Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  The newspaper battle that ensued was scurrilous and unmitigated enough to equal a later “media frenzy.” Thackeray led the Protestant attack, in the voice of John Bull in Punch editorials. The Catholic attack was anonymous as well, but Wiseman knew immediately who was leading it. It was Father Prout, writing now for the Globe. Cardinal Wiseman responded in the Catholic Rambler. “We have read, occasionally, articles of the Globe upon the late agitation, the brilliancy of illustration, the richness of apt quotation, the wit of reckless satire, and the inaccuracy of detail, confirmed what we had heard, that they are the productions of a pen, once more innocently employed on the literary forgeries of Father Prout. It strikes us with a melancholy regret, to witness the prostitution of talents apparently destined for a nobler cause, to think of the heart in which the convictions of early education and a sacred vocation, are day-by-day made objects of derision, and what has been taught as holy, is scoffed at, as absurd. One so engaged we must leave to grace, acting perhaps through present remorse; we can only say, that though generally these have been the most telling articles against us, we have felt them the least. In other writers we say there was often the conviction of a hearty bigotry; in these there was the hollowness of the mere vanity to dazzle.”

  Elizabeth saw this vanity in Father Prout. “I firmly believe that he is kind-hearted, in spite of his cynicism brought up on every occasion.… What is the unpleasant part of it, is the defect in delicacy, conventional or otherwise—and of course it is this which prevents him from perceiving at a glance that the constancy of his evening visits is an excess—to say the least of it. Still, one likes the human nature of the man.”

  “Hilarious” was the way Robert Browning would, decades later, recall those evenings of his early marriage. That was his impression of his friend of the wine and the spittoon: The Rome correspondent of a Vatican in crisis was another friend from earlier days.

  One day Robert had the surprise of seeing this squib in the Paris paper, extracted from the Daily News. “Rome is less happy than Florence in possessing only Mrs. Trollope and Lady Charlotte Bury, whereas Florence has Mr. Grattan, Mr. Lever, and Robert Browning and his gifted wife.” He showed the French notice to Elizabeth, and they laughed over it “a little at coffee-time.… We suspect Father Prout of being the expounder of the supreme happiness of Florence.”

  Their own supreme happiness and relief after the birth of their healthy son four months later was badly shaken by the death of Browning’s mother. “He has loved his mother as such passionate natures only can love, and I never saw a man so bowed down in an extremity of sorrow—never.”

  A love relationship exists on balances, as well as shared sympathies. And Browning at his weakest moment had a wife who had never been as strong. Her strength in labor led her doctor to tell a nurse, “In all his practice he has never seen the functions of nature more healthfully performed.” Elizabeth realized she had suffered labor of less duration and given birth to a child more robust than those “active, blooming women” whom she knew in Florence. Wasn’t it curious, she wrote, that “MY child should be remarkable for strength & fatness?” She wanted to nurse herself: She certainly had the milk for it. Though her medical adviser Mr. Jago agreed with her, she had abdicated “by force of public opinion.” The child went through many strong wet nurses instead in the year and a half before he was weaned. Elizabeth joined the majority opinion, thought the decision wise. “After the rapture of hearing my child’s first cry, I thought of nothing but of what was best for him—and the farther from me the better surely!—It was enough that I had not injured him so far!”

  Three days after her forty-third birthday, a woman who had been an invalid all of her adult life, whose slight body, like her handwriting, could be described as a whisper, against all probabilities, and against her father’s wishes, had given birth to a healthy child.

  In the summer of 1849, her husband in mourning, she had come into her own as a woman. “I can do as much, or more, now, than at any point of my life since I arrived at woman’s estate.” It was also the first time since the age of fourteen that she had been off morphine for a considerable length of time. Robert boasted of this and of her concentration on good nutrition. “That resolution of leaving off the morphine,” had “one among a thousand ‘strong men’ ” that determination? “Then in her food, habits . . she was perfect and faultless from first to last . . the nurse says of the babe ‘how well nourished he has been.’ ” In the love letters he referred to her as his Ba, who preferred morphine to pork chops, but the truth is that both the Brownings had terrible eating habits.

