Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  CLASPED HANDS OF THE BROWNINGS by Harriet Hosmer. The only way EBB would “sit” for this unique portrait was if Hosmer personally supervised casting the hands in plaster, which she did in 1853 at the Casa Guidi.

  Your soft hand is a woman of itself,

  And mine the man’s bared breast she curls inside.

  —RB, “Andrea del Sarto”

  What if they had had loving marriages, had wives who led them from concerns about daily life and material things, putting an emphasis on artistic accomplishment? What if their wives had brought into marriage “a mind! Some women do so”? Against Browning’s own worries about providing for his family as he wrote Men and Women, Elizabeth Barrett Browning held him to higher goals.

  ‘God and the glory! never care for gain.

  ‘The present by the future, what is that?’

  Spirit drawings produced by either EBB or Sophie Eckley during one of their private séances in Rome.

  “SUCH A WILD STEP”

  IN JANUARY 1855, Pen Browning walked into the salon of the Casa Guidi, where his mother sat. She was working on the manuscript of Aurora Leigh. He was going out for a walk, accompanied by Elizabeth Wilson (his “Lili”) or his beloved Ferdinando, or both. Pen, close to his sixth birthday, was dressed fancifully and elegantly as always, probably in velvet pants and a fine blouse with lace embroidery. His hair was long and flowing, as it would have been in the days of Renaissance princes. He already had his hat on, perhaps one with a feather on it. According to his mother, he looked “radiant.”

  Before the child left the house, he would always come to her with a parting speech, imitating his father, who never went out or even to his room to write Men and Women without asking his family to “ ‘wish him good fortune.’ ” In Peni-babble this translated into “Dod bless you” or “Tate tare of yourself” or, closer to the master himself, “I wish you dood fortune in the house.”

  Today he said simply, “Dod bless you darling pet mama! I’m going out.”

  To which his mother responded, “Do you love me, Peni?”

  “Oh yes—all the world—more than the world! all the stars.”

  “Would you be sorry if I went away?”

  “I never would let you go.”

  “But if I were to die!!”

  “Oh—don’t speak about it.”

  This was said with such an expression of pain on the child’s face that the mother was instantly seized by remorse. She tried to mitigate her words by talking “fast” about “all sorts of pleasanter trips” that the family might soon be taking—together.

  This wickedness, this “stupidity,” she related to her sister Arabel, who once slept in her room at Wimpole Street. Arabel had remained unmarried and at home, while her more gay-hearted and robust sister Henrietta, as well as her talented and ill sister Ba, went on to marriage, child rearing, and eternal expulsion from the heart and house of her father. In looks, Arabel most resembled her oldest sister, Ba—the thoughtful face weighed down as well by too many finger curls. It was an open face like her famous sister’s, plainer, the eyes less vivid, but the lips as full. In temperament she shared the serious and the religious nature of Ba, turned not to poetry and the artistic life but to charitable works and to a Christianity steeped in the nonconformist beliefs of their childhood. It was a good thing that Elizabeth had been thoughtful enough not to ask Mr. Stratten, that clergyman who consulted the wishes and ideas of his children, to marry her and Robert close to a decade ago. The father would never have allowed Arabel to continue to worship at his chapel. And it was there that the pious Londoner gained sustenance throughout her life.

  Arabel Barrett Moulton Barrett devoted much time and effort to the Ragged Schools she helped found for the poor, downtrodden, and prostituted girls of the London slums. At home she was an obedient daughter until the end. And after the end—her father’s death, that is—she finally had her chance to make her own life. But for certain things, it would seem, it was too late. A strong woman in her own right—“the union of gentleness with decision,” Joseph Milsand called it—she also bore the curse of many a duteous son or daughter. Inexplicably at times, cruelly at others, she was often overlooked. Even Elizabeth, who loved her so dearly, often relied on her to make reservations in London and Paris, often assumed that Arabel, too, would agree that Arabel’s own life was easier than Henrietta’s, and often took her for granted. But after all, they were sisters and Barretts. Both were able, to each other, to speak up. And Robert? Well, he was Robert Browning, double underline. He very much appreciated Arabel’s worth. He told his wife he loved Arabel as much as, if not more than, his own sister. And in this familial relationship, too, time would show the authenticity of his words.

