Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  ELIZABETH CLEMENTINE KINNEY (B. 1810), poet, essayist, journalist, was the grandchild of the colonial American poet Aaron Cleveland and the mother, by her first marriage, of the “banker poet” Edmund Clarence Stedman. She settled in Florence in 1853. Happy to leave Turin, where her husband was the U.S. ambassador to the House of Savoy, she wrote that the city “opened to me as a fountain in a moral desert with its arts, its poetical, hallowed associations.… I am no longer the slave of ‘high life,’ ” but “chose my friends from the congenial few who resort to Florence as we did, to drink at her fountains—not to be infected by her pools.” Among the friends she chose were Hiram Powers and the Brownings, her “favorite Florentines.”

  A year later the Kinneys returned to Florence, and they and the Brownings became good friends. Elizabeth wrote to Arabel, “Mrs. Kinney is a pretty woman with torrents of ringlets, & dresses perfectly—clever, literary, critical, poetical—just as you please … rather over-lovely & not over-refined . . but a favorite of mine through her truth & frankness, besides her warmheartedness towards ourselves. We often spend the evening at tea time with them.” By that time, Mr. Kinney was “the ex-minister at the court of Turin—He is an admirable, thoughtful, benevolent person, as liberal in politics as an American diplomat is bound to be & much more religious. Also he agrees with me textually about Louis Napoleon … indeed [we] … agree upon most subjects—excepting Swedenborg.”

  It was during tea that the Brownings had a conversation about George Sand that underlined how alike their attitudes were compared to any private reservations. Their point of view shocked Elizabeth Kinney, who recorded it word for word. The conversation about Sand is in progress, caught by the former newspaperwoman.

  “And I kissed her beautiful hand,” Robert Browning said.

  “Pray, who is her lover now?” Mrs. Kinney asked archly.

  “I can’t say, since she has a new one every day.”

  “What! Is she so bad as that? I supposed she had never loved but one—certainly but one at a time.”

  Browning, that lively, impulsive speaker, wry as a cricket, chirped, “One? good heavens! ‘their name is legion.’ Put three ciphers to your one and that will not include the sum total of her loves.”

  “And you kiss the hand of such a woman—Robert Browning does this?”

  He looked at Mrs. Kinney with an air of surprise: “Yes, & Elizabeth Barrett Browning does the same, in respect to one of the greatest geniuses God ever made!”

  “Well, well,” Mrs. Kinney responded, “the greater the genius, the greater the shame of yielding that body, which should be sacred … to the ‘lust of the flesh’: to me George Sand is the worst of women.”

  “Don’t say that!” Elizabeth exclaimed, getting up enough of a voice to continue. “She is not a bad woman, but, on the contrary, a good & charitable one.”

  “Then what your husband has said of her is not true.”

  “If it be true,” Barrett Browning answered, “it is only because she has fallen under the dominion of a sensual appetite, which she cannot control; but it is no more than gluttony, or intemperance; I pity her, more than I blame her for it. Her mind is none the less godlike.”

  Mrs. Kinney sighed; her heart was so swollen with indignation she could not speak. How could that pure spirit, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, entertain such an idea? Still, she was not a prude. She was willing to concede a point. If George Sand had been led astray by an uncongenial husband, why, then, perhaps one could excuse an indiscretion, an unlawful love—

  “Love!” both the Brownings interrupted in unison. “She never loved anyone but herself.”

  ECCO ROMA

  ALL ROADS lead to Rome, but for seven years the Brownings’ way was being paved with good intentions. It was not until the end of 1853 that they finally arrived, singing. It had been a glorious eight-day journey, replete with sightseeing. Those spectacular Umbrian hills, more like rolling mountains, where St. Francis once walked a penitent in bare feet, and which became the background for many a Renaissance painting. Assisi, Terni. Perhaps part of the fun for Penini was sharing his mother’s first time. “For the child was radiant & flushed with the continual change of air and scene.” A budding patriot, he had been told that dangerous weapons were not allowed in by the Roman police, so he had plans of “tissing the pope’s foot,” so he could keep his toy gun.

  The Brownings went right to their apartment at 43 Via Bocca di Leone. How could they help but be in the highest spirits? Not only had they finally arrived in the Eternal City, but their good friends, the American sculptor William Wetmore Story and his wife, Emelyn, had not only found them a suitable apartment but had lit the fires and the lamps for them. After their long trip, they walked into a warm and glowing third-floor apartment, cozy and welcoming as home. No rooms to find, no chills in the late autumn, no odd or predictable tourist nightmares. The Storys, Americans with whom they’d vacationed in Bagni di Lucca, and who lived in Rome and knew it like a book, had ensured their comfort. They had probably heard of this apartment through their countryman and old friend, the painter William Page, who lived in the apartment below with his second wife, Sarah, and their children together and by her first husband.

  PEN’S SKETCH OF HIS FATHER. RB’s knightlike qualities as perceived by his four-year-old son.

