I pray that the Italians may be a more tolerant people in this regard than the English. They are after all a darker-skinned race than we.
Wimpole Street,
October, 1846
IV
Until now I have resisted all temptations to add to the foregoing. I subjoined not a word even on that blackest day in November, 1850 when Elizabeth’s Poems in two volumes appeared in a new edition that contained a section entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese, evidently addressed to the man now her husband. I could bring myself to do no more than hastily glance through these poems; they seemed to me of a most improper, indeed disgusting intimacy, but it was not that which wounded my feelings. The title is intended to puzzle or misdirect the reader, but if it had been specifically meant to cause me pain it could not have been more artfully devised. For ‘little Portuguese’ was my own personal pet-name for her, kept a secret between the two of us, an affectionately teasing allusion to her pale honey-coloured skin. The thought of her violation of this precious confidence, of my name for her being, so to speak, filched away and handed to a man who, whatever else may be said of him, had known her for only five of her forty-four years – there are no fitting words. The first shock brought a return of the asthma from which I had suffered earlier in the year, and even now the hurt remains keen.
But for the moment, in the face of a second, graver blow, I am incapable of such Stoical forbearance. Yesterday I was in my dining room at 50 Wimpole Street when I heard from the hall the unmistakable sound of a child’s laughter and screams of delight. These were noises quite foreign to my house. I at once connected them with the known presence in London, not merely of my estranged daughter and her husband on their third visit, but of their six-year-old son, the child whose very existence I had tried to efface from my mind. Knowing what I must do, I inhaled several deep breaths; then, willing my head not to renew its trembling, I opened the dining-room door and strode into the hall.
There, on all fours in imitation of a lion or some such beast, was my son George Moulton-Barrett, and, retreating from him in feigned alarm, there was my grandson, Robert Wiedemann Browning. We stared at each other for what seemed an eternity, but was probably no more than two minutes. I could think of nothing to say and doubt whether, in any case, I could have spoken a word. The little lad facing me, whose looks reminded me strongly of my dead son Edward’s, could have served as artist’s model for a picture of a typical English boy, with the unambiguous fair colouring that that implies.
At last I turned and went back into the dining room, having mastered my strong desire to pick the youngster up and hug him to my breast. When I was breathing more or less normally I summoned George there. He stood before me, serious, dependable, the one of my sons I most respected.
‘Whose child is that, George?’ I asked, still not finding speech easy.
‘Ba’s child, father,’ he answered.
‘And what is he doing here, pray?’
‘He is waiting, sir, waiting until it’s time to return to his mother. I mean to take him on the short journey in a few moments. Would you come with us?’
‘I fear not, George. Truly I cannot.’
‘Papa, I beg of you. It would make Ba so happy.’
‘No, my boy. Leave me. And kindly remove the child forthwith.’
When I heard the front door shut after the two, I lowered my head into my hands and may possibly have shed a tear. So it had all been for nothing, I said to myself. What I had taken for facts had not all been facts, that or my conclusions from them had been erroneous. But if I truly thought I had been wrong, why had I refused to go to Ba with George and her son?
After a troubled night, I awoke this morning with the answer rising to my lips. My daughter is now forty-nine years old and some months. In the nature of things, it must be unlikely that she could bear another child, so unlikely that I can rule it out, feel untroubled by any possibility. But I find I still cannot bring myself to come face to face with her, and with him. I could bear her silent reproaches, his silent triumph, but not their pity. Her pity.
Wimpole Street,
August, 1855
V
The above is of course fiction, but it contains much fact, the prime example being Mr Barrett’s ten points.
With the exception of (4), all are matters of record. (9) and (10) certainly hold for the mid-nineteenth century, and I was told of (8) by a Jamaican friend in the 1970s. As regards (4), Mr Barrett had undoubtedly seen something in Browning’s work which many would agree was there without thinking it the result of being an untrue-born Englishman. Further, it might be instructive to produce suitably recondite but representative extracts from Browning and, say, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Byron, Keats, Hood, Beddoes, Tennyson, Clough and Arnold, and present them blind to a good class with the instruction to pick out which one was the work of a West Indian. The Browning sample might be the following excerpt from ‘Nationality in Drinks’, which Mr Barrett could easily have read, since it was first collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845:
Up jumped Tokay on our table,
Like a pygmy castle-warder,
Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,
Arms and accoutrements all in order;
And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South,
Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,
Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather,
Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,
Jingled his huge brass spurs together,
Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,
And then, with an impudence nought could abash,
Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder,
For twenty such knaves he should laugh but the bolder;
And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting,
And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting,
Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!
