The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved soon afterwards to Florence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there
is much perhaps to be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be said in the way of actual narrative. Each of
them had passed through the one incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett’s life had before her marriage been
uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliant
friends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, they experienced; but their life was of the kind that if it
were told at all, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous intellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife
rode far into the country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of the peasants; how they fell in with the
strangest and most picturesque figures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books and modelled in
clay and played on musical instruments; how Browning was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards;
how he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi’s hymn brought the knocking of the Austrian police;
these are the things of which his life is full, trifling and picturesque things, a series of interludes, a beautiful and happy
story, beginning and ending nowhere. The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the death of
Browning’s mother in 1849.
It is well known that Browning loved Italy; that it was his adopted country; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics
that the name of it would be found written on his heart. But the particular character of this love of Browning for Italy
needs to be understood. There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in it, who visit it annually,
who come across a continent to see it, who hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they are all
united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones.
There are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to think that they keep Italy, as they might keep
an aviary or a hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of beauty. Browning did not feel at all
in this manner; he was intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a nation. If he could not have loved
Italy as a nation, he would not have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything on earth, from the Middle
Ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at such length in "Mr. Sludge the Medium," he is interested in the life in things. He
was interested in the life in Italian art and in the life in Italian politics.
Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this matter is in Browning’s interest in art. He was
immeasurably fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in Italy gave him, of course, innumerable
and perfect opportunities for the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies was not like that of the
ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian cities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless lines of
magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk
about them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their diaries. But the way in which they affected
Browning is described very suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes herself as longing for her
husband to write poems, beseeching him to write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband was
engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as fast as he made them. This is Browning’s interest in art,
the interest in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable interest in how things are done. Every one who
knows his admirable poems on painting—"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and "Pictor Ignotus"—will remember
how fully they deal with technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a mess of colours. Sometimes
they are so technical as to be mysterious to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I once
knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper," and thought that Pacchiarotto was
the name of a dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment of his duty. These Browning poems
do not merely deal with painting; they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not what it is to so many
of the non–professional lovers of art, a thing accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops continually
growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. There
is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but Browning could not merely talk art with artists—he
could talk shop with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to be more than a fifth–rate painter,
or enough about the organ to be more than a sixth–rate organist. But there are, when all is said and done, some things
which a fifth–rate painter knows which a first–rate art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth–rate
organist knows which a first–rate judge of music does not know. And these were the things that Browning knew.
He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language
to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the
mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love
a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of
doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning
was in this strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course of his life half a hundred things at
which he can never have even for a moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurd little ingenuities,
such as the discovery of a way of making pictures by roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit of
fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a technical expert in painting, a technical expert in
sculpture, a technical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so bizarre a thing as an abstract police
detective, writing at length in letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian town. Indeed, his own
Ring and the Book is merely a sublime detective story. He was in a hundred things this type of man; he was precisely in
the position, with a touch of greater technical success, of the admirable figure in Stevenson’s story who said, "I can play
the fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny gaff, but not quite."
The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but an antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing.
We see the same phenomenon in an even more important matter—the essence and individuality of the country itself.
Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely that sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many
of those cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and admire and despise it. To them it was a living
nation, the type and centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and flaming heart of Western history, the
very Europe of Europe. And they lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas—the making of a new
nation, one of the things that makes men feel that they are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, with every
circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama of the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic
militarism of Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They lived in a time when affairs of State
had almost the air of works of art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become politicians in one of
those great creative epochs when even the politicians have to be poets.
Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental and English politics a very strong Liberal. This
fact is not a mere detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of the authorship of the "Eikon
Basilike" or the authenticity of the Tichborne claimant. Liberalism was so inevitably involved in the poet’s whole view of
existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative Conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal. His
mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and energy and in the ultimate utility of error. He
held the great central Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit beyond, and perhaps even
independent of, our own sincerest convictions. The world was going right he felt, most probably in his way, but certainly
in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in later years, entitled "Why I am a Liberal," expresses admirably this
philosophical root of his politics. It asks in effect how he, who had found truth in so many strange forms after so many
strange wanderings, can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. A Liberal may be defined
approximately as a man who, if he could by waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers of
mankind for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberal in this sense.
And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French Revolution made this claim for the liberty and
personality of human beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It attached indeed to the
independence of a nation something of the same wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems
attached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same; no one could say absolutely that a live man was
useless, and no one could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or must remain useless to the world.
Men remembered how often barbarous tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive the blood of
decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of the personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all
other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that
friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But in them it led to great international partialities,
to a great system, as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as Carlyle in love with
Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as Browning in love with Italy.
And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of energy and variety, on the other side was something
which we now find it difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time a great reaction in favour of monarchy,
aristocracy, andecclesiasticism, a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and dwelling almost entirely on the best
periods and the best qualities of the old régime. But the modern man, full of admiration for the great virtue of chivalry
which is at the heart of aristocracies, and the great virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, is not
in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, how astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and
material, and devoid of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe which survived, and for a time
conquered, the Revolution. The case against the Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not the case which a
rationalist would urge against the Church of the time of St. Louis, but diametrically the opposite case. Against the
mediæval Church it might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic about the destiny of man, too
indifferent to all things but the devotional side of the soul. Against the Church of Pio Nono the main thing to be said was
that it was simply and supremely cynical; that it was not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but on the
worldly counsel to leave life as it is; that it was not the inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, but the enemy,
the cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any kind or description. The same was true of the monarchical systems of
Prussia and Austria and Russia at this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy of the cavaliers who rode after
Charles I. or Louis XIII. It was the philosophy of the typical city uncle, advising every one, and especially the young, to
avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine, dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear.
