Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  It would only be back in Florence, as the Eckleys prepared to leave for the summer season, that Elizabeth became cautious. She sent Sophie a gift and a note to read after the Eckleys left for the Baths of Lucca. Perhaps she’d paid some heed to her husband’s misgivings—or her own. The note was as chillingly prophetic as it was loving: The poet loved her spiritual sister enough to tell her “the simple truth—you have done too much for me, thought too much of me—I have had to be on my guard against your kindness, as I might be against other people’s malice.”

  The trip back to Florence at the end of May had been a particularly joyful one. Napoleon and his troops had arrived in Italy, the Grand Duke had once more fled, and it looked as if, with France’s help, Victor Emmanuel II, the House of Savoy, would rout Austria. Once more the Italians captured the rapture of 1848, but with hindsight. This was just as the Brownings’ friend Massimo d’Azeglio, the great Italian patriot and Piedmont’s minister to England, had prophesied when he visited them in Rome.

  As the Brownings entered Tuscany, the tricolored flag of Italy was once more being displayed. How exciting it was for Pen to see it: “Here’s a flag—& there & there!—dear papa, dear mama, do look.” When the Brownings neared Florence they saw the French troops encamped close by on the Cascine meadows. Robert and Pen took off their hats and yelled out “Viva” from their carriage. And when they entered their city, it was “winged” with the tricolor from every window. The bright colors, the festive mood, the songs, and the morale must have reminded the couple of the exhilaration they witnessed from their windows on their first anniversary. “This time we know our own minds,” Ba reported, echoing d’Azeglio, and “the feeling toward France & the Emperor is beautiful to see. It is an enthusiasm of gratitude.” The camaraderie was exhilarating; there were shouts and songs. The Italians called out “Viva la Francia” to the French troops, who returned it with the French chorus “Vive l’Italie.”

  Back in Florence, Elizabeth missed a visit with Sophie one day because she thought her friend would have arrived earlier if she were coming. As a result, Elizabeth joined her husband and son, and the three drove to the Cascine meadows to visit the French camp and gossip with the soldiers. The British poets and their child shook hands with the men. One soldier in “an effusion of tenderness turned and kissed Peni,” who thought it “so very kind.” It was like a kiss from Napoleon’s lips. Such was the camaraderie of those spring days.

  Barrett Browning wrote a poem of this time when beautiful, well-dressed Tuscan ladies went into the field to dance with the common French soldiers who were stationed there. She pictured the times as the times really were. Joy and hope seemed everywhere. Sadness seemed to have deserted the poet. She wrote on the eve of Italian unification that she had never been happier in her life. And from the Brownings’ terrace, the one they had paced at night at the beginning of their marriage, two flags were draped, the French and the Italian.

  The Brownings were united in their Italian patriotism. Robert even admitted that the British government as well as the Times had been up to no good. He subscribed what he could monthly and even got Pen to concentrate on his lessons by rewarding him with his own money to give to the cause of unification. But Robert had done more, as had his wife. They had put their money into Tuscan bonds when one had no idea of the political fate of Tuscany. One can almost hear poor Mr. Kenyon rapping. But where Robert’s heart lay his funds lay also. “We shall hold on,” wrote Elizabeth, the poet of the Italian Risorgimento, “& funds like peoples, will rise again.”

  IN JUNE the French and Italian troops routed the Austrians from Magenta. On June 27 Elizabeth wrote to Arabel, “The sort of excitement we live in here you can scarcely imagine to yourself. Other wars have to do with commerce & political theories—this has to do with life, love, national salvation. The people have tears in their eyes through profound feeling. The poorest & most ignorant study the maps & count the advances & retreats, as if each had a personal enemy at his shoulder.”

  The Brownings and Pen weren’t considered English at all, she was proud to tell her sister. That’s what “an intelligent Italian assured me the other day . . & I believe it to be perfectly true, for we have not lived here in a corner, on account of our poetry . . & besides I have heard of my rages this spring from more than one quarter. They let us through the custom house with scarcely a question.… A friend of ours (by the way) was considerably amused, on coming to Florence & enquiring about me at the door of Casa Guidi” to have the answer from Ferdinando, “ ‘Sta molto bene è contentisima’: as if the state of my health was mainly dependent on the state of war—!—So, as long as the Austrians keep away, you need not spend an anxious thought on us indeed.”

