Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  Trumpeted in America at the time, where they were printed as Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems, they were harshly condemned in England. Despite the British antipathy to their French neighbor (though they were delighted that Napoleon wished to confine the Pope), the uproar against these poems by the author of Aurora Leigh was much more vituperative than the Brownings expected. For not only did the public misunderstand, but the critics were quite unrelenting.

  Robert Browning was furious, yet one negative review gave him unbridled delight. The British Spiritual Magazine to which his wife subscribed reported that she had been “Biologised by infernal spirits since Casa Guidi Windows.” They had seen the hand not of Dante but of “Moloch,” in her latest work. “Robert shouted in triumph at it, and hoped I was pleased, and as for myself, it really did make me smile a little, which was an advantage, in the sad humour I was in at the time.”

  The more mainstream reviews objected to politics being the subject of poetry, they objected to unfairness to England, and they objected to such poems being written by a woman. The reviewer for the Saturday Review believed “that women ought not to write about controversial issues of the day but should confine themselves to their household duties and that if they had to go out of their homes, they should become nurses, like Florence Nightingale.” This might have given Elizabeth confirmation. She believed, and had told Anna Jameson, that for all of her valor, Nightingale was appreciated because she stayed within the range of woman’s work as approved by men.

  One has to wonder what the fate of these impudent, self-willed, psychologically fueled, idealistic, and fiery political poems would have been had they been written by a man of similar stature. Would shocked critics have said of them that the Italian cause had found its visionary voice? Or that wide humanity had found its champion? For Barrett Browning was not ultimately a nationalist. Her concern was for “Italy and the World”:

  No more Jew nor Greek then,—taunting

  Nor taunted:—no more England nor France!

  But one confederate brotherhood planting

  One flag only, to mark the advance,

  Onward and upward, of all humanity.

  As her publisher had predicted, the uproar did not hurt sales, and as Aurora Leigh went into a fifth edition, Poems before Congress went into a second.

  Two poems in the collection, the poem to Napoleon and “A Curse for a Nation,” a poem against slavery in the States in which England’s insularity and corruption were also pointed out, infuriated John Bull. But it was the tone of her Preface to this slim volume that led the way. There was a certain bitterness in it and a certain condescension to the English reader. Had Barrett Browning been looking for a fight?

  She began by telling the British reader, “These poems were written under the pressure of the events they indicate, after a residence in Italy of so many years that the present triumph of great principles is to be heightened” by its comparison with what she, in 1849, “witnessed from ‘Casa Guidi windowes.’ ” So far so good. She felt compelled to go further, as she had in so many letters home. “Yet if the verses should appear to English readers too pungently rendered to admit of a patriotic respect to the English sense of things,” she would not excuse it by her long residence abroad or by her love of the Italian people. Why should she put the idea of her own lack of patriotic respect into her public’s mind? Why should she suggest what followed might be too strong for them? The answer was simple. It was because she loved truth and justice, “ ‘more than Plato and Plato’s country, more than Dante and Dante’s country,’ ” and, in her own words, “more even than Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s country.” Reading the Preface first, one now had a focus for the interpretation of the following eight poems. It, as much as her support of Napoleon, fueled the fire.

  That anti-British stance of hers, which she enunciated in letter after letter, was a political statement. There was no doubt that the London Times was narrow, that England was for Italy’s unity only if it didn’t have to pay any dues. And time would prove what the Brownings knew, that Queen Victoria was secretly on the side of her Austrian cousins.

  After her father’s death, the poet’s unrelenting bitterness in her letters toward England’s policies was remarkable. Her son was her “Florentine.” The last thing in the world she would wish for him was narrowly British roots. Pen spoke Italian at home, read German, and at times called his British mother “a foreigner.” “Never mind,” she wrote to Arabel, “perhaps England will be proud” of Pen one day, “and he shall be ‘a citizen of the world’ after my own heart & ready for the millennium.” Until that day when the spirit world and the human world united and all nations became one, as she phrased it to her son in “A Tale of Villafranca”:

  They say your eyes, my Florentine,

  Are English: it may be.

