Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also!

  Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things.

  “Poor the speech” of this man who can only make men and women speak. It was she, E.B.B., their love, their marriage, her noble art that spoke for the best in him. In this dedication, he saw her as he had always seen her, as an exalted person and great artist. Finally, there’s “one word more” in “One Word More.”

  Every creature on earth is given by God “two soul-sides,” one to show the world and one to show the woman he loves. He exposed that unseen side as the poem concluded. She was his “moon of poets.” There was the visible side of the moon: “Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you!” On that side, Browning stands with the adoring public “and praise you / Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.”

  But the best is when I glide from out them,

  Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,

  Come out on the other side, the novel

  Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,

  Where I hush and bless myself with silence.

  “One Word More” was finally a love poem. And that love glided past Daniel D. Home, money matters, and words to the other side of the moon.

  There were many reasons for Robert Browning’s expectations about Men and Women. From the crème de la crème of British literary society, from Rossetti to Carlyle to Tennyson to Ruskin to Jameson to Barrett Browning, great things were expected from Robert Browning. Not to mention that his old friend Domett had named a street for him in New Zealand, as well as one for Carlyle and Dickens, long before Browning was as popular as the other two writers.

  Later critics would concur that “Browning had reason for his early confidence, for he had produced his finest collection of poems thus far.” And all the commercial signs had been good. The trade had subscribed heavily, which meant the bookshops had ordered the volumes. The first edition was almost immediately sold out. The Americans wanted reprint rights, which also meant they might pay and might not pirate the edition. Browning’s confidence was buoyed.

  But beyond the public side of the moon, there were the dreams that went back to the magical days of the courtship. These dreams had become so imbued in the texture of the couple’s married lives as to have taken on the guise of fact. Robert Browning had completed the dramatic monologues that would be clearer than his earlier work and that would win him fame and, with it, God willing, royalties enough to make him at least co-supporter of his family. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had helped him to clarify his artistic intentions and had led him beyond concerns of money and material well-being toward the creation of the poems themselves.

  On November 17, 1855, the prestigious Athenaeum reviewed Men and Women: “These volumes contain some fifty poems, which will make the least imaginative man think, and the least thoughtful man grieve. Who will not grieve over energy wasted and power misspent,—over fancies chaste and noble, so overhung by the ‘seven veils’ of obscurity, that we can oftentimes be only sure that fancies exist?”

  An unremembered critic’s two sentences as opposed to a great poet’s greatest ten years of work? No contest. Browning’s hopes were dashed on publication day. Men and Women, in print and studied today, was out of print in about a month, after selling a first edition of fewer than two hundred copies.

  The Brownings were in Paris at the time; the magnitude of the defeat of Robert’s expectations was gleaned gradually. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was hard at work on Aurora Leigh. “Oh, I am so anxious to make it good,” she wrote to Anna Jameson. “I have put much of myself in it—I mean to say, of my soul, my thoughts, emotions, opinions; in other respects, there is not a personal line, of course.” Of course. “It’s a sort of poetic art-novel.” That was the end of February. On May 2, 1856, she wrote to her dear Madonna that Robert was encouraging her, though he had seen only six out of eight books. To the early advocate of women’s rights, she went on, “Oh, I do hope you won’t be disappointed with it—much! Some things you will like certainly, because of the boldness and veracity of them.…” Even after she had developed her “plan” she was true to her early “intention” of holding the mirror up to conventional life. This was to be the best of her life’s work. She had helped her husband at the point where she could, going through his proofs; she had borne the season in London, that city that she dreaded; now her focus was on the completion of the ever-flowering Aurora Leigh.

  Despite ill health it was a period of intense work and creativity—for her. The Brownings shared a publisher, Edward Chapman. From Paris, Robert wrote to him about Men and Women, asking Chapman about money matters and “if the book continued to do well.” He had seen notices of his book and on December 17 wrote, “Meanwhile don’t take to heart the zoological utterances I have stopped my ears against at Galignani’s of late. ‘Whoo-oo-oo-oo’ mouths the big monkey—‘Whee-ee-ee-ee’ squeaks the little monkey.” The critics aped each other. He looked forward to the French review by his dear friend Joseph Milsand in January. A French review? Chapman must have thought that too late and in the wrong language.

