Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  The shock of it brought father and daughter together. “And I was grateful to him for not saying aloud what I said to myself in my agony, If it had not been for you!” Comparing her father’s self-reproach with her own, she imagined he suffered more: “(for if I had loved selfishly, he had not been kind).” She also felt she “could love & forgive him for two . . (I knowing that serene generous departed spirit, & seeming left to represent it).”

  With her own generous, if hardly serene, spirit she could have compassion for her father, but she was unable to forgive herself. Even her father wondered that she did not die of the blow. She was too sick to be taken away from Torquay—at night she would hear the wind and the sea and the thunder. She relived the tragedy and lived in hell. Finally the next year she returned to London, where she became a recluse. Her room had a connecting door to her father’s. He would come to her at night, take her hand, and they would pray.

  Her health slowly improved. There was no more hemorrhaging, but there was bleeding from the lungs. For her occasional visits to the street in front of her house, there was a wheelchair. Still, her room was her world, crowded with sofa, bed, washstand, and the crimson bookcases bursting with books and lined with busts of the poets. She threw herself into poetry and literary work—was in fact saved by the very imagination that her doctors attempted to curb. Aided by her belief in God, by her family, and by the morphine she had taken since the age of fourteen, that “red hood of poppies” that calmed her and allowed her sleep, she waited for death. A letter arrived instead.

  EDWARD BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT (1807–1840). EBB’s favorite brother, “Bro.” Before he left Hope End at the age of thirteen to attend Charterhouse, the prestigious boarding school, he and his sister shared tutors in Greek, Latin, art, and poetry.

  Beyond the trappings of romance, which in the Brownings’ days included the exchange of lockets (not of gold but of hair), and which in Robert Browning’s case included jotting down on the envelope of Elizabeth’s most recent letter, the number of the letter, the date of the last visit, the length of the visit, and before it all the “+” sign of addition and of the cross—there was the strength of mature, passionate love. It was a love based on the unshakable belief that the other must have absolute freedom to choose or to reject it. It made no claims beyond love itself. “The selfishness I depreciate,” Robert Browning wrote, “is one which a good many women, & men too, call ‘real passion’—under the influence of which, I ought to say ‘be mine, what ever happens to you’—but I know better and you know best.”

  The fact that this rich correspondence comes down to us is a story in itself. There was no more private a person than Robert Browning. Only one long poem out of his life’s work is expressly autobiographical—La Saisiaz. Almost every other work at least attempted to disguise the living impetus. And toward the end of his life he went through his correspondence and burned anything he thought not meant for the public eye.

  Now the love letters, with their many references to the Barrett household and the peculiarities of Moulton Barrett, or to Henrietta’s romantic situation, similar to Elizabeth’s, the thoughts about dear friends, John Kenyon and Mary Russell Mitford and Anna Jameson, are quite revealing. Matters were alluded to that the poets at times found difficult to broach out loud, even to one another—such as Robert’s need always for a separate dressing room. Love letters. What could be more personal? Yet Browning did not burn them after his wife’s death, nor did he give his son specific instructions as to what he should do with them after his own demise.

  “I, for my part, value letters … as the most vital part of biography,” Elizabeth once wrote to him, objecting to his view that personal letters should be destroyed. For without them “Death would be deader from henceforth.”

  About to leave London, Elizabeth, who must pack the minimum, wrote: “Your letters to me I take with me, let the ‘ounces’ cry out aloud, ever so. I tried to leave them, & I could not. That is, they would not be left: it was not my fault.”

  Just as their marriage day became their holy day—excluding other anniversaries and reverberating politically, artistically, and personally right on through their lives—their letters became a holy text, scripture of sorts. Robert Browning considered his wife the superior artist. She certainly was one of the greatest letter writers in the English language.

