Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  Mahony’s friend John Sheehan (who wrote poetry under the name of “The Irish Whiskey Drinker”) summarized Mahony’s plight. His genius “would have ensured him a place in the first rank of any profession but the one to which he unfortunately had committed himself.” Dissatisfied with any other profession, he would have been able to “break new ground, and try his fortune in a more congenial calling.” But not as a priest. For “a bad wife or a bad husband can be got rid of,” but an ordained priest is bound to celibacy and committed forever. Bishop Blougram touched on this predicament when he told Gigadibs:

  In every man’s career are certain points

  Whereon he dares not be indifferent.

  A man can choose what he wants from life, but

  he should wed the woman he loves most

  Or needs most, whatsoe’er the love or need—

  For he can’t wed twice.

  According to the Irish Whiskey Drinker, a person like Mahony, in a profession “for which God never intended nor nature constituted him,” is condemned “to a life of secret sorrow, self-reproach, and inevitable hypocrisy.”

  At the end of the poem, Blougram, comparing his success, his “daily bread,” “influence,” and “state” to Gigadibs’s obscurity, asked again, “In truth’s name, don’t you want my bishopric?” What has Gigadibs’s truthful doubting brought him? If he were one of the “privileged great natures” of his time, his self-abnegation would be valid: “But you,—you’re just as little those as I.” Once more we have the inevitable comparison between the similar range of talents of both men and the contrast between the success of the Bishop and the failure of the literary man.

  Browning interpreted the outcry against Cardinal Wiseman in 1850–51 as a strong indication of the deterioration of faith among the British people. He might well have agreed with the Chronicle that what John Bull really objected to was the audacity with which Wiseman, the brilliant churchman, upheld and insisted upon his beliefs and practices. For, surely central to the theme of the poem are the Bishop’s arguments against succumbing to doubt, his apology for belief as an active agent for the good in this world. What beliefs did the English public offer in place of Wiseman’s? Thackeray’s “Mr. Punch’s Appeal” that satirized Wiseman unmercifully and that Thackeray himself later regretted, implied that to be British was religion enough! British religion seemed to be proudly equated with antispiritualism and the sneering habit.

  What about Frank Mahony? Brilliant, clever as he was, ripe with talent and wit, astute about the retrogressive and tyrannical elements of the papacy and its attempt at European influence—how was this renegade priest’s life a better model to follow than Wiseman’s? An alcoholic, Mahony lived a life full of bohemian negligence. As Father Prout, he was famous in his time. An amusing writer and a light poet, he was not a great artist. His loss of a religious career had meant the loss of spiritual and psychological focus.

  There was much to object to in the “great Bishop,” and Browning, in his portrait of Blougram, pointed out his political conservatism, his excessive worldliness, his casuistry. But he was a man who had made faith work in his life. Once he was “back on Christian ground,” the sophistic Bishop’s words became as healing as the Guardian Angel’s hands.

  You call for faith:

  I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.

  The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say.

  If faith o’ercomes doubt. How I know it does?

  By life and man’s free will, God gave for that!

  To mould life as we choose it, shows our choice:

  That’s our one act, the previous work’s His own.

  Free will. That tenet of Christianity that allowed Elizabeth to marry the man she loved allowed Robert to understand his own doubts, and allowed both of them their marriage of true minds.

  Browning seemed to feel that the danger to England was not from the Pope breaking into Westminster Abbey, but from the stultification of the spiritual life from within. “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” like Wiseman’s “Appeal to the English People,” which sold so many copies, was directed against the spiritual malaise of the times.

  In the context of the abusive treatment Wiseman received in the British press, Browning’s words about the character reported by Charles Gavan Duffy should be taken seriously. “Yes, he said, Bishop Blougram was certainly intended for the English Cardinal, but he was not treated ungenerously.”

