Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  Although the twenty-year-old acted like a child and proclaimed his lack of manly strength, he was taller than the poet and half his age. Browning’s rage surprised the medium. When Home raised his hand to shake Browning’s, the poet refused. Browning told him that if he didn’t leave immediately, he’d throw him down the stairs.

  Home left immediately, but he didn’t hold a grudge (not Mr. Sludge). He couldn’t understand it, he’d tell all of London. He liked Robert Browning so much; he wanted to be the poet’s friend.

  The couple could not have picked a more public altercation. Back in London less than a month, Robert Browning had thrown D. D. Home out of his house to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s consternation. This gossip of the day probably changed emphasis in time, just as the spiritual hand that crowned Elizabeth at the séance became identified as Dante’s. “It is really a pity to contradict the story about Dante’s hands,” she wrote to Anna Jameson. “I should have been enchanted to have had such a coronation.” What about that wreath, that thorny memory? Why, Ba brought it back to Florence and kept it in her bedroom in the Casa Guidi as it dried and got dusty. It took Browning two more years before he threw it out the window. And one can imagine the issue the couple were discussing in private, when the desiccated garland hit the cobblestone street.

  But the issue itself was not cut-and-dry. At the time it was not spiritualism Browning was disavowing as much as Home. Why, even Elizabeth Kinney, who shared Browning’s disbelief, would go to a séance of Home’s when he arrived in Florence a few months later. When she saw “accordions fly through the air, playing as they went,” she became, temporarily, an ardent believer. Browning would not discredit her experiences. They simply weren’t his. His rage was not at belief. He had missed his opportunity to expose Home, to reach out and feel those spiritual hands—to grab them, to see if they were indeed on a string or on a person. Show his wife the truth. But that reach had exceeded his grasp. No wonder he was so enraged after the séance with Home. For the first time in their married life, Robert found himself alone.

  But any thought that Robert would be an average husband, or a tyrannical one who forbade his wife, was ill founded. By October 31, 1855, the Brownings were back in Paris expecting a visit from the famous novelist Bulwer-Lytton, now Sir Edward, and his son the poet Robert Lytton (pen name “Owen Meredith”) when who should appear, “judge of my consternation … Mr Jarves himself!” The room “seemed to swim with Hades let loose.” Rather than threatening to throw this bedfellow of Home down the stairs, “Robert met him & he Robert in as friendly a manner . . as if there was no spiritual world.” Of course there was no talk of the spiritual world as they chattered about “Florence friends.” When the Bulwer-Lyttons arrived, Ba made tea and then had a chance to talk with Jarves on the side. He said something softly to her, to which she replied, “Oh, I don’t dare to ask you.”

  Jarves looked over toward Robert “with a half smile, gently, not in vexation, . . & then said . . ‘I know—And I have so much to tell you, so much, so much.’ ”

  In a whisper he told her he could now see the spirits as plainly as he saw her. They woke him up at night sometimes, and he could hear the spirit voices. “It seems to be a mediumship of a high order.” But before Mr. Jarves could tell her all, Robert called her to the general conversation, and Jarves left. To Arabel she commented, “When you say I am not submissive as a wife I am sure I don’t know what you mean—it seems to me I deserve the gold medal for passive perfection . . except in thought & conscience . . which cant be made passive if one happens to have any.”

  The dutiful wife was then startled when Robert whispered to her across the tea table, “ ‘Speak of the spirits.’

  “ ‘No,’ said I . . I don’t like to do that.’ ”

  She realized that Sir Edward had heard of “the whole explosion in London in all its details.” So she didn’t speak because “I did not choose that he should suppose me capable of the indelicacy of throwing the conflicted subject in the face of my husband before people, without his special permission . . and Robert’s whisper had been inaudible to Sir Edward.” She went off to talk with the younger Lytton when they both realized that father and husband were “in the thick of the spirit-controversy.

