Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  FLOOR PLAN OF THE BROWNINGS’ APARTMENT, sketched by EBB in a letter to her sister Arabel, May 1848. It was EBB’s idea that the couple rent the apartment in the Casa Guidi unfurnished, furnish it themselves, and sublet it during their long stays in Paris and England.

  Robert Browning with his sore throat was no longer the lover in yellow gloves who would not walk on the street where she lived, no longer the deliciously foolish wise man on his wedding trip. He was a husband about to become a father. He had written one new poem since his marriage and was unable to support his wife on the proceeds from his poetry. Since the time of the love letters he thought of seeking employment. Elizabeth vehemently urged him to stay constant to his art. But his unease about his finances continued. In Pisa, on the election of Pio Nono, it was thought there might be a British Legation to the Holy See. Browning wrote to inquire about filling that post. He had experience. Before he met his wife, he had been part of a delegation to Russia. Though in his letter he stated he would do this for patriotic reasons alone, and did not want a stipend, he probably envisioned one. The project, however, did not materialize.

  Many of Browning’s friends and acquaintances were writers who made a living as journalists. Among them were William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and the Reverend Francis Sylvester Mahony, known in his day as “Father Prout.” The novelist Thackeray was often the voice of Mr. Punch. Dickens, along with John Forster, was the founder of the Daily News during a time when events often brought him to Rome. In Rome, his paper had a brilliant, if erratic, Vatican correspondent—that flamboyant literary man, poet, and Jesuit, “Frank” Mahony. Through Mahony, Browning was going to have a ringside view of the papacy, without being in a delegation.

  As a young man, Mahony had had great theological potential. He was educated by the Jesuits in Ireland and abroad and became prefect of studies at Clongowes Woods, his own as well as James Joyce’s alma mater. Mahony was forced to resign from this position after returning late and drunk from an expedition with students. Hardly the prefect of studies James Joyce would one day immortalize. Apparently the Jesuits still held hopes for Mahony, as they sent him to Rome on a period of probation. Of this period he told his friends that “he might have had a Cardinal’s hat, but for that which is imputed to him as his one great fault—conviviality.”

  By 1834, in London, the priest Mahony found a second profession, one more suited to his bohemian way of life and his love of drink—he became a journalist. He started to write for Fraser’s Magazine, taking as his persona the deceased Father Prout, whom Mahony had known as a child. He wrote lively articles interspersed with poetry in the manner of a witty, learned, but essentially frolicking and gentle-hearted priest. He lived addicted to club life, as one of the hard-drinking Fraserians. In the Daniel Maclise caricature of that famous group, we pick out, among the splendid array of wineglasses, Thackeray and Mahony.

  Browning met Father Prout in London in the 1830s. “I never knew where he lived; he used to disappear, and return as unexpectedly.… One day I began ‘I go to Italy—’

  “ ‘We shall probably meet there,’ he said.

  “I started a few days after, spent a month on the road and reached Leghorn; as I was being rowed past the Lazaretto to land, I looked up at the knot of passengers just deposited there by a steamer of longer passage than mine. Mahony was leaning over the rail.”

  Mahony had an uncanny way of popping up at significant moments in Browning’s life. However, when Browning remembered this unexpected meeting at port thirty years after it occurred, he tailored his impressions away from the personal. For it had occurred during Browning’s wedding trip just as the couple finally disembarked in Italy. It had been prepared for by a meeting at another significant occasion—on the day Browning picked up the fateful passport which would get him and his wife out of England. As he crossed Poland Street with the passport in his hand, “just at the crisis, he met—Father Prout.”

  “Oh, of course, I met him just then,” Robert told Elizabeth. “It was a moment worthy of being so signalized!”

  “Curious,” Elizabeth responded.

  She didn’t think more of it. Then, at the end of their arduous wedding trip, finally arriving in Italy, “landing at Leghorn, at nine o’clock in the morning, our boat which was rowed from the steamer to the shore, passed close to a bare jutting piece of rock on which stood a man wrapt in a cloak, he also having just landed from an English vessel bound from Southampton—Father Prout!! Wasn’t it an extraordinary ‘dramatic effect?’ …”

  “Robert cried out, ‘Good Heavens, there he is again!—there’s Father Prout!’

