Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  Short-term rentals were as short-term rentals still are … some were too shoddy, some in the wrong part of town, some too expensive. Finally, the couple decided on some nice rooms on Via Maggio. They must have considered them much better than their comfortable pile of rooms at Pisa, because they were willing to pay the same price. The one deficiency was lack of sun, but they felt that the beauty of the rooms and the use of the fireplace would compensate.

  Within ten days, abstract logic did what it usually does in the face of life—it backed off. The rooms were too cold. They had left London for the sun, yet now they were in an apartment that could be on Wimpole Street. Elizabeth’s lungs started to react, and Robert was in a great rush to move her out of there. They made an agreement with the padrone to pay the rent until he found another tenant. Now here was a situation in a foreign country that could dent the happiest marriage. What a botch. How hard is a landlord going to look for tenants for sunless rooms when he’s still collecting rent? Many a marriage has been undone in picturesque climes, with “I told you so!” ringing in the air. Why did we rush into rooms with no sun? It was your idea. My idea? You mean you didn’t bargain with the landlord? Pay him until he finds a new tenant? We’ll go broke!

  No such scenario for the Brownings. Robert accused himself for the compromise; Elizabeth believed she had convinced him to make it. Each offered praise of the other; this time they didn’t even argue over who was more forbearing.

  CASA GUIDI (bottom) AND THE BROWNINGS’ DRAWING ROOM, an engraving after the painting by George Mignaty (top). The Brownings celebrated their first anniversary here. They moved out in October 1847 and returned seven months later to the apartment on the piano nobile that became their home.

  To add to the annoying situation, after they signed their lease, they heard that the padrone of Casa Guidi had been ready to accept their terms and they really could have kept their old apartment. For the time, it was too late.

  While they were still at the Casa Guidi, that early lovers’ luck, what Robert called “providence” in his love letters, came rolling back to them again. For they were at the right place at the right time. History itself knocked on their door—in actuality, it came to their window.

  On September 12, 1847, the Brownings celebrated their first wedding anniversary as witnesses to a massive and joyous political demonstration. From the front windows of the Casa Guidi, they watched people from all over Italy march to the courtyard of the Pitti Palace across the way. There the masses gathered to thank the Austrian Grand Duke, of Italian blood, Leopold II of Tuscany, for granting the Florentines the right to form a militia, a civic guard, an act which promised the type of liberality that would lead to a constitution and to the unification of Italy into a nation. For the first time, the Florentines could bear arms to protect themselves.

  “So wasn’t our day kept well for us?” Elizabeth wrote to her sister Henrietta. The poets who had left England to find personal freedom and fulfillment found in Florence a public correlative to their new lives. The streets were so crowded on the Monday after their anniversary that it would have been impossible to get to the post office. Luckily, Henrietta’s and Arabel’s letters of congratulation had come before the Brownings’ sacred day. “The fact was, that our Italians had resolved to keep our day for us on a most magnificent scale.”

  There were forty thousand strangers in Florence that Sunday, from every part of Italy, and from every class, including the priesthood. There were also expatriates from every nation, and they all paraded past the Brownings’ windows into the Piazza Pitti, where the Duke and his family stood in tears, at a window themselves, greeting the populace. All along the way, “The windows … seemed to grow larger with the multitude of pretty heads, & of hands which threw out flowers & waved white handkerchiefs—There was not an inch of wall not alive.… Clouds of flowers & laurel leaves came fluttering down on the advancing procession—and the clapping of hands, & the frenetic shouting, and the music which came in gushes, & then seemed to go out with too much joy, and the exulting faces, and the kisses given for very exultation between man & man, and the mixing of elegantly dressed women in all that crowd & turbulence with the sort of smile which proved how little cause there was for fear.”

  ITALIAN DESPOTS. EBB embraced the cause of Italian unity at a time when the city-states were ruled by retrogressive forces.

  DEMONSTRATIONS IN FLORENCE FOR THE RIGHT TO FORM A CIVIC GUARD. EBB and RB watched the procession from the windows of Casa Guidi on their first wedding anniversary, Sunday, September 12, 1847.

  What a sight! The Brownings “went to a window in our palazzo which had a full view, and I had a throne of cushions piled up on a chair.” Then they waved their own handkerchiefs until their wrists ached. At night there were fireworks, and the couple walked over to the Arno to see them. They were struck by the civility of the crowd as well as by the unleashing of joy. People were embracing. “It was a state of phrensy or rapture, extending to the children of two years old, several of them whom I heard lisping ‘Vivas,’ with their little fat arms clasping their mothers necks. So wasn’t our day kept well for us?”

  Flush, not to be upstaged, sneaked out into the crowd, and celebrated freedom in his own way. He came back the next day looking very guilty and very tired. “Quite disgraceful for a respectable dog,” Robert said. Elizabeth made excuses for him, calling his prowling a case of confusion.

  The crowds, the demonstrations. The Brownings were standing on the brink of that revolutionary year throughout Europe, 1848.