  ANNA JAMESON by John Gibson. In the last five years of her life (1855–60), the prolific writer was often in Italy, where she was a respected member of the British and American expatriate community. Her husband, from whom she was estranged, had died in 1854, leaving his property to another woman. Jameson’s friends took up a subscription that guaranteed her an annuity of £100.

  Browning celebrated the new year of 1856 by writing to Chapman, “Now do, do pray dear Chapman, let us have the Christmas account to put a little life and heart into the end of this bleak month.” What a bleak month it had been for Men and Women: “I have read heaps of critiques at Galignani’s, mostly stupid and spiteful, self-contradicting and contradictory of each other.” Would it hurt sales? “You must tell me,” he wrote to Chapman, “if I am ever to know.” And like publishers before and after him, Chapman kept quiet. On April 12, 1856, Browning ended a letter plaintively, “Goodbye, my dear Chapman, I don’t tell you much but you tell me nothing at all.”

  And on April 21 there was a transformation in Robert Browning’s substance and style in dealing with Chapman. “We are very glad that another edition of E.B.B.’s Poems is wanted, and have turned over the various matters in our minds which you desire us to consider.” He threw himself into the arrangements for the publication of his wife’s past poems and for Aurora Leigh, using the first person plural as have husbands before and after him who’ve become business managers for their artist wives. “As to my own Poems—they must be left to Providence.”

  After the failure of Men and Women, Browning went back to his most obscure poem—one published fifteen years earlier, before he knew his wife—Sordello, which he attempted to revise. That was in late February. By April he had taken up drawing. His wife equated it with her novel reading: “He can’t rest from serious work in light literature, as I can; it wearies him, and there are hours on his hands, which is bad both for them and for him. The secret of life is in full occupation, isn’t it? This world is not tenable on other terms. So while I lie on the sofa and rest in a novel, Robert has a resource in his drawing; and really, with all his feeling and knowledge of art, some of the mechanical trick of it can’t be out of place.” When Browning returned to Italy, the hours still weighed heavily. He continued working from the nude in life-drawing sessions in Florence, and later sculpted with W. W. Story when they were together in Rome.

  In those letters to Chapman, Browning’s snapping tone at the stupidity of the critics became raw and uncomfortable, self-conscious and grating—as if something unexpressed were gnawing at his innards. A dream from the courtship was over. The future had not been won by present work. Throughout the fifteen years of his marriage, Browning would remain the obscure poet. There would be something in the savage-conciliatory tone of “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium,’ ” his satire of Daniel D. Home, that would suggest it was begun in this period. Yet his next volume of poetry w
ould not appear until 1864, three years after his wife’s death.

  A dream was over for Elizabeth Barrett Browning as well, though she couldn’t have realized it until they were back in Italy. She loved for love’s sake, as she wrote in the sonnets. She had also married a poet king, her superior, Robert Browning double underscore. But the pomegranate poet had lost heart.

  ARABEL AND THE “UNTLES”

  IN LATE JUNE 1856, when the Brownings returned to London from Paris, the situation of the previous summer was simply reversed. Elizabeth was completing and transcribing Aurora Leigh and Robert was supervising the proofs. The London visit was much more comfortable this second summer, thanks to John Kenyon. The Brownings were staying at 39 Devonshire Place, the home of their cousin and supporter, while he was on the Isle of Wight. Kenyon was an old man by then, and his health was failing. The previous year the Brownings had stayed a few extra days in London to visit with him. This year they would travel to see him for the last time.