  Perhaps one didn’t have to be as learned as a defrocked Jesuit to take one look at Robert Browning ill and realize he needed some eggs in his wine. Elizabeth and he ate very little. They favored a poet’s food group and seemed to exist on coffee, a bit of bread, chestnuts, and grapes. The two of them were once seen sharing a squab! Pomegranates, we are told straight out, are only to be admired visually and written about. One of the joys of Italy, the glorious fruits and vegetables, is occasionally mentioned—Robert loved watermelon—but sun seemed to supply vitamin C. Though we know neither could abide garlic or olive oil, one wonders if either ever ordered a salad. And when Elizabeth was overexcited or depressed, or when her lungs acted up and the coughing and phlegm reappeared, she took more morphine and ate even less. And drank more good strong coffee for those shattered nerves. Pregnancy changed this for its duration, and it along with her new motherhood contributed to a burst of well-being.

  After her mother-in-law’s death, Elizabeth was greatly disappointed about canceling the plans to travel to England, but she didn’t let Robert know. They never read each other’s letters in order to give each other absolute latitude, so she was able to confide to Mary Mitford: “He says it would break his heart to see his mother’s roses over the wall & the place where she used to lay her scissors & gloves. Which I understand so thoroughly that I can’t say ‘Let us go to England.’ We must wait & see what his father & sister will choose to do or choose us to do—for of course a duty plainly seen, would draw us anywhere. My own dearest sisters will be painfully disappointed by any change of plans,” but they were too understanding not to understand the motive.

  Browning didn’t want to go anywhere. His wife convinced him to look for a summer place by swearing that she and baby would not be able to bear the summer heat. It might have also helped that the two of them went on their exploratory trip alone, leaving the baby with his nurse and with Wilson. They traveled along the coast to La Spezia, saw the white marble mountains of Carrara, and had a glimpse of Shelley’s house at Lerici. To go to where Shelley had drowned was not particularly foresighted of the couple. It brought back Elizabeth’s memories of her beloved Bro.

  Retracing their steps and going high into a mountain village, they found out once again that “just in proportion to the want of civilization the prices rise in Italy. If you haven’t cups & saucers you are made to pay for plate.” Elizabeth then persuaded Robert to take just a look at the Baths of Lucca. He had a particular aversion to them, hearing they were a “wasp’s nest of scandal & gaming.” Once more, rather than finding a place “trodden flat by the continental English,” they were charmed by the cool mountains, the exquisite scenery, and the lack of their countrymen. It was cheap and away from it all, and they took an apartment for four months, till the end of October, for a reasonable rate. “We have taken a sort of eagle’s nest in this place, . . the highest house of the highest of the three villages which are called the Bagni di Lucca.” Here they would not hear the Austrians drumming from their windows. Returning to Florence, Elizabeth had a momentary dread that something would be wrong with the baby, but they opened the door of the Casa Guidi to find him happy, healthy, and content.

  The child was baptized Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning. They meant to call him Wiedemann, Browning’s mother’s maiden name. “It was all Ba’s doing—strange to say—tho’ I have been thinking over nothing else, these last th
ree months, than Mama and all about her, and catching at any little fancy of finding something which it would have pleased her I should do,—yet I never was struck by the obvious opportunity I had of doing the honour in my power, little as it was, by keeping up the memory of that dearest of names.” When they decided to christen the child before leaving for the summer vacation, “Ba told me I should greatly oblige her by not only giving our child that name but by always calling him by it, when he is old enough.” She told Robert she found the name “very pretty in itself, and sees many advantages in distinguishing between the two Roberts, avoiding nicknames for either of us.” No greater love hath woman. She proudly called her son “Wiedeman” (with one “n”), until Wiedeman, being a Barrett as well, found himself a nickname. To Robert, such a christening “is, of course, a very insignificant instance of Ba’s sympathy with me,—still I mention it, because it gratified me more as coming from her, than from anybody else.”

