But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter, while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of all the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a new development, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and to weigh at least three souls in the balance.  Upon further examination of Miss Barrett’s condition, the physicians had declared that it was absolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy.  This may, without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last great earthly opportunity of Barrett’s character.  He had not originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a self-indulgence in moral things.  He had grown to regard his pious and dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the universe.  And as long as the great mass of authorities were on his side, his illusion was quite pardonable.  His crisis came when the authorities changed their front, and with one accord asked his permission to send his daughter abroad.  It was his crisis, and he refused.

He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and somewhat detestable way of refusing.  Once when his daughter had asked a perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her singular parent remarked that “she might keep him if she liked, but that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice.”  These were the weapons with which he ruled his people.  For the worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp.  Barrett was one of the oppressors who have discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the fine verse of Swinburne:—­

    “The racks of the earth and the rods
    Are weak as the foam on the sands;
    The heart is the prey for the gods,
    Who crucify hearts, not hands.”

He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women, was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign.  When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey together.

Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were active in the matter.  Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett, the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father’s conduct with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy.  Mrs. Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thus removing all questions of expense or arrangement.  She would appear to have stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence and magnanimity.