  On January 10, 1855, on the very day Elizabeth told her sister of her “stupid” conversation about her own death with Pen, her old friend and correspondent Mary Russell Mitford died at the age of sixty-seven. From then on, really since the first days of her marriage, Elizabeth’s unpublished letters to her sister Arabel—more than 225, half of them at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and half in family hands—offer the most intimate account of the poet’s life. It was to Arabel that the poet revealed her soul—and her working habits.

  Robert Browning was completing the two volumes of his poetry to be collected as Men and Women, and Barrett Browning was working on Aurora Leigh. “Robert and I do work everyday—he has a large volume of short poems which will be completed by the spring—and I have some four thousand five hundred lines of mine—I am afraid six thousand lines will not finish it.” To assure their regular working schedule, they gave instructions that they would not receive visitors before three.

  On September 12, 1854, she wrote to her sister, “Married today eight years.” Pen brought her flowers; Ferdinando and Wilson helped him arrange them. “Then Robert had a gift for me, after the precious love undim through all these years, a beautiful malachite broach.” He knew how she admired malachite.

  Circumstances had favored the couple: love, friendships, a child. The future was still ahead of them. Robert’s poems were magnificent and clear. He would be appreciated this time. Elizabeth was writing directly and truthfully about modern life. The world of conformists and conservative critics would not be ready for her views. She didn’t care. She no longer had to imagine the world, she was living in it—giving voice to and influencing it through her art.

  Still, that “stupid” conversation with Pen. To someone who knew her as well as Arabel, it must have hinted at illness and morphine. The winter of 1854–55 was unusually cold in Florence, and Ba developed what she described to Arabel as “a little more cough … just in the morning—you know my cough is always there, waiting like a lion in his den & ready to work on provocation.” Robert’s prescription was to get her to take asses’ milk before she went to bed, and people said she was looking much better.

  That was as sick as she would ever get by letter home. Actually, she had had the worst attack of her old illness—the congested lungs, the coughing, the pain in the side, the difficulty in breathing—since her marriage. The lion stirred once more during some of the most active and happiest times of her life, and he prodded his ally, Elizabeth’s oldest foe—morbidity.

  This was just a glimmering of morbidity among happier preoccupations with domestic life and child rearing. The Brownings were still educating their child at home. Wasn’t Robert’s real education within the compass of his own father’s library? Didn’t Elizabeth keep the little glove of her father, who had been ripped from colonial life at Pen’s age to England for education?

  Now Henrietta was teaching her son mathematics. Too much disciplined learning could cause the child to break down, to run a fever. It was just not healthy. Elizabeth herself had been a child prodigy. Was she speaking from her own experiences as she exhorted her sister, with an intensity tinged with fear, to allow little Altham’s mind to develop naturally? Elizabeth would not teach Pen to count to a hundred just because his cousin
Altham could. In Rome she told him straight out, “I will never teach you that.”

  “Then I must go to Papa.”

  And what did Papa do, “out of spite,” according to his wife? Why, Robert “gave him the theory of counting to a hundred, directly.”

  In politics, tutored, Elizabeth told Arabel, not by her but by Ferdinando, Pen had become an Italian patriot, as were both his parents. But he developed as well an anti-British stance that foreshadowed the full blooming of his mother’s perspective and appalled his father. When the Brownings’ friend Isa Blagden said, “I’m proud of being English,” Pen responded, “But you’re only a woman, Isa!” Elizabeth was struck by the degree to which he felt “his advantage of belonging to the male sex.” It “quite startles me.”

  That he had made a point of his maleness at the age of six was probably as psychologically healthy as it was politically incorrect. Elizabeth had extolled his angelic qualities when he was an infant and she was reading Swedenborg. The daughter of Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett was still in no great hurry to see her beloved child grow up—too fast.

