Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  But even the friendship of the very wealthy could not stop the snow, and if there was unmelted snow on the mountains, they would not be able to make the trip. The Eckleys decided not to go to Rome either. They were stationed in Florence just waiting on the Brownings. Whatever the Brownings did, they would do.

  “Arabel!—since I began to write this letter it has begun to rain.”

  The Brownings and Eckleys left, along with two children, two teams of horses, drivers, and a pony.

  It wasn’t that Elizabeth and Robert did not see the particularities of the Eckleys quite clearly. “Such a woman & such a man are forever exceptions among men & women. I myself did not before I knew them, believe such things & such people could be,” Ba wrote to Arabel. David Eckley’s love of his wife moved him “as God’s love should move us all—Literally, what she loves he loves . . with a sort of child’s devotion—a desire to give away everything out of his pockets to prove what his feeling is—with tears in his eyes & a trembling in his voice—well it is strange.” Not only that, “he lays his head under our feet & begs us to walk over him. Not because she tells him to do it, observe, but because she feels so herself. It is strange.” Robert Browning was struck by the symbiotic nature of the Americans’ relationship, and by the way in which David didn’t have to wait to hear his wife’s wishes verbalized before he carried them out. The Brownings accepted his groveling largesse, and the two husbands continued a friendship that seemed based on long horseback rides together. On the trip to Rome the wives sat inside one of the carriages having their own conversation: “The spirits made signs several times to Sophie & me on the journey.”

  43 VIA BOCCA DI LEONE, ROME. A drawing found in the album in which Sophia Eckley kept EBB’s letters. The Brownings sublet this apartment in 1853 and 1858. During the 1858–59 season in Rome, the Brownings were in almost daily contact with Sophia and David Eckley.

  One wonders why they didn’t signal them to watch out for the road. The horses had a dangerous slip or two. But the great adventure was with the two oxen-team drivers “who came to take the two carriages up a mountain. The drivers began to fight, & one of them pulled out a knife & prepared to stab.” Robert Browning reacted quickly. The poet rushed in between the two angry men and prevented the stabbing, during which he was thrown down.

  “Oh, papa, papa!—come away, papa! Oh, the naughty man is killing papa.”

  His wife didn’t shriek the way her son did, “but did the next best & fainted—or all but fainted. It really was frightful.” There were bandits on the road as well, but, perhaps fortunately for them, they stayed clear of Robert Browning.

  The minute the Brownings got to Rome and settled at 43 Via Bocca di Leone, Robert went downstairs to the apartment of a dear friend from the time of his last stay in the Eternal City five years ago. William Page, the American Titian, had remarried. “The new wife said he was ill in bed—but as soon as he heard of Robert’s coming, he got up & dressed and came to throw himself in Robert’s arms.”

  Page’s third marriage was a stable one, though he was pained through his life by the newspaper notices of his moonfaced second wife, Sarah, who continued to use his name. After her young Italian lover left her, Sarah rejected her first idea of entering a nunnery and went on stage in America instead, taking the name Augusta Page. Later she married a notorious member of the Tweed ring, and when the ring was exposed in the press, she fled with her husband to Paris.

  Engaged by her new friendship with Sophie, Ba was well enough to give crowded teas: “People get warm (in other than a physical sense) by rubbing up against one another.” There were many friends in Rome: the Storys, the Pages, Harriet Hosmer, Charlotte Cushman, the Cartwrights, Odo Russell, Frederick Leighton, Lord Oswald. Not a few of them were spiritualists. But it was Sophie Eckley who added fresh confidence to Elizabeth’s belief in the spirits.

  By Christmas the daily contact with Sophie was evident in her greeting to her real sisters and brother Stormie, whom she kissed “through the air.” She told them: “Perhaps you may see my ‘nerve-spirit’ sitting at your Christmas dinner!—Yet dont, because you will see tears in the eyes of it, though a true loving smile on its lips.”

