Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  “First of all kiss me, dearest,” Robert responded, “and again—and now, with the left arm round you, I will write what I think in as few words as possible.” It took him many, many words to say that dueling was a man’s duty. “Mr Ba, what is Evil, in its unmistakable shape, but a thing to suppress at any price.” Mr Ba? Strong words for this lover.

  Not only that: “I do approve of judicial punishment to death under some circumstances—I think we may, must say … ‘it shall not be endured or we shall not be endured!’ ” She is “Dear Ba” again when he implored, “is Life to become a child’s game?”

  She kissed the envelope of this letter before opening it, telling by his handwriting that he was not angry with her. Her joy was intensified by the magic of his putting his arm around her, kissing her by mail.

  But that her poet of the Bells and Pomegranates could believe in dueling, “it is very ill, wonderfully ill . . so ill, that I shut my eyes, & have the heartache (for the headache!) only to think of it.” For, “If anyone had asked me, I could have answered for you that you saw it quite otherwise. And you would hang men even—you!”

  She wouldn’t argue anymore. “If I went on to write disagreeing disagreeable letters, you might not help to leave off loving me at the end.” That wouldn’t surprise her. “Good Heavens!—how dreadfully natural it would be to me, seem to me, if you DID leave off loving me!” Natural as the sun setting. “Only, more darkness, more pain.”

  What was he doing while she brooded? On the morning of April 9 he was busy counting anniversaries, just as he counted visits. Next Saturday, the one following Good Friday, would be four years to the day of Mr. Kenyon’s first asking “ ‘if I would like to see Miss B.’ ” (That was the visit her illness precluded.)

  As luck would have it, this letter did not arrive until late that evening. She had finally asked her maid, Wilson, to go down to look for it and then waited to hear “the footsteps of my letter. If I had not heard them directly, what should I have thought?”

  But her relief did not preclude the realization of an insurmountable breach in their opinions on the matter of dueling and that neither of them should or could “submit” to the other. Best not to talk about it. “I have had some pain from it, of course . . but I am satisfied to have had the pain, for the knowledge . . which was as necessary as possible … for more reasons than one.” Depression was setting in. Before Anna Jameson visited that day, “I went down to the drawing-room, I & Flush [her dog], & found no one there . . & walked drearily up and down the rooms, &, so, came back to mine. May you have spent your day better.”

  Robert obviously had. After a perfectly civil debate on the function of dueling and how it related to society, along with an expressed belief in the necessity of capital punishment, he had counted out the first possibility of having met Elizabeth years before. This same woman had just ended her letter, “I think of you, bless you, love you—but it would have been better for you never to have seen my face perhaps, though Mr. Kenyon gave the first leave. Perhaps!!”

  That he would stop loving her! That he would be angry at her. It was “hitherto undreamed of, a new faculty—altogether an inexplicable, impossible feeling.” But what he could imagine was “your being angry with me, very angry.” Perceptive, very perceptive. Didn’t she realize: “My own Ba!—My election is made, or God made it for me,—and is irrevocable. I am wholly yours. I see you have yet to understand what that implies.”

  It implied that he wanted to learn from her. “Oh, Ba, did I not pray you at the beginning to tell me the instant you detected anything to be altered by human effort? to give me that chance of becoming more like you and worthier of you?” Why, she had done just what he had asked, and “I am growing conscious of being in the wrong.” Such was the result of her “ ‘disagreeable letters.’ ” The warrior was still in armor, but now he pledged to his lady: “YOU ARE RIGHT and I am wrong and will lay it to heart, and now kiss, not your feet this time, because I am the prouder … by this admission and retraction.”

  Robert Browning gave in to “Mr Ba” on the dueling issue, and he was proud of it. The last thing he wanted to occasion was Elizabeth’s suffering. His knightly duty was toward his lady, who had the God-given female power to teach him values higher than his own. She was his Laura, his Beatrice, and he was luckier than Petrarch and Dante. He was going to marry the woman of his dreams and have a lifetime of such guidance. He wanted her to “persist in hoping better things” of him, and to hold fast to her opinions. In doing so, “you begin setting me right, and so I am set far on towards right—is not all well, love? And now go on, when I give next occasion, and tell me more, and let me alter more, and thank you,—if I can, more,—but not, not love you more, you, Ba, whom I love wholly.”