  By early July they had arrived at Bagni di Lucca. Robert was thin, haggard. Any effects of the prescription of “wine and good things” had long since worn off. At the Baths less than a week, he brought his grief to the mountaintop. “This evening I climbed to the top of a mountain, over loose stones in the dry bed of a torrent, and under vines and chestnuts, till I reached an old deserted village, with perhaps a half dozen inhabitants—one of whom, an old woman, told me I was ‘too curious’ by far, and should lose myself up there.” The old mountain woman was talking to a lost, middle-aged man. He wrote to his sister, realizing that Sarianna hadn’t such a place as the mountains of Bagni di Lucca to exercise in, “but this place, or any other, would do me no good of itself, any more than Florence—for, apart from the folly and wickedness of the feeling, I am wholly tired of opening my eyes on the world now.” It was almost as if the one poem he had written, in which he closed his eyes and prayed for healing, was prophetic.

  Browning was tired of the world. His remote eagle’s perch became him; he climbed from it to an even more isolated place. The “baby”—he didn’t call him “Wiedeman” in this letter to his sister—appeared to be as healthy as Ba insisted. Robert told his sister, “Sophia Cottrell came up here with her child yesterday,—12 months old,—with nothing like the size of our baby.” Everyone talked about how remarkably the baby was flourishing. “All which ought to be unmixed pleasure to me, but is very far from it.” This letter, which alternated between attempting to comfort his sister and his own despondency, ended on a peculiar note. “I had a bilious fit, these two days, but it is over this morning.”

  By the middle of July Elizabeth was delighting in the fact that “Ever since my confinement I have been growing stronger & stronger.” For her “it seems like a dream when I find myself able to climb the hills with Robert & help him to lose himself in the forests.”

  Another gesture of Elizabeth’s to help him had profound reverberations for the world. She had a risky card to play. One morning she told him that she had written some poems during their courtship that she had never shown him, because he had once said “something against putting one’s love into verse.” But the night before she heard him say the opposite. That gave her courage. “ ‘Do you know I once wrote some poems about you?… There they are, if you care to see them.’ ” And Browning learned, for the first time, of Sonnets from the Portuguese.

  He read them; she gave them to him at the perfect time. The old morbidity of a humiliated and dying woman, choosing between death and life, seemed as far away from her in her present condition as it would ever be. If the age difference had never been an obstacle between them, the extent of her pull toward the crypt might have been. If one were wise, as Elizabeth was, they were not the type of poetry to show a younger (or perhaps not even an older) lover.

  I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,

  As once Electra her sepulchral urn,

  And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn

  The ashes at thy feet—Behold and see

  What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,

  And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn

  Through the ashen grayness.

  That was from Sonnet V. Pick them at random. In Sonnet XVIII, after giving her lock of hair to Browning, she wrote that it was virginal. Her days of youth went yesterday, her hair was no longer girlish, her cheeks were pale from tears. Here was how in her heart she gave the traditional lock to her lover:

  I thought the funeral-shears

  Would take this first, but Love is justified,—

  Take it, thou,—finding pure, from all those years,

  The kiss my mother left here when she died.

  It is simply an irony of literary fashion that these poems have landed on the cute shelf.

  Elizabeth shared what Robert called that “strange, heavy crown, that wreathe of sonnets” at the very moment when her husband himself was experiencing for the first time, as a middle-aged man, the ashes of grief. He was ready to read them now. His love for her had taken her past death. Look at her. Look at the robust Wiedeman. Could her love for him now help him to accept grief and comfort him in this prolonged period of mourning? The sonnets, the last one dated two days before their marriage, were strong medicine.

  Browning was greatly moved. “How I see the gesture, and hear the tones,” he would remember years later. “And, for the matter of that, see the window at which I was standing, with the tall mimosa in front, and little church-court to the right.”

