Close of Mrs Browning's Life
When Men and Women was published in the autumn of 1855 the Brownings were again in Paris. An impulsive friend had taken an apartment for them in the Rue de Grenelle, facing east, and in all that concerned comfort splendidly mendacious. After some weeks of misery and illness Mrs Browning was conveyed to less glittering but more hospitable rooms in the Rue du Colisée by a desperate husband—"That darling Robert carried me into the carriage, swathed past possible breathing, over face and respirator in woollen shawls. No, he wouldn't set me down even to walk up the fiacre steps, but shoved me in upside down in a struggling bundle."[[70]] Happily the winter was of a miraculous mildness. Mrs Browning worked Aurora Leigh in "a sort of furia," and Browning set himself to the task—a fruitless one as it proved—of rehandling and revising Sordello: "I lately gave time and pains," he afterwards told Milsand in his published dedication of the poem, "to turn my work into what the many might,—instead of what the few must—like: but after all I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find it"—proud but warrantable words. Some of his leisure was given to vigorous and not unsuccessful efforts in drawing. At the theatre he saw Ristori as Medea and admired her, but with qualifications. At Monckton Milnes's dinner-table he met Mignet and Cavour, and George Sand crowned with an ivy-wreath and "looking like herself." Mrs Browning records with pleasure that her husband's hostility to the French government had waned; at least he admitted that he was sick of the Opposition.
In May 1856 tidings from London of the illness of Kenyon caused him serious anxiety; he would gladly have hastened to attend upon so true and dear a friend, but this Kenyon would not permit. A month later he and Mrs Browning were in occupation of Kenyon's house in Devonshire Place, which he had lent to them for the summer, but the invalid had sought for restoration of his health in the Isle of Wight. On the day that Mr Barrett heard of his daughter's arrival he ordered his family away from London. Mrs Browning once more wrote to him, but the letter received no answer. "Mama," said little Pen earnestly, "if you've been very, very naughty I advise you to go into the room and say,'Papa, I'll be dood.'" But the situation, as Mrs Browning sadly confesses, was hopeless. Some companionship with her sister Arabel and her brothers was gained by a swift departure from London in August for Ventnor whither the Wimpole Street household, leaving its master behind, had been banished, and there "a happy sorrowful two weeks" were spent. At Cowes a grief awaited Browning and his wife, for they found Kenyon kind as ever but grievously broken in health and depressed in spirits. A short visit to Mrs Browning's married sister at Taunton closed the summer and autumn in England. Before the end of October they were on their way to Florence. "The Brownings are long gone back now," wrote Dante Rossetti in December, "and with them one of my delights—an evening resort where I never felt unhappy. How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those two small people?—taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage and hardly needing a double bed at the inn."
The great event of the autumn for the Brownings and for the lovers of English poetry was the publication of Aurora Leigh. Its popularity was instantaneous; within a fortnight a second edition was called for; there was no time to alter even a comma. "That golden-hearted Robert," writes Mrs Browning, "is in ecstasies about it—far more than if it all related to a book of his own." The volume was dedicated to John Kenyon; but before the year was at an end Kenyon was dead. Since the birth of their son he had enlarged the somewhat slender incomings of his friends by the annual gift of one hundred pounds, "in order," says the editor of Mrs Browning's Letters, "that they might be more free to follow their art for its own sake only." By his will he placed them for the future above all possibility of straitened means. To Browning he left 6,500 l., to Mrs Browning 4,500 l. "These," adds Mr F.G. Kenyon, "were the largest legacies in a very generous will—the fitting end to a life passed in acts of generosity and kindness to those in need." The gain to the Brownings was shadowed by a sense of loss. "Christmas came," says Mrs Browning, "like a cloud." For the length of three winter months she did not stir out of doors. Then arrived spring and sunshine, carnival time and universal madness in Florence, with streets "one gigantic pantomime." Penini begged importunately for a domino, and could not be refused; and Penini's father and mother were for once drawn into the vortex of Italian gaiety. When at the great opera ball a little figure in mask and domino was struck on the shoulder with the salutation "Bella mascherina!" it was Mrs Browning who received the stroke, with her husband, also in domino, by her side. The absence of real coarseness in the midst of so much seeming license, and the perfect social equality gave her a gratifying impression of her Florentines.
In April it was summer weather; the drives of former days in the Cascine and to Bellosguardo, where a warm-hearted friend, Miss Isa Blagden, occupied a villa, were resumed. An American authoress of wider fame since her book of 1852 than even the authoress of Aurora Leigh, Mrs Beecher Stowe, was in Florence, and somewhat to their surprise she charmed both Browning and his wife by her simplicity and earnestness, her gentle voice and refinement of manner—"never," says Mrs Browning, "did lioness roar more softly." All pointed to renewed happiness; but before April was over pain of a kind that had a peculiar sting left Mrs Browning for a time incapable of any other feeling. Her father was dead, and no word of affection had been uttered at the last; if there was water in the rock it never welled forth. The kindly meant effort of a relative to reopen friendly communications between Mr Barrett and his daughters, not many months previously, had for its only result the declaration that they had disgraced the family.[[71]] At first Mrs Browning was crushed and could shed no tear; she remained for many days in a state of miserable prostration; it was two months before she could write a letter to anyone outside the circle of her nearest kinsfolk.
