THE VIA BOCCA DI LEONE, ROME, IN WHICH THE BROWNINGS STAYED.
From a photograph.
The summer and early autumn of 1853 were spent by Browning and his wife, as they had spent the same season four years previously, at the Baths of Lucca. Their house among the hills was shut in by a row of plane-trees in which by day the cicale were shrill; at evening fireflies lit up their garden. The green rushing river—"a flashing scimitar that cuts through the mountain"—the chestnut woods, the sheep-walks, "the villages on the peaks of the mountains like wild eagles," renewed their former delights.
On the longer excursions Browning slackened his footsteps to keep pace with his wife's donkey; basins of strawberries and cream refreshed the wanderers after their exertion. "Oh those jagged mountains," exclaims Mrs Browning, "rolled together like pre-Adamite beasts, and setting their teeth against the sky.... You may as well guess at a lion by a lady's lap-dog as at Nature by what you see in England. All honour to England, lanes and meadowland, notwithstanding. To the great trees above all." The sculptor Story and his family, whose acquaintance they had made in Florence before Casa Guidi had become their home, were their neighbours at the Baths, and Robert Lytton was for a time their guest. Browning worked at his Men and Women, of which his wife was able to report in the autumn that it was in an advanced state. In a Balcony was the most important achievement of the summer. "The scene of the declaration in By the Fireside" Mrs Orr informs us, "was laid in a little adjacent mountain-gorge to which Browning walked or rode."
Only a few weeks were given to Florence. In perfect autumnal weather the occupants of Casa Guidi started for Rome. The delightful journey occupied eight days, and on the way the church of Assisi was seen, and the falls of Terni—"that passion of the waters,"—so Mrs Browning describes it, "which makes the human heart seem so still." They entered Rome in a radiant mood.—"Robert and Penini singing." An apartment had been taken for them by their friends the Storys in the Via Bocca di Leone, and all was bright, warm, and full of comfort. Next morning a shadow fell upon their happiness—the Storys' little boy was seized with convulsions; in the evening he was dead.[[57]] A second child—a girl—was taken ill in the Brownings' house, and could not be moved from where she lay in a room below their apartment. Mrs Browning was in a panic for her own boy, though his apple-red cheeks spoke of health. Rome, for a time, was darkened with grief and anxiety; nor did the city itself impress her as she had expected: "It's a palimpsest Rome," she writes, "a watering-place written over the antique." The chief gains of these Roman months were those of friendship and pleasant acquaintances added to those already given by Italy. In rooms under those occupied by the Brownings was Page the American artist, who painted in colours then regarded as "Venetian," now almost darkened out of existence, as a gift for Mrs Browning, the portrait of Robert Browning exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1856. Browning himself wrote to Story with enthusiasm of Page's work. "I am much disappointed in it," wrote Dante Rossetti to Allingham, "and shall advise its non-exhibition." A second portrait painted at this time—that by Fisher—is familiar to us through a reproduction in the second volume of The Letters of Mrs Browning. A rash act of the morning of the day on which he entered Rome had deplorably altered Browning's appearance. In what his wife calls a fit of suicidal impatience, he perpetrated the high crime and misdemeanour, and appeared before her wholly unworthy of portraiture with clean-shaven cheeks and chin. "I cried when I saw him," she tells his sister, "I was so horror-struck." To mark the sin, his beard, when once again he recovered his good looks, was gray, but Mrs Browning cherished the opinion that the argentine touch, as she terms it, gave "a character of elevation and thought to his whole physiognomy." To complete this history, it may be added that in 1859 the moustache of his later portraits was first doubtfully permitted and was presently approved with decision as picturesque.[[58]]
Under all disadvantages of appearance Browning made his way triumphantly in the English and American society of Rome. The studios were open to him. In Gibson's he saw the tinted Venus—"rather a grisette than a goddess," pronounced Mrs Browning. Harriet Hosmer, the young American sculptress, working with true independence, high aims and right woman's manliness, was both admired and loved. Thackeray, with his daughters, called at the apartment in the Bocca di Leone, bringing small-talk in "handfuls of glittering dust swept out of salons." Lockhart, snow-white in aspect, snow-cold in manner, gave Browning emphatic commendation, though of a negative kind—"He isn't at all," declared Lockhart, "like a damned literary man." But of many interesting acquaintances perhaps the most highly valued were Fanny Kemble and her sister Adelaide Sartoris—Fanny Kemble magnificent, "with her black hair and radiant smile," her sympathetic voice, "her eyes and eyelids full of utterance"—a very noble creature indeed; Mrs Sartoris, genial and generous, more tolerant than Fanny of Mrs Browning's wayward enthusiasms, eloquent in talk and passionate in song. "The Kembles," writes Mrs Browning, "were our gain in Rome."