  Italy. “If only you were less beautiful,” lamented the seventeenth-century Italian poet Vincenzo da Filicaia. Lord Byron echoed this refrain, as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her book-length poem about the Italian struggle for liberty, Casa Guidi Windows. The art and architecture and poetry that impelled the civilized world to Italy were, as the Brownings witnessed in Pisa, all of the past. And while the past was passionately admired, the present was in shambles. Italy was a group of politically repressed city-states, with no unified culture and no contemporary power or life. The Austrians ruled Tuscany; the Vatican had authority over the Papal States. Naples and the Two Sicilies had a tyrant. The people were ruled by foreign leaders and by the Church. But the Age of Metternich was nearing its end, and one of the oldest civilizations was poised on the threshold of becoming, in less than three decades, its youngest country.

  For three hundred years Florence had slept. In the sixteenth century, between 1524 and 1534, Michelangelo sculpted his great marble statues Night, Day, Dawn, and Twilight for the New Sacristy of the Church of San Lorenzo. The political situation in Florence had then deteriorated under the rule of the descendants of the father of his people, Lorenzo de’ Medici. The sculptor saw the political situation represented by his statue Night, and wrote of it:

  Happy am I to sleep, and still more blest

  To be of stone, while grief and shame endure;

  To see, nor feel, is now my utmost hope,

  Wherefore speak softly, and awake me not.

  From their windows, more than three hundred years after Michelangelo’s disillusionment, the Brownings witnessed the wake-up call.

  Theirs were not lone voices of isolated stranieri in the politics of a foreign land. In the procession they had watched, “there was a place for them [foreigners]—& there were so many foreign residents here that it was by no means unimportant to admit their sympathy—French, English, Swiss, Greek (such a noble band of Greeks!) all with their national flags.”

  POPE PIUS IX, CA. 1855. Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, “Pio Nono,” was elevated in June 1846, three months before the Brownings married. His early liberal views propelled the forces of Italian unity that EBB championed in all of her late poetry.

  These foreign residents were in a special sense patriots. The “tourists” among them had fled Florence at the first signs of life. Their Night was the one on view in the Church of San Lorenzo. The last thing they wished was for it to awake. Their parade was the one t
hat took place daily at the Cascine, where residents greeted each other from their graceful, and at times eccentric, carriages. Their Florentines did not bear arms but existed to supply local color. And their exit gladdened the stouter hearts of liberals such as the Brownings.

  Change had been in the air even before the Austrian Duke Leopold II allowed the Florentines to form a militia. That decision itself was based on an extraordinary happening in Rome—an oxymoron: the election of a liberal Pope. This new Pope—Pius IX, “Pio Nono”—was, by papal standards, young, handsome, and graced with a beautiful singing voice. On his elevation, Pio Nono granted political amnesty in the prisons and freedom of the press in Italy for the first time in two hundred years. His reign began in a burst of popularity and cheering among young and old, among conservative Catholics and liberals, and among Protestant foreigners. His spirit generated a sense of amelioration.

  Giuseppe Mazzini, a leading proponent of Italian unity, advised his followers to keep up the applause and, with it, to keep demanding more. To the Young Italy party he gave these instructions: “Take advantage of the smallest concession to make an opportunity for bringing together masses of the people, if only in attestation of gratitude. Festivals, songs, agglomerations of people, numerous relationships established between men of every shade of opinion, suffice to cause the generation of ideas, to give the people the sentiment of its strength, and to render it exigent.” Reforms meant by Pio Nono to be gestures on his ascent, equivalent to commissioning a beautiful fountain for a town square, turned into a floodgate. He had not understood the thirst of parched hearts.

  Into this rush of events Elizabeth Barrett Browning plunged with a long poem. It opened with the poet and her husband watching the procession that occurred on their first anniversary. It was Robert who “concluded” that the little child they heard from the window, singing a song for liberty, was the voice of Italy, the voice of a new day. By the time she sent the hopeful poem to Blackwood’s Magazine the following year as a “Meditation in Tuscany,” the new voices had broken off, the children were once more asleep “upon their mothers’ knees.”

  By November 15, 1848, the Pope’s minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, had been assassinated on the steps of the Roman Senate—Caesar fashion. All had raised their knives and testified “ ‘I killed him!—I am Brutus.—I avow.’ ” Pio Nono sneaked out of Rome in disguise, and the former liberal accepted in Naples the hospitality of the retrogressive Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies. The Florentine Grand Duke had agreed to a Constituent Assembly in Rome before he realized that such an assembly would most certainly turn his Tuscany into a republic and wash him away. In February 1849 he fled from Florence and joined the repentant Pope at Gaeta.

  At the end of March 1849 the Italian troops had suffered defeat by the Austrians at the battle of Novara. At that point, many moderate Florentines championed the return of their Grand Duke. Leopold became a “traitor” when he came back not at the calling of the Florentines but under the auspices of the hated oppressors—the Austrians. The Brownings, once again settled in an apartment in the Casa Guidi, witnessed the somber reentry of Austrian troops in advance of the discredited Duke—Robert, hearing gunshots, went down to the street, Elizabeth to her second-floor terrace. When Leopold returned he emphasized his Italian blood by wearing the uniform of the Tuscan Civic Guard, creating an ambiguity of intention. A few nights later, however, he wore an Austrian uniform to an opera ball, bowing to either Austrian pressure or the dictates of fashion. From then on he was clearly no longer “Leopoldo Secondo” but “Leopold d’Austria,” as the Florentine newspaper the Alba would henceforth call him. All of Florence remembered that the gran duca (Grand Duke) had a nickname before September 12, 1847, gran ciuco (Grand Ass).