  And yet I’ve marked as blue a pair

  Following the doves across the square

  At Venice by the sea.

  She was as proud as she could be that the Florentines didn’t consider her or her family British. And her neighbor Eliza Ogilvy recorded that never once in their years of friendship had the poet spoken of her family’s “forbears” or traditions: “One might know Mrs. Browning for years, and never hear of one of her ‘forbears.’ ” No charming anecdotes about the benevolent slaveholder Edward of Cinnamon Hill that were often told by Treppy. In fact, no mention of Jamaica, from where all of her “forbears” came.

  After her death, Browning brought his son back to England: “Of course Pen is and will be English as I am English and his Mother was pure English to the hatred of all un-English cowardice, vituperation, and lies—.” Nicely put, but how purely English was she?

  What was it that she kept trying to tell her very British sister Arabel as she mocked Britain in letter after letter? What was it she was saying to George when she told him that he, along with England, had fallen not into any madness of great wits, “but the low consequence of some feline bite—You understand nothing.” What was it she attempted to throw in the face of her British public in her Preface to Poems before Congress? The tone of it was not the tone of the poetry, yet it very well may have done the reputation of that poetry harm. Insular Britain would suppress the freedom of a noble people for its own benefit. It was tyrannical and unbending in its self-interest. Insular Britain no more understood or sympathized with Liberty outside its domain than her own father had. Her view of England’s politics had its own logic and sense, but her anger at England, her frustration and her contempt, contained painful recriminations that never would find their rightful channel.

  Her father would never acknowledge his grandchild; well, why should she acknowledge raising the first legitimate great-great-grandson of Edward of Cinnamon Hill? In life, as in art, Pen was her Florentine. Until the millennium, she had found the country of her soul.

  The sibling who stood up for her volume this time was, surprisingly enough, Stormie, the shy stutterer who always took the side of the underdog, although he would never approve of his sister’s secret marriage to Browning, seeing it to the end of his long life as a betrayal of his father. “Arabel tells me that you praise my last book—which is very extraordinary for an Englishman—Oh Storm—If you were to see, if you were to read, if you were to know, how I have been abused in England.” She sent that letter to Jamaica, where Stormie (Charles John, his Moulton grandfather’s namesake) and Sette (by then quite obese) handled (or mishandled) the family’s diminishing fortunes.

  Well might Stormie applaud such a poem against slavery as his sister’s “Curse for a Nation.” Four months before his father’s death, he had had in Jamaica by Elizabeth Barrett, a woman of color, a daughter, Eva. (“Eva” wasn’t a Barrett name; was it a reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin?) In February 1860 another daughter, Arabella, was born. He and his two children were given conditional baptism in the Catholic church. As early as 1853, Elizabeth heard rumors that Stormie had converted to Roman Catholicism. A few years after his sister’s death
, in 1863, Stormie married his mulatto children’s governess, “a well educated brown woman of good class,” Anne Margaret Young. Had his father any hopes of avoiding legitimate heirs of mixed blood, they were posthumously undone. Stormie, with that quiet civility of his, erected a monument instead at Cinnamon Hill, Jamaica, where his father had been born. “About eight feet high with a Cross at the top,” its inscription read:

  To The Memory

  EDWARD MOULTON BARRETT

  Proprietor of those Estates

  who died in London

  A.D. April 17, 1857

  R.I.P.

  THE TRIP BACK to Florence from Rome that June in 1860 had none of the ebullience of the previous year’s return. Elizabeth compared her state with that of Pen’s pony; they were both “unusually fatigued” during the picturesque six-day journey. “I am not as strong since my illness last summer.”

