THE BROWNINGS

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 June 1932, Page 12

THE BROWNINGS

A GREAT LOVE STORY. Ho.\v many of us ever find time to think of the v Brownings’ great love story, still less to read the thousandodd, closely-printed pages of their letters? (writes Ruth M. Bedford, in the “Sydney Morning Herald”). Our imagination quickens, at the names bright in legend and in poetry— Deirdre and Naisi, Tristram and Iseult, Paolo and Francesca. We know those are stories of romantic love which, world-old and world-wide, still have power to thrill us. But we are apt to overlook the fact that as late as the prosaic 19th century, in stolid Anglo-Saxon. England, a love blazed forth which was as daring, as wonderful, as highly romantic as any legendary tale. Even in this year of grace a woman approaching 40 is not considered youthful, but how much older she was in 1845, when woman’s youth was almost as brief as an English summer. Yet the question of age seems scarcely to have entered the heads of Elizabeth and her insistent lover: they knew it was completely unimportant. The friendship began on paper. Browning set the ball rolling in impulsive admiration of her poems, “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” he wrote, “and I love you too.” Elizabeth, who was not anything like as dead as she thought she was, replied very cordially. Letters followed, thick as leaves falling, in autumn, for both poets lived to write.

Friendship developed rapidly, though Browning’s ardent wish to meet Elizabeth was not granted for- some months. “In the Spring we shall see,” she vaguely promises in January; and on February 26, the hasty Robert is writing: “Real warm spring, dear Miss Barrett, the birds know it, and in spring I sail see you, surely see- you—-for when did I once fail to get whatever I had set my heart upon?” '

But when they did meet at last —he, so eager, she, so nervous that with tears and trembling she almost refused to let him in at the last moment—he all but wrecked matters by the “wild speaking” of the letter Which he dashed off to her the next day. Of all the hundreds of letters which passed between them, this alone was destroyed, after it had been returned by the gravely displeased Miss Barrett. “You have said some intemperate things—fancies—which you will not say over again, nor unsay, .but forget at once and for ever. . . .

which will die out between you and me alone, like a misprint between you and the printer.” Browning’s tactful reply and her generosity blotted out this episode.

PATERNAL OPPOSITION. For by September love was acknowledged between them, and was filling every need of their widely different natures. Week after week Elizabth endeavoured to crush all hope in her buoyant lover, for reasons against marriage there were in plenty—not only her ill-health but her father’s extraordinary attiude towards marriage; he had absolutely forbidden it to all his children, and almost incredible scenes are described when his anger was incurred by a daughter who so much as dared to think twice of some man. He knew that his favourite Elizabeth received visits from the poet, Robert Browning, but presum-

ably it never entered his head that this invalid daughter could remotely contemplate marriage. Besier’s fine play, “The Barretts of Wimpole Street,” has an interesting though possibly exaggerated, study of Mr Barrett the tyrant. He is a rather unpleasant, pathological case, and Elizabeth did not defend her father’s views, nor understand them; only her love tor him never failed. But, delicate and devoted though she ws, she was no fool or weakling. As soon as she realised the strength of Browning’s love, and her own, she admitted it, though she saw no hope of its fulfil.ment. But when there was definite promise of a return to comparative health, she was not the woman to allow her father’s complete unreason-

ableness to stand in her way. How gently and with what dignity she writes of her father and his utter lack of consideration of her, hisharshness! How temperately the fiery Bi owning replies, though his was far the hardest part—to see his beloved suffer, unable to raise a finger to help. T think I ought to understand what a father may exact and a child should comply with,” he writes, himself a much-loved and devoted son, in a family remarkable for mutual affection; “and I respect the most ambiguous of love’s caprices if they give never so slight a clue to their alljustifying source. . . I wholly sympathise, however it go against me, with the highest, wariest, pride and love for you, and the proper jealousy and vigilance they entail —but now and here the jewel is not being overguarded, but ruined, cast away. . . .

You ask whether you ought to obey this no-reason. I will tell you—all passive obedience and implicit submission of will and intellect is by far too easy to be the cours'e prescribed by God to man in this life of probation—for they evade probation altogether.”

A AIANY-SIDED NATURE. Reading on, how attached one grows to Elizabeth, so sensitive, so dutiful, so well acquainted with grief, and yet so full of fun, so quick to understand. It is interesting, too, to realise her excellent critical faculties, which had little scope in those days, when she was only known as a poet. The unstinted admiration felt for her poetry seems strange to us—of all she poured forth with fatal facility, probably only the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” will survive, that lovely tribute to a great mutual love. But her lover, so far above her in every literary sense, would probably have knocked down in his headlong way anyone who dared to imply that his genius was greater than his wife’s.

The character of Browning, as revealed in the letters, is of pure gold. How lovable is his boyish eagerness, how admirable his restraint, his good sense, his absolutely sane and wellbalanced outlook. In all his relations lie seemed to have been little short of perfect—a beloved son and brother, an ardent yet considerate lover, a staunch friend. His understanding of Elizabeth’s love for her implacable parent and his behaviour throughout that impossible situation is beyond praise, and one of his biographers speaks of his letter to Mr Barrett after the elopement as a model

of fine feeling. The letter was returned unread, as were all Elizabeth’s. It is with a sense of growing excitement that one approaches the end of the volume, when the lovers have agreed to elope to Italy, that country beloved by Browning, where he hopes his “Ba” may ‘grow really strong. Only Wilson, Elizabeth’s faithful maid, is taken into her confidence, and accompanies her mistress to St. Marylebone Church on the day of the secret marriage, and a week later, goes abroad with the married pair. The courage of this step—the marriage and journey to Italy—was considerable. To take away to a distant foreign country a woman who, until lately, practically never left her sofa, was a tremendous risk. As a biographer says, had Elizabeth died, Browning would have been considered little short of a murderer, while Elizabeth knew she had burnt her boats indeed. ‘By to-morrow at this time I shall have you only to love me, my beloved,” she writes in her last letter of all —for no more letters were written by either; after their marriage they were never parted for a day—- “ You only. As if one said God only. And we shall have Him beside, I pray of Him.” So the letters end, and we are left the richer by two friends, following them wistfu,lly in thought into their future life—their 15 years of perfect happiness.

And they are gone! Ay, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the light, one feels inclined to write on the hook’s last page. And one’s heart glows at the thought of-such a deathless story. It doesn’t matter that the yellowing pages of “Aurora Leigh” may never be turned again, that much of Robert’s work will remain on dusty library shelves; what does matter is that their courageous love lit so enduring a blaze that other pilgrims, travelling by lonelier paths, may see the light afar, and, drawing near, be warmed and comforted by it.