Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  Had she any faults at all,

  ’T was having none, I thought too—

  There seemed a sort of thrall;

  As she felt her shadow ought to

  Fall straight upon the wall.

  Her sweetness strained the sense

  Of common life and duty;

  And every day’s expense

  Of moving in such beauty

  Required, almost, defence.

  In Siena it would appear that one person brought her the truth about Sophie. Whoever it was, it was a message and a messenger she couldn’t dispute. Less than four years before, she heard from Elizabeth Kinney in Florence that D. D. Home’s “moral character” had failed and that Hiram Powers had excluded him from his house. She wrote to Powers to ask him if Home’s “sorcery” was also “trickery.” For “the opinion of a quiet, cautious philosophic observer like yourself, would be incalculable to me.” A detached onlooker, no Robert Browning, informed her that Sophie’s mediumship was an absolute fraud, just as her husband had told her … and told her. Once, she had faced that her father loved her less than she thought; now it was time to look again at the truth.

  AUTOMATIC WRITING. This scrap, preserved among three others in Sophia Eckley’s album of EBB’s letters to her, was most possibly an example of the automatic writing the two women privately experimented with in Rome in 1858–59.

  And to break the bond. She wrote Sophie a letter that she considered harsh and devastating. But reading it, one might agree with Sophie, that it was “kind.” The poets never shared the letters they wrote to others, but this letter Elizabeth gave Robert to read.

  “My dear Sophie, as I told you before I believe in the spirits—nor do I mean to express a doubt that the spirits have written through you and me—On several occasions also, words have apparently been written in reply to mental questions of mine, and names been given, which could not have been in your mind! But then, observe, they were in my mind—and they were only apparently written as I say: I mean they were legible rather to me than to you—which means very faintly legible.”

  More to the point were the long messages written down by Sophie supposedly coming from spirits of those related to Ba. Her father? Bro? Her mother? Treppy? John Kenyon? Her dear uncle Samuel? Her dead brother Sam? Her grandmother and namesake? Edward of Cinnamon Hill? Whomever they were from, these messages seemed to prove that American was spoken in heaven (and hell): “The form of expression was distinctly unlike those beings, in fact, I should say impossible to them! Again & again, for instance, there have been slight Americanisms—turns of phrases which are not usual among the English.”

  Of course this proved nothing against the American medium: “throws not a shadow of suspicion on the medium’s ‘integrity,’ (need I say that?) but was & is an indication to me that my particular spirits were not present nor speaking.”

  The poet took her share of the blame. “Certainly, when you have wished to leave off the writing, I have sometimes urged the continuance of the experiments. That is perfectly true.” One can see Robert nodding. “I wished to push the experiments to the utmost extent of the power we had. But you must be aware that beyond a certain line, there was nothing. I had no personal proof of anything but some involuntary writing . . which never of itself & without distinct characteristics could satisfy me. The ‘sounds’ are twenty times more satisfactory to me, as I have often told you—but the sounds never occurred with us—never: though with you alone, you said they were always occurring.”

  Sophie had told her “you are sure of my having had communication with spirits belonging to me. How can you possibly be sure, if I am not sure? There has been no testimony worth a straw to me—though I kept my mind open & ready for the possibility to ripen into a certainty—Sometimes for a moment it touched a probability—but never beyond.”

  Why, just ask Robert: “My husband is my witness that I told him at the time, when he asked me the question ‘whether I believed in certain identities,’ . . that ‘I kept my belief in a balance, believing in the class of facts, & in the possibility of getting identities proved, but not considering them proved in my case so far.’ ” No, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had never herself made contact with her dead.

  “Always I shall be eager to hear any experience on the subject which is & must remain one of deep interest to me. But the writing seems to me of no practical use, at least such writing as you and I produce—and I have made up my mind to try it no more. I think there are spirits who communicate—nay I believe there are: but the question of identity is quite different, & there is no sort of proof that any spirit connected with myself ever intimated his or her presence through your mediumship, either to you or to me. In fact, I grieve to say that the proof is the other way, as I apprehend it. It is my great loss. Too happy I should be to believe otherwise. For minutes together I have struggled to believe it—but thought has always been too strong for belief & desire.”

