‘Mr Browning is an honourable English gentleman with none but the highest notions of what is right and proper. Or have you heard some lying tale to the contrary?’
‘Nothing of that sort,’ I had to answer. ‘He is … he’s simply not fit.’
‘You refer presumably to his lack of a personal fortune.’
‘You know there’s very little that could be of less moment to me than any such consideration. In itself, that is. But the consequence of his lack of means must be that he lacks the sensibility required of him in his dealings with a personage such as yourself.’
‘I can assure you that Mr Browning yields to no one where sensibility is concerned.’
‘He attended no university.’
‘His wealth of knowledge would challenge any who have. And since when was attendance of a university a guarantee of sensibility?’
‘He is six years your junior.’
‘Oh, stuff. Mama was four years older than you. Tell me the truth, father; why have you taken so strongly and so suddenly against poor Mr Browning? I remember so well how happy you were on my account when he first appeared.’
‘That was before … I will no longer permit his visits. Oh, Ba,’ I burst out, ‘pay heed to what I say as never before. I beg of you, be guided by me. I don’t know what you and he are to each other, and I swear to you I don’t wish to know, but let there be no more of it.’ I stared at her and spoke with all the earnestness of which I am capable, ‘In the name of God, my daughter, banish the man Robert Browning from your life.’
Truth is so terrible, even in fetters, that for a moment I thought I had won. Then Elizabeth turned away from me and said in level tones, ‘I will not. Robert and I love each other. If God is to be brought into the matter, let Him part Robert and me, for nothing human will. If you try to prevent his entry into this house, I will leave it forthwith and trust to Mr Kenyon or Mr Boyd to help me. Now please go.’
So ended my last conversation with Elizabeth on this subject, in fact our last conversation worthy of the name in this world. On Saturday, 19th September, 1846, she left my house for ever, having a week earlier been married without my knowledge to Robert Browning at St Marylebone Parish Church. Soon the couple, taking Flush with them, were in Paris. Three weeks later they had reached Italy.
I suppose I had all along regarded it as inevitable, but to have such a thing happen, however clearly foreseen, is utterly different. But what else could I have done, knowing what I knew?
Let me set in order what I knew and if need be whence I knew and know it.
1. Robert Browning is of very dark complexion. (Kenyon’s phrase; my own observation.)
2. It has been said in London that he is of Creole or coloured blood. (Kenyon.)
3. His ancestry includes a West Indian grandmother. (Kenyon.)
4. The style in which he expresses himself, while correct grammatically, is fundamentally different from that of a true-born Englishman, not merely in his choice of words, but in his way of putting them together and their movement in his verses. (My own reading of the last-named and memory of what I heard of his first letter to Ba, also my glimpse of its cover.)
5. Mine is a slave-owning family domiciled in Jamaica for many years, indeed Elizabeth was the first for some generations to have been born in England.
6. I am myself of dark colouring.
7. Elizabeth is indeed of pale complexion, but there are distinct olive or sallow tints in that pallor. (Witness my personal pet-name for her.)
8. No West Indian person can be certain of his or her pedigree.
9. By a phenomenon known, I believe, as atavism, plants and animals have a tendency to reproduce earlier types. (My own observations in Jamaica.)
10. The laws of heredity are at present not well understood, but a child will often resemble its grandfather or grandmother rather than either of its immediate parents. (Common knowledge.)
It surely stands to reason and to common experience, requiring no further argument, that the presence of Creole blood on both sides of a union must redouble to an incalculable degree the chances of Creole blood in the issue.
No doubt in days to come the question of the colour of a human being’s skin will seem no more and no less interesting than the colour of eyes or hair. Here in England in the reign of Queen Victoria, those days must appear impossibly far off. By the very same consideration, how could I tell my daughter that the combined heredities of herself and Browning might – very likely would not, but still might – produce black offspring? How could I go so far as to say I had a reason for trying to forbid their further association? The result must have been not only to destroy Ba’s love for me, as the bearer of the worst of bad tidings, but also to place at risk her prospects of happiness. The latter I could not face. Better for all three concerned that I should continue to appear to my dearest Ba, and perhaps in time to the world, the very epitome of a selfish, obstinate, unreasoning tyrant. That is the part I must continue to play until my death. I resolve to do so and to keep my secret.
I pray that the Italians may be a more tolerant people in this regard than the English. They are after all a darker-skinned race than we.
Wimpole Street,
October, 1846
IV
Until now I have resisted all temptations to add to the foregoing. I subjoined not a word even on that blackest day in November, 1850 when Elizabeth’s Poems in two volumes appeared in a new edition that contained a section entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese, evidently addressed to the man now her husband. I could bring myself to do no more than hastily glance through these poems; they seemed to me of a most improper, indeed disgusting intimacy, but it was not that which wounded my feelings. The title is intended to puzzle or misdirect the reader, but if it had been specifically meant to cause me pain it could not have been more artfully devised. For ‘little Portuguese’ was my own personal pet-name for her, kept a secret between the two of us, an affectionately teasing allusion to her pale honey-coloured skin. The thought of her violation of this precious confidence, of my name for her being, so to speak, filched away and handed to a man who, whatever else may be said of him, had known her for only five of her forty-four years – there are no fitting words. The first shock brought a return of the asthma from which I had suffered earlier in the year, and even now the hurt remains keen.
