Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  English and American critics have not seriously considered Barrett Browning in this role. On the contrary, because of its political concerns, the poem has often been dismissed. Henry James understood the perceptivity of the poet’s political point of view; he was closer to her time, but he felt that politics as a subject diminished her poetry. “The cause of Italy was, obviously, for Mrs. Browning as high aloft as any object of interest could be; but that was only because she had let down, as it were, her inspiration and her poetic pitch.” Certainly this formalistic stance merged well with the ensuing New Criticism, and one can understand why a poem such as Casa Guidi Windows would be overlooked through the 1950s.

  As the critics of the 1960s began to discover that a poem can both “mean” and “be,” and as political commitment began to be viewed as no anathema to artistic expression, one could have hoped for a reevaluation of Barrett Browning’s Italian period. None was forthcoming. Worse, as the historical issues of 1848 faded into obscurity, critics began to misinterpret the political basis of her works in a way Henry James never would have.

  When the poet looked back at her early optimistic view of Leopold II, she repented that she had believed in his oaths “like a woman.” Well, this was not an individual blunder. The enthusiasm for the Grand Duke in 1847 and the disillusionment with him in 1849 accurately reflected the attitude of all of liberal Europe before and after the revolutions of 1848.

  When the poet’s relation to the attitudes of the day is completely forgotten, and her similes based on womanhood and motherhood are taken as felonies, critical stereotypes abound: “The fullest expression of her own feeling at this time—it can hardly be called thought—is Casa Guidi Windows.… The poem is a single instance of the way in which the use of verse pumps Elizabeth up beyond any possibility of coherent and rational discussion. Metaphoric violets, swords, crowns, and croziers accumulate until there is no room for realities. Politics founder in rhapsody and anecdote about dead Florentine poets and artists.” The authors of this, William Irvine and Park Honan, were writing in the early 1970s a biography of her husband, a man they respected, and showing absolute condescension to a woman they did not understand. How could they account for the fact that the Brownings shared the same political ideas? “Yet one suspects, making allowances for its childlike vision and its frantic idiom, that this poem sets forth the essential elements of thought and feeling for both Elizabeth and Robert. His ‘Why I am a Liberal,’ for example, is not inconsistent with the sentiments of Casa Guidi.” Presumably, had Elizabeth Barrett Browning believed “like a man,” she would have written not a book-length poem but “Why I am a Liberal,” a minor sonnet.

  In actuality, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was on the forefront of liberal European thinking. Since childhood she had felt she was to write about issues that could change society. When she turned fifteen, she wrote in her “Autobiographical Essay”: “I always imagine that I was sent on the earth for some purpose! To suffer! to die! to defend! To save by my death my country or some very very dear friends! To suffer in the cause of freedom!! I know, I understand not how this is but I feel it to my heart core & so strong is this feeling that it amounts almost to presentiment!”

  More than twenty-five years later, living her own life in Italy, she found her cause. Though she had trusted Grand Duke Leopold, seeing the events of her first anniversary as prelude to even greater reform, she herself escaped what she called the epidemic “falling sickness” of enthusiasm for the Pope. At the time, Vincenzo Gioberti’s idea in “Il Primato” (1843) that the various states of Italy could become federated under a Pope was taken up very seriously by the popular neo-Guelph movement, which thought it had found in Pio Nono an ideal leader. That Barrett Browning disagreed with this position is a tribute to her political astuteness and to her nonconformist point of view. Many of her countrymen living in Florence had a different outlook.

  After the abolishment of press censorship, not only did two liberal Italian papers arise in Florence, the Alba and the Patria, but an English-language paper as well, the Tuscan Athenaeum, edited by Thomas A. Trollope, brother of the novelist. Articles and poetry praising the Pope and the new regime appeared. The politics of the English-language paper, its tongue-in-cheek irony, so Florentine in character, made its fifteen months of publication part of the history of its time. The Tuscan Athenaeum brought to the forefront a new type of foreign resident. These stranieri were so intimately involved with the progress of their adopted land that they formed a community that could be called Anglo-Florentine.