  She parted from Sophie. “So much I have said, dearest Sophie, that you may understand where & how the question rests with me. There is nothing to regret in having tried a long series of experiments—but then there would be, if ever I began it over again, after once seeing them to an end.”

  Could Sophie salvage the friendship? According to Robert, she never even tried. “When Mrs. Eckley found herself discovered, she never made an effort to recover her place in Ba’s liking—not to say love, still less esteem: she just asked leave to come and see her sometimes,—by way of hiding the separation from people.”

  After the rupture Elizabeth wrote to Sophie: “Ever dearest Sophie, what am I to say? That you were very wicked & that I pardon you, or that I was very wicked & you must pardon me. Really considering what passed, it looks to me as if the wickedness of us two was mixed up.” After all, “I meant no harm, you meant no harm—now did you?”

  At the end of this note she reached for an analogy from the mathematics Pen was studying: “You are a dear darling friend. After the long sum, there’s the quotient … don’t they call it? I mean the figure at the bottom,—the result.”

  The “result” she factored candidly to Arabel when in 1861 the Eckleys and the Brownings were once more in Rome. “I have seen her only three times this winter—I am very cold—but there’s no quarrel—She asked me to forgive her—I said . . If she had injured me it would be very easy to forgive—but what was impossible was to feel the same to a person in whom one has lost faith. I said it quite mildly. She asked me to kiss her & say God bless her—and I did both. Afterwards—she conducted herself precisely as if nothing wrong was between us—The fact is (it’s horrible to say …) she wants to pass for being my friend,—& would eat much dirt for that fair distinction. I never was more deceived in a woman. The least touch of real feeling, though expressed in a good honest fit of crossness would comparatively have saved her with me. But the calculating want of delicacy & sensibility are too disgusting to my whole nature. There’s a piece of scandal for you my own Arabel.”

  The scandal turned into a poem, “Where’s Agnes?” According to Browning, his wife had thought of making the poem completely specific, a true “Where’s Sophie?” She disguised “the circumstances for my sake—who always said, ‘For the husband’s sake,—and because you deserve some punishment in the matter.’ ” It was he who published the poem for the first time in the collection of his wife’s works he edited after her death.

  In the startling image that opened the poem, the deceived lover who narrates it imagines that it would have been better had someone come to report not Agnes’s treachery but her death. This messenger would have said:

  ‘I saw her, I who speak,

  White, stiff, the face one blank:

  The blue shade came to her cheek

  Before they nailed the plank,

  For she had been dead a week.’

  This gruesome depiction of Agnes dead and moldering would have been better than the truth that Agnes was corrupt morally—her soul “turned mere dirt.”

>   Why, if he had spoken so,

  I might have believed the thing,

  Although her look, although

  Her step, laugh, voice’s ring

  Lived in me still as they do.

  But, “my Agnes false? such shame? / She?” Much, much worse. By the end of the poem, anger and disillusionment veer inward and the deceived lover asks, “Who’s dead here? No, not she: / Rather I.”

  The result of Agnes’s deceptions? No more “fluctuant curves” for this believer in ideal womanhood. “No more roses!—hard straight lines.” The “Poplars, cedars, cypresses!” that end the poem are a harsh tribute to masculine logic (and Robert Browning) on the issue of that “white rose,” Agnes. And both images point to death.

