Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  Sarah Anna Browning had married in midlife, and she died a few months short of completing her seventy-seventh year. In his late thirties, Robert experienced for the first time crushing human grief. It was the type of pain none of us escapes, as Elizabeth noted. The birth of the child and simultaneous death of the mother unhinged him. Just as he was beginning to draw close to his child, he could not help drawing away. The joy he had felt at the birth seemed a devilish irony. Whatever guilt he felt for leaving a mother in her mid-seventies, for her never having met his wife, never knowing of the birth of her only grandchild, never having the normal compensations from a son’s marriage, came crashing in. In his grief, he could not accept his new happiness. It was now Elizabeth who had to take care of her husband, through a long stretch of despondency. She, who was well acquainted with grief, said she never experienced one as deep as Browning’s over his mother.

  During these early years of the marriage, there had been other times when Robert’s health had suffered—incidents perhaps leading to this crisis in 1849. The previous summer, before the birth of his son, he had had a serious bout of influenza. Florence lies in a picturesque valley surrounded by rolling hills, immortalized in Renaissance painting. In the dog days of summer, aesthetics can’t save it; it can smolder. The Arno quivers not as the arrow in Elizabeth’s poetry but in simulation of a low boil. Elizabeth herself had just recuperated from the miscarriage she had in late February or early March 1848. Arabel copied her sister’s letter out for Henrietta. “It appears that I am not strong enough for some blessings—but others are lavished on me.” As Robert recovered from influenza, the couple decided on a trip to the Adriatic in the middle of a blistering July.

  The first stop was Fano, outside Ancona. They had come toward the Adriatic for cool breezes, but once more their travel plans were overly optimistic. They had relied on the Murray guidebook, which said Fano was a good summer residence—but it, too, was baking. They found “vegetation scorched into paleness, the very air swooning in the sun, and the gloomy looks of the inhabitants sufficiently corroborative of their words, that no drop of rain or dew ever falls there during the summer.” After three days they “fled” to Ancona, a “sea-city” beautiful to look at but so hot that they stayed a week “living upon fish & cold water. Water, water, was the cry all day long.” Elizabeth spent her time stripped down to her petticoat in her hotel, hardly caring if the waiter saw her, “demoralized out of all sense of female vanity, not to say decency.” But it had been in the terrible heat of Fano a week before that Robert became inspired to write the first poem since his marriage.

  There, in the blessedly cool, dark interior of the Church of St. Augustine, Robert became transfixed by an altarpiece by Guercino, the Guardian Angel. This angel, a rather monumental, androgynous central figure with glorious outstretched wings, had its long, graceful hands around a small kneeling child, whom it was teaching how to pray. For it, not just for cool sanctuary, the couple reappeared three times in three days.

  Part of Robert’s restlessness in those days, an unease he could not explain, might have been because of his unproductivity. His dream had been to marry his love and for both of them to escape the world and to write. Elizabeth had written and sent off to America “The Runaway Slave”; she had completed the first part of Casa Guidi Windows. She was readying the next edition of her works; he, too, was busily preparing his old poems for publication. Both were editing more than writing. Neither of them, at this period, could be called prolific. But Robert Browning had written nothing new at all.

  Another part of his unease was his anxiety about money. That her brothers were now accusing him of living off his wife must have brought to the fore his worst fears. The only vulnerability to the world the couple acknowledged was this defensiveness about their combined income. And by Fano, Elizabeth might have either suspected or known she was once more pregnant. He had saved his wife from death by British winter, and had exposed her to death by hemorrhaging. Was any child worth the risk?

  Robert Browning now had the love he wanted. Did he need anything else? Where would this third pregnancy lead? He did not pursue a career in order to be free to write, yet he wasn’t writing. Was he another one of those gifted men, like his friends in England, who wrote and published verse in their youth, then drifted to other things and never really found themselves? Men who suffered from religious doubts? Had he lost the promise of his youth? Was he homesick for what had been? He brought anxiety into church with him.