Other facts in my story include Browning’s first letter to Elizabeth and the extracts from it; the paraphrase of her reply; Mr Barrett’s membership of the Reform Club; his asthmatic weakness, including the severe attack of 1850; Browning’s visit in August, 1846 and the reason offered for its prolongation; and Mr Barrett’s meeting with his grandson. ‘The Portuguese’ was certainly Browning’s pet-name for Elizabeth; there is no evidence it was ever her father’s.
With one exception, I mean the thoughts and feelings I attribute to Mr Barrett to be sincere on his part, truthful. The exception is his final paragraph, where his explanation for not wanting to face Elizabeth and Browning strikes me as distinctly thin. His ‘real’ motive is more likely to have been fear of betraying his jealousy at seeing the two unequivocally together, with their offspring. (Not a sexual jealousy: I have never believed that he harboured a guilty passion for his daughter.) And perhaps he was still obsessed by his theory. Anyhow, he died in 1857 at the age of seventy-two; Elizabeth survived him by only four years.
I myself think it most unlikely that Browning, any more than Elizabeth, had some ‘Creole’ blood, though, if he had had, Victorian literature and the world in general would be that much more interesting. He would have been the English member of a great trio of European coloured writers of the nineteenth century, the others being Alexander Dumas père (black grandmother) and Alexander Pushkin (black great-grandfather), both of whom can be taken as sharing something of his spirit.
A few additional facts may be of interest. In 1972 I gave a talk on Tennyson to a literary society in Barnet. I was glad that what I had to say was entirely favourable to the poet, because my audience included his highly articulate ninety-three-year-old grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson (1879–1977), though that is by the way. In the closing stages of the meeting, the secretary of the society took me aside.
‘Now I know Tennyson wasn’t the same person as Browning, but we have a Mrs [I forget] in the audience, a descendant of Browning’s brother. Would you like a word with her?’
‘Very much,’ I said.
/> The word I had with the lady was not memorable, but I was most interested to find she was black, especially when I checked afterwards and found that Browning had no brother. None known to history, that is.
[1] Note: I am now satisfied that the abusive term scoundrel is unjust, together with the following clause, and that they represent nothing more than a transient, though once deeply felt, emotion of mine. —E. B. M-B.
[2] Not by any means all of them, alas. My dearest Mary, Elizabeth’s mother, had died seventeen years before this at the age of forty-seven. —E. B. M-B.
BORIS AND THE COLONEL
I
Edward Saxton was the Fellow and Director of Studies in English at a small Cambridge college, and concurrently a lecturer in that subject at that university. His special interest, on which he had given a course for over fifteen years, was the work of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith and lesser poets of the eighteenth century who were then collectively regarded as precursors of the Romantic movement. The events recounted here took place in 1962, when Edward was forty-five years old; a thin, rather tall figure with a perceptible stoop.
He still lived where he had done when his wife had died suddenly two years earlier, in what called itself an old mill house in a village some miles east of Cambridge. He had a green shooting-brake and used it to drive himself to and fro most days during term. One such day in late spring found him in the college room he used for teaching, a few minutes before his first pupil was due.
This pupil was unlike his others in more than one way. To begin with it was a girl he expected, an undergraduate at one of the women’s colleges. Also unusually, she was so interested in her subject that, over and above a weekly tutorial hour with her own Director of Studies, she had come to an arrangement whereby she showed her work to Edward four times a term. This was due partly to his personal qualities and partly to her third point of singularity, a family connection with him.
Lucy Masterman was a niece of Louise, Edward’s dead wife, child of her elder brother, now in her second year at the university and nearly twenty years old. She was sturdy, dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, with large watchful brown eyes, a feature she had shared with Louise. She still retained the artless manner she had shown as a little girl, though Edward had sometimes thought she found it came in handy when dealing with grey-haired scholars like himself.
That manner was in place when, punctual as ever, she arrived. Indeed, that morning it was slightly more marked than usual, if anything, but when he looked back afterwards it seemed no time at all before Lucy was reading him her essay, and scarcely longer till she was illustrating her set theme, ‘Gray’s use of the rhymed quatrain in his Elegy’.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife (she read)
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Lucy’s comment was that the simple inhabitants of Gray’s village might have been surprised to receive such a weighty tribute, with its heavy, regular rhythms and its tendency to epigram. A stanza such as the following, she went on, might have sounded more comfortable and comprehensible:
But if one should return whose errant mind (she read)
From rustic toil once took him far abroad,
All then would labour merely to be kind,
And crave his presence at their humble board.
The excitement that filled Edward on hearing these last four lines was quite unfamiliar to him, and it was not paralleled by anything that happened later. It had reached its full strength almost at once, and he could not remember afterwards how he had restrained himself from giving way to his feelings. For a moment he was young again, when anything had seemed possible. As Lucy paused, he asked her to stop for a minute in tones suited to a real command, and in an uncharacteristic movement got up and paced the floor.