  In the poem a lover is deceived by a beautiful, seemingly stainless woman. In life, the poet often referred to Sophie’s having fallen in love with her. Her own letters to Sophie at the time sound as if she were a younger woman experiencing a schoolgirl crush. “Of course the letters are nothing but what it is natural Ba should feel for ‘Agnes’ in her supposed perfection of purity,” Browning would write to Isa Blagden almost seven years after his wife’s death, when he finally read the entire collection. He made no distinction between Agnes and Sophie. There was none. In the same letter he remembered Sophie’s appearing in London to offer her condolences after his wife’s death, “bathed in tears.” “I could not, for the life of me, feel angry—any more than the poor fellow, in ‘Madame Bovary,’ ” with the man whom, after his wife’s suicide, he finds, by a bundle of love letters, had seduced his wife.”

  When Ba wished she could get her letters back, realizing that Sophie would show them to people, “I used to reply (for she mentioned her belief more than once)—‘of course she will parade them, and you must make up your mind to it.’ ” Now you laugh at the “ ‘love, the honesty you were once confident in.’ ” It was Ba’s own fault: “ ‘You should have believed me so far at least as to use your own faculties and so get to believe for yourself.’ ” Almost seven years after his wife’s death, “So I say still—with hardly any additional pain.”

  In a much lighter moment, in Paris at the end of the Le Havre trip, when Ba was once more well enough to go out shopping by herself, she lost her purse through absentmindedness on the way to a shop to buy a hat. Pen ran home to tell his father. Both assumed he’d be very annoyed, but instead, by the time she got to their place, he was coming out of the door with more money. She wrote to Arabel, “There was Robert perfectly magnanimous & forgiving, coming to pity & bring more money. It was very, very good of him. Still, as I say, he is human, & I expect to [be] reminded of it three times a day to the Day of judgment.”

  Browning’s sole charge against Sophie was “that she cheated Ba from the beginning.” But his charge against his wife: “I say, in the bitterness of truth, that Ba deserved it for shutting her eyes and stopping her ears as she determinedly did.”

  He accepted Sophie “as a familiar blotch on a picture of the past,” he could write to Isa, rather calmly. But he could also blow up in a letter to Story after hearing of her lies against poor David, her husband. He talked about that “dunghill” once again. The other day, he told Story, he “solaced” himself by placing “two portraits of her, one on each side of a delicious drawing ‘in the costume of Truth.’ ” One can imagine him alone in his study in England, his Italian days behind him, with two portraits of Sophie, the Liar, dressed elegantly as she dressed, on each side of a nubile, naked Truth. “I should like above most things to have a good talk with her: no hurting me, alas!” But he never would talk—or rage—to her face.

  In 1869, Browning visited Sophie in London to read the book that contained all the letters his wife had written to her. “Much such a collection as I expected,—and leaving off abruptly, where I was certain it would: the first leaf records the fact that at the present owner’s death it belongs to me,—or, I being dead, to Pen. She repeated her offer that I might take it at once: I should have been harsh,—or rather foolish to do so,—for under these circumstances known to many people, any other bequeathment of the book would bring far more disgrace to her than the publishing would bestow glory: I have little doubt she has shown them to far more people than she confessed to,—but I believe she never intended for a minute to print or sell anything.”

  Why didn’t Browning take the book at that moment? Is it possible that he couldn’t bear to have it in his sight? Was his anger such that he still felt Sophie’s possession was something his wife deserved?

  He never burned any of those letters after Sophie’s death in Arques, France, in 1874. They were left, along with the love letters, to Pen. After Pen’s death they went to the Moulton-Barretts, and they were sold at auction at Sotheby’s in 1937 as part of the estate of Elizabeth’s nephew Harry Peyton Moulton-Barrett. They are now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The letters have been taken from the album, which is also at the Berg. The stripped album is poignant. The letters are strange. There’s a dried flower among them—picked from the grave of Keats—the type of gift Ba often wished for herself instead of Sophie’s lavishness. They’ve never been published, nor has there been much of an attempt to quote from them. In a minor way they are the dark side of the Brownings’ love letters. It was no feeble bigamy, this affair of soul between Sophie and his wife. His wife needed that which did not exist, and when her husband could not give it to her, she fell in love with someone who could. Browning, in spates, neither forgot nor forgave. He was as human as his wife. If the poets were right in their belief that they would meet again, then this was one grievance Robert Browning brought with him to Judgment Day.