Towards the end of May 1854 farewells were said, and the Brownings returned from Rome, to Florence by vettura. They had hoped to visit England, or if this should prove impracticable, to take shelter among the mountains from the summer heat. But needful coin on which they had reckoned did not arrive; and they resolved in prudence to sit still at Florence and eat their bread and macaroni as poor sensible folk should do. And Florence looked more beautiful than ever after Rome; the nightingales sang around the olive-trees and vineyards, not only by starlight and fire-fly-light but in the daytime. "I love the very stones of Florence," exclaims Mrs Browning. Her friend Miss Mitford, now in England, and sadly failing in health, hinted at a loan of money; but the answer was a prompt, "Oh no! My husband has a family likeness to Lucifer in being proud." There followed a tranquil and a happy time, and both Men and Women and Aurora Leigh maintained in the writers a deep inward excitement of the kind that leaves an enduring result. A little joint publication; Two Poems by E.B.B. and R.B., containing A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London and The Twins, was sold at Miss Arabella Barrett's Ragged School bazaar in 1854. It is now a waif of literature which collectors prize. There is special significance in the Date and Dabitur, the twins of Browning's poem, when we bear in mind the occasion with which it was originally connected.
In the early weeks of 1855 Mrs Browning was seriously ill; through feverish nights of coughing, she had in her husband a devoted nurse. His sleepless hours were troubled not only by anxiety on her account but by a passionate interest in the heroisms and miseries, of his fellow countrymen during the Crimean winter: "when he is mild he wishes the ministry to be torn to pieces in the streets, limb from limb." Gradually his wife regained health, but she had not long recovered when tidings of the death of Miss Mitford came to sadden her. Not until April did she feel once more a leap into life. Browning was now actively at work in anticipation of printing his new volumes during the approaching visit to England. "He is four hours a day," his wife tells a correspondent, "engaged in dictating to a friend of ours who transcribes for him." And a little later she reports that they will take to England between them some sixteen thousand lines of verse, "eight on one side, eight on the other," her husband's total being already completed, her own still short of the sum by a thousand lines. Allowance, as she pleads, had to be made for time spent in seeing that "Penini's little trousers are creditably frilled and tucked." On the whole, notwithstanding illness and wrath directed against English ministerial blunders, this year of life in Florence had been rich in happiness—a "still dream-life, where if one is over-busy ever, the old tapestries on the walls and the pre-Giotto pictures ... surround us, ready to quiet us again."[[59]] London lodgings did not look inviting from the distance of Italy; but the summons north was a summons to work, and could not be set aside.
The midsummer of 1855 found Browning and his wife in 13 Dorset Street, London, and Browning's sister was with them. The faithful Wilson, Mrs Browning's maid, had married a Florentine, Ferdinando Romagnoli, and the husband also was now in their service. The weeks until mid-October were occupied with social pleasures and close proof-reading of the sheets of Men and Women[[60]] Browning took his young friend the artist Leighton to visit Ruskin, and was graciously received. Carlyle was, as formerly, "in great force, particularly in the damnatory clauses." But the weather was drooping, the skies misty, the air oppressive, and Mrs Browning, apart from these, had special causes of depression. Her married sister Henrietta was away in Taunton, and the cost of travel prevented the sisters from meeting. Arabella Barrett—"my one light in London" is Mrs Browning's word—was too soon obliged to depart to Eastbourne. And the Barrett household was disturbed by the undutifulness of a son who had been guilty of the unpardonable crime of marriage, and in consequence was now exiled from Wimpole Street. In body and soul Mrs Browning felt strong yearnings for the calm of Casa Guidi.