Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  She had written to Arabel almost a year after the death of her father: “Did I tell you ever that cheerfulness was a christian duty? I should rather have said, (if I did not say) that it is the proof of a higher spiritual life, I think so still. So much I think so, I would compound for less knowledge as the price of it. I would rather be mistaken in dogma, than downcast as a habit of mind. I think this is always a proof of a low spiritual state and a reason for looking back to see where the life has been wrong or the tenets unscriptural. I think that if we can’t do God’s work cheerfully in this world, we shall not do it cheerfully in the next.”

  Not only her Christianity but spiritualism enforced this faith. “You know I don’t believe in any sudden dropping at death into joy or pain. After death, After death, [sic] there is the continuance as well as consequence of the life here. If Christ has not redeemed us, He never will. If we are born again here, the new life has begun in us already—and if we do not like that here, it is a bad sign. This is my persuasion.”

  The persuasion ran deep. When Sophie Eckley’s sister died, Ba wrote to Sophie from the Casa Guidi, “She is nearer you, you know, than she would be if alive. Do not disturb her where she is, by unreasonable sadness,—but rather by faith & assurance draw her ‘nearer & nearer.’ And still nearer, till the re-union for ever.” And as for Sophie’s duty to her husband and her son: “You must put the light in the old house windows for them, & not let them lose their way in the wood.”

  But the poet was no longer able to light her own way.

  Generally a wry yet cheerful quality prevailed in her letters. But the unpublished letters to her sister Arabel document the private story. Browning often tried to shield her from the writing of letters when he felt they were harmful to her health, and the tone of the letters she wrote to Arabel in December 1860 after Henrietta’s death suggests they were written in solitude. Her handwriting became progressively longer and sloppier as she wrote. Some parts were scratched out and some written over, oddities in her correspondence. All her letters were spontaneous conversations, heart-to-heart. These were tinged with morphine.

  EBB WITH “BRO” AND HENRIETTA (CA. 1818) oil by William Artaud (top), and HOPE END, a photograph of the siblings’ childhood home (bottom). By 1860 the past was a ghostly memory for Elizabeth Barrett Browning. After the death of her sister Henrietta, she could not regain her Christian optimism in the way she had after the death of Bro.

  The loose handwriting hadn’t the spidercrawl of death upon it, as it had in Florence during the illness that brought on her decline. She seemed to be getting high as she wrote. “There is pressure from within” for her to write to her sister. “I think of you, oh I think of you. As you said, we are drawn closer together, Arabel.” This did not mean that the bond with Henrietta had slackened. “She is only in the next room—though for me I cannot see her or hear her—others might.” As her handwriting degenerated, she remembered the onset of her anxiety about Henrietta: “Dear, I was frightened through all that illness—from the beginning—that little light soft hint you gave pierced me through like a knife. And Robert thought me foolish & that I really did want some evil to cry about.” Robert “did not understand. And then besides, because he loves me it was anxiety about me, he struggled to present the bright side of things.”

  She regretted not having gone to England to be with Henrietta, though Robert told her “it is quite wrong of me to be sorry that I did not go. He would have let me go if I had persisted—only he would have deeply disapproved, he says—and I was influenced by his opinion & yours too—Now I can’t help feeling some bitterness about it—only that’s foolish of course. But all our grief is foolish, if we could see aright.”

  The problem was that the poet could not see aright. Her deep Christian faith, her reading of Swedenborg, and her belief in the spirits convinced her that Henrietta “is as in the next room—that the change too, is not great. There are so many things I believe which are comforting—And yet, or how it is.” Here she stumbled as she re-created her feelings: “It is like some precious wine poured into an ill-tempered cup—this cup of my nature—and the moment this is set down to the fire—cup breaks—wine runs out.”

