The letters from which this story has been drawn have from first to last one burden; in them deep answers to deep; they happily are of a nature to escape far from the pedantries of literary criticism. It cannot be maintained that Browning quite equals his correspondent in the discovery of rare and exquisite thoughts and feelings; or that his felicity in giving them expression is as frequent as hers. Even on matters of literature his comments are less original than hers, less penetrating, less illuminating. Her wit is the swifter and keener. When Browning writes to afford her amusement, he sometimes appears to us, who are not greatly amused, a little awkward and laborious. She flashes forth a metaphor which embodies some mystery of feeling in an image entirely vital; he, with a habit of mind of which he was conscious and which often influences his poetry, fastens intensely on a single point and proceeds to muffle this in circumstance, assured that it will be all the more vividly apparent when the right instant arrives and requires this; but meanwhile some staying-power is demanded from the reader. Neither correspondent has the art of etching a person or a scene in a few decisive lines; the gift of Carlyle, the gift of Carlyle's brilliant wife is not theirs, perhaps because acid is needed to bite an etcher's plate. And, indeed, many of the minor notabilities of 1845, whose names appear in these letters, might hardly have repaid an etcher's intensity of selective vision. Among the groups of spirits who presented themselves to Dante there were some wise enough not to expect that their names should be remembered on earth; such shades may stand in a background. It is, however, strange that Browning who created so many living men and women should in his letters have struck out no swift indelible piece of portraiture; even here his is the inferior touch. And yet throughout the whole correspondence we cannot but be aware that his is the more massive and the more complex nature; his intellect has hardier thews; his passion has an energy which corresponds with its mass; his will sustains his passion and projects it forward. And towards Miss Barrett his strength is seen as gentleness, his energy as an inexhaustible patience of hope.
When Browning and his wife reached Paris, Mrs Browning was worn out by the excitement and fatigue. By a happy accident Mrs Jameson and her niece were at hand, and when the first surprise, with kisses to both fugitives, was over, she persuaded them to rest for a week where they were, promising, if they consented, to be their companion and aider until they arrived at Pisa. Their "imprudence," in her eyes, was "the height of prudence"; "wild poets or not" they were "wise people." The week at Paris was given up to quietude; once they visited the Louvre, but the hours passed for the most part indoors; it all seemed strange and visionary—"Whether in the body or out of the body," wrote Mrs Browning, "I cannot tell scarcely." From Paris and Orleans they proceeded southwards in weather, which, notwithstanding some rains, was delightful. From Avignon they went on pilgrimage to Petrarch's Vaucluse; Browning bore his wife to a rock in mid stream and seated her there, while Flush scurried after in alarm for his mistress. In the passage from Marseilles to Genoa, Mrs Browning was able to sit on deck; the change of air, although gained at the expense of some weariness, had done her a world of good.