  There was truth to these lighthearted words. “I used to have literal physical palpitations over the newspapers—tears in my eyes, sobs in my throat.” For Elizabeth, “The war must end well.”

  Now in Florence as the war went well, Elizabeth’s anxiety turned into a new form of excitability and happiness, and the poet went full force from the sofa into society: “I never in my Florence life was so dissipated as just now—I feel stirred up to the dregs of me, & go here & there, to hear & talk & look into other people’s faces for sympathy. I cant rest, I am so excited.” Why shouldn’t she be excited? She instructed Arabel as to the meaning of the victory at Magenta: “What you should see in this . . the arm of God has been with us from the beginning, . . to make Austria mad, in order to destroy her life in Italy.”

  She even accompanied her husband to the theater and recorded that theaters in Florence were empty because of the preoccupation with the war. “I heard the great actor Salvini saying lately that the real tragedies had excluded the false ones.”

  By now the Brownings might have been considering their summer plans. But “I should have much disliked being away from Italy at this crisis, as a matter of feeling,” she wrote to Arabel. Furthermore, it was a good time “to be in the neighbourhood of our coupons,” she jested to her frugal sister, referring to the interest on their Tuscan bonds. “If the Grand Duke, the tender parental grand Duke had bombarded Florence, as he desired or even if Austria came up now & bombarded us, the risk to coupons would be considerable, you see. Not that we are or have been in the slightest alarm. Only our interests are here . . just as our hearts are on the cause.”

  When Robert met their friend the minister of finance on the street, he enthusiastically took both his hands and congratulated him on the prospects of Italy. Excitement was so well justified that perhaps even Browning didn’t think of the effect a possible reversal might have on his wife. Ba informed her sister-in-law that in Florence, “it is as if each one had a personal enemy in the street below struggling to get up to him. When we are anxious we are pale; when we are glad we have tears in our eyes.… You [people in France] talk about our living or dying, but we live or die. That’s the difference between you and us.

  “We shall live, however. The hope is rising into triumph.”

  Though the Eckleys went to the Baths of Lucca and the Storys were at Siena, the Brownings stuck to their Florence in the heat of the revolution. Then, like a lightning bolt out of a starlit night, Napoleon abruptly agreed to an armistice. In a finger’s snap the Peace of Villafranca was signed on July 9, 1859, a little more than a month after the Brownings returned to Florence. Sudden death. Only it wasn’t a father, it was Tuscan hopes that died.

  My little son, my Florentine,

  Sit down beside my knee,

  And I will tell you why the sign

  Of joy which flushed our Italy

  Has faded since but yesternight:

  And why your Florence of delight

  Is mourning as you see.

  Knowing that Prussia might be joining Austria to fight, seeing the casualties and the lack of active Italian soldiers, Napoleon compromised. Austria would yield Lombardy to Piedmont; France would eventually absorb Savoy and Nice. But Tuscany? Once more the Grand Duke would return.

  Elizabe
th managed to write to one person, her sister in the spirits: “But I have been miserable about public affairs, couldn’t keep the tears away from my eyes for days & days, wasn’t fit to write or sleep or eat or do anything.

  “I was in despair in fact.”

  So was Florence.

  The poet was “enraged with the whole world meaning England, Prussia & Russia—Selfish, wicked policy which has undone us.… You can see I cant help harping on it. My heart is sore.” She scarcely alluded to the spirits. She had grown “very bitter, very skeptical, very fierce,” she told her spiritual sister. “One doesn’t fall down from a star with impunity.”

  WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775–1864). A pencil sketch of the octogenarian by W. W. Story. The Romantic poet and author of Imaginary Conversations was an early champion of RB’s work. In the 1840s, when EBB mentioned RB in a poem, Landor wrote a poem about Bells and Pomegranates as well. It compared RB to Chaucer. In Florence years later RB became the official guardian of the querulous old poet who tried everyone’s patience, including EBB’s.