  “We went to the inn and breakfasted, and after breakfast the reverend Lion came into the room, and I had the honour of introduction—not of examination though, for as he told Mrs. Jameson afterwards, when he met her in Rome, he couldn’t see my face through my black veil.” She had drawn it down when he approached.

  Seeing Father Prout from their boat, standing on a rock, wrapped in a cloak, as Elizabeth reported at the time, or seeing him bending over the rail of a ship, as Browning remembered it years later, was quite reminiscent of how Browning envisioned a glimpse of Waring on the pirate ship:

  And one, half-hidden …

  Under the furled sail soon I spied,

  With great grass hat and kerchief black,

  Who looked up with his kingly throat

  and “then the boat, /I know not how, turned sharply round.” A case of life imitating art. But Father Prout turned up in more than poetry.

  Two months after their first anniversary, Robert came home from his walk one evening in Florence and said to Elizabeth, “Ah, ha! I have been kissed by somebody since I saw you last.”

  Rather than teasing her to jealousy, he jolted her. For she was suddenly seized with the idea that her two sisters had arrived in Florence, “Arabel at any rate! Yes I thought it was Arabel!”

  Seeing her gasp for breath Robert quickly explained “it was only his haunting friend, Father Prout,” who was just there for an hour or two on his way to Rome.

  Father Prout’s greeting—he “kissed him in the street, mouth to mouth, a good deal to his surprise.” During their few hours together Prout inquired about Elizabeth, “reiterated his regret at my veil being down at Leghorn,” promised to send them “from Rome a letter of introduction to our Grand Duke’s librarian of the Pitti,” went to a coffeehouse with Robert, and then, with Robert helping him, got into the diligence to Rome. He hadn’t time “to go home with Robert and see his unveiled prophetess.”

  But he would. In the fall of 1848, the period of the assassination of the Pope’s minister and the Pope’s disguised retreat to Naples, Father Prout came to Florence. He walked in on the couple. “If you could see us in these great rooms (they are so immensely high that they look still larger) you would think it all rather desolute still. No carpets down, no curtains bought yet,” Elizabeth had written to Arabel in May. By fall she had decided to do the bedroom in whites, and they were still waiting for fresh curtains that were taking forever to be delivered. Mahony certainly arrived at another significant moment. Among the scant new furnishings and the newly laid carpet, he found his friend Browning burning with fever, pale, sleepless, his eyes languid, his pulse racing. The unveiled prophetess had a nasty bruise on her forehead. Only two days before she had fallen from her chair and toward her destiny. She was bruised, pregnant, staying away from morphine, and worried about a possible miscarriage and her husband’s health. There stood Father Prout, in the middle of what could be called a low point of loving domesticity. The couple’s situation seemed as dire as his friend Anna Jameson’s predictions.

  The Jesuit was chameleon in dress, witty in speech, and perceptive enough to see at a glance that things were in disarray. He had that combination of charm and audaciousness that often accompanies a dissolute nature—that sense of being kinder than his comments. His friend Browning needed strength and his friend’s wife needed humor. Elizabeth credited his per
ceptivity as part of “knowing everything as those Jesuits are apt to do.” He saw that Robert’s fever was advancing because his general condition was too weak to fight it. And that the unveiled Elizabeth was frightened to death. He worked his magic, preparing a cure “with his own kind hand,” Elizabeth reported. It was a mixture of eggs and wine. Their new Italian servant, watching this, rolled his eyes to the heavens, crying “O Inglesi, Inglesi!”—which one can translate, What will these foreigners think of next? But the cure worked.