  She responded to Browning’s letter, saying that she had never loved him so entirely. “It went to my heart, & stayed there, & seemed to mix with the blood of it.” Still she joked of his “submissiveness.” After all, their relationship was not built on letters alone. He visited her two times a week. He knew his power over her and certainly must “understand, in the midst of the obeissances, that you can do very much what you please, with your High priest.”

  Then, in making light of her depression, she revealed its roots: “It was just natural that when we differed for the first time I should fall into low spirits.” For “whenever I am not glad, the old fears & misgivings come back—no you do not understand . . you CANNOT, perhaps!” She became “sad even to tears.” The drowned brother reemerged as she argued with her lover over an issue that might lead to death.

  Three years before she met Browning, Elizabeth Barrett defended him to Mary Russell Mitford, who had accused him of effeminacy, for living at home and fearing that his mother and sister might take “his horse away from him.” “I call it affectionateness,” Elizabeth answered, “that he should not bear to do what wd. occasion them anxiety. If he had been afraid himself, he wd. himself have abjured the horse—and that WE might have called effeminacy—but love, love, . . who dares say a word against the influence of love? It is strongest, be sure, with the strongest.”

  “I feel I must live with you,” Browning wrote in his next letter, “if but for a year, a month—to express the love which words cannot express, nor these letters, nor aught else.” And this first, and most dangerous, disagreement passed, leading them to greater intimacy. They had become lovers who knew how to make their love work. Call it adjustment on both their parts, call it compromise on Robert Browning’s, they were now much closer to marriage. It was time for Elizabeth to allude to another dangerous subject. This time it was not morphine or dueling—the subject was money. The agent that precipitated the discussion was John Kenyon.

  John Kenyon (1784–1856) was born in Jamaica, came to school in England, and never returned. For a brief time he was a classmate of Elizabeth’s father, who was a cousin. At the time of the courtship, Kenyon, just over sixty, was twice a widower. His relationships with women who might lead to “bridescake” were a constant source of lively gossip in the letters between Mary Russell Mitford and Elizabeth Barrett in the 1840s. Kenyon had introduced the two women. He was independently wealthy, wrote some verse himself, and was well known in literary circles for his generosity, his grace, and his wit, among other things. He knew everyone. When Elizabeth’s family moved to London in 1836 he introduced himself to her, and though Moulton Barrett was not hospitable to him, he became Elizabeth’s devoted friend. He even succeeded once in getting his shy cousin Miss Barrett in the same room with William Wordsworth.

  In 1839 he introduced himself to the son of another old school friend, Robert Browning, and was a champion of his work as well. John Kenyon, the distinguished minor poet and lover of literature, became the cupid of the courtship. It was Kenyon who suggested (on that Holy Saturday in 1842) that Robert meet Elizabeth. Elizabeth had actually documented this in a letter to Miss Mitford on March 27–28, 1842. “Dear Mr. Kenyon came here again yesterday (Sunday) I am writing now on monday.
… Mr. Browning, the poet, passed saturday & a part of sunday with him, & pleased & interested him very much! He has bad health—swimmings in the head—& a desire (if any loosening of family ties should give him to himself) to go to a Greek island & live & die in the sunshine. Mr. Kenyon says he is ‘a little discouraged’ by his reception with the public, which I am very sorry to hear . . but ‘a strong sense of power’ which is equally obvious may obviate the effect of the depression.”

  It was the persistent Kenyon who sent Robert’s sister, Sarianna, a copy of Elizabeth’s Poems of 1844 with its reference to Robert Browning’s pomegranate heart. Robert read this copy on his return from Italy. Then Kenyon suggested that Elizabeth would be happy to receive a letter from Robert about the poems, and it was he who once more urged his young friend to write before Robert actually sent his fateful letter.

