Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  SARIANNA BROWNING (1814–1903). The poet’s sister was an intelligent and lively woman who devoted her life to her family, taking care of her parents, and then, after her father’s death in 1866, joining her widowered brother’s household in London, where she was both a companion and a great help in managing his daily affairs until the end of his life.

  It was so difficult for Robert to return to his old home at New Cross, now that his mother was dead, that he visited there alone at first, to adjust slowly to the place. Staying there, sleeping over, was out of the question.

  His imagination sanctified the past. But he came home to his living family. Sarianna and her father had dealt with death firsthand, and Browning Senior was out of mourning. His father had already become enamored of a neighbor, a Mrs. Minny Von Müller, and was writing her passionate love letters. The widow did not send them back for the elder Robert Browning to burn. The homecoming: the mourning son, the courting father, the lively sister, Sarianna, caught between two passionate extremes. If the unworldly and guileless elder Browning broached the subject of a new woman in his life, one can imagine his minimizing it in relation to his son’s shock. How much did Sarianna know, and how much did she disclose to her sensitive brother? One remembers her tact in sending him three notes in the midst of her grief, to prepare him for his own. One doubts the situation was ever handled directly; it had the aspect of a Browning Senior caricature—Poet’s Return. After his son had reached some small peace with his memories, his daughter-in-law and his only grandson arrived. Grandfather and Wiedeman got along famously, and that relationship turned out to be both timely and convenient, keeping talk of Mrs. Von Müller at bay.

  It was in Paris during a visit from the father and Sarianna that the issue surfaced. Both father and son had a penchant for debating theological and philosophical questions, so perhaps the elder Browning approached his relationship from the point of view of the issue that greatly perturbed him. His new friendship had run smoothly until Mrs. Von Müller had confided in Browning Senior that while still a young woman she had married her second husband before she knew for certain that her first husband was dead. This weighed on the elder Browning’s conscience and led him to write to her that she had been “guilty of crime or gross error.” Later he retracted and apologized. Perhaps in Paris he sought his son’s advice. Should he continue to court a woman who had married her second husband without being certain her first had been laid to rest? He might have then noticed that his son was so shocked by the mention of a courtship that he hadn’t time for the niceties of the theological threads. Browning Senior found himself backtracking, seizing not on thoughts of remarriage but on the lack of character of this kind of widow manqué. And his son rushed to help his father shed whatever unholy hold Von Müller had forced on him.

  The affair was not handled clearly—or cleverly. The father fudged. The son? Well, Robert vented all his anger on the widow. And he put it in writing. In a letter she received on November 1, 1851, Browning wrote that “ ‘his father had informed him of the manner in which she had annoyed him and of the persecution he had undergone.’ ” Shortly after this she received a letter from Browning Senior, “withdrawing his proposal” because of her youthful misconduct. His proposal? Did the son know they were engaged—or did he believe that was part of some sinister persecution?

  Mrs. Von Müller and her son sued the elder Browning for breach of promise. The case went to court. It was only during the legal proceedings that Robert found out just how many letters had passed between the two. His angry righteousness turned to pain. Through his letter and his advice he became a prime mover of his worst nightmare: a public scandal that hit the papers, a profane blot on the memory of his mother, and a situation that put his rather guileless and eccentric father in the position of looking like an old fool.

  And perhaps that was the good news. The bad news was that Browning Senior lost the case, the judgment ruinous, over eight hundred pounds. To escape it and the humiliation, Robert’s father moved out of England. He was accompanied by his daughter, the child who had stayed home. Sarianna settled in Paris, where she kept house for her father. Browning Senior was freed from tedious bank work and was eventually on pension till he died. Sarianna was in a sense forced out of the house at New Cross. During those years of exile, which her bookish and eccentric father learned to enjoy much more than she, did she ever regret her beloved brother’s homecoming?

  On both ends of the Paris stay, there were trips to England. And hopes for reconciliation with Moulton Barrett. Elizabeth wrote to him once more, and Robert, according to her, wrote him an irresistible letter.