Early in October the journeying closed at Pisa. Rooms were taken for six months in the great Collegio Ferdinando, close to the Duomo and the Leaning Tower, rooms not quite the warmest in aspect. Mrs Jameson pronounced the invalid not improved but transformed. The repose of the city, asleep, as Dickens described it, in the sun and the secluded life—a perpetual tête-à-tête, but one so happy—suited both the wedded friends; days of cloudless weather, following a spell of rain, went by in "reading and writing and talking of all things in heaven and earth, and a little besides; and sometimes even laughing as if we had twenty people to laugh with us, or rather hadn't." Their sole acquaintance was an Italian Professor of the University; for three months they never looked at a newspaper; then a loophole on the world was opened each evening by the arrival of the Siècle. The lizards were silent friends of one poet, and golden oranges gleamed over the walls to the unaccustomed eyes of the other like sunshine gathered into globes. They wandered through pine-woods and drove until the purple mountains seemed not far off. At the Lanfranchi Palace they thought of Byron, to see a curl of whose hair or a glove from whose hand, Browning declares (so foolish was he and ignorant) he would have gone farther than to see all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey condensed in Rosicrucian fashion into a vial. In the Campo Santo they listened to a musical mass for the dead. In the Duomo they heard the Friar preach. And early in the morning their dreams were scattered by the harmonious clangour of the church bells. "I never was happy before in my life," wrote Mrs Browning. Her husband relieved her of all housekeeping anxieties. At two o'clock came a light dinner—perhaps thrushes and chianti—from the trattoria; at six appeared coffee and milk-rolls; at nine, when the pine-fire blazed, roast chestnuts and grapes. Debts there were none to vex the spirits of these prudent children of genius. If a poet could not pay his butcher's and his baker's bills, Browning's sympathies were all with the baker and the butcher. "He would not sleep," wrote his wife, "if an unpaid bill dragged itself by any chance into another week "; and elsewhere: "Being descended from the blood of all the Puritans, and educated by the strictest of dissenters, he has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact of owing five shillings five days." Perhaps some of this horror arose from the sense of that weight which pecuniary cares hang upon all the more joyous mountings of the mind. One grief and only one was still present; Mr Barrett remained inexorable; his daughter hoped that with time and patience his arms would open to her again. It was a hope never to be fulfilled. In the cordial comradeship of Browning's sister, Sarianna, a new correspondent, there was a measure of compensation.
Already Browning had in view the collected edition of his Poetical Works which did not appear until 1849. The poems were to be made so lucid, "that everyone who understood them hitherto" was to "lose that mark of distinction." Paracelsus and Pippa were to be revised with special care. The sales reported by Moxon were considered satisfactory; but of course the profits as yet were those of his wife's poems. "She is," he wrote to his publisher, "there as in all else, as high above me as I would have her."
It was at Pisa that the highest evidence of his wife's powers as a poet came as an unexpected and wonderful gift to her husband. In a letter of December 1845—more than a year since—she had confessed that she was idle; and yet "silent" was a better word she thought than "idle." Her apology was that the apostle Paul probably did not work hard at tent-making during the week that followed his hearing of the unspeakable things. At the close of a letter written on July 22, 1846, she wrote: "You shall see some day at Pisa what I will not show you now. Does not Solomon say that 'there is a time to read what is written?' If he doesn't, he ought." The time to read had now come. "One day, early in 1847," as Mr Gosse records what was told to him by Browning, "their breakfast being over, Mrs Browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table should be cleared. He was presently aware of someone behind him, although the servant was gone. It was Mrs Browning who held him by the shoulder to prevent his turning to look at her, and at the same time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his coat. She told him to read that, and to tear it up if he did not like it; and then she fled again to her own room." The papers were a transcript of those ardent poems which we know as "Sonnets from the Portuguese." Some copies were printed at Reading in 1847 for private circulation with the title "Sonnets by E.B.B." The later title under which they appeared among Mrs Browning's Poems in the edition of 1850 was of Browning's suggestion. His wife's proposal to name them "Sonnets from the Bosnian" was dismissed with words which allude to a poem of hers, "Catarina to Camoens," that had long been specially dear to him: "Bosnian, no! that means nothing. From the Portuguese: they are Catarina's sonnets!"
Pisa with all its charm lacked movement and animation. It was decided to visit Florence in April, and there enjoy for some days the society of Mrs Jameson before she left Italy. The coupé of the diligence was secured, and on April 20th Mrs Jameson's "wild poets but wise people" arrived at Florence. An excellent apartment was found in the Via delle Belle Donne near the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and for Browning's special delight a grand piano was hired. When Mrs Browning had sufficiently recovered strength to view the city and its surroundings her pleasure was great: "At Pisa we say, 'How beautiful!' here we say nothing; it is enough if we can breathe." They had hoped for summer wanderings in Northern Italy; but Florence held them throughout the year except for a few days during which they attempted in vain to find a shelter from the heat among the pines of Vallombrosa. Provided with a letter of recommendation to the abbot they set forth from their rooms at early morning by vettura and from Pelago onwards, while Browning rode, Mrs Browning and Wilson in basket sledges were slowly drawn towards the monastery by white bullocks. A new abbot, a little holy man with a red face, had been recently installed, who announced that in his nostrils "a petticoat stank." Yet in the charity of his heart he extended the three days ordinarily permitted to visitors in the House of Strangers to five; during which period beef and oil, malodorous bread and wine and passages from the "Life of San Gualberto" were vouchsafed to heretics of both sexes; the mountains and the pinewoods in their solemn dialect spoke comfortable words.