  In the cool interior of St. Augustine, detached from the heat of the day, Browning looked up at Guercino’s Guardian Angel with its flowing robes, its outstretched wings, and its eyes pointing the child toward heaven. And he asked the angel to leave that child it was teaching to pray, “when thou has done with him, for me!” He wanted those hands that clasped the small hands of the child to cure his malaise. He wished them to close his eyes and draw him near, and then the “healing hands” would act much like human hands ministering to a migraine:

  Pressing the brain, which too much thought expands,

  Back to its proper size again, and smoothing

  Distortion down till every nerve had soothing,

  And all lay quiet, happy and suppressed.

  In this wish to “lay quiet, happy and suppressed,” his biographer Betty Miller saw “something which corresponded closely with an omnipresent need of his own nature,” that of “childhood’s surrender to the ministering presence of a supreme being.” Today we are less uncomfortable when an adult asks the “bird of God” to suspend his flight and “see another child for tending, / Another still, to quiet and retrieve.” We are less uncomfortable when an adult comes in contact with his own need for succoring and nurturing, which Browning so clearly captured in the poem.

  The poet prayed for healing, the repair of “all worldly wrong” so that he could view the world once more as God had made it. With these newly opened eyes, he could see that

  All is beauty:

  And knowing this, is love, and love is duty.

  What further may be sought for or declared?

  These strong lines seem to complete the five-stanza poem.

  One wonders if these stanzas were all composed at Fano and the three additional stanzas added in Ancona the next week. The poet was no longer in church. The voice of the three ending stanzas used an “I” much more personal and subjective than the one his wife had employed in the first part of Casa Guidi Windows. The poet spoke directly to a friend:

  Guercino drew this angel I saw teach

  (Alfred, dear friend!)—that little child to pray.

  In an awkward parenthesis, Alfred Domett, whom Browning hadn’t seen since Domett abruptly left for New Zealand in 1842, popped right into his poetry.

  WHEN ONE THINKS of Alfred Domett, one thinks first of the George Lance watercolor of him, the poet in his youth. A sensuous, dark-haired, handsome young man with a cleft chin, clothed in a romantic cape, and wearing a wide-brimmed and floppy hat. This was the image Browning would keep for thirty years, till Domett, the ex–prime minister of New Zealand, returned one day, as abruptly as he had left, and called on the poet in London. Browning captured the earlier romantic wandering poet in a poem published in 1842, “What’s Become of Waring?” In it Waring was glimpsed on a pirate ship.

  The real Waring, Alfred Domett, wrote to say goodbye to his friend Browning, dating the note simply “Saturday.” Browning recorded in his own hand: “April 30, 1842—the day he set sail aboard the S.S. Sir Charles Forbes.”

  Dear Browning—

  I return your books with many thanks—I need not assure you of my love nor that my wishes for all good for you will be as lasting as life. God bless you for ever—Write (to the world)—& to me at New Zealand. Say goodbye for me to your family—I have no time to call—

  Yrs ever

  Alfred Domett

  Domett quietly sent along a book of his own, his Poems of 1833. Possibly too rushed or too proud to autograph it, he left it for Br
owning to record carefully: “From A.D. May 2, 1842 RB.”

  Twenty days and two attempts later, Browning wrote his first letter to his friend. “I have a sort of notion you will come back some bright morning a dozen years hence and find me just gone—to Heaven, or Timbuctoo; and I give way a little to this fancy while I write, because it lets me write freely … my real love for you—better love than I had supposed I was fit for.”

  When he was a boy, he told his friend, as he would later tell his wife-to-be, “I had fancy in plenty and no kind of judgment,” but as a man, he grew. “However I am so sure now, of my feelings, when I do feel—trust to them so much, and am deceived about them so little—(I mean, that I so rarely believe I like where I loathe, and the reverse, as the people round me do)—that I can speak about myself and my sentiments with full confidence. There!”

  Once again—“There!” Browning did not confuse his emotions one for the other. He knew his own feelings. “I shall never read over what I send you,—reflect on it, care about it, or fear that you will not burn it when I ask you,” he told dear Alfred. “So do with me. And tell me all about yourself, straight, without courteously speculating about my being … and by my taking the same course … we shall get more done in a letter than when half is wasted.”