  Christmas gifts, receiving gifts in general, had become a problem. Nowadays when Sophie asked Ba if she liked something they’d seen together, she immediately said “no” to ward off receiving it. The ploy didn’t usually work; at times Pen got the gift. But Sophie wasn’t the only gift-bearer. At Christmas, Elizabeth was given some very expensive brooches, two of which were from people she didn’t love. The one from Sophie she accepted out of love and because of love, though it made her uneasy. She wrote to Sophie that her “beautiful cameo” was meant for Sophie’s “own marble throat.” The gift produced what is rare in the poet’s letters: unctuous prose. She fretted over the gifts. “Tell me Arabel, how is one to accept gifts from persons one doesn’t love, & how is one to refuse them to persons one would avoid quarreling with?” One of those that she apparently did not love was the wife of her husband’s best friend, William Wetmore Story. She returned the cameo she received from Emelyn, telling her she had just accepted an identical one.

  Sophie’s never-ending gift-giving was upsetting to Robert Browning. “Naughty dearest Sophie,” Ba responded to one unnamed but obviously lavish present.

  “Don’t take it. It’s too much,” Robert told her.

  “It’s too much, & I will,” answered Ba. The rationale was that “There is a name & a thought! you—” and that is not to be devalued. Still, “dear, dearest Sophie, let this be the very last thing of this kind that you overwhelm me with because you give me pain—” Yet there was a double message because, “No, I won’t say more—I love you, dear, dear, much, & I take it from you for love’s sake.”

  Browning watched the expensive love pour in.

  Throughout the long season in Rome, the spirits showed themselves through Sophie’s mediumship. On March 29, 1859, Ba assured her real sister, “I’m not ‘going mad’ Arabel oh no.… Intercourse with the unseen makes me calm & happy—full of hope & understanding of the two worlds.” The next six and a half lines might have exceeded Arabel’s limitations; they are heavily crossed out. Robert Browning couldn’t cross anything out. He saw his wife revive physically and mentally through her relationship with Sophie. He once had the power to bring his wife to the real rivers and mountains—to life. Now this beautiful and strange American woman, who both Brownings agreed was protected from life through the velvet trappings of wealth, was making his wife calm and happy, showing her a world that didn’t exist.

  Elizabeth’s morphine use may have increased during this time after her father’s death, adding to her calm, or else its effects were simply more noticeable. People talked about it, and it got into print on more than one occasion. Julia Ward Howe was one American woman not charmed by the Brownings. She felt the couple had slighted her when she was in Italy, and she consoled herself in her 1857 volume of poetry, Words for the Hour. These words could be sung to the music of her most famous work, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

  I hear you do not praise me, Barrett Browning, God inspired

  Nor you Robert with your manhood and your angels interlyred.

  Revenge was hers in another poem in the volume, “One Word More with E.B.B.” The nasty poem included stanzas which told the reader that Julia Ward Howe would say no to drugs, even if drugs brought with them poetic heights.

  I shrink before the nameless draught

  That helps to such unearthly things,

  And if a drug could lift so high,

  I would not trust its treacherous wings;

  Lest, leaping from them, I should fall,

  A weight more dead than stock or stone,—

  The warning fate of those who fly

  With pinions other than their own.

  Robert was outraged. In Rome he made a special trip to see Howe’s sister, the wife of the sculptor Thomas Crawford and mother of the novelist Marion Crawford—�
�to show her how much I despised her sister.” Then and through the rest of his life, he would never suffer in silence even the slightest disparaging of his wife’s name.

  Elizabeth was much more tranquil. The allusion was to a “ ‘nameless drug’ dear, & not morphine,” she wrote to Sophie. With an understanding of the reading public’s love of symbolism, the poet thought the literal meaning might not be understood. But even if it were, she was “not a bit” angry. Why should she be? It had been “perfectly true, so far, that life is necessary to writing, & that I should not be alive except by help of my morphine.” In the same letter she told her friend, “I have had too many poison arrows in me to care for a harmless word like this. I am not like YOU, Sophie . . used to walk on velvet & breathe only the breath of such roses . . as you send me, dearest, kindest friend. How beautiful.” Perhaps her morphine opened her even more to Sophie.

