Life and Letters of Robert Browning [81]
of this people -- when no excess, no quarrelling, no rudeness nor coarseness
can be observed in the course of such wild masked liberty;
not a touch of licence anywhere, and perfect social equality!
Our servant Ferdinando side by side in the same ball-room with the Grand Duke,
and no class's delicacy offended against! For the Grand Duke
went down into the ball-room for a short time. . . .'
==
The summer of 1857 saw the family once more at the Baths of Lucca,
and again in company with Mr. Lytton. He had fallen ill
at the house of their common friend, Miss Blagden, also a visitor there;
and Mr. Browning shared in the nursing, of which she refused to entrust
any part to less friendly hands. He sat up with the invalid for four nights;
and would doubtless have done so for as many more as seemed necessary,
but that Mrs. Browning protested against this trifling with his own health.
The only serious difference which ever arose between Mr. Browning and his wife
referred to the subject of spiritualism. Mrs. Browning held doctrines
which prepared her to accept any real or imagined phenomena
betokening intercourse with the spirits of the dead; nor could she be repelled
by anything grotesque or trivial in the manner of this intercourse,
because it was no part of her belief that a spirit still inhabiting
the atmosphere of our earth, should exhibit any dignity or solemnity
not belonging to him while he lived upon it. The question
must have been discussed by them on its general grounds
at a very early stage of their intimacy; but it only assumed
practical importance when Mr. Home came to Florence in 1857 or 1858.
Mr. Browning found himself compelled to witness some of the `manifestations'.
He was keenly alive to their generally prosaic and irreverent character,
and to the appearance of jugglery which was then involved in them.
He absolutely denied the good faith of all the persons concerned.
Mrs. Browning as absolutely believed it; and no compromise between them
was attainable, because, strangely enough, neither of them
admitted as possible that mediums or witnesses should deceive themselves.
The personal aspect which the question thus received
brought it into closer and more painful contact with their daily life.
They might agree to differ as to the abstract merits of spiritualism;
but Mr. Browning could not resign himself to his wife's trustful attitude
towards some of the individuals who at that moment represented it.
He may have had no substantial fear of her doing anything that could place her
in their power, though a vague dread of this seems to have haunted him;
but he chafed against the public association of her name with theirs.
Both his love for and his pride in her resented it.
He had subsided into a more judicial frame of mind when he wrote
`Sludge the Medium', in which he says everything which can excuse the liar
and, what is still more remarkable, modify the lie. So far back
as the autumn of 1860 I heard him discuss the trickery
which he believed himself to have witnessed, as dispassionately
as any other non-credulous person might have done so.
The experience must even before that have passed out of the foreground
of his conjugal life. He remained, nevertheless, subject, for many years,
to gusts of uncontrollable emotion which would sweep over him
whenever the question of `spirits' or `spiritualism' was revived;
and we can only understand this in connection with the peculiar circumstances
of the case. With all his faith in the future, with all his constancy
to the past, the memory of pain was stronger in him than any other.
A single discordant note in the harmony of that married love,
though merged in its actual existence, would send intolerable vibrations
through his remembrance of it. And the pain had not been, in this instance,
that of simple disagreement. It was complicated by Mrs. Browning's
refusal to admit that disagreement was possible. She never believed
in her husband's disbelief; and he had been not unreasonably annoyed by her
always assuming