  In its pages, from October 30, 1847, through January 22, 1848, we can see that for the intellectuals and artists in Florence in the Brownings’ time, the “falling sickness” for Pio Nono was epidemic. “We are rather overwhelmed with poetry,” Trollope wrote in November. The poem of his future wife, Theodosia Garrow, was entitled “The English Heart to the Roman Pontiff” and began:

  Sovereign Pontiff! Gracious Ruler!

  When we view thee from afar,

  Waving back the mists of error,

  Strengthening faith, dispelling terror,

  Patient as the angels are …

  Why, when we view him, we have “eager kindred feeling” for this “Promethean soul!”

  Walter Savage Landor, the man who would three years later write bitterly against the Pope and Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, sent this to the Tuscan Athenaeum: “Never until now, most holy father! did I hope or desire to offer my homage to any potentate on earth; and now I offer it only to the highest of them all.”

  Barrett Browning knew better. Her dissent stood out dramatically. “We want thee, O unfound / and sovran teacher!” But where can the teacher be found? A Pope? She understood that the politics of an individual is a result of the individual’s circumstances. “Distrust / The rich man reasoning in a poor man’s hut.” Distrust “The poet who neglects pure truth to prove / Statistic fact.” Distrust the child who will pick the easier rather than the harder road. Distrust “The woman who has sworn she will not love.” And distrust that a Pope, sitting on the papal throne, will become an Andrea Doria, a liberator of his people.

  At his best, a Pope is a Pope; we want a teacher, a man who is not “enchanted to the waist,” one who is “complete and all alive.” Half travertine (the Roman material used to build the Vatican), “Half suits our need and ill subserves our plan.” Her estimation proved correct. She wrote half-jestingly to Mary Russell Mitford on October 2, 1849: “The Pope is just a pope; and since you give George Sand credit for having known it, I am more vexed that Blackwood … did not publish the poem I wrote two years ago, in the full glare & burning of the pope-enthusiasm which Robert & I never caught for a moment. Then, I might have passed a little for a prophetess, as well as George Sand! Only, to confess a truth, the same poem wd. have proved how fairly I was taken in by our Tuscan Grand Duke. Oh!—the traitor!!”

  Another disappointment she wrote about in part two of the poem was the laxity of the Florentines:

  Bitter things I write,

  Because my soul is bitter for your sakes,

  O freedom! O my Florence!

  The Alba published an address “To the Tuscans,” which the Tuscan Athenaeum translated: “We see splendid banners, flowers, illuminated processions, and civic parades. But we do not see, by God, soldiers with packs on their backs ready to depart! We hear the happy songs of children and women, choruses of grown-ups, the same old proclamations, schemes, protests, ponderous discussions;—but we do not hear war cries and goodbyes from those ready to leave for the battlefield.” Ultimately, Barrett Browning, like so many other Italian patriots who saw defeat and ruin all around them, turned her eyes to the constitutional monarch of the House of Savoy in Turin, to the intentions and acts of Victor Emmanuel II and, by extension, to the King’s reforming minister, Camillo Benso di Cavour. Cavour would become the teacher, the complete man. The poem ended on a note of hope and prophecy: “Life throbs in noble Piedmont.” Which, it turned out, was true.

 
; Although in her disastrous “Advertisement to the First Edition” Barrett Browning presented herself with her usual diffidence, she was a very famous poet. She could have no idea that in the next century the “value” of her intense personal impressions would be at such a low ebb that readers could mistake her words for a straightforward apology for what they could then assume to be a long, random, impressionistic poem of no evident artistic centrality. What unified the poem was the radical use of the “I” narration. She was the individual woman, and at the same time the poet, who saw with intensity and conviction the true and the beautiful and attempted to translate this vision for mankind. As a woman, as a wife and mother, she felt herself for the first time in her life to be a vital part of humanity. She was no longer a “blind poet.”