  This patron of the arts, this kind and tactful man, turned, unknown to himself, into a bespectacled nemesis as the courtship developed. Every time he visited Elizabeth, mentioned Robert, looked her in the eye, she felt his eyes, behind his glasses, prying into her and she was fearful. Had she forgotten—or was she guiltily remembering—the many times she had subtly pried into his love life, relishing every tidbit she could discern and sending it on to Mary Russell Mitford?

  On John Kenyon the poets differed. Robert was certain he must know of their relationship. Left to his own, he would have confided in Kenyon. Elizabeth was totally opposed to this. Kenyon could not bear the responsibility of direct knowledge. He would try to talk them both out of the relationship and might even let on to her father. She was certain he’d be all for the union, after it occurred, for then he’d have borne no responsibility. He’d be able to think of himself as someone who would have supported the relationship had he known. But she was adamant in her belief that he’d be temperamentally unequal to advance notice. This resolved itself into her constant and growing fears concerning what lay beyond those damned spectacles that seemed to magnify his eyes into a piercing question mark.

  This scene spurred Elizabeth Barrett to speak to Robert Browning about money.

  Enter John Kenyon, culprit cupid, his eyes burning into Elizabeth: “I suppose now that Mr. Browning’s book is done & there are no more excuses for coming, he will come without excuses.”

  She changed the subject. But Kenyon returned to it. What were Mr. Browning’s objects in life? Mrs. Procter, the wife of the poet Bryan Waller Procter, “had been saying it was a pity he had not seven or eight hours a day of occupation.”

  How could she say that! Why, Mr. Kenyon, Mr. Browning “did not require an occupation as a means of living, having simple habits & desires.” Nor did he need one “as an end of living” as he had one in the exercise of his genius. In fact, had Mrs. Procter’s husband “looked as simply at his art as an end, he would have done better things.”

  “Ah now! You are spiteful,” Kenyon returned, “and you need not be, for there was nothing unkind in what she said.”

  “But absurd!” Absolutely absurd, “seeing that to put race horses into drag carts, was not usually done nor advised!”

  There was no need to be angry.

  “But what business have worldly women to talk their dusts & ashes over high altars in that way?”

  Still trying to appease his cousin, and at the same time considering the possibility of Browning’s getting a job, he told her, “Wordsworth had given himself to the service of the temple from the beginning,” but “he did not escape so from worldliness.”

  She answered, “But William Wordsworth is not Robert Browning!”

  It was time for the peace-loving man Elizabeth had portrayed to back off. Thus, Elizabeth concluded, “Mr. Kenyon spoke of your family & of yourself with the best & most reverent words.”

  Still, Kenyon had brought up the subject his cousin had ripped up letters about, “torn the paper now & then.” It was a subject Robert had attempted to broach the previous Saturday while they were still dueling. Hardly the time. Even now the time was not right, but when it did come “let this be a point agreed upon by both of us. The peculiarity of our circumstances will enable us to be free of the world . . of our friends even.” She wanted them to “use the advantage which falls to us from our misfortune,—&, since we must act for ourselves at last, let us resist the curiosity of the whole race of third persons . . even the affectionate interest of such friends as dear Mr Kenyon.” Nobody should have the power to count “whether the sixpence, we live by, came most from you or from me . . & as it will be as much mine as yours, & yours as mine, when we are together . . why let us join in throwing a little dust in all the winking eyes round—oh, it is nonsense & weakness, I know—but I would rather, rather, see winking eyes than staring eyes.” Why should anyone, friends or family, know anything about their affairs when it came to “mere money”?

  For the fact was, Elizabeth Barrett had money. Up until then, Robert Browning had devoted himself entirely to his poetry and his studies. He lived at home, socialized in London, traveled, and wrote—subsidized by his father. Marriage and its greater financial responsibilities were the furthest things from Browning’s mind. As was the gossip about his living arrangements. He was a single man, living frugally. A few months before he wrote to Elizabeth, he confided in Anna Jameson that he did not believe in romantic love.