  “ ‘Oh’, said Lytton to me . . ‘I do wish they would talk of something else.’ (He was so afraid of a quarrel.) Not a bit of it.”

  In fact, “Robert recounted his observations . . how he wasn’t permitted to touch the ‘hands,’ how he thought they were operated by strings …”

  Bulwer-Lytton then replied. He was a handsome, young-looking man, with “a quantity of light curly hair (not a touch of grey) and moustaches.” He spoke with “a slight excess of emphasis . . but full of information & fluent & even brilliant in expression.”

  “ ‘The first time I held a hand I believed it was Home’s own—& I thought within myself . . “Now, shall I expose this young man.” Then I considered—He is young, he doesn’t do the thing for money . . I will rather take him apart presently & speak quietly to him on this ill-proceeding. In a moment, however, the indignation overcame me, & I said aloud, “Mr Hume, that was your hand!” He rose up from the table exclaiming against the wrong I did him by such a suspicion. He went to the window & shed tears hysterically & I followed him & soothed him,—begged him to come back & to allow me to satisfy my natural doubts by holding his hands in mine. He said he would do anything I chose. He came back. I held his two hands in mine—& the three spirit hands proved themselves to me that they were not his. One great hand, rough like a mariner’s—one soft smooth delicate woman’s hand, of which I felt the veins and the polished nails—and one child’s hand that played with mine, was caught & let go. There was no child in the room. I cannot believe there was a trick at all.’

  “Robert listened to it all.”

  In a much lower voice his son told Ba what he had heard about Home in Florence. Home was staying with the Trollopes, and “Mrs. Trollope says she has seen him lifted into the air & whirled round the room, with her own eyes.” Nothing unusual. “The manifestations in America are said to be more & more wonderful.”

  Robert Lytton was wise to whisper. Imagine Robert Browning being told Home was whirling in the air around the Trollopes’ villa. Levitating or in a circle, in his long career Home was never found out. In the twentieth century it was Harry Houdini who attempted to debunk him. Houdini constantly sought to make spiritual contact with his mother, who had been the most important person in his life. He argued with the arch-spiritualist Conan Doyle about Home, and wrote an exposé as well. It was Houdini’s contention that Home was no medium but a master magician, like Houdini himself.

  In his blood Browning knew Home for a trickster—one who stayed among the rich by offering them the rappings of their dead young sons. Some say it was because Home always performed within a family circle of believers that outsiders had trouble catching him or were too polite (as Browning thought he had been) to try. Years later, Maggie Fox would confess that she and her sister had begun the whole phenomenon of spiritual rapping as youngsters in Arcadia, New York, through their ability to make raps with their feet. But by then she was out of luck and an alcoholic, and later recanted her recant.

  Browning despised Home, but in 1855 he was open to spiritualism. When the Lyttons said they were going to a French medium the next day, turning to Robert, Sir Edward asked, “ ‘would you like to go?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ said Robert in a moment. ‘And would you?’ ” he asked Ba.

  “I looked at my liege lord & was permitted to say my natural ‘yes.’ ”

  The French girl turned out to be a weak medium.

  After that séance, Robert said to his wife, “You see I am not ashamed of acting against my own resolutions.”

  She was able to answer truly “that it was one of the noblest things in him, not to be tenacious in either wrong-saying or wrong-doing. And so we were the best of friends in the world with regard to spiritual matters.”

  Sti
ll, “At the same time, at the same time, Arabel, I shall never mouth the subject, unless it is first mouthed.” Nor make mention of Home in letters: “He will be convinced one day, this Robert of mine, . . but it wont be by me, or by my means.”

  Many of the intellectuals, artists, and liege lords of the day whom the Brownings knew were fascinated by and believed in the spirits. Harriet Beecher Stowe was an example at the head of Ba’s list of believers who had logical minds. Yet those closest to Ba didn’t believe: her husband, her sister Arabel, her brother George. Henrietta’s disbelief wasn’t given equal intellectual weight. They were wrong and Ba was right, and the wonders of spiritualism produced letter after letter.