  Which he resisted, and sent back to the Brownings in a package. In it were all the letters his daughter had written to him since her wedding trip—not only returned but unopened. Some of them had around them the black bands of mourning. Even this did not tempt Moulton Barrett to read, to see if something in his daughter’s life was terribly wrong. He enclosed with these a letter so unremitting, so conscious of the pain it would cause, that Elizabeth, at the time a parent herself, was even better able to see how deep this rejection was. She did not believe, if he could still, after six years, be so hateful toward her, that he had ever really loved her.

  Elizabeth and Robert’s reconciliation with George Barrett, and on a lesser note with her other brothers, must have been helped, at least slightly, by the marriage of her sister Henrietta to their third cousin William Surtees Cook on April 6, 1850. It had been during the Brownings’ courtship that Surtees drank some tea left in Henrietta’s cup. Placing his “ugly mouth, where her pretty lips had been,” he realized, “This is Love—.” And a few days later he noted in his diary, “Her father’s consent before marriage is hopeless.” He would “run away with her when I am a Captain, if she will.”

  Five years later Henrietta did not leave Wimpole Street, as had Elizabeth, before she and Surtees did what her brothers considered the right thing. Their cousin wrote to Moulton Barrett, properly asking for his daughter’s hand. Moulton Barrett called the letter an insult. The logic was that these two adults were going to marry no matter what the father might say. Therefore, as brother Alfred (Daisy) put it in “a 72-stanza epic depicting the event”:

  With hurried footsteps light as air,

  The errant damsel flew,

  Fast down the well-known winding stair,

  Nor paused to say adieu.

  Henrietta was over forty. Daisy, ten years younger, but a particular friend of the couple, wrote “to tell Henrietta of the aftermath of her elopement, of the ‘grand battle scene in the drawing room’ ” after her father was informed, and to assure her that “ ‘nothing which any of us heard tonight has in the least shaken us in our belief that you were in every way justified in the course you have taken.’ ”

  Surtees was related through the mother’s side of the family, and the Graham-Clarkes were cold to the couple because the officer hadn’t much money and he also seemed to have trouble finding a good commission. Henrietta couldn’t get from the country to London to see the visiting Brownings. Still, she and Ba wrote. With Henrietta, Elizabeth shared thoughts about straitened finances that she felt might be lost on Arabel. With Arabel she shared certain concerns about Henrietta’s streak of recklessness. The fact that Arabel was childless did not stem Elizabeth’s flow on the issue of child rearing. On the way to France and England in June 1851, Elizabeth wrote from Venice of a motherly concern, Henrietta’s disdain of baby caps, in relation to her infant son.

  Venice had struck Elizabeth with force. “I have been in a sort of rapture ever since we arrived . . For the sake of it I would give up Florence, and twenty Parises besides.” Only the deteriorating health of Robert and Wilson would finally spur her to leave. She alone, drunk on beauty, remained strong. Eliza Ogilvy was in Venice with the Brownings, and she remembered the very long walks she took with Elizabeth. “I think those were the longest walks I ever knew her [to] attempt. She very much depended for strength on a daily dose of ether
in some peculiar mixture prescribed for her. One day the child got hold of the medicine after the maid had measured and poured it out. He drank it off, and great was the alarm, but it did not hurt him.”

  Around this time Robert won a rare victory concerning child rearing on the issue of baby caps. “Wiedeman wore a light cap with the full borders for above a year, and until yesterday he always wore the same under his hat & would continue to do so, only that Robert & I had a quarrel about it yesterday & Robert had the upper hand,” she wrote to Arabel. “Robert wants to make the child like a boy, he says (because he is a man)—and I because I am a woman perhaps, like him to be a baby as long as possible. I maintain that he looks prettier, too, in the cap under the hat, but I yield the point & Wilson consoles me by declaring that he looks pretty anyhow.”

  WILLIAM SURTEES COOK (1813–87) AND HENRIETTA BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT (1809–60). EBB’s sister married her cousin, four years her junior, on April 6, 1850, when she was forty-one and was immediately disowned by her father. “He never once, e’en in a dream, / Gave ear to lovers tune,” wrote the couple’s confidant, brother Alfred. “No thoughts would make the heart repent, / Or feel for Surtees Cook.”

  For some reason, “it vexes Robert when people ask if he is a boy or a girl—(oh, man’s pride—) and he will have it that the lace caps & ribbons help to throw the point into doubt.”

