Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  And at fifty he might have appeared to himself what he later tried to keep his son from becoming—something of a dilettante. Sketching, modeling, playing the piano, discoursing with his friends, not to mention some high-spirited antics late at night.

  He could look back at his marriage and see that things had not worked out as he and Ba had envisioned.

  He was still dapper: “Robert is looking remarkably well and young—in spite of all lunar lights in his hair,” Elizabeth wrote to her sister-in-law at the end of March 1861 from Rome. “He is not thin or worn, as I am—no indeed—and the women adore him everywhere far too much for decency. In my own opinion he is infinitely handsomer and more attractive than when I saw him first, sixteen years ago—which does not mean as much as you may suppose, that I myself am superannuated and wholly anile, and incompetent therefore for judgement. No, indeed, I believe people in general would think the same exactly.”

  Still, she wished he were writing rather than sculpting. “But Robert waits for an inclination,” so the “active occupation” of modeling “is salvation to him with his irritable nerves, saves him from ruminating bitter cud, and from the process which I call beating his dear head against the wall till it is bruised, simply because he sees a fly there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some Saurian monster.” The truth is, “He has an enormous superfluity of vital energy, and if it isn’t employed, it strikes its fangs into him. He gets out of spirits as he was at Havre. [She knew what he tried to keep from her.] Nobody understands why—except me who am in the inside of him and hear him breathe. For the peculiarity of our relation is, that even when he’s displeased with me, he thinks aloud with me and can’t stop himself. And I know ultimately that whatever takes him out of a certain circle (where habits of introversion and analysis of fly-legs are morbidly exercised) is life and joy to him.”

  She understood Robert to the extent that she lived inside of him and heard him breathing. Robert was no less reticent to tell his brother-in-law George: “I shall only say that Ba and I know each other for time and, I dare trust, eternity:—We differ toto coelo (or rather, inferno) as to spirit-rapping, we quarrel sometimes about politics, and estimate people’s characters with enormous difference, but, in the main, we know each other, I say.”

  That was the pride of their years of love. Whatever had altered, trust had not. They breathed with each other’s breath. At the beginning they saw the other as a brilliant poet, an amazing intellect, a compassionate and strangely similar heart. They learned their differences through the years. Neither gave over to the other. Each remained a complex and thrilling person. An exciting person to know, a different person to know. As early as December 1851, Ba wrote to Arabel about her and Robert’s disagreement about Napoleon: “You know I do think for myself (if the thought is right or wrong) and I do speak the truth (as I am capable of apprehending it) to my husband always. Also, we agree absolutely always on the principles of things—& therefore it is, that what you used to call ‘our quarrelling’ is an element of our loving one another, & a very important element too.”

  No wonder they were so proud to proclaim their knowledge to their in-laws. To know each other on the other side of the moon was for each the accomplishment of their love. They didn’t say they knew what was best for each other. Ba might have wanted Robert to write, but she knew that was what Ba wanted, not Robert. And Robert might have wanted Ba to admit that Home was a fraud, but suppose after his death Ba were to make “a present of the £4000 to Mr. Hume, the day after receiving it,—what then? Could I prevent her?”

  Mrs. Jameson had died in 1860, another sadness for the Brownings. She had always argued against the impractical nature of poets—and that they certainly shouldn’t marry each other. But the Brownings never tried to create the other in his or her image. They were far away from the marriage of David and Sophia Eckley—a marriage that ended in bitterness.

  Their true accomplishment? Knowing each other as each was, not as each would like the other to be. And being proud of and trusting that holy knowledge right to the end.