  While the Brownings were in London Arabel was whisked away by her father to vacation at Eastbourne. “How I miss you dear, dearest Arabel!” the poet wrote on the flap of the envelope on October 2, 1855. “I shall always think tenderly of the risk you ran for me, in coming to London.” She would have spared Arabel, gone to her instead with Pen, but she didn’t want to leave Robert in the midst of his proofs “when I can really be of use to him.”

  That summer Moulton Barrett saw his grandchild for the first and only time. It was one of the occasions when Pen was at Wimpole Street visiting his aunt Arabel and uncle George. “George was playing in the hall with him and he was in fits of laughter. Papa came out of the diningroom and stood looking for two or three minutes.” Then Moulton Barrett asked George, “ ‘Whose child is that?’

  “ ‘Ba’s child.’

  “ ‘What is the child doing here?’

  “Not a word more—not a natural movement or quickening of the breath.”

  ALFRED TENNYSON READING MAUD. Black ink and sepia wash by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, September 1855. Rossetti was one of the guests of the Brownings in London who heard Tennyson read Maud and RB read “Fra Lippo Lippi.” Sarianna Browning noticed Rossetti sketching as Tennyson read. The sketch later hung left of the fireplace in the Brownings’ salon at the Casa Guidi.

  Arabel, upset at her father, had sworn she would not leave town while her sister was there. But she did succumb, her rebellion manifest in a secret trip to London. There was a reason beyond proofs why the Brownings wouldn’t visit her at Eastbourne: “As to Robert, you must learn that he sees snakes and crocodiles in Thames water without the microscope—he sees in every drop of good every possibility of evil—and as to money-matters, the idea of being in a difficulty is absolutely horrible to him.” Speaking Barrett to Barrett, Elizabeth asked her sister to indulge her husband in his avoidance of the expense of traveling. “It’s horribly difficult (as I know) for rash people like you & me to sympathize with cautious people like him—cautious as to spending money at least—”

  When Arabel did visit, she walked in on an uneasy household. John Kenyon had once more forgotten the half payment on the hundred pounds he had sent the poets each year since the birth of Pen. The scene with Home was still in the air, and Ba herself was unhappy in London now that dear Arabel was banished. Moreover, Pen was sleeping with his mother and given to wild fits of extreme temper, understandable given his separation from Wilson’s constant scrutiny and focused concern. The poets were not only working over the proofs of Men and Women but at the same time attempting to keep social obligations with all of London who wished to see them. Sociability was a particularly good idea, given their long exile and the imminent publication of Robert Browning’s first new collection of poetry in ten years. Still, Arabel also walked in on a very special literary evening when Tennyson read Maud aloud and Browning read “Fra Lippo Lippi.”

  Good aunt as well as good sister (and rebellious daughter manquée), Arabel brought Pen back to Eastbourne with her, allowing the Brownings to concentrate on the proofs: “Robert misses Peni almost as much, I think, as I do. It’s the bird of the house, fled.” Though Pen ruffled his feathers at times, he also enjoyed himself, requesting to stay a few days longer once perched. This time the radiant only child was the center of attention of his aunt and many unmarried uncles. The whole flock had been shooed from London while Grandpa Barrett stayed on at Wimpole Street, supervising yet another thorough cleaning.

  THE ALMOST

  MIRACULOUS YEAR

  WITH THE BIRD of the household on vacation, the Brownings could concentrate on Robert’s proofs—their only reason for remaining in London. They had high hopes for Men and Women, these two volumes of Browning’s new poetry. The intensity of their expectations had a history stemming back to their earliest love letters. Long before Ba met him in person, his future wife had begun to have a profound influence on Robert’s work. She wrote at the beginning of the correspondence, “Yet I believe that, whatever you may have done, you will do what is greater. It is my faith for you.” He too believed his best work was ahead of him, and agreed. She answered, “I really did understand of you before I was told, exactly what you told me. Yes—I did indeed. I felt sure that as a poet you fronted the future—& that your chief works, in your own apprehension, were to come.” Elizabeth was aware of her own sharpness of intuition, a certain psychic power. She spoke with authority on Browning’s future greatness and fame, and such prophecy inspired the younger poet—he was being appreciated as he appreciated himself in his deepest dreams.