  The letter that began “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett” might not have been written at all. Ten months later, Robert told Elizabeth that he had prided himself on not writing to her, because he never wished “to reach you out of the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius.” He hadn’t wanted to be one of those fools who are “never quiet till they cut their initials on the cheek of the Medicean Venus to prove they worship her.” It was only when he returned from Italy in December and read of her reference to his Bells and Pomegranates in her collected Poems of 1844 that he wondered if he should write “on account of my purely personal obligation.” He did so “on the whole, UNWILLINGLY,” once more prompted by John Kenyon, who had earlier said he thought she would be happy to hear from him. “I shall only say I was scheming how to get done … and go to my heart in Italy.… And now, my love—I am round you . . my whole life is wound up and down and over you.” That heart of Browning’s was the one Elizabeth Barrett referred to in “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”:

  or from Browning some “Pomegranate,” which, if cut deep down the middle,

  Shows a heart within blood-tinctured of a veined humanity.

  That heart occasioned his first letter.

  In his letter of January 10, 1845, Browning mentioned having come with John Kenyon to visit her in 1842, but not being received because of her illness. It was “as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or crypt.” What brutal words for any woman to hear (particularly if they were true). They just may have opened a crack in the crypt. She answered the next day. “BUT . . you know . . if you had entered the ‘crypt,’ you might have caught cold, or been tired to death, & wished yourself ‘a thousand miles off.’ ” Not that she wanted to make him think that their not meeting was for the best. “I would rather hope (as I do) that what I lost by one chance I may recover by some future one. Winters shut me up as they do dormouse’s eyes: in the spring we shall see: & I am so much better that I seem turning round to the outward world again.” So much for crypts. She ended the letter, “I will say that while I live to follow this divine art of poetry . . in proportion to my love for it and my devotion to it, I must be a devout admirer & student of your works. This is in my heart to say to you—& I say it.”

  Two days later, still filled with the images of the Italy he had returned from, and realizing his gaucherie, he turned the crypt image as jeweled and graceful as Pre-Raphaelite stained glass. “I will joyfully wait for the delight of your friendship, and the spring, and my Chapel-sight after all!”

  RB’S FIRST LETTER TO EBB, January 10, 1845, pages 1 and 4. Note how the constricted handwriting of page 1 loosens by page 4. Receiving the letter, EBB wrote to a friend, “And I had a letter from Browning the poet last night, which threw me into ecstasies—Browning … king of the mystics.”

  Within the first four days of their correspondence, the spring brought forth new meaning for each. Within sixteen days Browning told her, “this does me real good, gives real relief, to write. After all, you know nothing, next to nothing of me, and that stops me. Spring is to come however!” A month later: “For reasons I know, for other reasons I don’t exactly know … I had rather hear from you than see anybody else.” By the end of February: “I never was without good, kind, generous friends and lovers, so they say—so they were and are—perhaps they came at the wrong time—I never wanted them.” On February 27 she wrote to tell him that her spring came later than his, but that “that spring will really come some day I hope & believe, & the warm settled weather with it, and that then I shall be probably fitter for certain pleasures than I can appear even to myself, now.” />
  By March 11, Robert Browning was discernibly in love: “I never yet mistook my own feelings, one for another—there! Of what use is talking?”

  She didn’t answer for nine days. It was more difficult than she realized to admit springtime. She wondered if perhaps he could “penetrate my morbidity & guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not accustomed, I shrink & grow pale in the spirit.” Did he understand, this man who had lived such a different life than she?

  “You seem to have drunken of the cup of life full.… I have lived only inwardly,—or with sorrow, for a strong emotion.” Even when she was healthy, before her illness, a child at Hope End, she lived in isolation. Her spirits drooped to the ground “like an untrained honeysuckle” except for one person in her house, her brother, but she did not name Bro to Browning because “of this I cannot speak.” Still, “It was a lonely life.… Books and dreams were what I lived in.… And so time passed, and passed.” After her illness, and after Bro’s death, when she believed there was no prospect “of ever passing the threshold of one room again,” she began to think bitterly that she was leaving a world she had never experienced. “I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave.” She had seen “no great mountain or river—nothing in fact.” Could Robert Browning understand?