  Elizabeth wondered if a new treatment, something beyond conventional medicine, would help her. Homeopathy had helped cure Robert’s biliousness, but he had had to give up wine. “Oh—if it were not for my contradictory drug which I cant do without,” she lamented more than once. Homeopathy particularly appealed to her, for “I have a profound disbelief in the power & knowledge of medical men.” Who was more an expert than she? “Such heaps of new drugs &—old, as I took when I was ill. Drops here, pills there—& so many bread crumbs in effect, as Robert observed. The medical art is the merest blindguessing, I am certain. Homeopathy is a road broken in the right direction, though one cant always travel by it, when under previous obligations as I am.”

  The contemporary reader can’t help wondering what might have happened if, even at this late point in her life, the poet had been able to go through a slow withdrawal from morphine and been able to substitute for it proper food and exercise. Would that have been homeopathy enough? This is not to contradict the poet’s notion that her morphine kept her alive. It had in effect kept her heart from bursting out of her chest, and it very well might have had a beneficial effect on her damaged lungs. As brave as she was at facing the truth once she saw it, her elixir had had the ability to bring her relief and sleep—for over forty years.

  Returning from Rome, she found herself “under previous obligations” and stuck to her morphine and her travels. Even if she increased doses of both, the prescription was wearing thin. And luck was not with her.

  That June of 1860, in a weakened physical state, she received the first hint of another personal tragedy. From Florence she wrote to both of her sisters, who were in London. But Henrietta was not there on holiday; she was there to consult good doctors. “Dearest Henrietta & Arabel, I see you both together,—and a word dropped by Arabel shows me Henrietta not well, suffering pain.” The cause of the pain was hinted at in a way that allowed Elizabeth to connect it with some type of gynecological problem “very common in these latter days.” Quiet and cheerfulness were necessary, wrote the older sister, advice once more keeping fear at bay. Henrietta should get a nursery governess to take care of her children for a few months. Rest was what she needed. “I am sure my dearest Henrietta should lie on a sofa all day & not walk or stand—isn’t that so?” The prescription would suit someone who was attempting to avoid a miscarriage. Perhaps that was what Elizabeth was led to believe. At the same time, the youngest brother, Occy, and his wife, Charlotte, had just had “their new joy.” That Henrietta didn’t wait until after the child’s delivery before going up to London to consult the doctors signified that she must have been quite ill. “Although, after all, no one can help a woman very much in that hour, it always seems to me.” Ironically, that same Charlotte would die in childbirth a few years later.

  Ba had at this first hint of her sister’s illness a dark presentiment. She knew her own anxiety caused her to exaggerate and blacken her feelings, but still this news of Henrietta’s seeing doctors in London made her feel once more “as if there was a stone around my neck somehow.” Robert attempted to reassure her, but wondered if she was self-willed in her worry. At every whisper as well as every crisis since her father’s death, she had, against her own intentions, looked toward despair.

  Henrietta, for whose birth the slaves in Jamaica did not get a half holiday (as they would have, had Henry been born), was only three years younger than Elizabeth. She had always been the outgoing sister, the one who had taken risks. She had been prettier, healthier, more lighthearted than the others. Her older sister had been close to death most of her life. Henrietta’s younger sister, Arabel, worked hard for others at the Ragged Schools and suffered from pain in the face—perhaps a neuralgia—as well as breathing difficulties that resembled Elizabeth’s as she grew older. The middle sister was caught between Art and Piety on either side and ill health on both and had skipped out to the country to lead her own normal life. She had a good marriage, three children, though her cousin Surtees, who had courted her with such steady persistence, seemed not to have gotten the select commissions he had wanted. The family did not have much money. They had their life. And they had absolutely no intention of giving their daughter to Aunt Arabel, no matter how favorable the economics. With Henrietta, healthy, lively, perhaps not as deeply reflective as her two sisters, Elizabeth had been able to share all of her maternal advice, pouring it out to her married sister in letter after letter. A specialty was the evils of too much childhood education. Henrietta’s oldest boy, Altham, who would become Pen’s friend, had been taught to count to a hundred, whereas Pen had to make his way past mother to father to imitate that feat. Altham was sent to school, was made to memorize, was taken out of baby hats too early … Neither sister would live long enough to see the result of her system.