  High and distraught, she testified to her moral weakness. “Because I am so unworthy Arabel—the word is made for me—‘I believe—help—my disbelief.’ ” Earlier in December, when her erratic handwriting also showed the effect of the morphine, she had written, “I am very unworthy. You know I was always. I believe in the spiritual, but the mortal takes hold of me & strangles me. Robert says I am put to shame sometimes by the Theodore Parker people who believe in the voice of God within them only—not in our Lord Christ’s, and yet manage to keep up in face of great disasters.”

  She could not find the comfort her faith should offer, her Christian optimism. Something must be lacking in her. Something must be wrong in her life or in the tenets of her beliefs.

  “Dearest dear, I ought not to name myself—but if you knew what the last three weeks or more have been to me—what that journey was—Looking back it seems as if the blood of my heart MUST be left in stains on the stones of the road. Here it is all very still—And Robert takes care of me, & keeps away every face, & I am much, much better through his tenderness. I helped Peni to prepare his Latin testament for the Abbé today—so you may see how well I am.”

  Yet she herself was the precious wine pouring out of her broken spirit as she asked her questions: “Did the illness come on suddenly as it seemed to me? When she went to London was there alarm? I dig into the dark with my poor heart in wondering at these things. Did she never speak to the children—in reference to what was coming.” She had been more specific in another letter: “Tell me one thing. Was it cancer—? did she think it would end so from the beginning? did nobody give much hope?”

  While her handwriting seemed to be suffering extra strain, she again wrote while she was alone. She had been able to keep a thought still in her head, she told Arabel, “Which proves that I am not quite base & suicidal, eating my own poisoned heart because I will.” If Robert were not out, “he would send his true love. He was very much touched by your words about him—yes touched to tears. He loves you dearly. He said he would do more for you than for his own sister—and I believe it.”

  As for Elizabeth, she had always had a very special love for Arabel, and she asked Arabel to love her and pray for her before her handwriting, perhaps along with that thought she was holding, became indistinct.

  In another letter to Arabel, Elizabeth sent her the one thing that had helped her grief since Henrietta’s death. It was an abstract from a letter she had received from Harriet Beecher Stowe. Without having any idea of Henrietta’s death, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin wrote about the solace she had just received from having contacted the spirit of her own dead son. “It did me more good (her letter did) than anything which has happened, & so I couldn’t hold it for myself though to you it may probably seem a pure piece of insanity.” One doubts Arabel forwarded it to her brother-in-law, as Elizabeth had suggested.

  “You will not have liked my last letter perhaps—you don’t feel with me in some things! It might be wise to be silent, but I love you so that I can’t keep out of sight points which lie habitually near in me to the region of love.” It had been the first letter she received from Stowe, and “it struck me as at least a strange coincidence that she should have been impelled just now & just in such terms to write me this letter.” Add to that, she’d just heard from Mr. Jarves in America. She took both as signs: “It looks as if it were meant that I should take comfort and I do take it.”

  She rose up to meet her faith: “I think that some of it came thus Arabel—that in the first shock, we get distracted.” We “cant disengage our feelings from the earth—I hope it has been more a stupidity of mind than anything else in me, & that as the eye sees clearer it makes no tears.” For certainly we would be able “to communicate if the defect were not in us.”

  Meanwhile, “I have
seen nobody yet—which Robert says is wrong & must end—& of course must—but here in Rome if one opens one’s door, one opens it to everybody. The quiet has been the best thing for me. Now I read. Reading is so part of my life that I suffer horribly when I dont read. The soul eats itself.”

  A few weeks later she received a letter from Surtees which Robert absolutely would not allow her to read. “He says it is a sort of letter which must have done good to the writer—full of the deepest tenderness & grief—but that it would simply ‘tear me to pieces’ & he can’t consent to give it to me. I resisted & entreated for some time—It looked like a selfishness & want of love to be spared so—But Robert was positive. He said there was nothing new.… Therefore he must oppose himself to my being exposed to fruitless agitation. For me, I am sick of being ‘spared’ & useless.” So useless was she that she had allowed all letters about Henrietta’s illness, from the beginning, to be filtered through her husband. She blamed herself for her weakness—was it lack of love to need to be spared so? As she had written to Arabel earlier, “If I could envy you whom I love so, anything Arabel, it is your bitter melancholy life of the last five months—What a thing to look back on? You helped what a human being could—you were there—you saw the last. There is a deep pure benediction over you & in you—& you have it as a joy forever.” The ink here was blotched. By tears from the sister writing or by the sister reading these words?