  No wonder Robert, the most sexually unbiased of men and the great friend of Anna Jameson, Adelaide Sartoris, Harriet Hosmer, and Charlotte Cushman, was shocked not by his child’s masculine bluster but by his disturbing lack of John Bull. He argued with his son on the issue of British patriotism. “As for me I can’t help laughing,” wrote Ba to her sister. She attributed Pen’s anti-British stance to his linguistic superiority to those in the Anglo-Florentine community who couldn’t speak proper Italian: “The English always will shut their mouses when they speak.”

  PEN BROWNING, ten years old, Rome, 1859. Elizabeth could not bear to have his hair cut and liked to dress him fancifully. Robert inscribed this copy of the photograph, “Penini with his eyes squeezed up against the Roman sun, May 24, ’59.”

  In Pen’s formative years the Brownings’ contrasting views of child rearing would not be that confusing to the child. He knew when to go to his father and when to go to his mother. As progressive and at times radical as Elizabeth’s child-rearing views were, and as concerned as Robert was for his Florentine child to become British (whether or not he wore knickers), as a married couple these two poets, rather unconventionally, offered balance.

  And Pen offered his parents an added incentive for leaving Florence: to visit aunts and uncles, and at least one grandfather, who hadn’t seen the radiant child since he was three. A more immediate reason was to get to England in time to expedite the publication of Men and Women, due to be issued by the end of 1855. The couple planned, as much as they ever planned, to repeat the pattern of their trip four years earlier, visiting London on either end of a long stay in Paris.

  Once more they made the decision to keep the Casa Guidi. Their last months in Florence had been filled with painters and cleaners sprucing up the apartment. The money it took was well worth it. They “have not paid too much for making our apartment quite perfect . . too perfect almost to leave! . . & fit to receive anybody in the shape of an occupant.” They’d sublet at a good rate, and since they planned to return to Florence in a year or so at least for a little while, they would have a pleasing apartment should they decide to live there longer.

  Just before the Brownings left Florence, a singular escapade of Elizabeth’s was recorded by Elizabeth Kinney. Kinney wrote that she, Harriet Hosmer, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were together when Robert told them of some fine paintings in a nearby monastery not open to women. Harriet Hosmer “jumped up and exclaimed, ‘But we will see these pictures!’ ” Characteristically, she suggested they dress like schoolboys, in “full pleated frocks reaching to the knees, and fastened at the waist by leather belts, with loose trousers à la Turque, cloth caps, etc.,—and go as male pupils of Mr. Kinney and Mr. Browning, they to pass as our tutors.”

  “ ‘Good!’ cried Mr. Browning.” If Mr. Kinney agreed, he would, and “our grave husbands approved.” Hiram Powers was let into the secret and helped in “getting up” the disguises, which included boys’ wigs. “Mr. Powers declared that no one would suspect that we were not youths, Mrs. Browning about nineteen, and I fifteen. But Hattie Hosmer, being short and stout, looked like a fat boy … and very peculiar!”

  HARRIET HOSMER (1830–1908) by William Page, ca. 1855. She was the first American woman to come to Rome to study sculpture. Determined to become a professional, she arrived at John Gibson’s studio with two daguerreotypes of her work and a certificate of proficiency in anatomy from the Missouri Medical College. She later formed a close friendship with both of the Brownings, who were charmed by her puckishness and wit.

  They met for the adventure and dressed at the Casa Guidi. “Mrs. Browning completed her toilet first, and really looked handsome in it. For the first time I saw her without those dark, heavy curls she always wore half concealing her cheeks, and the wig of short straight hair improved her looks; excitement gave her usually pale face a fine color, and her large black eyes an unwonted brightness.” But then she did something “crazy” as the others finished dressing. Elizabeth Kinney and Hattie looked out the window and found that rather than waiting inside the gates of the palazzo for the carriage, there was “Mrs. Browning walking slowly on the square up and down! It must have been an extra dose of opium that pushed her to such a wild step!”

  Disguised as a schoolboy, her hair pulled back, as handsome as Bro when they were both young, she wandered dazed beneath her own window. Did her costume bring her back to that day at Hope End, before her illness, when the brother she loved and whose tutor she had shared was sent away to school, leaving her alone in her study of the classical languages and with her knowledge that the world he entered was fraught with dangers?