  Many a critic appears ready to punish the couple for not having lived happily ever after, but having lived real lives. Without comment, in Robert Browning: A Portrait, Betty Miller ended her section on the “Death of Elizabeth” with this quote:

  “ ‘The general impression of the past,’ wrote Robert Browning a few years later, ‘is as if it had been pain. I would not live it over again, not one day of it. Yet all that seems my real life,—and before and after, nothing at all: I look back on all my life, when I look there: and life is painful. I always think of this when I read the Odyssey—Homer makes the surviving Greeks, whenever they refer to Troy, just say of it, “At Troy, where the Greeks suffered so.” Yet all their life was in that ten years at Troy.’ ”

  Yes, life had been painful. His mother’s death; his own questioning, nervous temperament; the lawsuit against his father; money worries; the constant responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood; the failure of his best poetry; Ba’s relationship with Sophia Eckley; the long, sad decline and loss of the woman who was the great love of his life …

  But what we can glimpse of the other side of the moon is much more compelling. After all, what was so extraordinary in the Brownings’ marriage was that these two complex individuals both believed the years they spent in Italy together, her last years and his middle years, were the only years in which they really lived. Daring to marry secretly and to leave England to fend for themselves, they had actually brought each other to life.

  LA VITA NUOVA

  IT WAS CLEAR to Robert Browning that his wife was in decline. In Rome that last season she did absolutely nothing—only went out for three or four short drives during the six months they were there, and never walked two steps out of her room. Her dosage of morphine increased; movement triggered depression.

  The photo of her with Pen in Rome in 1860 showed her as she was toward the end, her lips stretched long, resembling a smile, her head tilted to the side, her look knowing. The broad leathery face, the wide lips, the skin tight over the bones … She didn’t look her fifty-four years; she didn’t look ill as much as she looked somehow preserved, encapsulated. She believed she had the blood of West Africa in her. In this picture, next to her long-haired fairy prince of a son, her unidealized, exotic features are captured, contrasting sharply with her hooped skirt and her silly curls.

  In the London winter of 1846, now so long ago, random luck had championed the lovers. The unusual springlike weather allowed Elizabeth Barrett the time she needed to regain her health. It had been a period of “lovers’ luck” when not only had the elements favored the couple but their visits continued without interruption by the curious or by the vindictive. And after their marriage, the first anniversary was celebrated by the Italians striking out for liberty underneath their very windows.

  If the trip to Rome in 1860–61 brought with it the personal loss of a sister, the trip back to Florence brought with it a tragedy for all Italians, who were now so close to unity. On June 5, 1861, on the Brownings’ first day back in Florence, Camillo Benso di Cavour, the great diplomat and architect of a unified Italy, died at the height of his power at fifty years of age, after a short, violent illness.

  CAMILLO BENSO DI CAVOUR (1810–61), at the Congress of Paris in 1856, the architect of the Italian Risorgimento, the great diplomat of the House of Savoy. His sudden death was another mortal blow to EBB.

  This great Piedmontese statesman was worth any amount of Barrett Browning’s praise. Cavour was born in 1810, the younger son of an old and illustrious Absolutist family. From his academy days through his stint in the military, both his parents complained that his liberal views and liberal friendships were destroying them. At eighteen he wrote to his older brother words that are reminiscent of Barrett Browning’s autobiographical essay when she was just fifteen: “I would die a thousand times for my country or for the good of the human race.” However, the future diplomat appended
, “if I believed it would truly benefit it.” A short and plump man, he was round-faced as a youth. By the end of his life he had a dark receding hairline and graying whiskers that outlined his face and met under his strong chin. This gave his weighty face an oblong cast. His round spectacles seemed wedged between overhanging brows and pronounced cheekbones, and they magnified narrowed, questioning, very clear eyes. Clarity was a part of Cavour’s genius. He knew exactly what he wanted: liberty for Italy under a constitutional monarch from the House of Savoy. His diplomatic skills allowed him to examine the possibilities inherent in any political situation, no matter how volatile and unpredictable, to see in what ways it could be turned toward this goal. He had negotiated brilliantly with Napoleon. He had been indispensable to King Victor Emmanuel II, and to Italian hopes.