  “Have you thought at all … of taking little dear Mary?” Ba asked Arabel in another letter. “For the child’s sake. I feel the propriety of it strongly, and I can’t help believing that he [Surtees] will yield soon. His own mother will press it on him—for women understand such things better than men.” Victorian women, apparently. “I can’t write of those children—my heart & eyes fill.”

  By February 1861 Arabel had decided to return Emma to her parents. Keeping her had been “a mistake from the first, you will be right in being decided at last & not renewing. If you had been very fond of the child & acted out of the fulness of your inclination instead of things being pressed on you, it would have been different.… But to be called to the duties & responsibilities of a mother without a mother’s love is hard.… At the same time … I cant blame the parents for being extremely disappointed—I am sorry for them & for the child.” Still, Arabel must stand firm: “hold yourself free to receive Mary.” Surtees Cook, however, would never give his daughter up.

  As for herself: “I am pretty well & I eat & I drink.” This time the “hysterical choking” that came from her inability to cry had lessened, she had earlier told her sister, so in a sense she was forced to eat. Still, “I am little contented with myself indeed. It seems to me that I am not earnest earnest enough to get the right good out of anything.” The repetition of the word earnest which ended one line and began the next is a rare repetition found in the long correspondence. When Oscar Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest, he played with more than a given name. He spoofed the Victorian emphasis on spiritual earnestness—the ultimate soundness of the individual’s faith and the worthiness of her soul. “I feel right for a moment & then let the feeling go. Pray for me to believe better & hold fast more.”

  An earnest Christian, particularly one who incorporated into Christianity Swedenborgian and spiritualistic beliefs, would hear her sister in the next room. She could not. She felt she had been soul-to-soul with her sister, feeling her pain in Siena as Henrietta suffered in London. But after her sister’s death, she could no longer locate her. Neither could she see people, move from her chair, from her room, get on with her life.

  In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s letters to Arabel, in the handwriting, in the morphine highs, and in the tortured conscience, one sees the depth of the poet’s pain. “As for me, I’m made of brown paper & tear at a touch.”

  But she never ceased to struggle against depression. “Sometimes one gets self disgusted & rolls oneself in the dust,” she wrote to Arabel, “—but with me it’s chiefly when I am tired (from one rough reason or other) of sitting up. Sometimes I feel as if I had ever so much light on my face & saw more than most people—& that’s not humility—is it? What vexes me again is, that light or not I stumble & fall, as certainly as others whom I have taken on myself to call blind.” In this letter from Rome, perhaps in February 1861, she encouraged her sister to “go to the Strattens” to moderate her own mourning. For “Nothing is more true to me than that gloom is an immoral thing … and as to solitude, I know it to be full of temptation.” She gave Arabel her best advice: “Dancing is better for the soul than fasting, I believe.”

  WE KNOW EACH OTHER

  THERE IS NO DOUBT that Robert Browning was a man who nurtured others. Look at his care of Robert Lytton during his illness, his guardianship of Walter Savage Landor. The care he took of John Kenyon when he could. Also in London he had been very solicitous of Lady Elgar and helped to feed her after her stroke. The shadow side of this need to be of use to those he loved would later fall on his son, on whom he would try to impose his own standards. He would try to “help” Pen to become the British gentleman Pen didn’t want to be. He never tried to help his wife be anything other than herself.