  The Storys had two children, Edith, eight, and Joe, six. Joe was named after his grandfather, an eminent lawyer from Salem, Massachusetts, who had risen to associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. During the summer at Bagni di Lucca, the two families and their children had laughed and played and created theatricals together. Joe was just a year or so older than Penini, and the two boys got along famously. There was even a thrilling donkey ride arranged by the Storys in the mountains, which Penini paid for the next day with a sore behind.

  On the first night in Rome, the Brownings had a chance to thank the Storys for their kindness in arranging this warm welcome. As Elizabeth put it, that night “we had a glimpse of their smiling faces.”

  The next morning, before breakfast, there was a knock at their door. A manservant stood there with little Edith Story and a message. Her brother, Joe Story, was in convulsions. “Too true!” Edith was left with Wilson, and the Brownings rushed to the Storys, who were living on Piazza di Spagna. Their first full day in Rome was spent at the deathbed of Joe Story. “For the child never rallied . . never opened his eyes.” He was dead by eight in the evening.

  While they were with the grieving parents and dying child, little Edith had become ill at their apartment and could not be moved. Their downstairs neighbors, the Pages, had a room for her. They took her and put her to bed. It was a gastric fever that can go to the brain, the fever that had just killed her brother. The Storys’ English nurse appeared to be dying of it as well, and downstairs, Emma, the Pages’ youngest daughter, was sick with the same symptoms.

  If Elizabeth could have, she would have caught her child “up in my arms & run to the ends of the world, the hooting after me of all Rome would not have stopped me. I wished—how I wished . . for the wings of a dove . . or any unclean bird . . to fly away with him & be at peace.” She had lost her head, that’s how her husband put it. “There was no possibility but to stay.”

  The physicians solemnly assured her there was no contagion possible; otherwise she would have at least sent her child to another house. The doctors proved correct, and the two children and the English nurse survived. “Roman fever is not dangerous to life . . simple fever & ague . . but it is exhausting if not cut off . . and the quinine fails sometimes.”

  In the weeks that followed, the Rome that Emelyn Story and Elizabeth saw from the Storys’ carriage was the road to the Protestant cemetery. Elizabeth steeled herself to accompany the poor stricken woman, who sat calmly in her seat. Given the circumstances it would be “worse than absurd” for Elizabeth to faint: “I flinch from corpses & graves, & never meet a common funeral without a sort of horror. When I look death-wards I look OVER death—& upw
ards . . or I cant look that way at all.”

  One can see this in her poem “A Child’s Grave at Florence,” written soon after the birth of Penini. Reading the title of the poem from Rome, Father Prout thought the poets’ infant had died—as he later had the brimming tactlessness to tell them. But no, it was the child of an active, blooming woman, Countess Sophia Cottrell. In the poem, the daughter that died, Alice, is called Lily:

  Of English blood, of Tuscan birth,

  What country should we give her?

  Instead of any on the earth

  The civic Heavens receive her.

  Prout should have read further:

  —Oh, my own baby on my knees,

  My leaping, dimpled treasure,

  At every word I write like these,

  Clasped close with stronger pressure!

  Too well my own heart understands,—

  At every word beats fuller—

  My little feet, my little hands,

  And hair of Lily’s color!

  Then the poet looks over the grave.

  Love, strong as Death, shall conquer Death,

  Through struggle made more glorious:

  This mother stills her sobbing breath,

  Renouncing yet victorious.

  The compensation for the grieving parents is bitter:

  Well done of God, to halve the lot

  And give her all the sweetness;

  To us, the empty room and cot,—

  To her, the Heaven’s completeness.

  Then the poem concludes quickly, and neatly, with a lily symbolizing “death’s ANNUNCIATION” held in a smiling angel’s hand.

  Life was not as neat, and Elizabeth didn’t deceive her only child when he asked about his friend Joe. She explained to Penini that Joe had died on earth and his soul was in heaven. Pen thought of his friend often, aware that Joe’s body was lying under the cypress trees, the points of which he could see in his excursions in Rome.

  When another dear friend to Penini, the Brownings’ manservant Ferdinando, complained of being ill, Penini told him he hoped he wouldn’t die. Ferdinando, not in a good mood, answered that perhaps it would be better if he did; after all, then he could go to paradise.

  Pen was more than willing to join him there, just as he’d been willing to be lowered from the old wall in Fiesole, if another were tied together with him. And he knew how death could be accomplished: “I should do like Joe—eat a quantity of fruit & take no medicine, and then I should die too & go to you, & they would put wings on our backs and we should fly about wherever we like.”

  Thus the child of the poets structured his own compensation. His religion was formed from his heart and his imagination and from what he picked up along the way. He received no formal religious education, he was taught no dogma. He was much too young to understand any of that, and in no way, his mother was adamant, was he to be force-fed. But his Christian parents were good examples, and he daily witnessed his mother’s morning prayers. Just as the Brownings’ love was nurtured by their respect of each other’s free will, their religion was rooted in faith. Their child would come to God at his own pace. After all, God exists. And so do death and love.

  Such an ominous beginning to the Roman stay—the song they came singing turning to dirge. Anxiety was compounded by little Edith’s relapses. Finally the Storys took her out of town. On the way to Naples, fearing the worst, they called on Robert Browning, asking for his comfort on their trip.