  Now, a person who up until a few days before agreed with the conventional wisdom about the relationship between a man’s honor and dueling certainly would feel it was a man’s duty to support his wife. The creative artist needed time, a husband needed money. Money would never be as “mere” to Robert Browning as it always would be to Elizabeth Barrett.

  For Elizabeth, her being of independent means was simply a part of their good luck. Mere money would fulfill the “condition” of their union, which she had discussed with him long ago—“leaving England within the fewest possible half hours afterwards.” For “I should not dare breathe in this England—Think!—There is my father—& there is yours!—Do you imagine that I am not afraid of your family?—& should be still more, if it were not for the great agony of fear on the side of my own house. Ah—I must love you unspeakably . . even to dare think of the possibility of such things.” They would leave conventions behind.

  Elizabeth Barrett had the heart of a Romantic poet in the body of an ailing woman living in one of the most repressed households of the Victorian period. A convergence of luck and love backed by money was about to set her free. It would bring this poet who lived in books to the land that inspired Keats and Shelley and Byron—and the young Browning. Browning’s older friend and admirer Walter Savage Landor had put it in the words to Robert that would reverberate through the lovers’ letters:

  But warmer climes

  Bring brighter plumage, stronger wing:

  . . .

  Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where

  The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

  What awaited Elizabeth Barrett was the land that would one day claim her as its own. She would become the poet of its fight for unification. “I would not see Italy without your eyes,” she told Browning when yet another friend offered to accompany her there for her health. To go with anyone else would be to go “as a dead Ba clasped up between the leaves” of a book. The Italy she did travel to with her husband was not yet a sovereign state; it was, as Metternich disdainfully declared it, a geographical expression. Right now, on the brink of the revolutionary year of 1848, it awaited her, singing song for song.

  By mid-April the lovers had resolved their one true altercation and were beginning to discuss the financing of their new life. Elizabeth had bought a bonnet, one that looked a bit like a Quaker’s, only to learn that by “blind instinct” she had hit the style that was the height of fashion for that season. This bonnet buying proved “a serious purpose of going out, walking out, driving out, now doesn’t it?”

  “I expect everything from your going out of doors … what a joy to write it, think of it, expect it!” Browning re
plied. On May 5, 1846, she’d “like to carry this letter to the post myself—but no, I shall not be able.” That evening: “We talk of the mild weather doing me good . . of the sun doing me good . . of going into the air as a means of good!—Have you done me no good?” she asked, and answered, “I have been drawn back into life by your means & for you.”

  And then on the eleventh of May—nine days short of Robert Browning’s first visit a year before—he received a flower. “Look what is inside of this letter—look! I gathered it for you to-day when I was walking in the Regent’s Park. Are you surprised?”

  She and Arabel and Flush went in a carriage. The sun was shining through the trees, casting “that green light” which so attracted her that “I wished so much to walk through a half open gate along a shaded path.” They stopped the carriage and got out: “I put both my feet on the grass . . which was the strangest feeling! . . & gathered this laburnum for you. It hung quite high up on the tree, the little blossom did, and Arabel said that certainly I could not reach it—but you see!” What did it feel like to be standing under trees and in the grass? “It was like a bit of that Dreamland which is your special dominion,—& I felt joyful enough for the moment to look round for you, as for the cause.… Dearest, we shall walk together under the trees some day!”

  On May 29, at the Botanical Gardens, Elizabeth committed a crime: “Is it felony, or burglary?” Outwitting the Queen’s gardeners, she picked Robert Browning another flower. The act did not cast a dark shadow. On the contrary, sitting in the Summer House, where the band sat on high days, she experienced what she enjoyed most in nature, “the green under the green . . where the grass stretches under trees. That is something unspeakable to me, in the beauty of it. And to stand under a tree & feel the green shadow of the tree! I never knew before the difference of the sensation of a green shadow & a brown one. I seemed to feel that green shadow through & through me, till it went out at the soles of my feet and mixed with the other green below.” Quite a trip.