Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  Browning sifted through these factors and told some of them to Elizabeth, who was well enough to have her own opinions, repeating them through his report. “It is the old story—they don’t know my case—I have been tapped and sounded so, and condemned so, repeatedly: this time it is said the right is the affected lung while the left is free—Dr. Chambers said just the contrary. This is only one of my old attacks. I know all about it and I shall get better.” Not only that, but this attack of asthma, Elizabeth told her husband, was not as bad as the one that brought them to Siena two summers ago. She’d get well. But most likely an abscess had already broken in her lung.

  From then on, Browning carried his wife into the drawing room every day, where she sat in her nightgown in her own chair in the airiness of the room. “She read the newspapers, a little—saw nobody of course,” and went to bed about seven. Browning sat up most nights; in the last week he remembered lying down by her only once, or perhaps it was twice. He was up so often to tend to her that he simply stopped going to bed. She didn’t seem to notice. By then they had brought a small bed into the drawing room and put her in it and “she began to doze very much.” But she dozed restlessly and seemed unaware that her husband was not in bed on a sofa behind her.

  Dr. Wilson had prescribed nourishment, even wine, imitating in effect Frank Mahony’s cure of years ago in these same rooms. “But Ba never could or would try to take solid nourishment: she had strong brodo (clear soup) but would take nothing else.” It went on like this, twice a day his wife telling him she was feeling better, though the symptoms remained unfavorable. Though she could hardly speak anymore, she was as cheerful as ever. “It would be nothing,” she repeatedly told Browning. A week after she sat in the cross-breeze and developed a sore throat, she drank some asses’ milk with success. She had a better night, always with “much expectoration however, and her feet swelled a little.” Robert allowed Isa Blagden to come and to kiss her. Elizabeth managed to whisper, “I am decidedly better,” and Isa thought she was.

  ELIZABETH AND PEN BARRETT BROWNING, photograph by Alessandri; Rome, 1860. “This is simply to introduce Penini & me,” EBB wrote to Arabel on June 14, 1860. “I don’t please myself, being vain [after] the manner of women, & not being pleased to look either black or old. But it’s made up to me in Penini, even in the vanity. He’s lovely—isn’t he—.”

  ROBERT BROWNING, photograph by Alessandri; Rome, 1860. Browning had said that there were no two pictures of him that looked alike. His good state of health, implemented by homeopathic cures, was in sharp contrast to his wife’s.

  On Friday she seemed to rally, for not only did she take her asses’ milk and brodo, but she had some bread and butter. Another positive indication: The Brownings began once more to discuss where they were going to live. The Casa Guidi had grown too small. They seemed to be clutching onto their lives as they realized that for both of them the Casa Guidi “had suddenly grown distasteful … noisy, hot, close—poor place we had liked for fourteen years!”

  Robert said, “It would be best to take a Villa—you decide on Rome for the winter, and properly,—what good of coming in the summer to a town house you cannot stay in?”

  She said, “Ah, but I can’t leave Florence, I like Florence,—you would like to establish ourselves in Rome.”

  “No,” Browning said, “there’s Villa Niccolini, for instance—that would just suit.”

  “That would suit—try, enquire.” She seemed so intent on his taking action immediately that he moderated.

  “There’s no hurry,” he told his wife. “We can get in there at once if you like—and it will be just as cool as Siena, with the convenience of being near the city.”

  “Oh, that’s not it—we must change the air now, that is my one chance,—I meant, that if you take it for three years you can send up our furniture and we can enter at once in it when we return next Spring.”

  It was her only chance. The woman who sublet the Casa Guidi so often, and was instrumental in not giving it up, was suddenly ready to flee as quickly as she could. The excited rush was light-headedness. Robert named it and Elizabeth agreed. She was having strange thoughts, she told her husband. And she was taking more morphine. Rather than the tricolored flags of Italy that lined the streets of Florence and that she portrayed in her poems, she now saw the reverse: Hungarian colors hung from the windows.

  ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, May 27, 1861, photographed by Alessandri a month before her death. On June 11, 1861, she wrote to reassure Arabel concerning her health: “How I look like myself you will see by my photograph, sitting for which was my last wise act at Rome.”