  Moulton Barrett was still intractable. His oldest child continued to visit Wimpole Street on the sly. In July, a defiant Elizabeth jotted Henrietta a note from “Wimpole Street, sitting at Arabel’s table while she goes down to see Trippy in the dining room, I take her pen, and ask you to keep me company.” The note cuts off when “Arabel shrieks out I shall be too late.” But Papa didn’t come home in the middle of this brazen act of rebellion. When he heard that the Brownings were back in London staying at John Kenyon’s, he sent Arabel and the family to Ventnor—on the other end of the Isle of Wight—on a moment’s notice. During her secret visit to London the previous year, Arabel may not have seen her anxious brother-in-law at his best, but she was learning to sympathize—more than Ba could understand at the time—with caution, not only on the matter of spiritualism but on money matters as well. Arabel had wanted to defy her father the previous summer. Now she wanted to again but didn’t. Instead, she appealed directly to the frugal Robert Browning to bring his family to her in exile. Elizabeth wrote: “We came off from London at a day’s notice, the Wimpole Street people being sent away abruptly (in consequence, plainly, of our arrival becoming known), and Arabel bringing her praying eyes to bear on Robert, who agreed to go with her and stay for a fortnight.”

  The way his grandfather Barrett whisked his aunt and uncles from his mother now captured Peni’s attention: “It has naturally begun to dawn upon my child that I have done something very wicked to make my father what he is. Once he came up to me earnestly and said, ‘Mama, if you’ve been very, very naughty—if you’ve broken china!’ (his idea of the heinous in crime)—‘I advise you to go into the room and say, “Papa, I’ll be dood.” ’ Almost I obeyed the inspiration—almost I felt inclined to go.”

  At Ventnor, “Poor Arabel is in low spirits—very—and aggrieved with being sent away from town,” Ba wrote to Julia Martin. She shrugged off Arabel’s grief at being exiled, and told her old friend, as well as her sister, that the air would do her good. Not only that, “happiness is more an intellectual habit than the product of circumstances,” she lectured Arabel. By October she did admit to a physical liability of Ventnor to “dearest, darling” Arabel. “Do you know, it does seem to me that sea air always makes your legs swell.”

  Arabel had not been well the last winter and worked much too hard “in London with schools and Refuges, and societies.” Elizabeth disapproved of all of this social work. Her sister “does the work of a horse, and isn’t a horse.” One wonders if Aurora Leigh’s harsh opinions about those who sacrifice themselves for the poor owe their roots to Arabel’s dogged work for others. Arabel needed, her oldest sister prescribed, “a new moral atmosphere—a little society. She is thrown too entirely on her own resources, and her own resources are of somewhat gloomy character. This is all wrong.”

  A few months earlier, on July 4, 1856, Arabel Barrett Moulton Barrett had her forty-third birthday. A good time to take a tally. She was the sister of a famous poet, the youngest daughter in a large family, and the one daughter who had stayed home. She may have had a romance at Torquay, but after that tragic season she had slept on the sofa in her sister’s room during all the years Ba was an invalid on Wimpole Street. She had done her duty to her siblings and to her father. Now she was a middle-aged woman. This was the second summer in which she was ordered to leave town by her father. Commanded to leave her charities, her chapel, her visiting relatives from Italy, her city; to leave her life. On both occasions she had said she wouldn’t obey but she had. By obeying, she was learning something new and frightening about her situation.

  ARABEL BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT (1813–68). The youngest sister of the poet, who slept in her room on Wimpole Street and who was Elizabeth’s closest confidant after her marriage. “My comforter, Arabel, you always were,” EBB wrote to her sister after the death of their father.

  When Ba and, after her, Henrietta disobeyed Moulton Barrett, they left the house on the arm of a husband and the promise of a new life. Both now had households and children of their own. She missed the company of those sisters. What would happen to Arabel if she disobeyed her father—not about marriage, but about where she spent the summer? She had done nothing to offend her father, but as the years passed her freedom had become more and more dependent on him. Perhaps it took her being forced to abandon town to make her realize how tenuous her situation in life really was. At Ventnor, Arabel told Ba she realized that she could be kicked out of the house at Wimpole Street at any moment, on the slightest provocation. That winter in London, perhaps while tending her father, who had not been well, she began to think of what she would do. She could become a companion, she told the poet. She was artistically inclined. She wondered if she could “apply herself among the wood-engravers.” She was actively preparing herself for the eventuality of being disinherited.

