II.
There followed fifteen years during which the inexhaustible correspondents of the last twenty months exchanged no further letter, for they were never parted. That is the sufficient outward symbol of their all but flawless union. After a leisurely journey through France, and an experimental sojourn at the goal of Mrs Browning's two frustrated journeys, Pisa, they settled towards the close of April 1847 in furnished apartments in Florence, moving some four months later into the more permanent home which their presence was to render famous, the Palazzo (or "Casa") Guidi, just off the Piazza Pitti.
Their life—mirrored for us in Mrs Browning's vivid and delightful letters—was, like many others, in which we recognise rare and precious quality, singularly wanting in obviously expressive traits. It is possible to describe everything that went on in the Browning household in terms applicable to those of scores of other persons of wide interests, cultivated tastes, and moderate but not painfully restricted means. All that was passionate, ideal, heroic in them found expression through conditions which it needs a fine eye to distinguish from those of easy-going bourgeois mediocrity. Their large and catholic humanity exempted them from much that makes for bold and sensational outline in the story of a career. Their poetic home was built upon all the philistine virtues. Mrs Jameson laughed at their ["miraculous] prudence and economy"; and Mrs Browning herself laughed, a little, at her husband's punctilious rigour in paying his debts,—his "horror of owing five shillings for five days"; Browning, a born virtuoso in whatever he undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did an easy rhyme, and all other symbols of that slovenly Bohemia which came nearest, on the whole, to his conception of absolute evil. They lived at first in much seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown alike to the Italian and the English quarters of the Florentine world. But Arcady was, at bottom, just as foreign to their ways as Bohemia. "Soundless and stirless hermits," Mrs Browning playfully called them; but in no house in Florence did the news of political and literary Europe find keener comment or response than in this quiet hermitage. Two long absences, moreover (1851-52 and 1855-56), divided between London and Paris, interrupted their Italian sojourn; and these times were crowded with friendly intercourse, which they keenly enjoyed. "No place like Paris for living in," Browning declared after returning from its blaze to the quiet retreat of Casa Guidi. But both felt no less deeply the charm of their "dream life" within these old tapestried walls.[31] Nor did either, in spite of their delight in French poetry and their vivid interest in French politics, really enter the French world. They were received by George Sand, whose "indiscreet immortalities" had ravished Elizabeth Barrett in her invalid [chamber] years before; but though she "felt the burning soul through all that quietness," and through the "crowds of ill-bred men who adore her à genoux bas, betwixt a puff of smoke and an ejection of saliva,"—they both felt that she did not care for them. Dumas, another admiration, they did not see; an introduction to Hugo, Browning carried about for years but had no chance of presenting; Béranger they saw in the street, and regretted the absence of an intermediator. Balzac, to their grief, was just dead. A complete set of his works was one of their Florentine ambitions. One memorable intimacy was formed, however, during the Paris winter of 1851-52; for it was now that he first met Joseph Milsand, his warm friend until Milsand's death in 1886, and probably, for the last twenty years at least, the most beloved of all his friends, as he was at all times one of his shrewdest yet kindliest critics. Their summer visits to London (1851, 1852, 1855, 1856) brought them much more of intimate personal converse, tempered, however, inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by pain, discomfort, and fatigue. Of himself, yet more than of the Laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a later poem to Tennyson—"noble and sincere in friendship." The visitors who gathered about him in these London visits included friends who belonged to every phase and aspect of his career—from his old master and mentor, Fox, and Kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness, to Dante Rossetti, his first and, for years to come, [solitary] disciple, and William Allingham, whom Rossetti introduced. Among his own contemporaries they were especially intimate with Tennyson,—the sterling and masculine "Alfred" of Carlyle, whom the world first learnt to know from his biography; and with Carlyle himself, a more genial and kindly Carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and whom his biographers mostly efface.
[31] Letters of E.B.B., ii. 199.
After their return from the second journey to the north their Italian life lost much of its dream-like seclusion. The publication of Men and Women (1855) and Aurora Leigh (1856) drew new visitors to the salon in Casa Guidi, and after 1853 they repeatedly wintered in Rome, mingling freely in its more cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the gaieties of the Carnival. To the end, however, their Roman circle was more American than English. "Is Mr Browning an American?" asked an English lady of the American ambassador. "Is it possible that you ask me that?" came the prompt and crushing retort; "why, there is not a village in the United States so small that they could not tell you that Robert Browning is an Englishman, and they wish he were an American." Spiritualism, in the main an American institution, became during the later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to the other. One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one else discovered, it was ill to play—Walter Savage Landor. Here it was [the] wife who looked on with critical though kindly sarcasm at what she thought her husband's generous excess of confidence. Of all these intimacies and relationships, however, the poetry of these years discloses hardly a glimpse. His actual dealings with men and women called out all his genial energies of heart and brain, but—with one momentous exception—they did not touch his imagination.