But for the moment, in the face of a second, graver blow, I am incapable of such Stoical forbearance. Yesterday I was in my dining room at 50 Wimpole Street when I heard from the hall the unmistakable sound of a child’s laughter and screams of delight. These were noises quite foreign to my house. I at once connected them with the known presence in London, not merely of my estranged daughter and her husband on their third visit, but of their six-year-old son, the child whose very existence I had tried to efface from my mind. Knowing what I must do, I inhaled several deep breaths; then, willing my head not to renew its trembling, I opened the dining-room door and strode into the hall.
There, on all fours in imitation of a lion or some such beast, was my son George Moulton-Barrett, and, retreating from him in feigned alarm, there was my grandson, Robert Wiedemann Browning. We stared at each other for what seemed an eternity, but was probably no more than two minutes. I could think of nothing to say and doubt whether, in any case, I could have spoken a word. The little lad facing me, whose looks reminded me strongly of my dead son Edward’s, could have served as artist’s model for a picture of a typical English boy, with the unambiguous fair colouring that that implies.
At last I turned and went back into the dining room, having mastered my strong desire to pick the youngster up and hug him to my breast. When I was breathing more or less normally I summoned George there. He stood before me, serious, dependable, the one of my sons I most respected.
‘Whose child is that, George?’ I asked, still not finding speech easy.
‘Ba’s child, father,’ he answered.
‘And what is he doing here, pray?’
‘He is waiting, sir, waiting until it’s time to return to his mother. I mean to take him on the short journey in a few moments. Would you come with us?’
‘I fear not, George. Truly I cannot.’
‘Papa, I beg of you. It would make Ba so happy.’
‘No, my boy. Leave me. And kindly remove the child forthwith.’
When I heard the front door shut after the two, I lowered my head into my hands and may possibly have shed a tear. So it had all been for nothing, I said to myself. What I had taken for facts had not all been facts, that or my conclusions from them had been erroneous. But if I truly thought I had been wrong, why had I refused to go to Ba with George and her son?
After a troubled night, I awoke this morning with the answer rising to my lips. My daughter is now forty-nine years old and some months. In the nature of things, it must be unlikely that she could bear another child, so unlikely that I can rule it out, feel untroubled by any possibility. But I find I still cannot bring myself to come face to face with her, and with him. I could bear her silent reproaches, his silent triumph, but not their pity. Her pity.
Wimpole Street,
August, 1855
V
The above is of course fiction, but it contains much fact, the prime example being Mr Barrett’s ten points.
With the exception of (4), all are matters of record. (9) and (10) certainly hold for the mid-nineteenth century, and I was told of (8) by a Jamaican friend in the 1970s. As regards (4), Mr Barrett had undoubtedly seen something in Browning’s work which many would agree was there without thinking it the result of being an untrue-born Englishman. Further, it might be instructive to produce suitably recondite but representative extracts from Browning and, say, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Byron, Keats, Hood, Beddoes, Tennyson, Clough and Arnold, and present them blind to a good class with the instruction to pick out which one was the work of a West Indian. The Browning sample might be the following excerpt from ‘Nationality in Drinks’, which Mr Barrett could easily have read, since it was first collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845:
Up jumped Tokay on our table,
Like a pygmy castle-warder,
Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,
Arms and accoutrements all in order;
And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South,
Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,
Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather,
Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,
Jingled his huge brass spurs together,
Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,
And then, with an impudence nought could abash,
Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder,
For twenty such knaves he should laugh but the bolder;
And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting,
And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting,
Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!
Other facts in my story include Browning’s first letter to Elizabeth and the extracts from it; the paraphrase of her reply; Mr Barrett’s membership of the Reform Club; his asthmatic weakness, including the severe attack of 1850; Browning’s visit in August, 1846 and the reason offered for its prolongation; and Mr Barrett’s meeting with his grandson. ‘The Portuguese’ was certainly Browning’s pet-name for Elizabeth; there is no evidence it was ever her father’s.
With one exception, I mean the thoughts and feelings I attribute to Mr Barrett to be sincere on his part, truthful. The exception is his final paragraph, where his explanation for not wanting to face Elizabeth and Browning strikes me as distinctly thin. His ‘real’ motive is more likely to have been fear of betraying his jealousy at seeing the two unequivocally together, with their offspring. (Not a sexual jealousy: I have never believed that he harboured a guilty passion for his daughter.) And perhaps he was still obsessed by his theory. Anyhow, he died in 1857 at the age of seventy-two; Elizabeth survived him by only four years.