  There is hardly an image in the poem that does not testify to the poet’s lived life after her marriage. When she spoke of Petrarch at Avignon and Vaucluse she and Robert had sat on the rocks underneath the spray of the fountain. When she spoke of Savonarola, she had just read his poetry in a new edition. Her reference to Lorenzo the Magnificent’s deathbed at Careggi? She mentioned in her letters the present occupants of the villa. Cellini’s Perseus in the Loggia, Michelangelo’s New Sacristy, Dante’s Stone, Santa Maria Novella, the beauties of the Arno, of Vallombrosa, of Tuscan Bellosguardo, were as much a part of her daily experiences as the demonstration that marked her first anniversary and the return of the Grand Duke after the birth of her child. She captured it all, from the chalking of slogans on the walls of the churches, the song to liberty the child sang that inspired her poem, and the smile of her own child that led to the end of her work: “This world has no perdition, if some loss. / Such cheer I gather from thy smiling, Sweet!” Centrality is achieved in Casa Guidi Windows by the poet’s linking of all her immediate personal experience and newfound freedom to her intense poetic voice which sang out for the birth of an Italian nation.

  Barrett Browning was aware of the problem all Victorian poets faced (and all poets face). Can poetry ultimately have an effect on life? Does poetry matter? To her, poetry was a form of action. Like Shelley, she saw the poet as the unacknowledged legislator of mankind. Unlike many more pessimistic nineteenth-century British poets, she did not emphasize the negative connotations of “unacknowledged.” She did not look back to the defeat of the principles of the French Revolution, but forward to the live France of 1848. And there she found that the artist’s words still had effect, whether they expressed the intense perceptions of her heroine, George Sand, of Victor Hugo, or of the poet who would become part of the provisional government after the “February” revolution, Alphonse de Lamartine.

  Who spoke for Italy other than to bemoan the beauty that kept her powerless, as had Filicaia, Lord Byron, and Auguste Barbier? Her intention was to speak for Italy in the present. What was daring about her narrative point of view was that she consciously presented herself as the poet, the singer of the new day. There was splendid confidence in her voice when she assumed the role of the poet of the Italian Risorgimento. It was a confidence that many of the Victorian poets less sure of the effect of their poetry, such as Robert Browning at the time and Matthew Arnold, might envy. Even in her disillusionment she found herself not in Arnold’s words, “here as on a darkling plain /Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /Where ignorant armies clash by night.” In her disillusionment she still wrote of We thinkers, We hopers, We poets who have had dreams of what Italy could become. As a poet she was still vitally connected to the world and to history.

  The Paris of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein is one with which we are quite familiar, and the art that emerged from Americans free to be themselves among the inexpensive delights of the Parisian cafes in the 1920s resonates to this day. The Italy that formed the background for all of Barrett Browning’s late works, and for the masterpiece of Robert Browning’s middle years, was in a sense, and more politically, their Paris. Not only is it less known today, it wasn’t well known in its own day.

  Blackwood’s Magazine rejected the first part of the poem, calling “Meditation in Tuscany” a “ ‘grand poem’ but past all human understanding.” Elizabeth wrote to her sister that she was perplexed that Mr. Kenyon “seems to do more than agree with Blackwood’s complaints,” especially since “the best is that poor Robert had congratulated me on being so ‘perfectly clear this time.’ ”

  The cry of this poem, however, reaches beyond the locale. The final exultation of Barrett Browning’s voice in Casa Guidi Windows is that what the poet experiences matters. She had not a social theorist’s program for amelioration. She was a poet with a fierce and final confidence in poetry, and a great belief in freedom. To that vision of a better world she contributed what she could—her voice.

  In 1852 she would look out of yet another window, this one in Paris, to see the coup d’état that would make Louis Napoleon emperor. She would write of it on February 15, 1852, to John Kenyon: “As it was in the beginning, from ‘Casa Guidi Windows,’ so it is now from the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. I am most humanly liable, of course, to make mistakes, and am by temperament perhaps over hopeful and sanguine. But I do see with my own eyes and feel with my own spirit, and not with other people’s eyes and spirits, though they should happen to be the dearest—and that’s the very best of me, be certain, so don’t quarrel with it too much.”