  In fact, he was treated dramatically and wittily enough to have appealed to a wider audience than Browning had up till then. In 1850 the poet published Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, poems related to “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” in terms of religion and doubt. The book sold around two hundred copies. Had “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” been published separately after it was completed, this long poem, based on a contemporary outrage, would have had a chance to sell briskly. But Browning never published the poem separately, never called attention to all of its contemporary and political references. It appeared in Men and Women in 1855.

  Clearly, Browning had purposely separated himself from the literary men and the topical event. He who followed the newspapers and journals so avidly and knew so many journalists in Italy, France, and England was never a journalist himself. He bemoaned his lack of sales and worried about not being the main support of his family, yet he held back a work on a contemporary theme by which he would have profited. Artist and gentleman, he dissociated himself from Fleet Street and searched for that which was meaningful in his time and durable for all time.

  Today, after the pamphlets and the newspapers and the journals are forgotten, and Nicholas Wiseman, the great mover of the Victorian Roman Catholic Church, is hardly more remembered than his adversary, the Reverend Francis S. Mahony (Father Prout), “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” remains. That work of art is the significant document of its times.

  THE ROADS THAT LED TO ROME

  THE BROWNINGS’ married years have become intrinsically connected to their lives in Florence. But their long lease on the Casa Guidi evolved circumstantially. They spoke of giving it up when they traveled to Paris in 1851. Instead, on Elizabeth’s advice, they sublet. After five years of marriage and the birth of a son, they didn’t consider themselves tied down. They were still travelers on slender means, artists with worlds to discover. Jerusalem, Egypt … When Elizabeth once suggested California as a place of opportunity for her future brother-in-law, one wonders if her thoughts led her there as well.

  In terms of a permanent home, Elizabeth championed Paris as the Brownings’ final destination; events within Browning’s family made that choice, finally, acceptable to him. Right up to the very end of their fifteen years together, on her deathbed in Florence, she and Robert spoke of where they planned to settle down.

  Their many travels were more confined than their imaginations—to the continent and to England. Money was a small part of it; the major, of course, was Elizabeth’s health.

  Cold weather still had a pronounced effect on her lungs. She began to cough strenuously, lost her voice, her breath, her weight, and was confined to her rooms. She was not long off her morphine. To catch a cold meant the danger of renewed and dangerous bouts of pulmonary congestion. In an age in which infectious diseases were rampant, when influenza and malaria abounded, and child mortality was very high—even in the best circles—the Brownings were dauntless and daring travelers. They seemed to catch revolutions the way other people caught colds, but without the slightest fear for themselves or their child. Amid the political upheaval in Paris, it was a stranger who, on the street, had to advise Wilson to turn around and go home with Wiedeman, as stray cannon fire could be a problem on such flat terrain.

  Elizabeth once more watched history unfold. Just settling in Paris at 138 avenue des Champs Élysées in December 1851, she witnessed the celebration of the coup d’état bringing Louis Napoleon to power, the beginning of the Second Regime. And by now she was back in correspondence with her brother George. She had “scarcely
left the window these two days, watching the pouring in of the troops, to music, trumpets & shouting, with splendid military maneuvres of every kind. The president himself rode immediately past our windows through the great thunder of a shout … ‘vive Napoleon’—People tell us it was ‘Vive l’empereur,’ but I tell you what I heard myself.” Her sympathy for the “president,” Louis Napoleon, is “with his audacity & dexterity,” and “is rather artistical sympathy than anything else.” It would be after he crowned himself emperor that artistic sympathy turned more militant. Napoleon III would take a prominent role in Italy’s struggle for unity.

  Though her sister Arabel would frown on her behavior, she and Robert went to see Dumas’s Camille, “which you moral English are crying out against,” and the acting was so exquisite that it “almost killed me out of my propriety—I sobbed so, I could scarcely keep my place.” Robert sobbed, too. “When people want their hearts broken, they have only go to & see—There is a caricature representing the whole pit with umbrellas up to defend themselves from the tears raining out of the boxes.”

