CHESTERTON-ROBERT BROWING - EARLY WORKS
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 any one who wishes to understand how deep was
the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly
worthy 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. Carlyle, Tennyson,
Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very
strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness
and air 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 affectation, 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 men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names
is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in
which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in
one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley,"
who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by
making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised
Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:--
"There was a bad poet named Clough,
Whom his friends all united to puff.
But the public, though dull,
Has not quite such a skull
As belongs to believers in Clough."
The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's
life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who
sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled
against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled
interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of
great men who all contemned 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 time, 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 tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was
open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When
she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a
straining 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 wildly logical, and
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 Hudibras, and we do not find
it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of
Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:--
"Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise--sooth,
But glittered dew-like in the covenanted
And high-rayed light. He was a despot--granted,
But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth
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 in 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
nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a
difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light
shades of the same colour.
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 a 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 garrulity 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 in the position of
Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a 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
in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt
and renunciation. The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though
little or nothing is 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 endowed with some faculties 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, an unconscious selfishness, was
eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of
all 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 brow-beaten
or caressed. During the early years of 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 bedridden 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 sickbed 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 deathbed. She
was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all
atmospheres--a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere
has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. A
man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health,
and yet regard, 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 every one 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 of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a
spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own
with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience,
"tearing open parcels instead of untying 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.
Impetuosity, 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 his beard off,
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, did her husband after her
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 colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they
coloured 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 AEschylus and Euripides 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 sombre 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 marvellous
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 solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with
charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely
self-revelation which is possible for an invalid 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. At all times of his life he was sufficiently fond
of his own way; at 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 in the
Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on
any one else. 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's wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh
at east winds yet as I do."
Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has
within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It is
a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many
profound questions.
It is impossible to deal at any length 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. To the mind of
the present writer the whole 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. Christ 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. Thus it
was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in
the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation
by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in all
such cases as these is that the man in 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 significance when read by the people to whom
they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance
when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of
sanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this world
too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great 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. But 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 should 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, for every one who is married in a church
does make a confession 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 no 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 those words, were
to utter a poem compounded of private allusions 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 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 seem 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 the
second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence
you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to
watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and
secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come
upon some 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 Phoibos Apollon, you
are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on ...
[Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind
with what dislocated ankles."
What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it
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 live stock 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. . . . 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 . . . the
fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too
overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . 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 sixpence 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
"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a
conventional accuracy. The tail, 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 his tail with such energy that every one 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 bore as a badge an
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 colour
of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life
upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," 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 lucent vein of humour, which does not
easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under
the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional
wit of which we have already taken notice 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 sort
which can be pursued 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, an almost
exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting
of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes
of interrogation. Wordsworth 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--nobody 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 dilettante, 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
splendid 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 thoroughly 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 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 learned to talk as you do in London; although
I can 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
colours; 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 at two on Tuesday."
They met on May 20, 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 of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have
been paralysing. "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 signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket
of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the
other!--'Why, even then,' said my sister Arabel, '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.
Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters 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
was right is of course 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 up hill 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
that any 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
exaltations 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 very 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, less still of the nervous conditions 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 Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it would
have been recognised 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 alike 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 centre 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 fit 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, and in medical matters a
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 physicians 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
great 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 favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that
is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her
singular parent remarked that "she might keep him if 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 on 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 consciences 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 cognisance of the fact, and were active
in the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary
of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella 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 to her guns 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 in Europe
alone. She went to Paris, and had not been there many days, when she
received a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
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 effected, is narrated,
as every one knows, in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided that
an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand
to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously 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 every one 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 theatre. 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 your social position,
destroying your health, etc., etc." This touch is very suggestive of
the power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people
as well as Major Pendennis. 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 Captain Cooke. On receiving a
surprised 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 allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some
Meredithian 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, but 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 dispensations 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 anti-social. 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. It 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 general rule. 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 in not having allowed
it to affect him.
Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost
monotonous assertion of Browning that this elopement 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 sombre 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 a tree for some moments, looking round her at
the leaves and the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home,
and agreed to the elopement. 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 walked quietly out of her father's house, became
Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned home
again as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showed
some of that 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 tranquillising
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 pre-eminently one
of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth
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
maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man
for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a
certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to
describe or to 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 to Italy.
They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to
them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They do
not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a
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.
CHESTERTON-ROBERT BROWING - EARLY WORKS