CHAPTER IV

BROWNING IN ITALY

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.