  As an advanced “citizeness of the world,” she was also on the side of humanity, not the side of narrow national interests. For the British, another Napoleon was as ominous as Pio Nono making claims on Westminster Abbey by the change of titles—and just about as dangerous, according to Barrett Browning.

  She could excuse Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, “no revolution ever took place in France with so little bloodshed & suffering.” Indeed, he had suppressed his opponents, but by “the exiling of the head of parties,” not by the cutting off of heads. And then with a logic that would have done any statesperson proud: “The president seems to choose to have all the reins in his hand, but to pull them only when the necessity occurs. A bad system of government, you will say, & I agree with you entirely.” Still, “a democracy with a responsible man at its head, is no despotism whatever ugly despotic signs may be shown by the actual executive.” It vexed her that the “great fact” of Louis Napoleon’s being freely elected was overlooked by the English journals. “Truth, truth—do let us have truth—‘C’est la vérité—’ said George Sand—.”

  George Sand. If Arabel would object to Camille, imagine her disapproval of her sister’s vast admiration of this woman, this novelist, who lived in utter freedom, among and with different men. In a sense, Paris was, to Elizabeth, synonymous with meeting George Sand. Sand was said to be not often there but at home writing plays and employing “a house-full of men, her son’s friends & her own, in acting privately with her what she writes—trying it on a home stage before she tries it at Paris.” Elizabeth heard her son was “a very ordinary young man of three & twenty, but she is fond of him. As for ‘les amours’ she has lived purely enough for the last year, they tell me . . she talks of herself as being less tormented by ‘ces passions d’enfer,’ & seems to resign herself, after some lingering struggles, to passing into a sort of elderly womanhood of George Sandism.” Robert might contribute to the rain of tears falling on the coughing, dying Camille, but, just as he had trouble with his wife’s views of Napoleon, he had trouble with making the first social move to see the one woman Elizabeth admired as much as she did a strong and liberal man. “No,” she told him, “you shant be proud . . and I wont be proud—and we will see her—I won’t die, if I can help it, without seeing George Sand.”

  In February 1852, Sand was in Paris, under an alias, attempting to escape “the plague of her notoriety.” People told Elizabeth, “ ‘She will never see you—you have no chance, I am afraid.’ ” They couldn’t have sent a better letter of introduction—one of Mazzini’s, along with a note from both of them, written by Elizabeth. Sand sent an invitation by return post to Elizabeth—or was it to the poet of the Italian cause—the poet of the now-published two-part Casa Guidi Windows? In the second paragraph she also invited “Monsieur Browning.”

  In the middle of February, wrapped from head to foot, carried out by Robert into a closed carriage, Elizabeth went to meet her heroine, “rather at the risk of my life.” Her reward: “I have seen George Sand.”

  The Brownings were received in a room with a bed in it, “the only room she has to occupy, I suppose, during her short stay in Paris.” George Sand came toward them. The giant of Elizabeth’s imagination was actually not much taller than she. She was dressed simply and well in a high-necked gray woolen gown and jacket with long white muslin sleeves buttoned at the wrist. In a cordial manner, she held out her small, well-shaped hand. Elizabeth took it in her own, and with that spontaneous passion that at times leapt from her letters, she stooped and kissed George Sand’s hand.

  GEORGE SAND (1804–76) was the literary idol of EBB, who named the heroine of her novel in verse Aurora Leigh after the writer, whose real name was Aurore Dupin. Years before she met Sand in Paris, EBB wrote two sonnets to “Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, / Self-called George Sand.”

  “Mais, non! je ne veux pas!” George Sand remedied this act of homage by kissing Elizabeth’s lips.