  THE MARRIAGE OF

  TRUE MINDS

  HIS

  TWO AND A HALF YEARS after their marriage, Robert Browning became a father. Before then, he had watched the passion he shared with his wife lead to two miscarriages. He told Elizabeth that he could never love a child the way he loved her, and had repeatedly denied that he had parental instinct. When Elizabeth caught cold in late winter 1849, in the ninth month of yet another pregnancy, Robert wished the unborn child would disappear in some magical way without harming his wife. During her twenty-one-hour labor, Robert had been with her as often as he was allowed, witnessing her incredible forbearance; she never cried out. “I sate by her as much as I was allowed, and shall never forget what I saw, tho’ I cannot speak about it,” he wrote to her sisters. When, on March 9, 1849, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy, the joy and relief Robert experienced were witnessed by the nurses, who portrayed him as dancing rather than walking as he spread the news.

  The letters he wrote immediately after the birth were very happy ones. To Mary Mitford: “Ba desires me to tell you that she gave birth, at 2¼ this morning, to a fine, strong boy, like Harry Gill with the voice of three,—a fact we learned when he was about half born.” Still, he didn’t go to see his son immediately. It was Eliza Ogilvy, the upstairs neighbor whose maternal experience had supported Elizabeth during the anxieties of this pregnancy, who was the first to hold the baby. Browning had to be told by the nurses of his infant’s good health. The child’s head was so big that the caps Eliza knitted before the birth, to cheer the doubting Elizabeth into the belief in a happy outcome to the confinement, did not fit. To his sisters-in-law Browning wrote: “Was it not dear of Ba to refuse to look at the Babe till I could show it her? as I did.” He brought his son to his wife in his arms and placed the infant in hers. It was then that he found that the caps, being too small, only meant “ ‘as they were tied!’ ” The couple clipped three strands of the infant’s hair—one to send directly to Browning’s mother.

  Here joy ended. His mother did not live to receive her strand, nor did her doctors allow her to know the child—her only grandchild—was born and survived. Supposedly, it would overexcite the woman who was now dying from a sudden ossification of the heart. Robert received three notices from his sister, Sarianna. The first congratulated him on the birth of their child; the second said, “I grieve to say our dearest mother is very ill.” Then the third, “that dreadful letter” that told him of her death. Sarianna had been attempting to lessen the shock, for the second note was “written when all was over—Sarianna had great courage.”

  Two and
a half years since he had last seen her. It had been Elizabeth, hadn’t it, who’d wondered if they should postpone their voyage until his mother’s health improved. They left on Browning’s insistence, never imagining they’d be away so long. Browning’s memory of the week after their marriage, as he busily prepared for their departure, would now be as well his last memories of his mother. “He goes back to his first memories when he was a little child & she knelt every night by his bedside.… Through childhood, through youth … to the last night of his leaving home for Italy.”

  No consolation to Robert that “Her death in its suddenness was very beautiful.” Her last words, “God bless my dear . . dear . . dear,” and then, “Come, come quickly . . quickly . . quickly . .” and, finally, “even so.”

  Robert Browning had been devoted to Sarah Anna Wiedemann Browning. In the love letters she was felt as an aromatic presence, the flowers from her garden always in Elizabeth’s room. They, unlike the hothouse flowers Elizabeth’s father brought her, seemed never to die. Sarah’s husband, ten years her junior, had the temperament of a scholar; a bank clerk by day, at home he delighted in exploring subjects in his wonderful library and drawing his political, social, and lighthearted caricatures. Practical sense was no more his forte than travel arrangements or choosing apartments was his son’s. It was Browning’s mother who kept the household in order, and her gifts were shared by his energetic sister, Sarianna.

  The mother was remembered affectionately by Browning’s mentor Thomas Carlyle as a “true type of a Scottish gentlewoman.” Browning’s friend Alfred Domett remembered her as a woman with the squarest head he had ever seen. It put him in mind “absurdly enough no doubt of a tea-chest or tea-caddy,” but he also remembered the great affection Robert had for her, and his gentleness toward her as well.

  SARAH ANNA BROWNING (1772–1849). Caricature by her husband, Robert Browning, Sr., ca. 1826. The only known likeness of the poet’s mother. She was an accomplished gardener. Her deep interest in the natural world and in music, as well as her great fondness for animals, was passed on to her son.