  Beyond the personal, he considered the poems the greatest sonnet sequence in the language since Shakespeare. “When Robert saw them he was much touched & pleased—& thinking highly of the poetry he did not let . . could not consent, he said, that they should be lost to my volumes [1850] & so we agreed to slip them in under some sort of veil, & after much consideration chose the ‘Portuguese.’ ” Elizabeth herself was “the Portuguese.” She noted: “Observe—the poem which precedes them [the sonnets], is ‘Catarina to Camoens.’ In a loving fancy, he had always associated me with Catarina, and the poem had affected him to tears he said, again & again. So Catarina being a Portuguese, we put ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’—which did not mean, as we understood the double meaning, ‘From the Portuguese Language’ … though the public (who are very little versed in Portuguese literature) might take it as they pleased.” “Purposely an ambiguous title,” Robert remembered. And uncharacteristically, when people pulled down the mask, “I never cared.”

  The trials of life did not disappear that summer, but the couple arrived at a further level of intimacy.

  And when they returned from Bagni di Lucca, Wiedeman, whom Robert bathed daily, had a new tooth, and both poets got back to work.

  Elizabeth completed the second part of Casa Guidi Windows. Robert wrote Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, two long poems published as a small book. But it took him another year for the questionings and experiences of his own life to meet history head-on. Then some of the religious speculation of the earlier poems became part of a drama that was greater than the sum of its parts—the drama for which his nights with Father Prout had prepared him, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.”

  “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” paralleled and parodied a major news event of 1850–51: Pio Nono elevated the Anglo-Irish Nicholas Wiseman to Cardinal, and bestowed on him a bishopric with a real British place name. This daring move of the Pope and the Cardinal caused an uproar at the time. If history came up to Elizabeth’s windows, it came to Robert in the newspapers and journals and pamphlets of the day. And through his friends.

  “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” seemed ripe for the stage. Two men, one the wealthy Bishop of keen intellect and sophisticated tastes and the other the doubting, indigent literary man who holds the Bishop in contempt, had been sitting at the Bishop’s full table at his chapel in London. During a long night’s journey into day, complemented by wine and more wine, they revealed levels of themselves and their souls. Their clash of values and passions had been on “the dangerous edge of things.” The reader joins them as th
e Bishop, having heard the cynical journalist Gigadibs out, offers his defense. Had the Roman Catholic Bishop been born three hundred years ago, before the Reformation, he tells Gigadibs, the British public would have said of him, “ ‘What’s strange? Blougram of course believes.’ ” Had he been born seventy years ago, educated by the Enlightenment, “ ‘disbelieves of course.’ ” But in the contemporary England of deep-rooted skepticism and doubt, “ ‘He may believe; and yet, and yet / How can he?’—All eyes turn with interest.”

  The difference between the two ship passengers, a simile Blougram used, perhaps referring to the Punch cartoons satirizing Wiseman’s return to London, was one not of taste but of temperament. Bishop Blougram took what he rationally could from life and therefore had a “snug and well-appointed berth.” Gigadibs, if he could not have all that he wanted, got in “a pique” and came on board bare, “While sympathetic landsmen see you off.” Both Gigadibs’s bare appearance and pique remind one of Mahony. In London, he had been “a remarkable figure.… A short, spare man, stooping as he went, with the right arm clasped in the left hand behind him; a sharp face with piercing gray eyes that looked vacantly upwards, a mocking lip, a close-shaven face, and an ecclesiastical garb of slovenly appearance.” His slovenly appearance at times made people think him a beggar.

  In the poem, the Bishop asks the literary man, “What’s wrong? Why won’t you be a Bishop too?” In life, Mahony told his friends he could have been a Bishop, too, could have worn Wiseman’s cardinal’s hat, which he later satirized in the Globe in such pithy statements as “his shocking bad hat has set us all by the ears.” Like Wiseman and Mahony, Blougram and Gigadibs “have minds and bodies much alike.” Whereas Wiseman, “ ‘The Outward-bound,’ ” became “the great Bishop,” Mahony, the bohemian priest, became a hard-drinking literary man. One was a success in life, one a failure. “Why won’t you be a Bishop too?” The echo of the central conflict of the Reverend Frank Mahony’s life is heard in the poem.