  So Robert won, although Elizabeth viewed his idea of masculine identification as misplaced pride. Her idea of a child’s sexuality was classically pre-Freudian—a child has no sex—as well as being specifically Barrettian. One remembers the Hope End portrait of the young Elizabeth as a winged creature, too young and angelic to have grown a lower half to her body: “The truth is that the child is not ‘like a boy,’ and that if you put him into a coat and waistcoat forthwith, he only would look like a small angel travested. For he isn’t exactly like a girl either—no not a bit. He’s a sort of neutral creature, so far.”

  She kept him as neutral as she could. He had long curls that, for all Robert’s coercing, she would never have the heart to see cut in her lifetime. “Jasper” was the color assigned her son’s hair in her poetry, glints of red and brown among the gold. She also dressed him poetically, as a Renaissance prince with brimming hats and velvet frocks. This might not have been as peculiar as it seems. The idea of Renaissance garb was all the fashion among the Anglo-Florentine artists. Robert did not like it, but his major fashion victory was his statement on baby caps.

  In this belief in the neutral child and in her lack of separation from him, and in her delight in extending his babyhood, she was her father’s daughter. But in other ways, she went far beyond the restraints of her own childhood. Her great belief was to let her child come to language and education and the forms of religion in his own good time. She believed an activity was good for a child in direct relation to its annoyance of an adult. A child should laugh, run, play hard, make noise. She didn’t create pleasant lies for a child’s ear when asked a direct question. And contrary to the fundamentals of British education, she did not send her child away from home for education. She believed it a good thing to spoil the child—to reward, and to disapprove, with kisses.

  Her son remembered her as a woman full of joy, and it was in this spirit that she raised him. But the excesses of attention that he was used to by the time they reached London, and Wilson’s visit to her own family, tied Elizabeth down—the first time she’d taken the full brunt of progressive child rearing. When Wilson returned, the mother found she missed being awakened by her child at six. Browning worked around the edges of this upbringing, bringing in discipline through the music that he taught him, and at times succeeding in sustaining a reasonable punishment for a misdeed. In a carriage one day, the child’s head rested on his father’s leg. A traveler commented, “Your father spoils you.” To which the child looked up and answered, “Oh no, my mother spoils me.”

  All of his wit, his hypersensitivity, his “baby-lonian” baby talk, of Italian, mixed with a little French and less English, was captured by his mother for posterity in letters, many of them cut down by less doting male editors. She wrote to her brother George from revolutionary Paris, “As to Wiedeman, he is in ecstasies at the sight of the soldiers, & the sound of the music. If you ask Wiedeman if he likes the revolution, he says—‘Less’ (yes!) ‘buono, buono!’ ” And to “Vive Napoleon,” being taught him by his French nurse, “he adds out of his own head, ‘Bwavo, bwavo!’ (bravo).”

  ROBERT WIEDEMANN “PEN” BARRETT BROWNING (1849–1913), by Euphrasia Fanny Haworth. The only child of the poets. This pencil and colored-crayon drawing by an old friend of Robert Browning’s was done ca. 1851, after RB was able to persuade his wife to take their son out of his baby caps.

  “Wiedeman” invented his nickname. In attempting to say his name (in goodness knows what accent), his tongue caught and he came out with something like “Pen,” and later this turned into “Peni” and “Penini.” “Wiedeman” took second place once more, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning.

  Bwavo Penini!

  It was as Penini that the child returned to the Casa Guidi. After their long stay in France the Brownings were greeted by a welcome calm, their own apartment, their familiar furniture, their cozy surroundings, all in excellent repair. Subletting had worked out well; they’d even gained some months of free rent themselves. Elizabeth planned more home improvements that would allow them to sublet at a higher price when they went to Rome. In the spring of 1853 the Brownings were happy to be back, and in a spirit of a second honeymoon, settled down to each other and to serious writing.

  Their plans to go to Rome fell through once more, because of illness there, and because John Kenyon forgot to send the biannual fifty pounds. In grandfatherly fashion, he had sent a hundred pounds a year since Pen’s birth. But spring in Florence compensated. “People do always best, relying on themselves,” Elizabeth wrote. “For my part I thank God for a very, very happy winter—so happy! Money-affairs never trouble me.”