  In 1864, sixteen years later, Robert remembered the scene in almost the same words as Elizabeth, but he added that even after the spiced wine, “I could not get sleep for the pain, and my wife took my head in her two little hands, in broad daylight, and I went to sleep at once, and woke better.” Browning’s guardian angel, prayed to a few months before in Fano, arrived in Florence as a renegade Jesuit aided by his own wife’s healing hands. “My husband is perfectly well, thank God, better than he has been for years, he says, in certain respects . . as in the power of eating and absence of headache. As for me, I am quite well too, . . &, so far have not appeared to suffer from my fall. If really no harm has been done … it is all but miraculous, considering the circumstances.”

  Robert remembered that after his cure “to assist convalescence” Prout “came six weeks together, without the interval of a day, spending evenings hilariously.” Or as Elizabeth exclaimed to her sisters, “Father Prout has spent every evening here except one, since I wrote last!” Her eternal gratitude gave way to impatience. “As a matter of course the wine is rung for instantly, with an apparatus for spitting!”

  Prout told the couple that “Florence agreed with him better than Rome did, that he liked the place, liked the beef, liked the bread and especially liked his Attic evenings with Browning and Ba!”

  From her couch, where she spent her pregnancy, Ba observed she had never seen two brilliant men with such diametrically opposed ideas. But this was the type of dueling Browning loved; it brought him out of himself. Browning and Mahony could argue about religion, politics, literature; they could gossip about friends. Two minds brimming to the full in learning and perception, one an atheistic priest, the other a believing and at the same time brooding poet.

  A Haydon in the living room? Even one who cured sore throats? A little more difficult than outrageous behavior by letter, though not impossible. “I lie on the sofa, and listen, and let myself be called ‘Ba!’ (for I assure you it comes to that,) without much minding: and when he goes away, there’s a general burst of indignation and throwing open of doors to get rid of smoke and malice. After all there are things in the man which one can’t help liking.”

  The “malice” that had to be aired out was Mahony’s staggering cynicism. The more he drank, the more sardonic he became, seeing anew how unfair was life.

  Robert must have spoken of their scorching summer trip, and of the days in Ancona, in which the only reprieve from the heat was the interesting meetings they had with the mother of the British Roman Catholic Bishop, soon to be Cardinal, Nicholas Wiseman. The mother, like the son, was cultivated and aristocratic, combining wealth, good taste, and intelligence.

  Mahony knew Wiseman from earlier days. Why, if Mahony were a hypocrite, he could have been a Bishop, too. Others had said he could have been. Why, if he could leave off or hide his bottles, if he could flatter and cajole, and suppress his doubts, why, his early promise would have borne its fruit, and he’d be way up there in the Church as was Wiseman. Mahony was too honest to pursue a Cardinal’s hat. In vino veritas. He was a poor literary man assigned by Dickens, at the moment, to cover the Vatican—his ecclesiastical duties, he called them. His newspaper work, in which he often satirized the Pope and Nicholas Wiseman, was anonymous, but as early as these meetings with Browning, he had been found out.

  Father Prout’s doubt echoed Domett’s. Dear Alfred had already been in the news defending the colonial interests against a Maori uprising—the Wairau affair—but at the same time trying to be “fair” to the “native rights” of “savages.” They should be treated with “the kindness and patience, but with the firmness and authority, requisite in the management of children.” He defended the New Zealand Company’s rights against the natives using the words of Carlyle. His remarks were published and copies taken to Australia—“Mr. Domett and the Press.” Browning tried unsuccessfully to get Domett’s remarks published in England. One is not surprised his correspondence with Domett ended after his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett. Soon Domett would propose subsidizing public education, and keeping mention of Christianity out of these schools. Again, the logic here was complicated, but it filtered to the press and to the people as a manifesto of anticlericalism and secular education. At its best, Domett’s view of Christianity was not Christ-centered; he saw religion as a moral code. Father Prout, with his blade of logic, saw religion as the vehicle for the advancement of hypocritical men.

  For Browning, these six weeks of wine and conversation would be the seeds of inspiration for one of the great poems of his married years. Perhaps Mahony was already telling him of the rumors that in a few years would ignite into fact.