  If all Robert Browning could do was watch, watch he did. Two years after his wife’s death, he wrote to the Storys that he had always known Sophie to be a liar. So this new lie of hers, that her husband had been unfaithful, “does not astonish me one whit nor in the least degree add to my acquaintance with that very peculiar mind which I had reasons of my own for thoroughly studying long ago: I dare affirm that I know that character in enough of its ins and outs, turns & twists,—and you, of course, remember that I did know it of old—those who did not, have all this novelty to learn & admire.”

  By April 30, 1859, Sophie was hearing loud voices. They followed her to church. She and Ba did automatic writings together, meaning that the spirits wrote through them, directing their hands. They also attempted communication through mental telepathy when they were apart. In their private séances together, Ba never heard voices herself. Her friend was the stronger medium. Yet as strong a medium as she was, the beautiful Sophie “is very shy & timid of being associated with these phenomena—,” Ba explained to her disbelieving sister in London. “Not like me, Arabel, who have none of that sort of shame about me. If it’s truth at all, it’s God’s truth—& why should a man or a woman be ashamed of it?” A good question. Robert Browning most likely pointed out to his wife: If it’s truth at all, why should Sophie Eckley be ashamed?

  But she and Sophie knew that a new world order was on the way. Love was once more pulling her by the hair; this time it was not only telling her she was alive, it was telling her she was right.

  Although the two women at times communicated “through the air,” they corresponded by letter as well. When Sophie asked the poet if she would be able to forgive her if she did something wicked, Elizabeth answered that the possibility of her wickedness was beyond belief. In Rome, when she was confined because Pen was unwell, she asked, “Have you had any sign from the spirits? You do not say. You are afraid of naming them to such a traitor as you have found in me. Is it so?” Perhaps Elizabeth had talked to others of Sophie’s powers despite her friend’s shyness. She certainly wrote to her sister and talked with her husband. The next day, Pen was better. “Dear you interest me very much,” the poet wrote, encouraging her shy friend, “Tell me more, more, as you know it, for there is nothing to me of such grand & at the same time, intimate significance, as this subject.” She might as well have written, just pour it on, give me exactly what is needed.

  Browning knew that his wife’s nature was such that she found it impossible to believe that the people she loved could possibly lie. But he also knew she helped inspire, was complicit, in Sophie Eckley’s deception. His wife, the testa lunga, had made up her mind.

  Elizabeth’s spiritual activities with Sophie did not exclude Christian worship with Robert, though one doubts it reassured her youngest sister concerning her sanity. “And when spring approached I was wicked enough to go with Robert (you now prepare to excommunicate me Arabel!) to the catholic services & no where else! I cant bear the fatigue of a succession of services on sunday, & I did prefer St Peter’s & the like & have enjoyed few modes of worship so much as the gathering together in the solemn twilight of the aisles, with the sublime music floating upwards with my prayers. In fact Arabel, both I and Robert liked it extremely.” Her son “went with us sometimes,” but by now he was old enough to attend the English church always. “A child requires something less vague than his own thoughts.”

  While Elizabeth and her soul sister consulted the spirits, Robert and David Eckley met every morning before dawn, at a quarter after six, and rode. Robert wrote to Isa Blagden, who was then in Spain, that “we go all about Rome, up & down, in & out, the worst & best of it, so that I can see it thoroughly on the outside & like it so much—so much more than last time.” The future author of that great Roman murder story The Ring and the Book was pursuing both halves of his Rome. Also, twice a week he would draw at the home of the painter Emma Landseer McKenzie. And at night he went into society. “I am far better & stronger than last year—tho’ sufficiently bothered by a cold I caught at the theatre the other evening—which is getting better.”