  Along with Penini and Wilson, the couple took an open carriage to see the sunset from the neighboring hills. Elizabeth was strong enough to climb “to the top of Fiesole (leaving the carriage)” and to enjoy the view from “an old wall which made me giddy to sit on—and I got scolded for having a ‘weak head,’ an expressive phrase.” When Penini looked over the wall and saw the “velly pretty” clusters of purple lilies, his mother suggested tying a rope around him and letting him down to pick them, then hoisting him back up. He’d only say “less” if Wilson was tied up with him, too.

  “A ministering angel” in the form of a daring teenaged Italian girl insisted on fetching them for the child. She clambered over the side and picked the flowers. Pen was in ecstasies, and his happy father gave the girl two pence half penny English, which she considered princely. On the way down the hills, in the glow of twilight, Pen saw roses he wanted to add to his bouquet, but the coachman wouldn’t stop, “which damped his joy a little—as is the way of all earthly joy, even when people go to Fiesole.”

  There were not only family outings. The proliferation of the railroad expanded romantic possibilities. The couple made a plan to leave “respectability and Penini behind us,” and have a day trip for themselves. They’d take a train to Pistoia and Prato and have dinner at their whim at some cafe or other. “Like two lovers,” Robert told her.

  The lovers traveled to Bagni di Lucca for the summer, far from the cholera at Rome. But, it would turn out, not escaping close proximity to their noisy neighbor in the Pitti Palace. The Grand Duke had left the heat of Florence and had taken the old house on the top of the mountain, the very one they stayed in after Penini’s birth, when Browning was mountain climbing and mourning his mother. Penini’s nursery was turned into one of the Duke’s drawing rooms. Right before they left Florence, they met Elizabeth Clementine and William Burnet Kinney. It was unusual for the Brownings to call on people (other than George Sand) first, particularly so close to their departure for the su
mmer. But William Kinney would have the latest political news. He owned and once edited the Newark, New Jersey, Daily Advertiser, and had come to Turin to be the American minister to the court of Victor Emmanuel II of the House of Savoy, which ruled Piedmont. He and his wife were on a short visit to Florence; that short affair would turn, by the next year, into a long love.

  Elizabeth was rewarded for her visit by hearing that Victor Emmanuel II liked her portrait of his father in Casa Guidi Windows. It was more than personally pleasing that the King of Piedmont was reading her work and had praised it to the American minister. By 1853, while the Brownings (and the Grand Duke) packed for their summer in the cool hills, the hopes of a united Italy rested no longer in Rome, where the republican government had fallen, or in Austrian Tuscany, but “in noble Piedmont,” as Elizabeth had predicted in her poem.

  Nor was Elizabeth’s portrait of the King’s dead father particularly flattering. Charles Albert was praised for dying well. If, as they say, he didn’t live well, the “sin” passed, for he was redeemed by cannon smoke. He died in exile in Portugal after the Italian cause was defeated at Novara: “Taking off his crown,” Charles Albert allowed one to see “A hero’s forehead.”

  Shaking Austria’s yoke …

  His last words were upon his lonely bed,

  ‘I do not end like popes and dukes at least—

  Thank God for it.’

  It appeared that the son no more than the father liked Popes or Grand Dukes. He was willing to live the way his father died, for the Italian cause. This message was almost worth the annoyance of a return visit by the Kinneys on the actual eve of the Brownings’ departure to the Bagni di Lucca for the summer.

  Elizabeth Kinney, who had been a newspaperwoman, kept a journal. She had reservations about Barrett Browning’s looks at first. The great poet appeared older than Mrs. Kinney imagined, her voice weak because of the illness of the lungs. Her idol would have looked younger and more attractive if she exposed her high cheekbones, and wore her strange and unfashionable heavy fingercurls away from her emaciated face. Then the upper part, “her great dark soul eyes,” might predominate even more, keeping one from her overlarge mouth. To this observer, she still had the saving grace, at least, of looking like a poet. The more youthful Browning, the son of a woman with the squarest head in England, had a round head placed squarely on his shoulders. His full head of black hair was laced with gray, as was his beard. He was impulsive and quick in speech, entertaining, as wiry as a cricket. But he had a quality Mrs. Kinney would regret, and others would praise—in the words of Walter Scott’s biographer, he didn’t look like any damned literary man.