  By 1845 she understood that she was gaining some semblance of health. Suppose her collected Poems of 1844 were not her last? Would she live on “as a blind poet”? Robert had written to her that he was tired of society. She, however, wanted to see more of the world. If she were to live, she wanted to write works that explored new forms. As artists, “Let us all aspire rather to Life—& let the dead bury their dead.”

  Browning couldn’t answer for eleven days. On March 31, when he did, it was a short, convoluted letter. How much should he say? Waiting for her springtime was affecting his own. “I would give you all you want out of my own life and gladness.” Then he alluded to the fact that he would not travel, not to his beloved Italy, if it meant leaving Miss Barrett.

  When Elizabeth answered on April 17, almost a month had passed since her last letter, and she was still concerned about the limitations of her existence: “Every life requires a full experience, a various experience—& I have a profound conviction that where a poet has been shut from most … aspects of life, he is at a lamentable disadvantage.” It was two more weeks into spring before Browning responded, telling her he had been suffering from headaches. By May 3 he sounded quite unstable. “I have had a constant pain in the head for these two months”—since the time Elizabeth told him her spring fell quite late in the season.

  “Shall I have courage to see you soon, I wonder! If you ask me, I must ask myself,” she deliberated during the first week in May.

  Robert shot back, “ ‘If you ask me, I must ask myself’—that is, when I am to see you—I will never ask you! You do not know what I shall estimate that permission at,—nor do I, quite—but you do—do you not? know so much of me as to make my ‘asking’ worse than a form—I do not ‘ask’ you to write to me—not directly ask, at least.”

  Then he pulled back. “No, no, that is being too grand! Do see me when you can, and let me not be only writing myself,

  “Yours.”

  Mistrustful? She was not mistrustful, she was shy, she answered, and she could not “admit visitors in a general way … it would be unbecoming to lie here on the sofa & make a company-show of an infirmity, & hold a beggar’s hat for sympathy.” Then telling him he was extravagant in wishing this permission that would mean “nothing to you afterwards,” and after assuring him that she would in the future understand his disappointment, she wrote simply, “Come then.” Exactly two months after Elizabeth admitted to the bitterness of living apart from human experience, Browning recorded on the back of her last letter:

  + Thursday, May 20, 1845

  3–4½ p.m.

  The first visit.

  Elizabeth had opened her door to the stranger. The great and reclusive poet, stretched on her sofa, had admitted the young suitor. Browning entered the Chapel, flowers from his mother’s garden in hand, and found not saints’ bones but the living and vulnerable woman, frail and delicate, with her big dark eyes and long black hair. She found him much better-looking than the picture that she had once hung in her room. Much more masculine than that image, he looked, she would later tell him, like her early fantasy of the ideal man. The subtext of the five months of correspondence had been devotion, kindled and kindred feelings, great sympathies, warm friendship. Now spirit met flesh. “You can’t kiss mind,” they would agree in later letters. The visit so affected Elizabeth that she remarked on it to her father. Robert Browning had unsettled her. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t get him out of her mind. She felt strange. The poet could not identify her emotion. Unparalleled blunder, she’d worry later, having mentioned her turmoil to her father.

  Robert as always knew exactly what he felt. Right after their first meeting he wrote her the one letter of the correspondence that does not survive. Most definitely he declared his love. An intemperate wild letter, Elizabeth labeled it. “You do not know what pain you give me in speaking so wildly.” How could he?