  In Robert’s second letter to his future wife, he acknowledged her greatness. She was able to do what he could not. “You speak out, you,—I only make men & women speak.”

  But that was his greatness, she replied. “You have in your vision two worlds—or to use the language of the schools of the day, you are both subjective & objective in the habits of your mind. You can deal both with abstract thought & with human passion in the most passionate sense.” And then she urged him to change direction. Up until then his inclinations were those of a dramatist. His works were performed (if not always understood) in London. “A great dramatic power may develop itself otherwise than in the formal drama; & I have been guilty of wishing, before this hour … that you wd. give the public a poem unassociated … with the stage, for a trial on the popular heart.”

  ROBERT BROWNING, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1855. Browning sat for this portrait while he was in London preparing his masterpiece, Men and Women, to go to press. EBB wrote to Arabel, “I wanted Rossetti to exhibit it, but he wouldn’t, being resolved to save himself for the great portrait he means to have of us two together next year—As to me, I shall have no time for much sitting for pictures, therefore if he wants me, he must snatch me.”

  She had “a fancy that your great dramatic power would work more clearly & audibly in the less definite mould,” away from “the theatre which vulgarizes … the modern theatre in which we see no altar!” She believed his “monodrams” and what later generations would call his dramatic monologues were more appropriate to his vast talents. She suggested, often subtly, and confidently, that in these poems, not in his stage dramas, his greatness would be recognized. He seemed, as always, ready to profit by her wisdom. He never again wrote for the stage.

  Not only did she predict his direction but her own as well. She told him in that second letter that she was aspiring to “a monodram of my own,” but that “her chief intention just now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem—a poem … completely modern … running into the midst of our conventions, & rushing into drawingrooms & the like ‘where angels fear to tread’ … & speaking the truth as I conceive of it, out plainly.” She was waiting till she could make up the right story on which to base the work. Ten years later the poets were reading proofs of Browning’s two volumes of dramatic monologues. After these were sent to the printer, they would return to Paris and Barrett Browning would complete her novel in verse, Aurora Leigh. These works were milestones of their marriage as well as of the cultures they represented.

  Among the fifty poems in which Men and Women speak were many on which much of Browning’s contemporary reputation is based. They were all dedicated to his wife in a poem written in London on September 22, 1855, just as the proofreading was completed. The ti
tle of the poem of dedication came from the love letters, from the way the poets had in those days of discussing their love and what they were going to do about it, by insisting they weren’t going to discuss it, they were just going to say—

  One Word More

  To E.B.B.

  1855

  There they are, my fifty men and women

  Naming me the fifty poems finished!

  Take them, Love, the book and me together:

  Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

  Though many of the following eighteen stanzas may not ring as crystal clear on first reading as the poets had hoped, the passion Browning felt for his wife, and the exultation he felt at the completion of his master-work, were movingly evident.

  Love, you saw me gather men and women,

  Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,

  Enter each and all, and use their service,

  Speak from every mouth,—the speech, a poem.

  The speech, a poem, not a play, it might be emphasized.

  Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows,

  Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving:

  I am mine and yours—the rest be all men’s,

  Karshish, Cleon, Norbert and the fifty.

  “I am mine and yours.” Could a good marriage be described any more succinctly? Could the privacy of marriage be described any more succinctly? Now the subjective poet:

  Let me speak this once in my true person,

  Not as Lippo, Roland or Andrea,

  Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence:

  The sentence is a quatrain in which he tells Ba:

  Pray you, look on these my men and women,

  Take and keep my fifty poems finished;