  WE POETS OF THE PEOPLE

  JUST AS Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s mental health would become much more precarious after her father’s death in the spring of 1857, her physical health became much impaired after the attack on her lungs—and perhaps her heart—in the heat of Florence in the summer of 1859. Still, her Phoenix-like ability to rise from the ashes was humorously recorded in her letters. And in Rome in 1859–60, her will to live was revived once more, particularly as she realized that the Treaty of Villafranca had not ended Italian aspirations. Large parts of Italy were in fact uniting under the House of Savoy in Piedmont, and Cavour was somehow harnessing Garibaldi, who hated him for, among other things, allowing his birthplace, Nizza, to become Nice. Fully aware that falling from the star of political idealism had spun her into physical decline, she vowed to moderate her hopes. She wrote to Julia Martin that she would be more careful this time: “As to Italy, I have to put on the rein to prevent myself from hoping into the ideal again. I am on my guard against another fall from the chariot of the sun.”

  People wondered at the Brownings’ going to Rome during these dangerous times. “If a revolution in a good sense would happen there, it would be welcome to me,” Ba wrote to Arabel. And prices were certainly lower in 1859–60. Once more privy to diplomatic and revolutionary sources, Elizabeth told Julia Martin that “things look magnificently, and if I could tell you certain facts (which I can’t) you would admit it. Odo Russell, the English Minister here (in an occult sense) … came to me two days ago and said, ‘It is plain now, The Emperor is rather Italian than French. He has worked, and is working, only for Italy.’ ” Both Brownings were close to the heart of Italian affairs in Rome. And if Robert had separated from his wife on the matter of Sophie Eckley, he came closer to her than ever before on political matters.

  An International Congress on the Italian question was to be held in Paris in January 1860, and, finally, Cavour had been chosen to represent Italy, which by itself championed the cause of the government at Piedmont, the House of Savoy.

  Right before the Congress, on December 22, 1859, a pamphlet, “Le Pape et le congres,” was published in Paris, and the ideas were attributed to Louis Napoleon. The pamphlet held that the Congress should urge that the Pope’s territory be confined to Rome, and that Romagna, separated de facto, should not return to papal
domination. It would seem that the old idea of a loose confederation of states under the figurehead of the Pope was giving way and that, in Garibaldi’s words, Italia sará. Italy will be. When Austria asked the Emperor if he intended to advocate the principles in the pamphlet, he said he would, and Austria withdrew from the Congress. It was postponed indefinitely, only to take place in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s last book of poetry, Poems before Congress. But initially the poet thought she was participating in a historical event:

  We, poets of the people who take part

  With elemental justice, natural right,

  Join our echoes, also, nor refrain.

  Her poetry became not the echo but the voice. It was she rather than Cavour who represented Italy. In doing so she addressed Napoleon:

  An English poet warns thee to maintain

  God’s word, not England’s …

  Her poem to Napoleon captured the political exultation of the time:

  Shout for France and Savoy!

  Shout for the council and charge!

  Shout for the head of Cavour;

  And shout for the heart of a King

  That’s great with a nation’s joy!

  Shout for France and Savoy!

  All the poems were based squarely on the historical situation and were full of the life of the times—if only one knew the times or trusted the poet’s voice: the disappointment of the Treaty of Villafranca, the tricolored Italian flag being brought into St. Peter’s at Christmas, the disappointment—in male voice, no repeating old mistakes here—at the Grand Duke’s returning yet again to Florence, the aristocratic Italian ladies dancing in the Cascine with the French foot soldiers, the Milanese ladies, patriotic and bejeweled, visiting the wounded in the hospitals. Once more Barrett Browning was the poet of the Italian Risorgimento—a true unacknowledged laureateship.