  And concurrently, in those days, he stayed himself. He could not bank a fire warm enough to dispel depression; what he could do—of an anxious temperament himself—was try his best not to fall into gloom as well. Though he had once told the woman he loved that he was sick of society and wanted nothing more than to stay by her side day and night, he had found society again, particularly in Rome and in the cool shadows of Bellosguardo where Isa Blagden held court. Robert Browning, even in the dark final days, lived his own life.

  Elizabeth was very grateful for this. She was no Sophia Eckley, needing to know why a note wasn’t written, or why the person she loved had other friends or accepted other gifts. There was none of that self-serving possessiveness which Robert once parodied as many couples’ idea of love. What Browning’s social life meant for her was that during these desolate spells of isolation and struggle, she had one less thing to punish herself about.

  But what did Browning’s social life mean to Browning? He was almost fifty years old in 1860 and had written no new poetry for five years. He knew his wife was comparing him with Tennyson, who worked on a daily schedule. Did he still consider himself a poet? When he looked back over his marriage, what did he see? As a younger man he had taken the greatest risk of his life. He had married a woman from a wealthy family, a poet of reputation, an invalid, and brought her to Italy without thought of the repercussions to him had she died en route. The one vulnerability of their early marriage was that people would say—and they did say—that he was living off his wife. The Brownings were no more in the class of the Barretts in England than the Tittles had been in Jamaica. It could not be lost on him that he had run off with the great-granddaughter of Edward of Cinnamon Hill. He had since his marriage executed all of the duties entailed with grace and compassion. “And knowing this, is love, and love is duty.”

  In the early years of the marriage, still learning from the woman and poet who, like Dante’s Beatrice, was there to show him the way, he had given up playwriting. He had concentrated on his dramatic monologues, wherein his fame would lie, in her opinion. He had summed up all the lived life of the first half of that marriage in two volumes of poetry that were, in both Brownings’ opinion, clear this time. But complexity was the very root of Browning’s genius. What he took from life he examined from every angle, and he found in his men and women objective correlatives for ideas and emotions which could be quite raw in his life. For example, knowing he hated Daniel Dunglas Home (and Sophia Eckley) in life has made some critics assume he hated the American medium Sludge in verse. In fact, he was as fair to Home as he said he was to Cardinal Wiseman when he used him as a prototype for Blougram. In “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’ ” he saw more than Home; he saw the type and how the type related to time and place. He was able to detach in poetry, see things whole, beyond the limitations of
his own ego. The impetus to the creation of a character might be loathing and hate, but an artist cannot hate his or her created character. The complexities of Men and Women were beyond the grasp of narrow England at first, though America understood what was different, what was new.

  Still, from the age of forty-five until his wife’s death, when he was fifty, he may have sketched out ideas, but he hardly wrote poetry. In Florence he attended life-drawing classes. Weekly he took a good long look at naked flesh. His wife was in such ill health during these years and Pen was sleeping in their room—it seems probable that there was a curtailment in their sexual life. But not in Browning’s sensual life. In the last year in Rome he sculpted every day with William Wetmore Story at the latter’s studio. The fleshy, the sensual, the delights of the eye—those were the exquisite pleasures Italy had to offer the Englishman. By now the Brownings had decided to stay in Italy, had in fact almost bought a villa in Florence toward the end. If it hadn’t been for the cold winters, they would have.

  If his countrymen had recognized Men and Women, perhaps he would have had the inspiration to keep on writing, believing as his wife did that what he saw in Italy was accessible to all men and women. As it was, the inspiration that acceptance can fuel was not forthcoming. He needed Egypt, Jerusalem. He made his wife swear they would travel—at least to Egypt. But that was not to be—nor did he, after her death, go without her.

  What of the early romantic love had proved illusion for him? They weren’t writing poetry together every day. And after Poems before Congress neither was writing. His aim had been to learn from his wife constantly. Yet there were many things he could teach her about the true nature of certain people. Only her Barrett stubbornness was as strong as she had warned him in her second letter. There was no saving his wife from her erroneous opinions—or her temperament or, finally, from her father. At fifty he couldn’t do what he thought he had done at thirty-three—save her life.