  “You remember,” she wrote, “surely you do—that I am in the most exceptional of positions: & that, just because of it, I am able to receive you as I did on Tuesday.” If he wrote about or alluded to what he had in his last letter, “I must not . . I WILL not see you again—& you will justify me later in your heart.” Browning interpreted this as well as he could without knowing anything of her father’s “system.” He assumed Elizabeth Barrett did indeed suffer from an incurable spinal condition as had been rumored. Why else would a declaration of love be so out of the question? It was not as if she didn’t want to see him again. “So for my sake you will not say it—I think you will not—& spare me the sadness of having to break through an intercourse just as it is promising pleasure to me,—to me who have so many sadnesses & so few pleasures.”

  “Wise man, was I not, to clench my first favorable impression so adroitly,” he answered in a long letter, the tone of which shifted from aloof sophistication to fear, to literary allusion, to biblical anecdote. He wrote, in panic, what he imagined Elizabeth wanted to hear. Much later in their relationship he’d admit: “And do you think you could have refused to see me after that visit? I mean, do you think I did not resolve so to conduct myself; so to ‘humble myself and go still and softly all my days’—that your suspicion should … clear up.” It did clear up; she returned his wild letter as he asked and also requested that he destroy her letter that misunderstood his intentions. One day she’d want his letter back, to find he had obeyed her and destroyed it, although he had kept her alarmed response.

  The friendship wobbled, but within a few weeks amid much talk of Prometheus, interspersed with Greek quotations—as if to prove literary companionship—the relationship continued. Little could Browning understand, at the time, the magnitude of his mistake.

  That Elizabeth had had the courage to admit him to her room was, in fact, a first step in her return to life. Her sisters, knowing her as they did, were quite surprised she had allowed the visit. She had not climbed mountains or seen rivers, but by the late spring of 1845 she had gained the courage to admit a friend.

  Elizabeth Barrett had opened the crypt to see. And all the life she had not lived in thirty-nine years rushed in upon her. The light did not blind her; it made her face that it was not her bad health, not the tragedy of Bro’s death, not God’s will, not her luck, that would deny her life. It was the system, her father’s system. Browning’s words, and the possibilities they opened to her, were a sin against her father. Her knowledge of how to sustain the relationship with Browning went deeper than thought. It came from being the child of such a father. She had shown Browning the role he must play. He seized upon it immediately. No more wild letters. As a result, he could visit again.

  “On tuesday week you can bring a tomahawk & do the critic
ism [of her work], & I shall try to have my courage ready for it.—Oh, you will do me so much good!” The visits continued, always in the late afternoon, after lunch and before her father returned for dinner. Moulton Barrett knew she corresponded with the “pomegranate poet,” and on the rare occasion that he was alerted to Browning’s having been at the house, he was either benign or vaguely annoyed.

  EBB AS AN INVALID WITH HER DOG, FLUSH. Pencil sketch by her brother Alfred dated “12 December 1843.” The window opening onto a summer garden is a pleasant fantasy. Her enclosed upstairs room on Wimpole Street got little sunlight, and its window overlooked chimneytops.

  Her sisters, Henrietta and Arabel, witnessed all the comings and goings, as did her maid, Elizabeth Wilson. The Barrett brothers were less involved. George, the barrister, met Robert Browning socially on occasion and spoke highly of him as man and poet. Alfred (nicknamed “Daisy”) once amused his sisters by pretending to faint and swoon onto a couch so that he, like Elizabeth, could receive romantic visitors. But that was all in fun.

  Elizabeth’s was not the only secret courtship in the household. Her sister Henrietta, three years younger, in her mid-thirties, healthy, lively, and pretty, was seeing her cousin William Surtees Cook. Accepted into the house because he was a relative (on the maternal side), he, too, was in love—constant and persistent and regular as the furniture—but this couple had longer to wait: until Surtees Cook got his military commission and they could afford to marry against the will of the father. It was simply an established function of the household that the less the brothers knew the better, and that all life existed away from the father’s eyes.

  ROBERT BROWNING. From an engraving by J. C. Armytage in Richard H. Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age (London, 1844). This portrait hung in EBB’s room before she met Browning. After meeting him, she found it quite inferior—effeminate—compared to the real man.