  Three years later, in her third letter to Robert, Elizabeth wrote the exact same thing. She asked him for a straightforward, honest, “masculine” correspondence: “Don’t let us have any constraint, any ceremony! Don’t be civil to me when you feel rude.… & let us rest from the bowing and the curtseying.… You will find me an honest man on the whole, if rather hasty & prejudging, . . which is a different thing from prejudice at the worst. And we have great sympathies in common.…” Talk about the marriage of true minds.

  ALFRED DOMETT (1811–87) AS A YOUNG MAN. A pencil sketch by Robert Browning, Sr., the poet’s father. Previously identified as a possible early portrait of the poet. Domett was a constant visitor to the Brownings’ home in what RB called “the suburban shade of Camberwell” in the late 1820s through the early 1840s.

  ALFRED DOMETT. Engraving of the sketch by George Lance. Domett, a close friend of the young Browning, left England in 1842, three years before RB’s courtship of EBB, and did not return for thirty years. He emigrated to New Zealand, where he was a journalist and later became prime minister (1862–63).

  Two months before his marriage Browning hinted of the possibility to Domett. “I have some important objects in view with respect to my future life—which I will acquaint you with next time I write, when they will be proved attainable or no.” The poet did not write to him again for twenty-six years.

  After the marriage, their mutual friend Joseph Arnould, a lawyer who was also managing Browning’s part of the marriage settlement, kept Domett up-to-date. He heard from Browning “a week back, in which he mentions you most kindly, and begged me to tell you all about him.” Arnould didn’t need much prompting. In his letter of November 30, 1846, he had already written, “I think the last piece of news I told you of was Browning’s marriage to Miss Barrett—which I had then just heard of. She is, you know, or else I told you or ought to have told you, our present greatest living English ‘poetess.’ ”

  He then told Domett: “She had been for some years an invalid, leading a very secluded life in a sick room in the household of one of those tyrannical, arbitrary, puritanical rascals who go sleekly about the world, canting Calvinism abroad, and acting despotism at home. Under the iron rigour of this man’s domestic rule she, feeble and invalided, had grown up to eight and thirty years of age in the most absolute and enforced seclusion from society: cultivating her mind to a wonderful amount of accomplishment, instructing herself in all languages, reading … original Greek, and publishing the best metrical translation that has yet appeared of the ‘Prometheus Bound’—having also found time to write three volumes of poetry, the last of which raised her name to a place second only to that of Browning and Tennyson.”

  The love story was told from the groom’s side of the aisle: “Well, this lady so gifted, so secluded, so tyrannised over, fell in love with Browning in spirit, before ever she saw him in the flesh—in plain English loved the writer before she knew the man. Imagine, you know him, the effect which his graceful bearing, high demeanour, and noble speech must have had on such a mind when she first saw the man of her visions in the twilight of her darkened room. She was at once in love as a poet-soul only can be, and Browning, as by contagion or electricity, was no less from the first interview wholly in love with her.… He of course wished to ask the father openly. ‘If you do,’ was her terrified answer, ‘he would immediately throw me out of [a] window, or lock me up for life in a darkened room.’ There was one thing only to be done, and that Browning did: married her without the father’s knowledge, and immediately left England with her for Italy, where they are now living in Pisa in as supreme a state of happiness as you can fancy two such people in such a place. The old rascal father of course tore his beard, foamed at the mouth and performed all other feats of impotent rage: luckily his wrath is absolutely idle, for she has a small independence of some £350 per ann., on which they will of course live prosperously.”

  He almost forgot to mention that the “invalid of seven years, once emancipated from the paternal despotism, has had a wondrous revival, or rather, a complete metamorphosis; walks, rides, eats and drinks like a young and healthy woman.” He referred to her as in her thirties, not forty, but still “a little old—too old for Browning—but then one word covers all: they are in Love, who lends his own youth to everything.”

