" 0 Lyric Love Half-Angel and Half-Bird "
[Next week Mr. Benson will write of his personal reminiscences of Browning, and describe how the poet told Archbishop Benson that he had " deskfuls of lyrics "—which have never been dis- covered.—ED. Spectator.] TN all the literature of love there is no chronicle more -I- human and romantic than that which records the affairs of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. At the time when they first met he was a man of thirty- three, a volcano spouting health and optimism and vitality, and she a cloistered invalid, six years his senior, who passed from bed to couch, and from couch back to bed again, and was completely subjugated by a most preposterous father, whose domestic tyranny over his hapless family can scarcely nowadays be credited. All her life she had been a poet : at the age of fourteen she wrote an epic on the Battle of Marathon in four books, and now published two volumes of verse containing a poem called " Lady Geraldine's Courtship." Browning came across it, and to his infinite satisfaction (for no one loved appreciation more than he) found himself and his work alluded to as :- " Some pomegranate which if cut Deep down the middle shows a heart within Blood-tinctured of a veined humanity."
He admired her verse immensely, and instantly wrote to ask if he might see her. From then until their marriage there flowed between them that unique and ardent cor- respondence which has happily been preserved to us.
After their very first meeting he wrote her a passionate love-letter, and she replied, in the true Early Victorian manner by forbidding him, under penalty of never seeing her again, to repeat such a mistake. He wildly and incoherently promised not to do so, and without any pause began again. The barrier she had so conscientiously propped up between them melted in the irresistible radiance both of them poured on it, and within a few months she is writing to him : " Henceforward I am your's in everything but to do you harm . . . none except God shall interfere between you and me. I mean that if He should free me within a moderate time from the chain of this weakness, I will then be to you whatever at that hour you shall choose, whether friend or more than friend."
The upshot was now certain. It was quite useless to ask her father for his consent, and we have the delightful spectacle of Browning, the most conventional of men in the small etiquettes of life devising a secret marriage and elopement with this secluded invalid. The marriage took place, and she returned to bed for a week to rest after it and plan their flight to Italy. And then this winged and rainbowed correspondence comes deliciously to earth, for with incandescent expressions of love they descend into a bottomless pit of confusion over trains and stations and luggage and steamships. Browning confurats the Tuesday and Friday boats of the South of England Steam Company with the Wednesday and Saturday boats of the South- Western, and she gets into a fever of anxiety about her boxes. - "• If we sent them,"• she writes, " to New Cross they would not reach you in time. Hold me, my beloved, with your love." Then -Browning mistakes the hour of their train, and overlooks the existence of an express, which, so she profoundly observes, goes faster than his wrong slow one. . . . The reader - fears they will never get off at all. But- they- did, and Wordsworth when he heard-of it observed : -" So Robert Browning and -Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together. Well, I hope they may understand each other—nobody else could." The Laureate's hope was magnificently fulfilled. • For fifteen year that noon of their devotion &dined not a degree froth its Zenith. LoVe was The fire Of their lives, and poetry their fiery hUsiness. At fixed hours he and she sat in adjoining rooms writing poetry, each stimulated instead of being paralysed, by the knowledge that the other was doing the same next door. Elizabeth cracked and shed her invalidism as a chrysalis its sheath : she glowed and flowered under the caress of the Italian sunshine, the pent prison of her life had fallen like the walls of Jericho at the blast of her lover's trumpet. Then gradually the high flame of her life. began to flicker, and in 1861 she died with her head resting on his cheek. " God took her to Himself," he wrote to a friend, " as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark uneasy bed into your arms and the light."
And then twenty-eight years later, when Browning himself was an old man, the flame and passion of his life flared up once more. He came across a volume of Edward Fitzgerald's letters, and read this sentence : " So Mrs. Browning's dead, thank God. We shall have no more Aurora Leighs." The two had never met, and this meant no more than that Fitzgerald did not like her poetry. But out burst the volcano of Browning's youth again, spouting lava. " I felt as if she had died yes- terday," he said, and he published in the Athenaeum the following lines :- To EDWARD FITZGERALD.
I chanced upon a new book yesterday : I opened it, and, where my finger lay 'Twixt page and uncut page, these words I read Sonia six or seven at most—and learned thereby That you, Fitzgerald, whom by ear and eye She never knew, thanked God my wife was dead.
Ay, dead ! and were yourself alive, good Fit; How to return you thanks would task my wits : Kicking you seems the common lot of curs— While more appropriate greeting lends you grace : Surely to spit there glorifies your face, Spittingfrom lips once sanctified by Her's."
We shudder, perhaps, at this molten explosion of hate and contempt, but can We suppress a whoop of satis-
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