  Along with the Brownings and much of liberal Europe, he realized that the hopes for Italy were with Piedmont, just as Barrett Browning predicted at the end of Casa Guidi Windows. To follow Mazzini’s Republican rhetoric and demand revolution all through the peninsula was to court anarchy and ultimate suppression. Had he, rather than Elizabeth Barrett Browning, represented Italy at the Congress that never materialized, he, too, would have shouted (or skillfully negotiated) “for France and Savoy!”

  Now, “the head of Cavour,” which had steered “the heart of a King,” was past thinking for Italy. Elizabeth wrote to her sister-in-law, “If tears or blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine. I feel yet as if I could scarcely comprehend the greatness of the vacancy. A hundred Garibaldis for such a man. There is a hope that certain solutions had been prepared between him and the Emperor, and that events will slide into their grooves. May God save Italy.”

  The Italian patriot and the Brownings’ friend Massimo d’Azeglio had a similar reaction, as quoted by Cavour’s biographer: “ ‘Poor Cavour!’ wrote Massimo d’Azeglio amid his tears, ‘I realize how much I loved him. I might well enough have died, who am no longer of any use. These two days past I seem to be dreaming, and I pray God to aid Italy; and one idea has at last given me a little calm. If Providence wishes to save Italy—and I believe it does—it will save her even without Cavour.’ ”

  Immediately on Cavour’s death Napoleon III officially recognized the Kingdom of Italy—a solution Barrett Browning predicted. But would Italy stay together? Would the Veneto and Rome be won without Cavour?

  In Florence after this dreadful blow, Elizabeth kept to her rooms. She did not leave the Casa Guidi nor did Robert urge her to go out. He did suggest that she take the air and exercise indoors. “Our terrace is green with quite high trees—daturas & others—& the smell of lemon blossom comes through the open window,” she wrote to Arabel in July 1857. And Sophia Peabody Hawthorne recalled that the first time she met the Brownings, Robert offered her a pomegranate from the tree on the terrace. In the first years of their marriage, the Brownings would go to the long and narrow terrace of the Casa Guidi and walk up and down, talking for hours at a time under the stars. Now, when Robert suggested that his wife get up and walk up and down one time to commemorate those days, Elizabeth made an attempt to get from her chair to the window, but could not.

  Robert would mark his wife’s decline from the Peace of Villafranca and the illness that attended it. The six-month trial of “daily waiting for news from Henrietta” and then Henrietta’s death “rendered her weaker—weaker—she did nothing at Rome … yet, on the other hand, her cheerfulness … made everyone say ‘how wonderfully she recovers,—she will soon be strong again, another quiet summer and then.’ ” Cavour’s death hammered another nail into inevitability.

  Isa Blagden, Our Lady of Bellosguardo, was a saint to the Brownings during these scorching June days. She went back and forth from Bellosguardo to Casa Guidi, staying with Elizabeth at times, helping Robert, and taking care of Pen.

  Elizabeth’s isolation seemed to be having the desired effect. But the hot weather affected her health in a new way. She told her husband, “My cough has got well at once, as is always the way in such weather, but, curiously, it begins to affect me, as usual.” Browning’s response to this sign of pulmonary illness was “Let us go at once.” They began to talk of where they would spend the summer. The choice would be made according to the requirements of Elizabeth’s health. The very conversation, like so many in the past, might have stirred hope. The old reliable prescription.

  There were clues in notes to a letter she didn’t finish to Ruskin that she may have been resolving some spiritual issues at the time. Ruskin had been writing to her of his own crisis of faith. His letter of May 13, 1861, struck a sympathetic note. He told her: “I am fighting through all kinds of doubt and wonder: and have no strength—cannot look things in the face.” She had asked him for a photograph. “You shant have anything of the kind.” When he looked at his own face, “I can’t conceive why I’m so ugly, but I am so ugly.” He had lost his belief in his church; his friends had deserted him. “I am stunned—palsied—utterly helpless—under the weight of finding out the myriad errors that I have been taught about these things: every reed that I have leant on shattering itself joint from joint—I stand, not so much Melancholy as Amazed.”

