of a poet he was not difficult to please the life of society was superficial but it is only very superficial people who object to the superficial to the man who sees the marvelousness of all things the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries the young man in evening dress pulling on his gloves is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite quite as incomprehensible and indeed quite as alarming a great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at or even disapproval of this social frivolity of Browning's not one of these literary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest in humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the wild west or a low tavern in Paris but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable people are not human at all humanitarians of a material and dogmatic type the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics humanitarians of a more vivid type the bohemian artists go to look for humanity in thieves kitchens and the studios of the courtier Latin but a humanitarians of the highest type the great poets and philosophers do not go to look for humanity at all for them alone among all men the nearest drawing room is full of humanity and even their own families are human Shakespeare entered his life by buying a house in his own native town and talking to the townsmen Browning was invited to a great easy-onies and private views and did not pretend that they bought him in a letter belonging to this period of his life he describes his first dinner at one of the oxford colleges with an unaffected delight and vanity which reminds the reader of nothing so much as the pride of the boy captain of a public school if he were invited to a similar function and received a few compliments it may be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this middle-aged social recognition but at least he enjoyed his second youth nearly as much as his first and it is not everyone who can do that a Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle-age of his memories are still sufficiently clear he was a middle-sized well-set-up erect man with somewhat emphatic gestures and as almost all testimonies mention curiously striding the voice the beard, the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an indignation had grown again but grown quite white which, as she had said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods his hair was still fairly dark and his whole appearance at this time must have been very well represented by Mr. G. F. Watts' fine portrait in the National Portrait Gallery the portrait bears one of the many testimonies to Mr. Watts' grasp of the essential character for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in which we get primarily the air of virility even of animal virility tempered, but not disguised with a certain touch of the pallor of the brain-worker he looks here what he was a very healthy man too scholarly to live a completely healthy life End of Section 14