  When Isa Blagden came at eight on Friday, Elizabeth took up her glass and said, “Oh, I not only have asses’ milk but asses’ thoughts—I am so troubled with silly politics and nonsense.”

  Isa told her some of the good news of Bettino Ricasoli following Cavour and having the ability to deal with Napoleon. This interested Elizabeth so much that Robert had to impose. “No talking, come, go Isa,” he said, and pushed her out.

  Isa told him later that when his back was turned for a moment to pour out medicine, Elizabeth whispered, “Did you say Ricasoli said his politics were identical with those of Cavour, only they took different views of the best way of carrying them out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, so I thought.”

  Isa was pushed out, convinced her friend was getting better. The doctor confirmed it with “perhaps a little better.” Then Elizabeth Romagnoli, Ba’s once-devoted Wilson, came and stayed for a half hour while her former mistress readied herself for bed, brushing her own hair. Wilson left convinced she was better. But the other servants were sure that Wilson was “a bird of ill omen,” and Pen got wind of this.

  “Are you really better?” he asked his pet mama when he went to say goodnight to her.

  “Much better.”

  He asked her the same question and received the same answer three times.

  Browning and the doctor discussed Elizabeth’s aversion to food. Robert had a very strong fowl jelly made and had it placed on ice in case his wife would have some during the night. She refused. Browning himself didn’t know if the food would do her any good. “The weakness came from other causes, and these were important—the other could be easily got rid of.”

  He sat up with her Friday night. She took her medicine, her morphine, she coughed and dozed constantly. “If I spoke she looked, knew me, smiled, said she was better, and relapsed.”

  By three o’clock in the morning the dozing made him very uneasy. She said, “You did right not to wait—what a fine steamer—how comfortable!” It was the slightly increased dosage of the morphine acting on her weakened body, he thought.

  Browning called for Annunziata and told her to get some hot water. He sent the porter for the doctor. He told his wife to sit up, and she was able to do this with some help. He put her feet into the hot water. “Well, you do make an exaggerated case of it!” she said. But then she said, “My hands too,” and put them in another basin of warm water.

  Her husband asked her, “You know me?”

  “Know you.” She looked at him smilingly, happily. “My Robert, my treasure, my beloved.” She kissed him and kissed him. “Our lives are held by God,” she told him.

  Robert’s response was more of the earth. “Will you take jelly for my sake?” (She hated the jelly.)

  “Yes.”

  He fed her a spoonful of it, then another. He poured some into a glass, and she drank it all.

  She put her arms around her husband. “God bless you, God bless you,” she kept repeating. And between this blessing she kissed him and kissed him, and when he laid her back down in the small bed, she continued to kiss the air with her lips and several times she lifted her own hands in front of her and kissed them.

  Fear came over him. The intensity of this devotion—why at this moment, unless?

  “Are you comfortable?” Browning asked.

  “Beautiful.”

&
nbsp; Then she motioned to have the jelly wiped from her hands. Browning sponged her hands for her, and she slept. He knew it was the end. He felt he had to raise her. He took her in his arms, supported her head with his own, and felt the struggle and the cough begin and end without relieving her chest. A second abscess had broken, piercing her trachea. Yet there was no pain; there were no sighs, just a silent fight. Her head fell to his arm, and he thought she had fainted. But then there was the least knitting of her brows.

  Four-thirty in the morning, June 29, 1861. Annunziata cried, “This blessed spirit has passed.”

  LEFT TO HIMSELF AT CASA GUIDI, his son under the care of Isa Blagden, Robert Browning re-created the death of his wife in a letter to Sarianna and his father. As he made arrangements for the funeral and the burial, he caught himself thinking, “I will ask Ba about that.” On the day of the funeral he scarcely noticed that the shops on their street had closed for it and that the morning and evening Italian papers had been full of the news and the mourning. The coffin was allowed to be carried through the streets on its way to the Protestant cemetery, a singular honor. There were two crowns of laurel and white flowers on it. In a sort of flash at the grave site Robert saw Italian men crying like children. He recognized the poet Francesco Dall’Ongaro and the historian Pasquale Villari among the many. He went straight from the cemetery to Isa’s villa—“and presently in the evening came the astonishing sight” of an unexpected comet that had “reached its nearest point to the earth on the 29th,” the day of Elizabeth’s death, and now, on the night of her funeral, blazed “over half the sky.” He saw the comet from the hills of Fiesole, aware that it was going off rapidly and that within a week or so it would be millions of miles away.