  No wonder she did not go to Paris when the Brownings were there, even though her own father had suggested it. On October 31, 1855, Elizabeth wrote to Arabel, “If Papa had not himself proposed the going to Paris, it would have been altogether different—but, as it is, he is just as likely to be displeased with you for seeming to care nothing about profiting by his suggestion, as not—very likely indeed to say, ‘They never accept my suggestions.’ ” But that suggestion of the father’s could very well have been a trap. Go to Paris. See your sister. Do as you like. Isn’t that what he had told Elizabeth years earlier when she applied to go to Pisa for her health? And she hadn’t gone. She had known better.

  Arabel was confronting the bleak possibility of being disinherited on a whim (or on the slightest provocation). Her brothers wouldn’t be able to help her without being disinherited themselves, and her sisters had family and money problems of their own. She was also, culturally, a sophisticated Londoner; that was her city, and she had no inclination to go to warring Tuscany or papist Rome, even though Ba wanted her to visit them in Italy. Ba’s suggestions to Arabel might have been heartfelt—don’t work so hard, go to a séance, visit us in Paris, come to Florence—but the encouragement was not for Arabel to be Arabel, but for Arabel to change, to live more like Ba. No wonder Arabel looked “dull” and sad at Ventnor. It was one thing to need a vacation, another to be commanded to go away. The legitimate great-granddaughter of Edward of Cinnamon Hill was not that far from the destitute girls she helped at the Ragged Schools. She might be a charitable and well-to-do spinster who had never earned a wage in her life, but at any moment she could be forced out into the streets.

  Perhaps Robert understood her anxieties more than her sister did. Her father was banishing her from the people she loved, and she could not stop him. It was Robert Browning she applied to, whom she prayed to, tears in her eyes. She didn’t want to go into this exile from the people she loved. It was he who immediately responded. Perhaps not all Barretts could afford to be as reckless in spirit as Elizabeth earlier assumed Arabel to be. Perhaps the interest on the four thousand left by one’s grandmother and the four thousand left by one’s uncle had to be added to the credits colum
n in order to balance the books. Arabel Barrett Moulton Barrett was one of the many unsung sisters of the nineteenth century. Her situation was not as dramatic as that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Henrietta Barrett Cook, both of whom left 50 Wimpole Street. But what this sister faced offered good reasons for a mid-age crisis. Her brothers had vocations, her sisters had husbands, and her father had complete control over her economic fate.

  Later that summer, Arabel didn’t dare to meet the Brownings at Taunton when they visited Henrietta and her family, “because she knew that if her father should come and find her absent he would never forgive her.” In September, from John Kenyon’s house on the northern end of the Isle of Wight, Elizabeth wrote to Henrietta about the planned trip: “Arabel and I talking of this, she said and swore she would go, too, if she could, without fear of an arrival from London. I have written to tell her when we go—and perhaps, perhaps—But no, I don’t dare to think of it. Robert says it’s very wrong of me even to wish for it. But I’m wrong obstinately. I’m wicked—I do wish it—Only I don’t hope much. I left her in bad spirits, distressed and angry at being sent to Ventnor, and determined to dislike it accordingly.”

  While the father had stayed in London, the Barrett siblings had had a wonderful time. Arabel and Ba, George and Henry and Occy. “What a very happy fortnight we had together! And how good they all were to me & mine! and how I never never shall forget it!… I feel as if I had been home again, the first time for ten years. How I love you all!” Home was still what it had always been for the brothers and sisters: a good time behind the father’s back.

  Elizabeth’s sisters had supported her marriage, and now the brothers, too, seemed reconciled. They certainly didn’t turn away from their elflike nephew any more than had Alfred, who had feted him at Marseilles. They had their work cut out for them. His rebellious uncles at Ventnor gave the seven-year-old Pen a British education: “Also, little Pen made his way into the heart of ‘mine untles,’ and was carried on their backs up and down hills, and taught the ways of ‘English boys,’ with so much success that he makes pretensions to ‘pluck,’ and has left a good reputation behind him.”