"Rolling or sliding down the precipitous path" they returned to Florence in a morning glory, very merry, says Mrs Browning, for disappointed people. Shelter from the glare of August being desirable, a suite of comparatively cool rooms in the Palazzo Guidi were taken; they were furnished in good taste, and opened upon a terrace—"a sort of balcony terrace which ... swims over with moonlight in the evenings." From Casa Guidi windows—and before long Mrs Browning was occupied with the first part of her poem—something of the life of Italy at a moment of peculiar interest could be observed. Europe in the years 1847 and 1848 was like a sea broken by wave after wave of Revolutionary passion. Browning and his wife were ardently liberal in their political feeling; but there were differences in the colours of their respective creeds and sentiments; Mrs Browning gave away her imagination to popular movements; she was also naturally a hero-worshipper; she hoped more enthusiastically than he was wont to do; she was more readily depressed; the word "liberty" for her had an aureole or a nimbus which glorified all its humbler and more prosaic meanings. Browning, although in this year 1847 he made a move towards an appointment as secretary to a mission to the Vatican, at heart cared little for men in groups or societies; he cared greatly for individuals, for the growth of individual character. He had faith in a forward movement of society; but the law of social evolution, as he conceived it, is not in the hands of political leaders or ministers of state. He valued liberty chiefly because each man here on earth is in process of being tested, in process of being formed, and liberty is the condition of a man's true probation and development. Late in life he was asked to give his answer to the question: "Why am I a Liberal?" and he gave it succinctly in a sonnet which he did not reprint in any edition of his Works, although it received otherwise a wide circulation. It may be cited here as a fragment of biography:
"Why?" Because all I haply can and do,
All that I am now, all I hope to be,—
Whence comes it save from fortune setting free
Body and soul the purpose to pursue,
God traced for both? If fetters, not a few,
Of prejudice, convention, fall from me,
These shall I bid men—each in his degree
Also God-guided—bear, and gladly too?
But little do or can the best of us:
That little is achieved through Liberty.
Who then dares hold—emancipated thus—
His fellow shall continue bound? Not I
Who live, love, labour freely, nor discuss
A brother's right to freedom. That is "Why."[[40]]
This is an excellent reason for the faith that was in Browning; he holds that individual progress depends on individual freedom, and by that word he understands not only political freedom but also emancipation from intellectual narrowness and the bondage of injurious convention. But Browning in his verse, setting aside the early Strafford, nowhere celebrates a popular political movement; he nowhere chaunts a paean, in the manner of Byron or Shelley, in honour of the abstraction "Liberty." Nor does he anywhere study political phenomena or events except as they throw light upon an individual character. Things and persons that gave him offence he could summarily dismiss from his mind—"Thiers is a rascal; I make a point of not reading one word said by M. Thiers"; "Proudhon is a madman; who cares for Proudhon?" "The President's an ass; he is not worth thinking of."[[41]] This may be admirable economy of intellectual force; but it is not the way to understand the course of public events; it does not indicate a political or a historical sense. And, indeed, his writings do not show that Browning possessed a political or a historical sense in any high degree, save as a representative person may be conceived by him as embodying a phase of civilisation. When Mrs Trollope called at Casa Guidi, Browning was only reluctantly present; she had written against liberal institutions and against the poetry of Victor Hugo, and that was enough. Might it not have been more truly liberal to be patient and understand the grounds of her prejudice? "Blessed be the inconsistency of men!" exclaimed Mrs Browning, for whose sake he tolerated the offending authoress until by and by he came to like in her an agreeable woman.