  IT WAS BROILING HOT in Florence when Elizabeth wrote Sophie this letter. But “at this time of crisis, it seems scarcely possible to live away from this place of action & information.”

  In fact, she was staying in her city by herself. “Robert is not here—think of that! He is at Siena!!!!”

  At a moment when Robert had to be worrying about the effect this latest political blow would have on his wife’s health, Walter Savage Landor, in his eighties, descended from the outskirts of Florence, giving “up his family for good and all!” For the last week he “has been spending the greater part of every day with us. At last he comes to a decision to go to Siena. Robert couldn’t let him go alone & set off in company with him at seven this morning in order to settle him as comfortably as the circumstances admit of his being settled, & then of course to return quickly—but he cant be back till tomorrow at soonest—The Landor family made a stormy attempt to besiege their Head in this house—but Mr Landor however, stated, that, if his beloved wife entered the door he would throw himself out of the window, she had nothing to do but to go away without further attempting to see him.”

  Browning went to Siena, where the Storys were kind enough to admit Landor temporarily till Browning could settle him. Wilson, who had lately had her own bouts of madness, now rented rooms, and the poet would make arrangements for Landor to board with her. But his visit had another object as well. While he was there, he and the Storys picked out a summer villa for the Brownings. It was important to get his wife away from the disappointments and the broiling heat of Florence, and the poet had no intention of joining the Eckleys at Lucca. His newfound guardianship of Landor might have indeed strengthened his case. In her next letter to Sophie, Elizabeth told her that “Robert in the act of depositing Mr Landor at Siena saw & was so enticed by a certain villa that he has taken it for two months—we go, in a week, if I am able to move.”

  If she were able to move. “Dearest Sophie—dear—I have your second note & am going to write things which will not please you.” First, she had been ill. Second, she and Robert were going to Siena for two months. About her illness, “It had been a very bad attack on the chest partly from cold, I dare say, & partly from late excitements acting on the circulation during the extreme heat. For two nights & days I suffered almost strangulation—which is quite passed—only I cant talk, or scarcely speak without being the worse for it.” She required “absolute quiet” and “change of air.” She was not supposed to write at all, but did so in order for Sophie to know she was getting better. “If Robert wrote you would tink [sic] me worse than I am—& I would not have you uneasy.”

  The handwriting in this letter to Sophie had degenerated. It might have been the mark of an aged woman attempting a scrawl after a debilitating stroke. “I have been ill.” It would be impossible to look at the letter without imagining the worst. Someone of Sophie’s inclination might have assumed it was automatic writing from a tortured ghost. The difficulty the poet had in physically forming the words is apparent. “May God bless you & love you. Wouldn’t it have been well to have died with my Italy? But I hold on to hope, to hope.… Your loving Ba.”

  Wouldn’t it have been better to die with Italy? The poet of the Risorgimento was next to death. Leaving Florence at all became a desperate attempt, a last option, to save her life. On July 30, she was carried out of the Casa Guidi, she was carried into a railway carriage, and then at Siena she was carried into the Hotêl Algride. Isa Blagden took it on her own to wire ahead to the Algride and to the Storys to alert them to her friend’s condition. And one of the few foreign doctors who had stayed in Florence, the Prussian patriot Dr. E. G. T. Grisanowski, followed after the poets by train and ministered to Elizabeth for two days and nights at Siena. He would take no recompense. She had become Tuscany’s own dirge.

  And when she could sleep in between the pain in her chest and the lack of breath and the wretched coughing, “I dreamed lately that I followed a mystic woman down a long suite of palatial rooms. She was in white, with a white mask, on her head the likeness of a crown. I knew she was Italy, but I couldn’t see through the mask. All through my illness political dreams have repeated themselves, in inscrutable articles of peace and eternal provisional governments. Walking on the mountains of the moon, hand in hand with a Dream more beautiful than them all, then falling suddenly on the hard earth—ground on one’s head, no wonder that one should suffer. Oh, Isa, the tears are even now in my eyes to think of it!