  If Robert had a spiritual sister, it was Isa Blagden. Blagden did not get along with Sophie. This good friend was the kind of person who was usually a welcoming hostess with a sympathetic ear. A small woman in her forties at the time, dark, lively, and of Indian and English blood, she was one of those expatriates who had learned to live creatively on little money. As “our lady of Bellosguardo,” she did this above Florence in the fourteen rooms of Villa Brichieri, employing two servants and keeping a carriage. A minor novelist and poet, she often shared expenses with another woman, and in her novel Agnes Tremorne she had written of the single life, “I think few writers lay sufficient stress on the large space which a true friendship … holds in the lives of two single women, and what exquisite enjoyments are derived from it. In the personal intimacy which exists in such a relation, there is entire comprehension and knowledge of each other. This is seldom attained, even in the holiest and truest marriage.”

  THE TERRACE AT BELLOSGUARDO. Isa Blagden’s villa was situated in the hills of Bellosguardo, from which one had not only a “beautiful view” but reprieve from the heat of the plain of the Florentine summer.

  It was a view with which Elizabeth might have agreed when she had urged Arabel to set up housekeeping with a like-minded single friend of hers as a rewarding alternative to keeping the young Emma: “It has seemed to me sometimes that you and Miss [Rafael?] might have agreed to live together—you agree in so much—& what you want in certain respects, she has—so that I should have been glad rather—only one person cant arrange for another.”

  The Brownings’ friends included many independent women. It may not have been a simpler age, but love was certainly less differentiated before Freud. Children were sexless, and the most lavish endearments in correspondence and person were often considered the call of the soul. While we are literally compelled by our textbooks to raise an eyebrow and clear our throats, the Victorians went on enjoying their freedom.

  Robert’s friendship with Isa Blagden seemed to have had some of the quality of his friendship with Anna Jameson, except that Isa and Robert were about the same age. In their friendship and correspondence there was a pattern that would run through the poet’s later life. He was to have many interesting women friends to whom he was attached in deep sympathy, mutual interest, and affection. He would have many women friends—and one wife.

  In the last years of her marriage, Elizabeth supposed that after her death her husband, being a man, might be capable of some “feeble bigamy.” Feeble she knew it would be. And bigamy? For both Brownings, yes. Whether one locates it in their Christian faith, their love of Dante, or their reading of Swedenborg’s Conjugal Love, they had faith that they would meet again in the afterlife. They believed their marriage was eternal. After Elizabeth’s death, Browning would put this quote from Dante’s La Vita Nuova in her Bible: “I believe and I declare—Certain am I—from this life I pass into a better, there where that lady lives of whom enamored was my soul.”

  His wife turned out to be as prescient
as she could be on the question of his feeble bigamy. As a widower he once thought of a second marriage, to Lady Ashburton, who seems to have proposed it. He emphatically assured Lady Ashburton that his heart lay buried in Florence and such a marriage would be for his son. In so doing he took a lifelong enemy rather than a bride.

  Many have commented, including his wife, on how handsome and well Browning appeared in the last years of his marriage. And in Rome he took diplomatic and aristocratic and intellectual society by storm. Everyone did then and always would love an evening with Robert Browning. Some later critics have suggested that perhaps a man in his prime, married to a woman six years his senior who was becoming increasingly reclusive, might have had a roving eye.… Well, that was just not to measure the extraordinary inner nature of Robert Browning. It was simply viewing a marriage from this side of the moon. On the underside was what Browning would one day call a familiar blot on his picture of the past—that thorny white rose, Sophia Eckley. Between 1857 and 1859 it wasn’t Robert, it was Elizabeth Barrett Browning who played with fire.

  Isa Blagden no more than Robert could convince Ba to be wary of Sophie. Instead, Ba tried to convince Isa of Sophie’s worth. Sophie wasn’t haughty, as Isa thought, but “shy, & hates strangers & mixed society.” She never called on anyone first, but she had called on Isa. Sophie “thinks you passed her once or twice in the street—she knows you were as cold as ice to her at Casa Guidi—and after all she writes, wishes to be on cordial terms with you. She told me so! & bade me to tell you. She is a very peculiar person, impressionable & susceptible to the last degree—but of a pure, sweet, & noble nature, which you would comprehend if you came near enough.”