  George Sand was a bit too heavy for her height, with shiny black hair parted and pulled back into a bun. She wore no head covering, which was the Parisian way. Elizabeth had seen photographs of her in ringlets and thought they would be better to deemphasize her overfull cheeks. Her complexion was a lusterless olive. “The upper part of the face is fine,” with “dark glowing eyes as they should be.” But the lower part of the face was disappointing. “The beautiful teeth project a little, flashing out the smile of the large characteristic mouth; & the chin recedes. It never could have been a beautiful face, Robert & I agree, but noble & expressive it has been & is.”

  No affectation, no coquetry “(& not a cigarette to be seen!).” She sat among two or three young men who listened to her. She spoke rapidly, low, without emphasis. She was not animated, but under her quiet, “an intense burning soul.”

  On their way out, Sand kissed Elizabeth again, and excused herself from returning the Brownings’ visit because of work. She automatically invited them back the following Sunday. Out of love for his wife, Robert, who couldn’t stand the society around Sand, escorted her there three times. The two or three respectful men sitting by George Sand turned into “crowds of ill bred men who adore her” in between “a puff of smoke and an ejection of saliva.” The crowd was “ragged Red”—that is, socialist, mixed with lower theatrical types. Elizabeth pictured Sand as standing above her admirers, alone and melancholic, as the overdramatic theater people, some in costume, flatter her, go down on their knees to her, “tu” her. Elizabeth would go down on her knees to her as well, if she’d leave off these admirers “& be herself as God made her. But she would not care for my kneeling—she does not care for me.” Elizabeth didn’t take it personally. “Perhaps she does’nt care much for anybody by this time—who knows?”

  George Sand slipped out of Paris without once visiting Elizabeth at home. Elizabeth was not proud; she eagerly went to see Sand in the middle of winter, when she usually did not budge from her rooms. Sand’s health had not been very good lately either. Nothing Elizabeth attempted around her literary lion turned out right. She tried to share, besides politics and art, another subject of common interest—weak lungs.

  “You should have seen the disdain with which she looked at my respirator—I took it out of my muff to show it to her—because her chest is not strong, & though better since she came to Paris, she has had a great deal of cough & was bled for this the other day—

  “ ‘Oh,’—said she—‘life wouldn’t be worth the trouble of such precautions.’ ”

  Elizabeth tucked her respirator back in her muff.

  George Sand’s eyes were still brilliant, her white uneven teeth still outflashed them when she smiled, “—only so rare a smile!”

  This lady’s smile seemed not to go everywhere. And she must have sensed Robert’s disapproval of her casual way of holding court among the Reds and the thespians. He treated her with an exaggerated courtesy, which she may have understoo
d as a criticism or considered as boorishly British—or both. When the two met by accident at the Tuileries, they walked the length together, and talked. But there was a coldness in their relationship that Robert referred to as a freezing over as soon as ice was broken. It probably didn’t help that this unusual woman, as irregular in life as in features, was put on a literary and political pedestal by his wife.

  Whatever discomfort he might have had in accepting what he considered his wife’s overvaluation of George Sand, it was George Sand who received his rather judgmental approbation. On these social occasions, he certainly was the reluctant husband. Browning could get angry—not at people he loved, but at those he saw putting people he loved in false positions.

  On their first trip to England, before they watched the coup from their window, this proclivity helped Robert to encourage his father toward an extremely unwise position. The Brownings had returned to London as publicly as they had left privately, with Wilson, with Flush, who had grown old and (according to their upstairs neighbor Eliza Ogilvy) smelly, and with the newest member of their entourage, their son, verging on the terrible, but to his mother terrific, twos. The trip to England had not been delayed solely by Robert’s reluctance after the death of his mother. On February 12, 1850, Elizabeth wrote to Arabel that “the attack at the beginning of the winter was neither more nor less than a miscarriage.” This time “I was sure of it.” And at the end of July 1850 the poet had the last of her four miscarriages, and the worst. She lost a hundred ounces of blood, and it took her months to get back her strength. Then, even after almost five years away, the trip to England was decided on finally because Arabel couldn’t get to Paris. At the time Elizabeth’s brothers were still not reconciled.