Chapter 4

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