by Julia Markus
From defacing property to going in a carriage with John Kenyon to see the new train pull in, to mailing her own letters at the post office behind which she would meet Browning on their wedding day, to visiting her old friend the blind and reclusive Mr. Boyd, to Mrs. Jameson’s taking her to Samuel Rogers’s private art collection at his home at St. James’s Place … lovers’ luck had prevailed.
On June 18, after a day of contemplating Robert, by eight, when the rest of the family was at dinner, “I remembered that I had not been out.” She did not want to upset the family’s dinner, and Wilson was off. “Therefore I put on my bonnet, as a knight of old took his sword, . . aspiring to the pure heroic . . & called Flush, & walked down stairs & into the street, all alone—that was something great!—And, with just Flush, I walked there, up & down in glorious independence. Belgium might have felt so in casting off the yoke.” This first casual joining of personal liberation with political liberation was to have untold reverberations in her later work.
By summer Elizabeth Barrett had returned to health and to a more active life: “Did I ever think I should live to thank God that I did not die five years ago?—Not that I quite, quite dare to do it yet.”
By August 21, at the beginning of her evening letter, she exulted, “Can I be as good for you as morphine is for me, I wonder,” and then expanded on the metaphor: “even at the cost of being as bad also?—Can’t you leave me off without risking your life,—nor go on with me without running the hazards of all poison—?” She stopped. The image was becoming convoluted. “The figure exceeds me, let it be ever so fatal. I may not be your morphine, even if I shall be your Ba!—you see!—”
Well, not exactly. What one does see is that as she regained her health, their lovers’ luck shifted. Browning had precipitated Elizabeth’s rambling metaphor by alluding to the curtailed visits with her. On August 20, the previous day, he had seen her for the first time in a week! Without meaning to complain selfishly, he asked her how she supposed he felt “without my proper quantity of ‘morphine’?” Then, perfect gentleman that he was, he inquired, “May I call you my morphine?” which led to her image.
The world could no longer be kept at bay. The circumstances of their courtship were becoming more dangerous that summer.
When Robert walked into Elizabeth’s room on his June 20 visit, he found it filled with art—with the sketches and portraits and paints, palettes, and brushes of the historical painter and lecturer Benjamin Robert Haydon. The painter had been a correspondent of Elizabeth’s since 1842—not that she had ever admitted him to her room. Mary Russell Mitford had first introduced her old friend to Arabel Barrett, who had artistic inclinations. Arabel had not been at all impressed by his frescoes. His reckless life would not impress her either. She certainly wouldn’t listen to his accounts of his romantic adventures or of his faithful wife, who followed after him to prison.
Haydon was one of those artists who lived extravagantly, ran up debts, landed in jail, battled his critics, and always insisted on his own way. He kept a journal of his exploits which Elizabeth did read and which he meant to publish. The largeness of his historical paintings limited their market. The largeness of his ego led to public ridicule. He was capable of writing to Elizabeth that, at an exhibition, Queen Victoria gave him the glad eye.
He had previously stored his effects with Elizabeth in 1843 when he lost out in the competition for decorating the new House of Parliament, for which he had submitted grand cartoons. He discussed the historical details and checked facts by letter with the helpful poet as he created Adam and Eve and The Black Prince Entering London in Triumph. After his failure to win the commission, “he set out to ‘educate’ the British public and his presumption and uncritical self-esteem became a regular butt of laughter in Punch” and elsewhere. Now, three years later, he repeated the gesture of storing his effects on Wimpole Street after what he considered the crowning disappointment of his artistic career.
In 1846, at the age of sixty, he mounted an exhibition of his work in London at the Egyptian Hall. As many times before, he put great enthusiasm into this endeavor, and though it was commonplace to deride his extravagance and his ego, at his age, after a lifetime devoted to art, it was quite understandable that he’d hope that this showing would be appreciated, and that he’d make the money he desperately needed.
