Life and Letters of Robert Browning [56]
with Mrs. Browning's safety: the latent practical disparities
of an essentially vigorous and an essentially fragile existence;
and the time came when these were to make themselves felt.
Mrs. Browning had been a delicate infant. She had also outgrown this delicacy
and developed into a merry, and, in the harmless sense, mischief-loving child.
The accident which subsequently undermined her life could only have befallen
a very active and healthy girl.* Her condition justified hope and,
to a great extent, fulfilled it. She rallied surprisingly and almost suddenly
in the sunshine of her new life, and remained for several years
at the higher physical level: her natural and now revived spirits sometimes,
I imagine, lifting her beyond it. But her ailments were too radical for
permanent cure, as the weak voice and shrunken form never ceased to attest.
They renewed themselves, though in slightly different conditions;
and she gradually relapsed, during the winters at least,
into something like the home-bound condition of her earlier days.
It became impossible that she should share the more active side
of her husband's existence. It had to be alternately suppressed
and carried on without her. The deep heart-love, the many-sided
intellectual sympathy, preserved their union in rare beauty to the end.
But to say that it thus maintained itself as if by magic,
without effort of self-sacrifice on his part or of resignation on hers,
would be as unjust to the noble qualities of both, as it would be false
to assert that its compensating happiness had ever failed them.
--
* Her family at that time lived in the country. She was a constant rider,
and fond of saddling her pony; and one day, when she was about fourteen,
she overbalanced herself in lifting the saddle, and fell backward,
inflicting injuries on her head, or rather spine,
which caused her great suffering, but of which the nature
remained for some time undiscovered.
--
Mr. Browning's troubles did not, even for the present, exhaust themselves
in that week of apprehension. They assumed a deeper reality
when his delicate wife first gave herself into his keeping,
and the long hours on steamboat and in diligence were before them.
What she suffered in body, and he in mind, during the first days
of that wedding-journey is better imagined than told.
In Paris they either met, or were joined by, a friend, Mrs. Anna Jameson
(then also en route for Italy), and Mrs. Browning was doubly cared for
till she and her husband could once more put themselves on their way.
At Genoa came the long-needed rest in southern land. From thence,
in a few days, they went on to Pisa, and settled there for the winter.
Even so great a friend as John Forster was not in the secret
of Mr. Browning's marriage; we learn this through an amusing paragraph
in a letter from Mr. Fox, written soon after it had taken place:
==
`Forster never heard of the Browning marriage till the proof
of the newspaper (`Examiner') notice was sent; when he went into
one of his great passions at the supposed hoax, ordered up the compositor
to have a swear at him, and demanded to see the MS. from which it was taken:
so it was brought, and he instantly recognised the hand of Browning's sister.
Next day came a letter from R. B., saying he had often meant to tell him
or write of it, but hesitated between the two, and neglected both.
`She was better, and a winter in Italy had been recommended some months ago.
`It seems as if made up by their poetry rather than themselves.'
==
Many interesting external details of Mr. Browning's married life
must have been lost to us through the wholesale destruction of his letters
to his family, of which mention has been already made,
and which he carried out before leaving Warwick Crescent about four years ago;
and Mrs. Browning's part in the correspondence, though still preserved,
cannot fill the gap, since for a long time it chiefly consisted
of little personal outpourings, inclosed in her husband's letters
and supplementary