  Watching her from Casa Guidi windows, Elizabeth Kinney exclaimed, “ ‘What shall we do!’

  “ ‘Why, go to her!’ answered Hattie. ‘We mustn’t leave the great Elizabeth alone in such a state!’ Hattie rushed down into the street and took Mrs. Browning’s arm to conduct her back.… By that time our strange appearance began to attract attention, when all at once Mrs. Browning, seeming conscious of the situation, began to cry, and whispered in my ear,

  “ ‘Oh, Mrs. Kinney, we shall be in the Bargello!’—(Jail).”

  It was all so ludicrous that “Hattie and I burst into a laugh. This excited observation still more, and we should have been the center of a crowd had not our husbands driven up in a hack and taken us in, just in time. But Browning was as pale as death with fright, and declared that now he would not venture to carry out our plan, as no doubt we had been discovered, and that the police might follow us, and the whole matter be exposed in the papers, with our names. Mr. Kinney laughed at his fears, while Hattie took fire and called him a poltroon and other hard names. Mrs. Browning cried, I laughed,” and Browning refused to visit the monastery.

  On the eve of leaving Florence, Elizabeth wrote a very long letter to her father. It had been almost nine years since she and Robert married secretly and she had left Wimpole Street without telling him. Surely there was at least a possibility, after all this time, and all this life, that there could be some sort of reconciliation.

  The signs were not favorable. Even before the Brownings’ arrival, the father was talking about taking Arabel out of London on vacation that summer. But the siblings still made their plans in the old secret way. “Arabel,” Ba wrote, “if Papa keeps more in the house than he used to do, next summer you can come to me, but I can’t go to you. Neither can Penini . . Only we must smuggle him in to see dear Minny [the housekeeper]—that must be.”

  By the middle of May, between writing and hearing Penini’s lessons first thing in the day, she was readying and packing Pen’s wardrobe, including twelve pairs of trousers with embroidery on each: “he’s expensive, that child . . and I’m vain about him.” Keeping Pen elegant wasn’t always easy. At a full-dress country party right before they left Florence, while out riding a pony with the other children, he filled his pockets with strawberries. H
is mother would not have known if Peni hadn’t boasted of it. She was able to scoop out his pockets with a spoon before he brushed up against and ruined other people’s clothes. “Such a mess!” His mother said, “Oh Penini, how could you do such a thing?”

  “But I didn’t sint they would melt, dear Mama.”

  But strawberries were the least of the Brownings’ annoyances that May. Just as they were getting ready for their trip, Elizabeth Wilson announced that she and their manservant wanted to get married! Perhaps Pen had been prophetic months before; on his parents’ eighth anniversary, grappling with the difference between anniversaries and birthdays, he asked Wilson, “Dear Lili, when is your wedding day.” Robert was usually opposed to mixed marriages, but in this case, he considered Ferdinando’s sympathies so wide that it was not an impediment. And Wilson had lived in Italy so long that she considered herself half Italian.

  These unions between Italians and foreigners might have gained a patriotic status as well. The American intellectual Margaret Fuller had come to Rome in 1848 from where she sent vivid dispatches of the early days of the Risorgimento to the New York Tribune. Her notices paralleled the events Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote about in Casa Guidi Windows and in many ways captured a similar point of view. Fuller was also preparing a history of the Revolution, which she considered her best work. Completely devoted to the cause of Italian unity, she fell in love with the younger Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli and had a child by him. Presumably they married, though there might have been obstacles to a legal ceremony. After the fall of the Roman Republic in 1849, Margaret Fuller moved to Florence with her family. Before her return to America with Ossoli and her child, on her last night in Florence in 1850, she had visited the Brownings and presented a Bible to Peni from her little son, inscribed prophetically, “In Memory of Angelo Eugene Ossoli.” Margaret Fuller had presentiments about the ocean voyage on the Elizabeth which she expressed to Elizabeth, who had lost her brother on a calm day at sea. The poet recounted to Arabel that Fuller turned “to me with that peculiar smile which lightened up her plain, thought-worn face, ‘I accept as a good omen that our ship should be called the Elizabeth.’ ”