  The Municipality of Florence would erect a tablet to Elizabeth on the Casa Guidi. Its Italian translated:

  Here wrote and died

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Who in her woman’s heart reconciled

  A scholar’s learning and a poet’s spirit

  And whose poems forged a golden ring

  Between Italy and England

  Grateful Florence

  Sets this memorial

  1861

  A week after her death, Minister Ubaldino Peruzzi, one of the most respected men of the new Italy, called on Browning to tell him “the Italians all were anxious” he should not leave Florence and “that Pen might continue to be ‘a Tuscan.’ ”

  If Pen had to go for a year or two, he should come back. “We want those who were friends in our ill days to share in our coming good fortunes—every thing will be open to him!”

  But Browning and his son were leaving. It was only after Browning had had Pen’s hair cut, had dressed him as an ordinary boy, and was ready for the voyage that would lead him back to London that his delayed “paroxysm of grief” welled up. In front of Isa Blagden he found himself gasping uncontrollably, “I want her, I want her.” Grief and rage, panic and surprise. “I want her.”

  PEN BROWNING on his horse, Stella; Rome, May 1861. “Imagine his ecstasy Arabel when I told him that Robert has actually bought the pretty Sardignian horse for him,” EBB wrote her sister from Siena, October 1859. After his mother’s death, his father took the twelve-year-old and his pony to live in England. But EBB had known her son. He returned to Italy permanently after he married.

  Later, in the French countryside, he would wake up only to the knowledge that Ba was dead, not to where he was or what he was doing. Once awake, he would struggle to bring the scraps of his life into focus. When he slept, he slept well, escaping a perilous despair.

  The night he wrote to his family, however, Browning was not without his wife in the Casa Guidi. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was in the next room. He blessed his “dearest papa and sis” and told them not to worry about him. He saw the rest of his life dedicated to his son. “I have some of her strength, really, added to mine.” He was now ready to end his letter and go to his wife, “my Ba, for ever.” He walked into the next room.

  Browning sat up with her that final night, just as he sat with her on so many other sleepless nights. But his wife was not coughing or struggling to breathe. Death had removed all signs of physical pain. The hollows and lines had been filled in. The conflict of conscience had been erased. Her own passage to the next room was as imperceptible as she always believed death to be. Not only her husband but those who viewed her had trouble believing she had crossed over.

  Leaving her side finally, he added a postscript to his letter: “How she looks now—how perfectly beautiful!” Her final serenity was a great solace to him. Her kissing him with such passion, her blessing him before she died. That youthful face of hers looked so happy. On those lips was such a living smile.

  A WORD MORE

  BROWNING NEVER REMARRIED; his widowerhood lasted for twenty-eight years. He didn’t allow a biography of his wife during that period. When people asked about her ancestors, he told them he had never discussed the subject with her, as he avoided areas that caused her pain. John Ingram approached Christina Rossetti in 1888 to write about Mrs. Browning, but she would not go against Mr. Browning’s wishes even though the fifty pounds offered was attractive to her. It is doubtful that his sister, Sarianna, would have approved a life of Robert right after his death in 1889 if she hadn’t wanted a third party to negate the issue of African blood. Privacy was important to the family. When Sarianna realized that her brother’s recorded voice was played after his death, she was shocked at the impropriety.

  During his widowerhood Browning’s need for privacy became absolute. Though he destroyed all the letters of his youth that came into his possession, all the letters to his family, he could never destroy his wife’s letters to him—and by extension, his to her. What to do with them? He could not decide. He left their fate to his son. Pen, by then not unused to controversy, published them in 1899. Browning knew his wife believed that “death would be deader” without letters. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t interfere with the Sophia Eckley correspondence. He fretted about the revealing letters to Arabel, half of which are still in family hands. He considered his wife’s belief in spiritualism the one flaw in a brilliant mind—a flaw the public might seize upon and exploit. In fact, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s reputation declined as time passed, just as his grew. By his trying to keep her real story from the public, much of her life became embroiled in sentiment and myth.