‘Did you know, Lucy,’ he said in his diffident tenor, when nearly half that minute had passed and he was himself again, ‘that that stanza appears nowhere in any received text of the Elegy?’
She blushed easily, as he had noticed. She did so now. ‘I thought it might be a cancelled stanza from one of the extant manuscripts.’
‘The so-called Eton manuscript has seven such stanzas, none of which even approximately resembles in any way the four lines you have just read me.’
Her blush deepened but she said nothing.
‘In any case Gray would never have written those lines,’ he pursued.
‘You seem very sure.’
‘So would you be, my dear, if you were once to hear in them what I heard. Read them aloud again.’ As soon as she had finished, Edward said, ‘There. Does that sound all right to you?’
‘Well . . .’
‘What about the rhymes?’
She looked at her page again and this time noticed something. ‘Oh.’
‘Precisely. Mind and kind are perfectly acceptable, if a little trite. Abroad and board, despite the words’ similarity to the eye, are not acceptable, as any speaker from the west of England or Ireland or America outside the South would spot immediately.’ If Edward’s habitual manner had anything vague or preoccupied in it, there was nothing of either to be seen in him by this time.
Lucy perhaps saw this. She said tentatively, ‘Abroad rhymes with Claude and Maud, and . . .’
‘And fraud. And board with abhorred and harpsichord and what you will. No poet of the eighteenth century, certainly not one as fastidious and well educated as Gray, could even have contemplated such a false equivalence.’
‘So my sententious quatrain is a fake.’
‘I’m afraid so. The work of a contemporary speaker of standard English, at a guess, possessing a good but not intimate knowledge of English poetry of the period, and more certainly a defective ear. Now. To begin with, not your work, Lucy?’
‘No. I found it in a cupboard in one of the guest bedrooms at home among some sheets of typing paper, which was what I’d really been after, the typing paper. I’d come across it there ages before and I’d just left it and forgotten about it until I needed some, some typing paper. You know how you do. And it was just there in with the other sheets, the sheet with that stanza typed on it.’
‘But who’d typed it, who’d written it, have you any idea?’
‘Not really. Some guest, I suppose. I’m often not there, you know, at home. Most of the time, in fact.’
‘Can I see it, the paper you found?’
Lucy hesitated. ‘I chucked it away. Probably somebody going in for one of those weekend competitions in the New Statesman or somewhere. You know – write some lines in the manner of this or that well-known poem.’
‘Very likely.’ This explanation, like the rest of Lucy’s last couple of remarks, did not satisfy Edward, but the light fog of boredom in which he habitually lived had begun to seep back in, and for the moment he could not understand or quite believe in the animation of his first response to what now seemed four rather ordinary lines. ‘But . . . what made you put it into your essay like that, in a way that suggested as strongly as possible that it was a bona fide part of Gray’s poem?’
‘Oh, that was just rather silly.’ Lucy showed some discomfort at being asked such a question. ‘I was wondering if you’d spot it, but I knew you would and of course you did as soon as I finished reading it, didn’t you?’
‘Almost. But I still don’t quite see what you hoped to gain from your little deception.’
‘Nothing at all. It was just a joke.’
Edward’s response to this information suggested he was no stranger to jokes, but had got out of the habit of responding to them. Perhaps he had come to find it an effort to laugh. ‘I thought as much,’ he said, laughing now. ‘But it seems to have recoiled on your own head, Lucy dear.’
‘What? Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose it has a bit. In a way.’
‘Well, I think we might get on with things, don’t you?’
And in n
o time she was citing the carrying-over of the sense between the sixteenth and seventeenth stanzas as the only case in the entire poem, and pronouncing on the significance of that. It was a well-written essay, one that showed some real feeling for literature, as Lucy’s always were and always did. When she had finished reading it and discussing it and its subject with Edward, they agreed that for next time she should consider the justice of Johnson’s remark, ‘In all Gray’s odes there is a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away.’
She was rising to go when Edward said to her, ‘Have you really no notion at all who it was that put together that piece of pseudo-Elegy you found?’
‘None whatever, I’m afraid. As I said, I’m not usually there.’
‘It might have been interesting to know.’
The matter was left at that for the time being.
Some weeks later, Edward was sitting in the common room of his college drinking a glass of sherry before dinner. He regularly did so whenever he dined in college, and he did that most nights, not because he particularly enjoyed either the fare or the company but because he preferred them to the alternative, a solitary meal prepared by himself in his kitchen at the old mill house. He was on visiting terms with several married couples both in Cambridge itself and in the country outside, but he was not the kind of man to attract or to welcome any kind of regular arrangement for getting himself fed by friends. Now and then he dined out in another college, and once or twice a term he spent the weekend at the house of his brother-in-law, but the evening in question was what his evenings generally were.
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