  “And yet I have hope …”

  Dr. Grisanowski helped Robert pick a suitable villa before he left Siena. Back in Florence he added his own voice to the Tuscan chorus about the great English poet who was dying with Italy.

  Only she didn’t die. Once again she was to rise slowly from the ashes of physical and mental defeat.

  Robert, between nursing his wife day and night, becoming Landor’s legal guardian, and hearing Pen’s lessons, had to cope with Mrs. Eckley. Why hadn’t the Brownings joined them in Lucca?

  Events had become so life-threatening that it is easy to overlook the domestic compromise the Brownings must have reached before Elizabeth became ill. Robert Browning had refused to spend the summer at the Baths of Lucca with the Eckleys.

  Ba had written that they were going to Siena because her husband had fallen in love with a villa. Then why were they at the Villa Alberti instead? On August 2, Robert gave Sophie one excuse too many: The proprietor had raised his demands, and Dr. Grisanowski preferred the small, more hygienic villa. Still, “I am very glad that we decided to come here … I have a dread of the damp dead heat I remember at Lucca in the middle of the day. Let Ba but get well and strong, as I trust will soon be the case, and I shall be thankful to Siena indeed.” For “This has been a sad interruption of her continued increase of health and strength since the spring.”

  This did not satisfy Sophie. When she wrote to the Brownings on August 4, Browning assumed she had not received his letter: “Ba has been very ill—more ill than you suppose, if you think her capable of writing to bid you goodbye from Casa Guidi.… Her strength was absolutely gone—she was carried downstairs, carried into the railway carriage, carried up to bed in the Hôtel—and she left Florence in so pitiable a state that Grisanowski set off by the next train and spent two days at the Hôtel with us to be of any use he might; he selected for us, not the beautiful Villa I had set my mind on but the least commodious of all that were to be let, on hygienic grounds for the quality of the air obtainable in it.”

  But why weren’t they at Lucca?

  “I am very satisfied that we should have gained less in your gay place—tho’ we certainly should have gained your neighbourhood, and all the delight that it implies. But you will have understood by this time how matters really stand. I trust that we shall meet again soon happily and be able to discuss the respective advantages of Lucca and Siena.”

  On August 9, Elizabeth wrote to her friend: “Dearest Sophie, here I am … on t
he right side of the earth.” She had to explain another slight. Not only hadn’t she written from the Casa Guidi again after the letter with the ghostly handwriting; she hadn’t communicated through the air: “Dear I spoke to you—but my voice was so hoarse & inward that you did not hear. I said, God bless you, Sophie.” She was better now, though “I am very weak—so weak that to walk across the room without an arm sets me reeling & liable to fall.”

  On to the important matters: “As to Lucca, dear, I could not have borne the journey to Lucca.… We required immense courage to come even here—If you had seen the state in which I was deposited in the railroad!” As to Sophie’s health: “But you—you have suffered from indigestion? I am sorry. You should take more exercise—did you not agree it was better?”

  Sophie Eckley had a single-minded concern the summer her friend almost died. Why didn’t Ba want to be in Lucca with her? What were people telling her in Siena? Had Ba found her out?

  Even in the midst of his wife’s illness in Florence, when she didn’t think the villa he had chosen would do, Robert had written to Story that they hoped to find another villa in Siena that would afford them two months of happiness. Two months of happiness away from Sophie Eckley. Robert Browning had had as much as he could take of her. In Siena and without the Eckleys the intimacy between the couple seemed to grow stronger. Robert had been “perfect,” Elizabeth would write in letter after letter.

  AS ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING slowly healed, viewing the eternal Tuscan landscape and breathing the clear air, her husband often sitting in silence by her side, she came to admit the truth about her spiritual sister. Earlier that summer in Florence, Elizabeth had written to Sophie that Sophie had an “exaggerated apprehension of what I am.… If you could see me as I am & yet love me, I should be much easier.” But the poet herself had an exaggerated apprehension of her American friend. We see this in her poem “Where’s Agnes?”