  Robert to leave Elizabeth and Pen in Rome to follow death? The Storys should have left Rome earlier and obeyed the doctor’s orders. Quinine, quinine, quinine was called for. Elizabeth stuck by her advice in letters to the worried mother, even defending the famous physician they had fired—not that she’d suggested they keep him once they had lost their trust. She was harshly honest in these letters. She was not happy that Robert made this overnight trip. In the end, she was, as she wrote to Emelyn, more than compensated by the good news of his not being needed once he got there. Little Edith rallied, and Robert Browning returned home.

  AMERICAN MARBLE CUTTERS

  AND YANKEE TITIANS

  WILLIAM WETMORE STORY would become a close and lifelong friend of Robert Browning. The American lawyer had artistic tendencies since youth. The writing that most pleased his relatives, however, was his two books on Contracts, still known at Harvard Law. At Harvard as well there’s a marble statue of his father, Judge Joseph Story. Today students think nothing of propping a cigar between its Carrara-white fingers. But it was the statue that brought Story to Rome. Torn for years between art and the legal profession, he was commissioned to do a memorial statue after his father’s death. He accepted on condition that he sculpt it in Italy. Perhaps his family thought this time he’d get Rome out of his system. In England, a father could be proud of a son who didn’t want to “work,” who wanted to be a gentleman and a poet. In nineteenth-century America, for a scion of an illustrious New England family, a family man himself, to go off to Italy, write poetry and sculpt, and take an interest in Swedenborg and spiritualism, not as a hobby but as a career—well, it was insane. W. W. Story did in fact have a nervous breakdown. What soothed his ragged nerves was following his heart.

  Unlike the Brownings, he did not have to pursue art in Italy by dedicating himself to clever economies in an inexpensive clime. Story was rich. By 1856, after his mother’s death, he would succumb to the siren’s song and establish himself and his family permanently in Italy. He would live on the piano nobile of the grand Palazzo Barberini, built according to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s designs. His landlord would not send bowls of oranges. The landlord was a Barberini, an aristocrat whose family gave Italy popes while they stripped the marble from the ruins in the Forum and from the Colosseum to build their palaces. The Barberini were as enterprising and as busy as the bees on their coat of arms. The Romans, who are as ironic in wit as they are in their acceptance of the madness of this world, had a saying since the sixteenth century: First came the Barbarians and then the Barberini. And after them the cultured American expatriates, such as William Wetmore Story, who had the money to rent their noble second floors.

  Of middle height, active in mind and body, friend of the Lowells and of Longfellow, a robust man of good conversation and wide interests, he was physically not unlike his friend Browning. Distinguished perhaps by accent, by an amazing growth of beard, and by the advantages of wealth—put to ideal uses. Story was principled, outgoing, intelligent, but not devious or ambiguous in a European sort of way—the type of American the novelist Henry James would write about. In fact, James became Story’s biographer.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, to be a “stonecutter” one had to come to Rome. It wasn’t just for the marble in the hills of Carrara that Michelangelo once chipped away at till he found its inner form. It was the way of life, the climate of art and ideas, the cafes, the teachers, and the Italian artisans, inexpensive to hire, and trained generation after generation to their work, who did the actual cutting out of the artist’s grand idea.

  A woman artist could work in Italy as well. There were no life modeling classes in which she could draw from a nude in the United States. Story’s friend Harriet Hosmer was the first American woman stonecutter. In Boston, when her doctor father asked if she could attend anatomy lectures at the Boston Medical Society, officials were shocked. In Rome, Hosmer studied with the English sculptor John Gibson, wore men’s clothing when she wished, and rode her horse on the Pincio. She was a short, vivacious woman. “Oh—there’s a house of what I call emancipated women—a young sculptress—American, Miss Hosmer, a pupil of Gibson’s, very clever and very strange—and Miss Hayes, the translator of George Sand, who ‘dresses like a man down to the waist’ (so the accusation runs). Certainly there’s the waistcoat which I like.… She is a peculiar person altogether, decided, direct, truthful, it seems to me. They are both coming to us to-night.” Hatty Hosmer was to become a great friend of the Brownings. A woman artist who lived on her own, who was no
t dependent on marriage or men. Another model for Aurora Leigh.

  The promise of freedom—in the personal liberation of their marriage, in the possibility of a unified Italy—expanded to include the open and imaginative lives of the Brownings’ artistic American friends. One of the earliest friends had been Hiram Powers. This American stonecutter living in Florence was famous for his Greek Slave. In the whitest marble, his full-length standing nude was as flawless as an air-brushed centerfold. Her arms were softly bound in front of her—to attest to the fall of freedom in Greece. It’s difficult today to imagine the symbolic force of this statue.

  WILLIAM WETMORE STORY (1819–95). The American lawyer, poet, and sculptor was the son of Joseph Story, a founder of Harvard Law School and U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice. After he gave up law, he moved his family to Italy to pursue an artistic career. He became the lifelong friend of Robert Browning, who in 1860 sculpted in Story’s Roman studio with him.