  The next letter Robert Browning wrote to Domett was in 1872. “How very happy I am that I shall see you again! I never could bear to answer the letter you wrote to me years ago, though I carried it always about with me abroad in order to muster up courage some day which never came: it was too hard to begin and end with all that happened during the last thirty years.”

  The last three stanzas of “The Guardian Angel” were an attempt to answer “Alfred, dear friend!”—or at least send a picture postcard of the Guardian Angel:

  We were at Fano, and three times we went

  To sit and see him in his chapel there,

  And drink his beauty to our soul’s content

  —My angel with me too.

  As Browning viewed Guercino’s angel, with his wife by his side, Domett on his mind, he realized he cared that Guercino’s fame should be recognized. Guercino did not work “earnestly” at all times, and he had “endured some wrong.” So what Browning attempted, he told his friend, was to help spread the fame of an artist who had problems similar to his own—and to Domett’s—being misunderstood, and not always being hard at work. He took the magnificent pathos of the picture “And spread it out, translating it to song.” There was nostalgia and longing as he ended in a poet’s postscript.

  My love is here. Where are you, dear old friend?

  How rolls the Wairoa at your world’s far end?

  This is Ancona, yonder is the sea.

  The longing was deeper, the vision less flippant and more personal than it had been six years before when Browning wrote

  What’s become of Waring

  Since he gave us all the slip,

  Chose land-travel or seafaring,

  Boots and chest or staff and scrip,

  Rather than pace up and down

  Any longer London town?

  Recuperating from influenza, traveling with his angel, who was once more pregnant, the poet had the need of healing hands. The sea did not bring relief from the intense summer heat; its beauty pointed yonder, to all that went before and was now so far away.

  Returning to Florence in the fall of 1848, the Brownings settled in at the home that would be theirs throughout their marriage, the apartment in the Casa Guidi, the building a “stone’s throw from the Grand Duke’s,” the Pitti Palace. Explaining why they had taken the rooms unfurnished this time, Elizabeth had written to Arabel in May that such a choice would
expedite their ability to spend summers in England: “Now, Florence is the cheapest place in Italy, which brings it to being the cheapest place in the world. Also this is the cheapest moment in Florence, through … really a silly panic. After a good deal of thinking then, we resolved on taking advantage of the cheapest moment in this cheapest place, to adopt the infinitely cheapest means of life.” By furnishing the rooms themselves, they would later be able to “sell furnishings or let the apartment using the proceeds to travel to England.” No doubt this was the logic she applied to her frugal husband. No doubt she also fell in love with the empty apartment. She was willing to sacrifice a carriage for it. After all, she was well enough to walk. In May she sketched for Arabel “our seven rooms, three of which are magnificent & the others are excellent . . to say nothing of our terraces.” The rather narrow terrace that opened out to the courtyard was the one the Brownings would go out on after coffee and walk back and forth for hours, till night fell. “The church of San Felice is opposite, so we haven’t a neighbour to look through the sunlight or moonlight and take observations. Isn’t that pleasant altogether?”

  Yet a badly ulcerated throat followed Browning’s summer influenza, and he was laid up at the Casa Guidi in September and October, refusing to see a physician. Nothing seemed to make him improve. Unlike the Guardian Angel, Browning’s angel was unable to heal her husband, and as a result fell into what she described to her sisters as an un-Christian funk. Politically, more conservative forces were mounting in Italy. Physically, Elizabeth was past her first trimester. A letter to Mary Mitford was full of her usual concern for the older woman’s health. “Were you never tempted to see into the meaning of that advertisement about ‘constipation’?—and a little book has appeared, I think, on the same subject.” She then told her friend that on October 8, two days ago, she had fallen forward out of her “lolling chair.” She hit her forehead with violence, but this protected her stomach. “Here’s the end of keeping in the house for months together, to avoid shakings & strainings! One falls out of an easy chair into the arms of destiny.” She hoped that all she’d get from it was “a week’s disfigurement & an hour’s headache—but the shock stunned me & couldn’t have happened at a more unfortunate time. Nobody was ever born to be happier & unhappier than I—the ‘mingled yarn’ is black & white.”