Love in a Prison
NEVER was such a romance as the Brownings' love-affair ! It-is incredible, yet it is true. The circumstances are prosaic in the extreme, prosaic to -the pitch -of absurdity. The course of true love did not run smooth, but the obstacles had as little poetry in them as a horsehair sofa ! The woman was thirty-nine and a malade iniaginaire, in tutelage, by her own timidity to an old ruffian of a father whose tyrannical eccentricity would have disgraced a farce. Browning was- in the plenitude of his physical and intel- lectual powers, a sane prosperous man of genius, withal a fine figure of a man observed of all observers. These two were chosen by the god of romance to* make a new crack in the vast hypothesis which we call poSsibility, to show passion perfect without a touch of grossness, and love retaining its passionate quality till death parted the lovers.
The book before 'us tells a story—it is not an essay in criticism. We can read it from start to finish without finding either confirmation or contradiction of our own opinion about Browning's poetry or his wife's. It compels our interest, it does not challenge our conviction. • It is said that men of genius have able mothers. We never heard the theory applied to women, and certainly it does not hold good in the case of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. - Her mother would seem to have been a nonentity. " We are all well and all composed," wrote Elizabeth at the time of her death. It is true that she did say also how much she missed and regretted poor Mrs. Barrett. In later life she described her as " one of those women who never can resist ; but, in submitting and bowing, on themselves make a mark, a plait within, a sign of suffering.". The sketch is obscure, but it throws some light upon the lack, of courage which made all her children unable to stand up to their father either individually or collectively. He is here described as " at once a country squire, a slave owner and a dissenter."
Poor-spirited person as we must imagine her to have been, Mrs. Barrett gave her elder children at least a happy childhood. No sooner was she gone than her husband set to, apparently on purpose, to give them a most wretched youth. Elizabeth at this time was a very pretty and attractive girl.
We read that she is outwardly " like some bright flower," yet seems in conversation both shy and sad. The words " broken spirited" were used about her when first she grew up. Later on Miss Mitford tells us that she lost the shyness and talked well. Her expression, too, changed : " The sweetness remains, but it is accompanied with more shrewdness, more gaiety, the look not merely of the woman of genius—that she always had—but of the superlatively clever woman." When first she saw Browning she was, as we have said, close on forty. She may have looked less, for, dull as her life had been for years, it had been without wear and tear. For three-quarters of the year it was a life entirely confined to one room—one room in Wimpole Street ! Her father very rarely allowed his daughter to leave London. On one occasion Elizabeth was three years without sight of the country. A cough and a slight riding accident induced a belief in herself and her family that she was really ill. During the whole of every winter fresh air was excluded from her room, and very often nearly all bright light ; enough to read by was all she grew to desire.
Her family came from time t6 time to sit with her, but, as she herself said, they got used to her invalidism and regarded her as buried— a dormouse waking in spring. Their father kept them, so far as he was able, from all pleasure and all change and all social life, but at least they could get out Of the house.
- If few people were allowed to come to the house, and fewer still penetrated to Elizabeth's room, a great many heard of her. Her poetry was making a great sensation, though her best work came after her marriage, and even old Barrett was proud to read what was said of his daughetr. He had always been a little proud of her, even when as a child she scribbled verse, and never grudged her education. She preferred learning of her brothers' tutors to learning of her sisters' governess. Her father let her read pretty freely merely telling her to avoid a certain bookcase in which Gibbon and Worn Jones were to be found. She dutifully obeyed him, but found Voltaire and Rousseau and many other volumes, not then considered fit for young ladies, upon an opposite shelf. Oddly enough, after she came to years of discretion, her father neither intercepted her letters not censored her reading. As time went on admirers of her work determined to see her—Mary Mitford was a privileged friend who came when she liked. She and John Kenyon, a cousin of the Barretts, had the entree of the invalid's room, apparently with her father's . consent, and between them they managed to introduce two or three more literary admirers. Everyone wanted to see the new poetess. Browning made an occasion to write to her and finally she allowed him to call. It was a great event when first he entered her room—and such a room.
But whatever the setting the lady must have Jooked charming. Browning fell in love at once, so did she. " When you came you never went away," she said, meaning that he was never absent from her mind— and to use the phrase of the day, he .soon " declared himself." The lady held back and the wonderful letters which their son did not scruple to give to the world, flew backwards and forwards for more than a year. On these letters we make no comment, the subject will not bear consideration, it falls to pieces in the hand." Many of them are quoted here, and we see that if Elizabeth could write a love letter she could also flirt in a.: manner -to- -recall Shakespeare's heroines, Every month saw her " better in health. First she made journeys across her room as Browning told her to do, then a longer journey downstairs, at last out and into the park. Last of all the two poets eloped to Italy. No one dare tell the father ! The brothers never officially knew what was going to happen. It was considered that they were less able than the sisters to stand the paternal outburst.
Old Barrett never spoke to Elizabeth again and she (it is the last incredible truth of the romance) grieved, as much as one so happy could grieve, over his refusal to make it up."
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