Robert Browning - The Complete Works of Robert Browning - Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition

I know you always loved her, and me too in my degree. I shall always be grateful to those who loved her, and that, I repeat, you did.

She was, and is, lamented with extraordinary demonstrations, if one consider it. The Italians seem to have understood her by an instinct. I have received strange kindness from everybody. Pen is very well — very dear and good, anxious to comfort me as he calls it. He can’t know his loss yet. After years, his will be worse than mine — he will want what he never had — that is, for the time when he could be helped by her wisdom, and genius and piety — I have had everything and shall not forget.

God bless you, dear friend. I believe I shall set out in a week. Isa goes with me — dear, true heart. You, too, would do what you could for us were you here and your assistance needful. A letter from you came a day or two before the end — she made me enquire about the Frescobaldi Palace for you, — Isa wrote to you in consequence. I shall be heard of at 151, rue de Grenelle St. Germain. Faithfully and affectionately yours, Robert Browning.

The first of these displays even more self-control, it might be thought less feeling, than the second; but it illustrates the reserve which, I believe, habitually characterized Mr. Browning’s attitude towards men. His natural, and certainly most complete, confidants were women. At about the end of July he left Florence with his son; also accompanied by Miss Blagden, who travelled with them as far as Paris. She herself must soon have returned to Italy; since he wrote to her in September on the subject of his wife’s provisional disinterment, *in a manner which shows her to have been on the spot.

*Required for the subsequent placing of the monument designed by F. Leighton.

Sept. ‘61.

‘… Isa, may I ask you one favour? Will you, whenever these dreadful preliminaries, the provisional removement &c. when they are proceeded with, — will you do — all you can — suggest every regard to decency and proper feeling to the persons concerned? I have a horror of that man of the graveyard, and needless publicity and exposure — I rely on you, dearest friend of ours, to at least lend us your influence when the time shall come — a word may be invaluable. If there is any show made, or gratification of strangers’ curiosity, far better that I had left the turf untouched. These things occur through sheer thoughtlessness, carelessness, not anything worse, but the effect is irreparable. I won’t think any more of it — now — at least… .’

The dread expressed in this letter of any offence to the delicacies of the occasion was too natural to be remarked upon here; but it connects itself with an habitual aversion for the paraphernalia of death, which was a marked peculiarity of Mr. Browning’s nature. He shrank, as his wife had done, from the ‘earth side’ of the portentous change; but truth compels me to own that her infinite pity had little or no part in his attitude towards it. For him, a body from which the soul had passed, held nothing of the person whose earthly vesture it had been. He had no sympathy for the still human tenderness with which so many of us regard the mortal remains of those they have loved, or with the solemn or friendly interest in which that tenderness so often reflects itself in more neutral minds. He would claim all respect for the corpse, but he would turn away from it. Another aspect of this feeling shows itself in a letter to one of his brothers-in-law, Mr. George Moulton-Barrett, in reference to his wife’s monument, with which Mr. Barrett had professed himself pleased. His tone is characterized by an almost religious reverence for the memory which that monument enshrines. He nevertheless writes:

‘I hope to see it one day — and, although I have no kind of concern as to where the old clothes of myself shall be thrown, yet, if my fortune be such, and my survivors be not unduly troubled, I should like them to lie in the place I have retained there. It is no matter, however.’

The letter is dated October 19, 1866. He never saw Florence again.

Mr. Browning spent two months with his father and sister at St.-Enogat, near Dinard, from which place the letter to Miss Blagden was written; and then proceeded to London, where his wife’s sister, Miss Arabel Barrett, was living. He had declared in his first grief that he would never keep house again, and he began his solitary life in lodgings which at his request she had engaged for him; but the discomfort of this arrangement soon wearied him of it; and before many months had passed, he had sent to Florence for his furniture, and settled himself in the house in Warwick Crescent, which possessed, besides other advantages, that of being close to Delamere Terrace, where Miss Barrett had taken up her abode.

This first period of Mr. Browning’s widowed life was one of unutterable dreariness, in which the smallest and yet most unconquerable element was the prosaic ugliness of everything which surrounded him. It was fifteen years since he had spent a winter in England; he had never spent one in London. There had been nothing to break for him the transition from the stately beauty of Florence to the impressions and associations of the Harrow and Edgware Roads, and of Paddington Green. He might have escaped this neighbourhood by way of Westbourne Terrace; but his walks constantly led him in an easterly direction; and whether in an unconscious hugging of his chains, or, as was more probable, from the desire to save time, he would drag his aching heart and reluctant body through the sordidness or the squalor of this short cut, rather than seek the pleasanter thoroughfares which were open to him. Even the prettiness of Warwick Crescent was neutralized for him by the atmosphere of low or ugly life which encompassed it on almost every side. His haunting dream was one day to have done with it all; to have fulfilled his mission with his son, educated him, launched him in a suitable career, and to go back to sunshine and beauty again. He learned by degrees to regard London as a home; as the only fitting centre for the varied energies which were reviving in him; to feel pride and pleasure in its increasingly picturesque character. He even learned to appreciate the outlook from his house — that ‘second from the bridge’ of which so curious a presentment had entered into one of the poems of the ‘Men and Women’ *— in spite of the refuse of humanity which would sometimes yell at the street corner, or fling stones at his plate-glass. But all this had to come; and it is only fair to admit that twenty-nine years ago the beauties of which I have spoken were in great measure to come also. He could not then in any mood have exclaimed, as he did to a friend two or three years ago: ‘Shall we not have a pretty London if things go on in this way?’ They were driving on the Kensington side of Hyde Park.

*‘How it strikes a Contemporary’.

The paternal duty, which, so much against his inclination, had established Mr. Browning in England, would in every case have lain very near to his conscience and to his heart; but it especially urged itself upon them through the absence of any injunction concerning it on his wife’s part. No farewell words of hers had commended their child to his father’s love and care; and though he may, for the moment, have imputed this fact to unconsciousness of her approaching death, his deeper insight soon construed the silence into an expression of trust, more binding upon him than the most earnest exacted promise could have been. The growing boy’s education occupied a considerable part of his time and thoughts, for he had determined not to send him to school, but, as far as possible, himself prepare him for the University. He must also, in some degree, have supervised his recreations. He had therefore, for the present, little leisure for social distractions, and probably at first very little inclination for them. His plan of life and duty, and the sense of responsibility attendant on it, had been communicated to Madame du Quaire in a letter written also from St.-Enogat.