  The poets who watched this somber parade after the defeat of Novara had a personal reason for joy that was not reflected by the political gloom. On March 9, 1849, after suffering two miscarriages, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had given birth to a healthy, fair-skinned baby boy. “I shall get Wilson to help my inexperience and tell you all the wonderful points,” Robert wrote to his sisters-in-law four days later. Wilson confined herself to one point. She “never did see such a delicate & beautiful skin.” What is “peculiarly beautiful in him, is & has always been his complexion, never a taint upon it, as clear as a flower,” Ba informed her sisters a month later.

  Elizabeth’s new friend and upstairs neighbor at the Casa Guidi, Eliza Dick Ogilvy, recollected, “Mrs. Browning was by no means an ordinary patient. The old Italian nurse said to me after the birth, ‘E un miraculo quello bambino e venuto da quel corpo.’ ” (It’s a miracle that baby came from that body.) The previous months had been spent in concern over her confinement and in fear of another miscarriage. She confided her anxieties to Eliza, who had just had her third child. Issues of childbearing, not issues of poetry, united them. She had given up morphine during her pregnancy, exhibiting, as Robert boasted to her sisters, an extraordinary strength equal to that of a thousand men.

  Her labor had lasted twenty-one hours, yet “when I heard the first cry, the unspeakable rapture of it!” she wrote to Arabel a month later. “I who had been a good deal tired & exhausted by the prolongation of the pain … rose up suddenly in my spirits to a sort of ecstasy . . not only forgot the pain but … slapped my hands & clasped them & exclaimed aloud.…”

  It was as a new mother that Elizabeth Barrett Browning watched the Austrians and the Grand Duke reenter Florence. She remembered:

  I wrote a meditation and a dream,

  Hearing a little child sing in the street.

  I leant upon his music as a theme,

  Till it gave way beneath my heart’s full beat,

  Which tried at an exultant prophecy

  But dropped before the measure was complete—

  Alas, for songs, and hearts! O Tuscany,…

  And she then wrote a second part to her meditation, bringing the two parts together under a very appropriate title, Casa Guidi Windows.

  She also wrote a foreword, an “Advertisement,” to the completed work: “This poem contains the impressions of the writer upon events in Tuscany of which she was a witness. ‘From a window,’ the critic may demur. She bows to the objection in the very title of her work. No continuous narrative nor exposition of political philosophy is attempted by her. It is a simple story of personal impressions, whose only value is in the intensity with which they were received, as proving her warm affection for a beautiful and unfortunate country, and the sincerity with which they are related, as indicating her own good faith and freedom from partisanship.”

  Critics have “demurred” ever since. They didn’t have to understand the Florence or the history of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s day. This was a “simple story,” it was about “personal impressions.” They undervalued the poetic “intensity” with which the impressions were received. Why? “Because I am a woman.” That was the image she chose to express her earlier mistaken faith in the Grand Duke:

  I saw the man among his little sons,

  His lips were warm with kisses while he swore,—

  And I, because I am a woman, I,

  Who felt my own child’s coming life before

  The prescience of my soul, and held faith high,—

  I could not bear to think, whoever bore,

  That lips, so warmed, could shape so cold a lie.

  Her foreword and this image would later harm her critical reputation.

  No woman poet in the last two centuries has been as misconstrued by American and British critics as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lauded by the Italians to this day as the poet of the Risorgimento, considered for the poet laureateship in the England of her own day, she, in her late work, has been considered everything from “misguided” up through “hysterical.” And the complaints mounted as time passed and the critics understood even less of the historical backdrop against which she had her vision. As “Mrs. Browning,” not as a wife and mother, but as a poet, she suffered an u
njust fate. The feminist critics have begun a resurrection of her art centered around her own feminist manifesto, her novel in verse, Aurora Leigh. They have shifted that chameleon name of hers once more. The poetry of her married years has become the work of “Barrett Browning.” If Barrett Browning still sounds strangely new, unexpectedly powerful, perhaps slightly strident, so was the poetry of her maturity.

  In Casa Guidi Windows the married poet who had experienced the mountains and the rivers could finally become what she had always wished to be, the poet of the new day. “And I, a singer also, from my youth, / Prefer to sing with these who are awake.” To sing “With birds, with babes, with men who will not fear / The baptism of the holy morning dew.” Many of those “wakers now are here,” and she would rather sing liberty with them than join the “old thin voices” and mourn the past. “We do not serve the dead—the past is past!” Viva Barrett Browning.

  “ ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ is the poetic cry which rises from Tuscany to the world in praise of the desire for liberty,” wrote the twentieth-century Florentine critic Giuliana Artom Treves. The poem in which Barrett Browning “describes the upheavals in Tuscany deserves the perennial gratitude of Italians for the way she frankly assumes the role of poet of the Italian Risorgimento.”