That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the Napoleon legend—that while Napoleon was
a despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the pessimism of Europe,
and erased the word "impossible." One does not need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of the
First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and
Austria driven into battle with a cane.
Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break–up of one part of this frozen continent of the non–
possumus, Austria’s hold in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and wholly cowardly and
unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance had established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief
would last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then.
But almost of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic princes and their chancellors discovered
with a great deal of astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, but to all appearance in a very
unmanageable period of its boyhood. In an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and philosophers
alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning
of the world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act symbols and become legends while
they are alive. Garibaldi in his red shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort calling to the coachman
to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of humanity
and liberty, and was willing, like some passionate Jesuit of the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a
philosopher or a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and picturesque than war itself. These
men had nothing to do with an age of the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them, as all things
pass; but since then we have had no men of their type precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful.
Gordon was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes.
When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been sent to him was stopped on the frontier and
suppressed on account of his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible for people living in a
commonwealth like ours to understand how a small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the obvious fact
that a great practical injury was really done to him; that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital
moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like
this is not the worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men not in the most serious matters, but
precisely in those matters in which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to accept cheerfully
unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient
system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a post–card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of
men is a strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world who would not rather be ruled by despots
chosen by lot and live in a city like a mediæval Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to smoke another cigarette, or
sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion for a caprice
for which he did not really care a straw. Unmeaning and muddle–headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if
extended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than the massacres of September. And that was the
nightmare of vexatious triviality which was lying over all the cities of Italy that were ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms
of Europe. The history of the time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles—struggles about the humming of a tune
or the wearing of a colour, the arrest of a journey, or the opening of a letter. And there can be little doubt that Browning’s
temperament under these conditions was not of the kind to become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of the
Imperial and Ducal and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passed the necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes
even transgressed its spirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy was extraordinarily full and varied, when we
consider the restrictions under which one at least of them had always lain. They met and took delight, notwithstanding
their exile, in some of the most interesting people of their time—Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, and Lord Lytton. Browning, in
a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of them, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night
by the bedside of a third.
It has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon the question
of spiritualism. That statement must, of course, be modified and even contradicted if it means that they never differed;
that Mr. Browning never thought an Act of Parliament good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. Browning never
thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a
matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance
between two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a great many things, for example, about
Napoleon III. whom Mrs. Browning regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the deserts of
Sir Galahad, and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberal principles could never pardon for the Coup d’État. If they
differed on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reason must be sought in qualities which were
deeper and more elemental in both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in her excellent Life of
Browning, states that the difficulty arose from Mrs. Browning’s firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning’s
absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writer who met them at this time says, "Browning cannot
believe, and Mrs. Browning cannot help believing." This theory, that Browning’s aversion to the spiritualist circle arose
from an absolute denial of the tenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often been repeated. But it is
exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with Browning’s character. He was the last man in the world to be intellectually deaf to
a hypothesis merely because it was odd. He had friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the
French legitimism of De Ripert–Monclar to the Republicanism of Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest
for heresies. It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to a man who had expressed with sympathy
the religion of "Caliban" and the morality of "Time’s Revenges." It is true that at this time of the first popular interest in
spiritualism a feeling existed among many people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a superstition
against believing in ghosts. But, intellectually speaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant
and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and
negligent even for that time. The fact was in all probability that Browning’s aversion to the spiritualists had little or nothing
to do with spiritualism. It arose from quite a different side of his character—his uncompromising dislike of what is called
Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit dubious
manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was
that Browning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read the Memoirs of David Home, the famous spiritualist
medium with whom Browning came in contact. These Memoirs constitute a more thorough and artistic self–revelation
than any monologue that Browning ever wrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are infinitely
the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral
and intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating perhaps in the disgusting passage in which Home
describes Mrs. Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband’s actions in the matter have been
adopted against her will. It is in this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of Browning. He did not dislike
spiritualism, but spiritualists. The second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should cast an eye, is
the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George
Sand. Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George
Sand which he afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. The society was "of the ragged red, diluted with the
low theatrical, men who worship George Sand, à genou bas between an oath and an ejection of saliva." When we find
that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the
early occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly right in concluding that he objected not to an
opinion, but to a social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably Philistine feelings, and one of
them was a great relish for his responsibilities towards his wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This is quite a distinct
thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will scarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good feelings, it has its
possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife.
David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857. Mrs. Browning undoubtedly threw herself into psychical
experiments with great ardour at first, and Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length forbade, the
enterprise. He did not do so however until he had attended one séance at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event
occurred, which is described in Home’s Memoirs with a gravity even more absurd than the incident. Towards the end of
the proceedings a wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being lowered, it was caused to rise slowly
into the air, and after hovering for some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight upon her head. As
the wreath was floating in her direction, her husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her.
One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a man whose wife was the centre of a weird and
disturbing experiment, genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it was generally believed that Browning
had crossed the room in the hope that the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its disobliging
refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and malignant aversion to spiritualism. The idea of the very conventional
and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is
one of the genuine gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. Browning could be fairly violent, as we know, both in
poetry and conversation; but it would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and said if Mr. Home’s
wreath had alighted on his head.
Next day, according to Home’s account, he called on the hostess of the previous night in what the writer calls "a
ridiculous state of excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he and his wife did not attend any
more gatherings of the kind. What actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the account in Home’s
Memoirs principally consists of noble speeches made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced
Browning to a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention. But there can be no doubt that the general
upshot of the affair was that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. There can be little doubt that he
was justified in this; indeed, he was probably even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical mysteries