For poor Haydon (to adopt an adjective much in use in the correspondence), there was bad news and there was worse news. Few visitors came to his exhibit, and he was losing money on it. Yet in the same hall there was an exhibition that was drawing thousands of visitors weekly. In his diary for the week of April 21 he noted twelve thousand people came to the other exhibit, and “113½” came to his.
One wonders if the “half” was his nemesis. For all of London was buying tickets to P. T. Barnum’s exhibition of Tom Thumb. Every day, the grandiose Haydon, in the grand hall, watched as the philistines of the world flocked past his large-scale paintings to gawk at an American dwarf.
Haydon attempted to stem the tide with Barnum-type advertisements for himself at the expense of Tom Thumb. This held the painter up to public ridicule yet again. Ten days after he sent his effects to Elizabeth, and after writing in his diary as usual, he shot himself and slashed his throat.
Robert read of the death in the newspaper. He worried that Ba might be startled and grieved, particularly since Haydon’s death was accompanied by a lightning storm. “How glad I am you told me you had never seen him. And perhaps he may be after all a mere acquaintance . . anything I will fancy that is likely to relieve you of pain! Dearest dearest!”
“Oh yes—it has shocked me this dreadful news,” Elizabeth replied. Could she have done something to prevent his suicide? She’d been told time and again that to offer him money “was to drop it into a hole of the ground.” Even so, she “cannot turn the thought away—that I did not offer.” Imagine, just yesterday she and Anna Jameson had been looking at his Napoleon at St. Helena at Mr. Rogers’s collection. The death of an artist whose effects were crowding her room, a lightning storm in the background, which stirred thoughts of Bro, a conscience disturbed thinking that she might in some way have been able to help … would it cause a return of morbidity? Robert didn’t have to worry.
“Oh—we are so selfish on this earth, that nothing grieves us very long, let it be ever so grievous, unless we are touched in ourselves . . in the apple of our eye . . in the quick of our heart . . in what you are, & WHERE you are . . my own dearest beloved! So you need not be afraid for me! We all look to our own, as I to you; & the thunderbolts may strike the tops of the cedars, & except in the first start, none of us be moved.”
Her analysis of Haydon’s psychological state was as accurate as her analysis of her own reaction. “The world did not recognize his genius, & he punished the world by withdrawing the light. If he had not that thought in him, I am wrong. The cartoon business, & his being refused employment in the houses of parliament . . that was bitter: & then came his opposition with Tom Thumb & the dwarf’s triumph . . he talked bitterly of that in a letter to me of last week.… Poor Haydon!… with all of his weaknesses, he was not certainly far from being a great man.” In July she wrote again of his “elements of greatness” despite his vanity. Yet “His conscience was not a sufficient witness, . . nor was God. He must also have the Royal Academy & the appreciators of Tom Thumb.” And then she made an observation which Robert found quite profound. “Often it has struck me as a curious thing (yet it is not perhaps curious) that suicides are occasioned nearly always by a mortified self love.”
Her correspondence with Haydon and her involvement in his unfortunate end was life knocking on Elizabeth Barrett’s door once more. Haydon had wanted her to edit and publish his voluminous diaries. In July, Robert wrote: “to lay the business of editing the ‘twenty-six’ (I think) volumes, with the responsibility, on you—most insane! Unless, which one would avoid supposing, the author trusted precisely to your ignorance of facts and isolation from the people a
ble to instruct you.” The posthumous revelations would be dreadful, and Robert acted the man of the world on her behalf in this matter. He defended Elizabeth Barrett at a dinner party, saying he knew for a fact that she had had no personal meetings with the man.
Haydon’s choice of editor (albeit she was second choice) was not “most insane.” Elizabeth had earlier read manuscript versions of his “Memoirs,” advising him against publishing parts. On the whole, however, she was for their publication. Through the mail he spoke to her of the necessity of the nude in art and confided in her of his passion for the poet Caroline Norton, including its effect on his wife and children. His letters at times seemed big and bawdy, although filled with paranoia against the public and an unbalanced sense of his own importance. In them he sketched his work as well as the treachery of the world. Elizabeth was by her own admission the greatest novel reader in the world. The installments of Haydon’s life read as melodrama, told from the point of view of a self-obsessed and licentious artist. By 1846, she was no longer encouraging his correspondence, for by then she was entering into her own life.