  But just the thought of Henrietta going first! In any large family it’s typical for each child to have a role. Henrietta’s role certainly wasn’t to get sick. It was easy to take for granted Arabel’s duteous and pious nature. She’d work herself to death. One understood, as well, Ba’s fortitude, her resilience against all odds, her eccentric poet’s temperament, her stubbornness. What did one take for granted about Henrietta? Her normal domesticity, her life!

  Back once more in Siena the summer after her health and her relationship with Sophie crumbled, Elizabeth’s sadness turned to morbid self-accusation. And any normal happiness was interrupted by the thought that at that very moment her sister might be in pain. Ba, unlike the fortunate Arabel, could not nurse Henrietta. Convinced not to go to England in her own weak state of health, she saw herself as completely useless. The only power she had was “at the end of my pen.”

  And by now the author of Aurora Leigh held her poetry against herself. Praise was abhorrent. “Thanks from a stranger for this or that have sounded ghastly to me who can’t go to smooth a pillow for my darling sister. Now, I won’t talk of it any more.” And she didn’t. She went on to Italian politics, spiritual concerns, the blessed quiet and lack of society in Siena outside of the Storys, Isa Blagden, and Landor. The struggle for balance, for Christian optimism, continued. But she did not see anyone; she stayed home. She told George to tell Henrietta that “I am with you in my soul, in my power of loving & suffering.” And she gave advice. “One thing is clear,” that “to lull the pain she must take opiates—because pain does actual harm—wears out the memory system. Sometimes the narcotic in a pill agrees less than in a liquid state—which is the case with me always. Then morphine agrees better than opium—Has she tried morphine?”

  As for Robert, when he was not tending his wife or Pen or the octogenarian Walter Savage Landor, or Wilson, or socializing with his small group of reachable friends—he rode.

  In October, when the Brownings returned to Florence, the waiting for news on Henrietta’s obviously deteriorating condition became unbearable, although Ba snatched at the one small light—that at the time Henrietta’s pain had lessened. But still, as she had written to Euphrasia Fanny Haworth in August, “an internal tumour,” which the London medical man called “ ‘an anxious case.’ We all know what that must mean.” On N
ovember 17, Robert wrote to William Story in Rome that he had just received the “worst news” about his sister-in-law, and he had decided to leave Florence at once. The end was in sight, “& what the effect would be on Ba, of mental & physical suffering together, you may imagine—so I am determined to get her off tomorrow.” He told his wife it was her duty to go to Rome before it became too cold to travel, keeping back the even colder news. The trip was meant to alleviate her mental state more than her physical state, to give her close to a week without a chance of a letter.

  They arrived in Rome to no news. Mail was misdirected. Things were chaotic. Any day now the Pope’s last city could join the rest of Italy in a burst of gunfire. It was not until December 3 that the Brownings received George’s notice that Henrietta Moulton Barrett Cook had died on November 23, 1860. On their very first trip to Rome the Brownings had been greeted, within twenty-four hours, by the death of young Joseph Story. Now they were once more greeted by death. Henrietta left a grieving husband—one who loved her to the point of always considering her in spirit and liveliness eighteen—and three children younger than Pen Browning, who was in his eleventh year.

  The dark veil of depression that the poet fought less and less successfully all summer came down over her head. On her honeymoon trip, Frank Mahony had complained of how she put down her veil before meeting him, the famous Father Prout. If she had seen next to no one in Siena, she saw no one in Rome. Robert kept the world, even Pen, at bay. As much as she loved her child, one finds no indication that she felt she had to stay alive for him. She felt less and less that she contributed to his life.

  Robert watched as she turned inward. He kept telling her she should go out, that this isolation should not last. She kept agreeing with him. Only she didn’t move from her apartment on Via Felice—Happiness Street. Her inability not to grieve devastated her. She became more and more convinced that her grasp of her faith was shallow and that she was unworthy.