  Elizabeth understood his difficulty, but she had escaped the shock of the “myriad errors” of Christian doctrine. “It is because the bonds of some traditions of religious teaching were loosened in me formerly & gradually during my long sequestration from the external communion of churches. I have long seen that the foundations of all the visible churches were giving way … that the scholastic forms which contain essential truths were splitting into atoms . . That an oak planted in a flower pot must shatter the vessel, if it lived & grew; that if Christianity were a vital principle it must develop.” Why, her spiritualism was based on this development.

  Ruskin was caught at a juncture where he could not tailor new clothes for his beliefs. Even “the greatest physical science discovery … since Newton’s time,” maybe “the greatest of all time,” that the “Sun’s made half of iron,” couldn’t divert him from his troubles for more than a moment. Perhaps he’d go somewhere in Switzerland and “grow currant bushes & red daisies,” spend his days walking and digging “till I’ve recovered tone of mind.” He had “a horrible feeling just now of having no home.”

  The poet responded, “Your sad letter drew me into a sad sympathy for you. Seeming to myself to see more clearly than you say you do, and feeling certainly a stronger cheerfulness …” A stronger cheerfulness.

  On June 20, Robert went out to read the newspapers at about six or seven o’clock in the early evening, and Isa Blagden came to stay with Elizabeth. It had been another hot day; the windows had been shut—Italian fashion—to keep out the heated air. In the hours before twilight, however, as the sun waned, there was usually a breeze in the air that accompanied the even light and the chirping of birds that are hallmarks of those hours. The windows of the Casa Guidi were opened to let the breeze in.

  During these early evenings it was usual for the poet to have a chair placed for her in the doorway between the rooms to catch the cross-drafts. Isa argued against it, but Elizabeth said, “Oh, the cushion at the back of the chair prevents my suffering.”

  Browning came in from his newspaper room, and the three had tea. Then his wife remarked, “I think I have a sore throat.”

  The next day seemed ordinary, although Elizabeth told Robert she had a cold. That night the coughing began to become serious, and she was restless and sat up often. In the morning, when Browning wasn’t with her, she took two “Cooper’s pills” to prevent the attack she thought imminent. Again, nothing unusual happened during the day, but she was so sick toward night that she asked her husband for a blister to be applied and some wine, for the congestion in her chest. The “Cooper’s pills,” the mixture of half stout and half porter to which she didn’t often resort, seemed to have too much of an effect. At ten in the evening Browning ran to the chemist’s for the blister, applied it, poured the wine. By one o’clock in
the morning her sufferings intensified; there was an accumulation of phlegm that she could not cough up. Browning left her with Annunziata, the servant who had long since replaced Wilson, dressed, and ran to Dr. Wilson, a physician who had a reputation for maladies of the chest. With great difficulty Browning aroused the porter and the doctor, who followed him back to the Casa Guidi. By now Elizabeth was worse, the congestion unrelieved. She labored to breathe. Dr. Wilson was a specialist. He wrote two prescriptions to go to two different chemists, and off into the night Browning and the porter of the Casa Guidi rushed. The poet returned, and a sinapism was put on his wife’s breast and back while hot water and mustard were put on her feet. She didn’t respond. The doctor stayed until five in the morning. Finally the attack was over, and hopes for her recuperation revived. Still, she had not slept for two nights, spending each “in violent exertion” attempting to breathe.

  JOHN RUSKIN, SELF-PORTRAIT. Ruskin believed that portraiture was good for art if the man it portrayed was virtuous. In the early 1860s, he suffered from a crisis of faith and lost many of his friends, but not EBB, to whom he could confide his despair in intimate detail.

  In the short days after this attack, Elizabeth would always report that the symptoms were “a little better.” The doctor examined her carefully, however, and reported “with a very serious face, that one lung was condensed (the right) and that he suspected an abscess in it.” Still, Dr. Wilson was aware of her history, of how she had for years pulled through. He couldn’t predict what would happen, except to say, “It would require a long time to get well.”