Earlier, his letters had brought her hulking slices of life. His outrageousness did not daunt her, but as she wrote to him in November 1842: “Alas, no! I do not indeed go out. You must not fancy me a hypochondriac, nor even saddened into all my solitude. Some three or four years since, I broke a blood vessel on my chest, & altho, I have rallied at different times & very much for the last year, it is only within these two months that there is evidence of its healing. And even now, I am so weak as to stagger like a drunken man when I attempt to walk without assistance.… But I believe I am gradually reviving.… And with care & heat during the winter, I have hope for next summer.” But that hope, three years before her first letter to Browning, had included no mention of any possibility of spring bringing a visit from him.
She told Browning she wanted her letters back from Haydon’s estate. “I threw away my thoughts without looking where they fell. Often my sisters have blamed me for writing in that wild way to strangers—& I should like to have the letters back before they have served to amuse two or three executors.…”
Still, on the matter of the publication of the diaries, she had a definite opinion. “Your argument does appear to me to sweep out too far on one side, so that if you do not draw it back, Robert, you will efface all autobiography & confession—tear out a page bent over by many learners—I mean when you say because he is above (now) the passions & frailties he has recorded, we should put from us the record.” However, “this record is not for the angels, but for us, who are a little lower at the highest.” And she suggested that three volumes could be taken from the twenty-six, “full of character & interest, & not without melancholy teaching.” She stuck to her guns, but she did not undertake the task.
Haydon’s death marked one of many breaks from her former life. Another figure from the past was an older tie, the blind Greek scholar and her former neighbor at Hope End, Mr. Boyd. She visited him in London when her health improved in the spring and summer of 1846. In her typical way, she made a preliminary trip to his house with Arabel, who went “to his room to tell him of my being there.” Nine days later, on June 30, she left a card for Mr. Kenyon, who was not home, “Then Arabel & Flush & I proceeded on our way to Mr. Boyd’s in St. John Wood, & I was so nervous, so anxious for an excuse for turning back,” that Arabel said, “ ‘Oh, Ba … such a coward as you are, never will be married, while the world lasts’ which made me laugh.” But finally, there she was, “at the door of poor Mr Boyd’s dark little room, & saw him sitting as if he had not moved these seven years—these seven heavy, changeful years. Seeing him, my heart was too full to speak at first, but I stooped & kissed his poor bent-down forehead, which he never lifts up, his chin being quite buried in his breast.” She had earlier described him to Robert: “Quite blind he is—& though scarcely older than Mr Kenyon … so nervous, that he has really made himself infirm, & now he refuses to walk out or even to go down stairs. A very peculiar life he has led ever since he lost his sight, which he did when he was quite a young man.”
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON (1786–1846). This self-portrait was done in 1846, just before the disappointed painter committed suicide. Three years before, he had sent another portrait to EBB, with whom he corresponded but who would not meet him in person. “A merry Xmas to you, my sweet invisible,” he wrote on December 19, 1843. “I have sent you my Portrait—Can’t you let me see yours? I think that’s fair & like Royal Persons. Are we not royal?”
The first visit went well, although he forced her to drink some of that wine of Cyprus that she would rather write about than imbibe: “If old Bacchus were the speaker, / He would tell you with a sigh, / Of the Cyprus in the beaker / I am sipping like a fly.”
On another visit, Mr. Boyd asked her “if I were going to be a nun.” The blind man had actually intuited what she was up to. He pressed her the following time she arrived, and “I allowed him to see the truth—& he lives such an isolated life, that it is perfectly safe with him, setting the oath aside. Also, he was very good & kind, & approved highly of the whole, & exhorted me … to keep to my purpose, & to allow no consideration in the world or out of the world, to make any difference.”