I myself think it most unlikely that Browning, any more than Elizabeth, had some ‘Creole’ blood, though, if he had had, Victorian literature and the world in general would be that much more interesting. He would have been the English member of a great trio of European coloured writers of the nineteenth century, the others being Alexander Dumas père (black grandmother) and Alexander Pushkin (black great-grandfather), both of whom can be taken as sharing something of his spirit.
A few additional facts may be of interest. In 1972 I gave a talk on Tennyson to a literary society in Barnet. I was glad that what I had to say was entirely favourable to the poet, because my audience included his highly articulate ninety-three-year-old grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson (1879–1977), though that is by the way. In the closing stages of the meeting, the secretary of the society took me aside.
‘Now I know Tennyson wasn’t the same person as Browning, but we have a Mrs [I forget] in the audience, a descendant of Browning’s brother. Would you like a word with her?’
‘Very much,’ I said.
The word I had with the lady was not memorable, but I was most interested to find she was black, especially when I checked afterwards and found that Browning had no brother. None known to history, that is.
Boris and the Colonel
I
Edward Saxton was the Fellow and Director of Studies in English at a small Cambridge college, and concurrently a lecturer in that subject at that university. His special interest, on which he had given a course for over fifteen years, was the work of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith and lesser poets of the eighteenth century who were then collectively regarded as precursors of the Romantic movement. The events recounted here took place in 1962, when Edward was forty-five years old; a thin, rather tall figure with a perceptible stoop.
He still lived where he had done when his wife had died suddenly two years earlier, in what called itself an old mill house in a village some miles east of Cambridge. He had a green shooting-brake and used it to drive himself to and fro most days during term. One such day in late spring found him in the college room he used for teaching, a few minutes before his first pupil was due.
This pupil was unlike his others in more than one way. To begin with it was a girl he expected, an undergraduate at one of the women’s colleges. Also unusually, she was so interested in her subject that, over and above a weekly tutorial hour with her own Director of Studies, she had come to an arrangement whereby she showed her work to Edward four times a term. This was due partly to his personal qualities and partly to her third point of singularity, a family connection with him.
Lucy Masterman was a niece of Louise, Edward’s dead wife, child of her elder brother, now in her second year at the university and nearly twenty years old. She was sturdy, dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, with large watchful brown eyes, a feature she had shared with Louise. She still retained the artless manner she had shown as a little girl, though Edward had sometimes thought she found it came in handy when dealing with grey-haired scholars like himself.
That manner was in place when, punctual as ever, she arrived. Indeed, that morning it was slightly more marked than usual, if anything, but when he looked back afterwards it seemed no time at all before Lucy was reading him her essay, and scarcely longer till she was illustrating her set theme, ‘Gray’s use of the rhymed quatrain in his Elegy’.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife (she read)
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Lucy’s comment was that the simple inhabitants of Gray’s village might have been surprised to receive such a weighty tribute, with its heavy, regular rhythms and its tendency to epigram. A stanza such as the following, she went on, might have sounded more comfortable and compre
hensible:
But if one should return whose errant mind (she read)
From rustic toil once took him far abroad,
All then would labour merely to be kind,
And crave his presence at their humble board.
The excitement that filled Edward on hearing these last four lines was quite unfamiliar to him, and it was not paralleled by anything that happened later. It had reached its full strength almost at once, and he could not remember afterwards how he had restrained himself from giving way to his feelings. For a moment he was young again, when anything had seemed possible. As Lucy paused, he asked her to stop for a minute in tones suited to a real command, and in an uncharacteristic movement got up and paced the floor.
‘Did you know, Lucy,’ he said in his diffident tenor, when nearly half that minute had passed and he was himself again, ‘that that stanza appears nowhere in any received text of the Elegy?’
She blushed easily, as he had noticed. She did so now. ‘I thought it might be a cancelled stanza from one of the extant manuscripts.’
‘The so-called Eton manuscript has seven such stanzas, none of which even approximately resembles in any way the four lines you have just read me.’
Her blush deepened but she said nothing.
‘In any case Gray would never have written those lines,’ he pursued.
‘You seem very sure.’
‘So would you be, my dear, if you were once to hear in them what I heard. Read them aloud again.’ As soon as she had finished, Edward said, ‘There. Does that sound all right to you?’
‘Well …’
‘What about the rhymes?’
She looked at her page again and this time noticed something. ‘Oh.’
‘Precisely. Mind and kind are perfectly acceptable, if a little trite. Abroad and board, despite the words’ similarity to the eye, are not acceptable, as any speaker from the west of England or Ireland or America outside the South would spot immediately.’ If Edward’s habitual manner had anything vague or preoccupied in it, there was nothing of either to be seen in him by this time.
Complete Stories Page 40