  G. K. Chesterton would write at the beginning of the twentieth century that, at his wife’s death, a door closed in Browning that would never open again. To open the door, to see how Browning managed and mismanaged the education of his son and his relations with other women, to take a look into the heart of the widower poet is a whole new story. A whole new life really. He wanted it to be as different as possible from what had come before, and his wish was granted.

  Men and Women is now considered his masterpiece. And in the eight years after his wife’s death he produced two outstanding works that had their roots in his old life with her in Italy: Dramatis Personae (1864) and The Ring and the Book (1868–69). His reputation increased, but poetry alone did not make him famous. He appreciated the irony of his ascent. He wrote about it to Julia Wedgwood, a woman who abruptly cut off their friendship in 1865 when she realized that the spiritual ménage à trois she was having with Robert and the memory of Elizabeth was going to cause her much more pain than pleasure. “I lost something peculiar in you, which I shall not see replaced,—is that stated soberly enough?” Robert wrote to her on March 8, 1869. He had no idea why she ended the friendship. But on to other issues. “Yes, the British Public like, and more than like me, this week, they let their admiration ray out on me, and at sundry congregations of men wherein I have figured these three or four days, I have seen, felt, and, thru’ white gloves, handled a true affectionateness not unmingled with awe—which all comes of the Queen’s having desired to see me, and three other extraordinary persons, last Thursday: whereupon we took tea together and pretended to converse for
an hour and twenty minutes; the other worthies, with the wives of such as were provided, being Carlyle, Grote and Lyell.”

  But Browning’s wife was present on the day he met Queen Victoria. On March 17, 1869, his sister, Sarianna, wrote to Annie Egerton Smith, “The interview with the Queen seems to have made a sensation, every body is talking of it—but I must tell you one little circumstance which occurred—Robt. saw her take Lady Augusta aside, and talk to her for some time in a low tone, and he perceived from her looks that she was speaking of him—Afterwards he found out that she was asking Lady Augusta whether it would be painful to Robert’s feelings if she were to speak to him of his wife,—for she was longing to express the deep admiration she felt for her, but would not do so if it might give him pain. Lady Augusta replied that she thought not, so then the Queen talked a great deal of her to him, in terms of thorough appreciation.”

  Robert Browning’s constancy to the memory of his wife became part of his public persona. Elizabeth Barrett Browning always maintained that the fame of a poet never was based on pure poetry. Browning’s poetry was appreciated for what it had to say. It was his Christian optimism (as the public interpreted it) that was sought after. He was seen as a teacher, a seer. Yet sixteen years after his wife’s death, he had a crisis that was at the very heart of his faith.

  On September 13, 1877, Browning had a chance to review his belief that he would rejoin his wife after death. On the day after what would have been the Brownings’ thirty-first wedding anniversary, he and his sister and their dear friend Annie Egerton Smith, half owner of the Liverpool Mercury, were vacationing together in the Alps at a chalet called La Saisiaz. He and Annie took a walk partway up La Salève, the mountain they planned to drive to the next day. They had a lively conversation on that walk. The latest issue of the Nineteenth Century had been delivered. In it was a dialogue “On the Soul and Future Life.” Immortality was argued for and against by prominent men, churchmen and agnostics, logical positivists and Comtean Socialists. Rational inductive reasoning was employed to discern scientifically if immortality was a belief or a fact. On the day after the anniversary of what Elizabeth had called her great compensation day, the one day a year the Brownings had celebrated as their sacred day, Robert Browning, playing devil’s advocate at times, brought himself and Annie back to his essential Christian belief in the immortality of the soul. And with that lively, intensely philosophic mind of his, he was able to do it on the back of the latest, most up-to-date, most fashionable method of scientific discourse of the late 1870s. He seemed quite pleased with his logic, had a pleasant evening with his sister and their friends, and went to sleep looking forward to the next day’s drive.