Not that she had an idealized view of her earliest friend, as she wrote to Robert: “Poor Mr Boyd. He cares for me perhaps more than he cares for anyone else . . far more than for his own only daughter,—but he is not a man of deep sensibility, &, if he heard of my death, would merely sleep a little sounder the next night. Once he said to me that whenever he felt sorry about anything, he was inclined to go to sleep.”
The world came knocking at Wimpole Street again in July with the arrival of the Hedleys from Paris. Jane Hedley was Elizabeth’s aunt (her mother’s sister) and Robert Hedley was her favorite living uncle, even though he was not related by blood. They had been with her in Torquay and were privy to the tragedy of Bro. When Uncle Hedley came from France to England three years later, Elizabeth confided in Mary Russell Mitford of the overwhelming reluctance she had to seeing him again after that tragedy. She didn’t want him to see how she had fared, nor did she want to relive the memory. When he arrived at her room, she cried, unable to help herself, and he comforted her with the great loving kindness he felt for her. That first meeting was also part of the past. The Hedleys had returned from the continent with their daughter Arabella. She was about to be married in England to a wealthy man. Aunt Hedley was planning one of those lavish traditional weddings that demand such attention to detail and cost so much money. It was the type of society wedding that neither Elizabeth nor Robert would consider, even if it were possible. The ongoing preparations were an ironic counterbalance to Elizabeth and Robert’s secret, and modest, plans.
ROBERT HEDLEY. EBB’s favorite uncle by marriage.
MARY RUSSELL MITFORD (1787–1855). One of the only people outside the Barrett family who knew of EBB’s devastation after the death of her brother. Mitford published an account of Bro’s death in her Recollections of 1851. “I have been miserably upset by your book,” EBB wrote in January 1852. Though she did not “mistake” Mitford’s kind intentions, her voluminous correspondence with her older friend dwindled to twenty-four letters in its last three years.
What the arrival of the Hedleys in London did was upset the couple’s schedule. Their long tête-à-tête was interrupted. Accidents were more likely to occur. Visits had to be delayed (depriving Robert of his morphine). The Hedleys had eyes to see, and they were clearly upset by Moulton Barrett’s treatment of his grown children. Visiting a household where middle-aged children were not allowed to marry? What would Jane Hedley’s sister have thought had she lived? What was wrong with their brother-in-law? They saw the attachment between Henrietta and Surtees Cook, one which Moulton Barrett seemed as blind to as he did to more than a year and a half of fresh flowers arriving from Robert to Elizabeth. The Hedleys were advocates for Henrietta, and some of their two-edged remarks hit Elizabeth in a way t
hey could not possibly have imagined at the time.
On July 13, Elizabeth had to sign a paper moving some of her money to the Eastern Railroad. She would later list that along with the assets she described to Robert: “Stormie told me the other day that I had eight thousand pounds in the funds: of which the interest comes to me quarterly … & from forty to forty-five pounds Papa gives me every three months, the income tax being first deducted.… Then there is the ship money, a little under two hundred a year … which I have not used at all.” (Her only expense, she told Robert, was her morphine.) It was that annual ship money that she transferred to the Eastern Railroad. “That investment is to yield a large percentage, I heard.” Lest one considered her in too good a position, “there are the ten shares in Drury Lane Theatre—out of which, comes nothing.”
Well, on July 13, as she signed that paper, her aunt “by way of saying a lively thing, exclaimed, ‘Is that your marriage-settlement, my dear?’ . . which made me so nervous that I wrote my name wrong & vexed Papa into being almost cross with me.”
Two days later the Hedleys were at 50 Wimpole Street having dinner with Papa Barrett and his children. The oldest daughter as always ate in her room. Aunt Hedley told her brother-in-law, “I have not seen Ba all day—and when I went to her room, to my astonishment a gentleman was sitting there.”
Moulton Barrett turned immediately to Arabel, his eyes speaking the family’s language. “Who was that?” they implored.
“Mr. Browning called here today,” Arabel answered.