  Since Henry VIII broke from Rome and established the Church of England, Roman Catholics in England had practiced their religion as quietly as possible. They were “low church,” sacrificing anything flamboyant in ritual or costume. In the nineteenth century there were movements within Anglicanism itself to reestablish some of the old ceremonies of the mass, a return to flowing robes and to incense, a sense of “high church.” While the Anglican Church pondered reintroducing earlier Catholic doctrines and practices, the Roman Catholic Church in England remained as hushed as possible, not to draw down upon itself and its Pope the wrath of John Bull.

  For example, a British Roman Catholic Bishop did not become a Bishop of a specific geographical location. He was given a spiritual, not a temporal, realm. As Cardinal, Wiseman would assume the title of St. Pudentiana, a church name. What Pio Nono did when he elevated Nicholas Wiseman was daring and startling—and urged by Wiseman himself. He reestablished the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and gave Nicholas Wiseman a real place name, the name such a Bishop might have had in England before Henry VIII. Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman came back from Rome the Archbishop of Westminster.

  “We ought to have our Abbey back” were the words Bishop Blougram used at the beginning of Browning’s poem “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” The line evoked the mood in England in 1850–51, when it was widely suspected that Pio Nono might actually attempt to reclaim Westminster Abbey. In the Punch cartoon of November 23, 1850, Wiseman acts as the shifty-eyed lookout as Pio Nono attempts to break into Westminster Abbey. The tool the Pope used to wedge open the door was embossed the “Roman Archbishopric of Westminster,” and the cartoon read, “The Thin End of the Wedge. Daring attempt to break into a church.”

  The unmitigated outrage against the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy was exacerbated by an ill-timed “Pastoral Letter” written from Rome in which Wiseman seemed to ignore both the Anglican crown and clergy and seemed to suggest a direct relationship between papal authority and the sovereign state of Great Britain. When Wiseman realized the extent of commotion caused by his “Pastoral Letter”—he was burned in effigy on Guy Fawkes Day—he returned immediately to London, took the bull by the horns, and published his own apology, called “An Appeal to the Reason and Good Feeling of the English People on the Subject of the Catholic Hierarchy,” which was reprinted in full in five London newspapers. Thirty thousand copies of the pamphlet were sold in a few days. Of course, he didn’t assuage such fears much by the way he returned. He came off the ship in full cardinal’s regalia, wearing his red cardinal hat and carrying the bones of a saint. This inspired Punch’s New Year’s Day cartoon for 1851. Punch’s “Proposal for a Happy New Year” was to ship the newly appointed Cardinal, “from Westminster to Melipotamus,” back to a legendary see.

  CARDINAL NICHOLAS WISEMAN (1802–65). Engravi
ng after a watercolor by F. Rochard, 1836. The prototype for RB’s Bishop Blougram. He was born in Spain of Anglo-Irish parents. His cultivated Roman Catholic mother, Xaviera Strange Wiseman, was an acquaintance of the Brownings, whom they met in Fano, where Wiseman’s sister the Countess Gabrelli lived. It was Nicholas Wiseman who convinced Pio Nono to reestablish the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and to send him back to London as the first Archbishop of Westminster. This caused a furor in England that RB satirizes in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.”

  “I LIKE TO BE DESPISED.” Punch, December 7, 1850. A caricature of Nicholas Wiseman in his satirized big cardinal’s hat; he had returned to England in November 1850 to a barrage of press criticism. “So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs,” Bishop Blougram tells his adversary, the newspaperman, at the beginning of RB’s “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.”

  THE FRASERIANS. Contributors in 1835 to Fraser’s Magazine by Daniel Maclise. The Jesuit Frank Mahony, who wrote under the name of Father Prout, was one of the many literary men in London RB knew, though RB himself never wrote for the newspapers and magazines. Clockwise from the standing Maginn, one picks out Irving, Mahony, Carlyle, D’Orsay, Lockhart, Fraser with his back toward the viewer, Coleridge with a cane, Thackeray, and Southey, among others.