Once more the July heat in Florence—"a composition of Gehenna and Paradise"—drove the Brownings to the Baths of Lucca. Miss Blagden followed them, and also young Lytton came, ailing, it was thought, from exposure to the sun. His indisposition soon grew serious and declared itself as a gastric fever. For eight nights Isa Blagden sat by his bedside as nurse; for eight other nights Browning took her place. His own health remained vigorous. Each morning he bathed in a rapid mountain stream; each evening and morning he rode a mountain pony; and in due time he had the happiness of seeing the patient, although still weak and hollow cheeked, convalescent and beginning to think of "poems and apple puddings," as Mrs Browning declares, "in a manner other than celestial." It had been a summer, she said in September, full of blots, vexations, anxieties. Three days after these words were written a new and grave anxiety troubled her and her husband, for their son, who had been looking like a rose—"like a rose possessed by a fairy" is his mother's description—was attacked in the same way as Lytton. "Don't be unhappy for me" said Pen; "think it's a poor little boy in the street, and be just only a little sorry, and not unhappy at all." Within less than a fortnight he was well enough to have "agonising visions of beefsteak pies and buttered toast seen in mirage"; but his mother mourned for the rosy cheeks and round fat little shoulders, and confessed that she herself was worn out in body and soul.
The winter at Florence was the coldest for many years; the edges of the Arno were frozen; and in the spring of 1858 Mrs Browning felt that her powers of resistance, weakened by a year of troubles and anxieties, had fallen low. Browning himself was in vigorous health. When he called in June on Hawthorne he looked younger and even handsomer than he had looked two years previously, and his gray hairs seemed fewer. "He talked," Hawthorne goes on, "a wonderful quantity in a little time." That evening the Hawthornes spent at Casa Guidi. Mrs Browning is described by the American novelist as if she were one of the singular creatures of his own imagination—no earthly woman but one of the elfin race, yet sweetly disposed towards human beings; a wonder of charm in littleness; with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice; "there is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster into her neck, and make her face look whiter by their sable perfection." Browning himself was "very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment; a most vivid and quick-thoughted person—logical and common-sensible, as, I presume, poets generally are in their daily talk." "His conversation," says Hawthorne, speaking of a visit to Miss Blagden at Bellosguardo, "has the effervescent aroma which you cannot catch even if you get the very words that seem to be imbued with it.... His nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child."
When summer came it was decided to join Browning's father and sister in Paris, and accompany them to some French seaside resort, where Mrs Browning could have the benefit of a course of warm salt-water baths. To her the sea was a terror, but railway-travelling was repose, and Browning suggested on the way from Marseilles to Paris that they might "ride, ride together, for ever ride" during the remainder of their lives in a first-class carriage with for-ever renewed supplies of French novels and Galignanis. They reached Paris on the elder Mr Browning's birthday, and found him radiant at the meeting with his son and grandson, looking, indeed, ten years younger than when they had last seen his face. Paris, Mrs Browning declares, was her "weakness," Italy her "passion"; Florence itself was her "chimney-corner," where she "could sulk and be happy." The life of the brilliant city, which "murmurs so of the fountain of intellectual youth for ever and ever," quickened her heart-beats; its new architectural splendours told of the magnificence in design and in its accomplishment of her hero the Emperor. And here she and her husband met their helpful friend of former days, Father Prout, and they were both grieved and cheered by the sight of Lady Elgin, a paralytic, in her garden-chair, not able to articulate a word, but bright and gracious as ever, "the eloquent soul full and radiant, alive to both worlds." The happiness in presence of such a victory of the spirit was greater than the pain.
Having failed to find agreeable quarters at Etretat, where Browning in a "fine phrenzy" had hired a wholly unsuitable house with a potato-patch for view, and escaped from his bad bargain, a loser of some francs, at his wife's entreaty, they settled for a short time at Havre—"detestable place," Mrs Browning calls it—in a house close to the sea and surrounded by a garden. On a bench by the shore Mrs Browning could sit and win back a little strength in the bright August air. The stay at Havre, depressing to Browning's spirits, was for some eight weeks. In October they were again in Paris, where Mrs Browning's sister, Arabel, was their companion. The year was far advanced and a visit to England was not in contemplation. Towards the middle of the month they were once more in motion, journeying by slow stages to Florence. A day was spent at Chambéry "for the sake of les Charmettes and Rousseau." When Casa Guidi was at length reached, it was only a halting-place on the way to Rome. Winter had suddenly rushed in and buried all Italy in snow; but when they started for Rome in a carriage kindly lent by their American friends, the Eckleys, it was again like summer. The adventures of the way were chiefly of a negative kind—occasioned by precipices over which they were not thrown, and banditti who never came in sight; but in a quarrel between oxen-drivers, one of whom attacked the other with a knife, Browning with characteristic energy dashed between them to the terror of the rest of the party; his garments were the only serious sufferers from his zeal as mediator.
The apartment engaged at Rome was that of the earlier visit of 1853-54, in the Via Bocca di Leone, "rooms swimming all day in sunshine." On Christmas morning Mrs Browning was able to accompany her husband to St Peter's to hear the silver trumpets. But January froze the fountains, and the north wind blew with force. Mrs Browning had just completed a careful revision of Aurora Leigh, and now she could rest, enjoy the sunshine streaming through their six windows, or give herself up to the excitement of Italian politics as seen through the newspapers in the opening of a most eventful year. "Robert and I," she wrote on the eve of the declaration of war between Austria and Victor Emmanuel, "have been of one mind lately on these things, which comforts me much." She had also the satisfaction of health enjoyed at least by proxy, for her husband had never been more full of vigour and the spirit of enjoyment. In the freezing days of January he was out of his bed at six o'clock, and away for a brisk morning walk with Mr Eckley. The loaf at breakfast diminished "by Gargantuan slices." Into the social life of Rome he threw himself with ardour. For a fortnight immediately after Christmas he was out every night, sometimes with double and treble engagements. "Dissipations," says Mrs Browning, "decidedly agree with Robert, there's no denying that, though he's horribly hypocritical, and 'prefers an evening with me at home.'" He gathered various coloured fragments of life from the outer world and brought them home to brighten her hours of imprisonment.