Dared and Done Page 4

  How necessary was the secrecy? Later in the relationship she would tell Browning what had happened to Henrietta as a young woman: “But now I must remember—& throughout our intercourse I have remembered. It is necessary to remember so much as to avoid such evils as are evitable.” She looked back “shuddering to the dreadful scenes in which poor Henrietta was involved who never offended as I have offended.” Henrietta had asked her father for consent to some outing or occasion that involved, evidently, a young man. “In fact she had no true attachment, as I observed to Arabel at the time: a child never submitted more meekly to a revoked holiday. Yet how she was made to suffer—Oh, the dreadful scenes!—and only because she had seemed to feel a little. I told you, I think, that there was an obliquity . . an eccentricity—or something beyond . . on one class of subjects. I hear how her knees were made to ring upon the floor, now!—she was carried out of the room in strong hysterics.” Elizabeth had tried to follow her out. “Though I was quite well at that time & suffered only by sympathy, [I] fell flat down upon my face in a fainting-fit. Arabel thought I was dead.”

  EDWARD BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT. Detail of an oil of EBB’s father by Henry William Pickersgill. EBB’s father did not allow any of his adult children to have suitors. Although he knew “the pomegranate poet” visited his invalid daughter, he had no idea how often. The poets met while he was at work.

  How much power did Edward’s “eccentricity—or something beyond . . on one class of subjects” have over Elizabeth? One incident seemed to turn the tide of the courtship, admitting Browning as lover as well as friend. There was a lot of talk in the summer of 1845 about Elizabeth’s traveling for her health. Her father might decide to send her to Alexandria or Malta without consulting her. Then her physician, Dr. Chambers, the physician of Queen Victoria as well, prescribed that she must go abroad, that she would not survive another winter in London. Pisa was considered. Had Moulton Barrett approved, she would have been accompanied on the trip by her pious youngest sister, Arabel, and by Stormie. Browning, who canceled all thoughts of travel within a month of his first letter to the poet, would have shown up wherever she wintered. Everyone close to the Barrett household believed that it was of the utmost urgency that Elizabeth leave London in order to stay alive. Her father weighed the idea, but by September 17, 1845, “it is all over with Pisa.” Still, “do not blame me, for I have kept my ground to the last, & only yield when Mr. Kenyon & all the world see that there is no standing.… I spoke face to face & quite firmly [to her father]—so as to pass with my sisters for the ‘bravest person in the house.’ ”

  But her father was not the insurmountable difficulty. She wrote again that evening: “The ‘insurmountable’ difficulty is for you & everybody to see,—& for me to feel, who have been a very byword among the talkers, for a confirmed invalid through months & years, & who, even if I were to go to Pisa & had the best prospects possible to me, should yet remain liable to relapses & stand on precarious ground to the end of my life.… A plain fact, which neither thinking nor speaking can make less a fact.” As clear as it was to her that bad health was her real obstacle, in her first disappointment she wondered, “I had done living, I thought, when you came & sought me out! and why? & to what end? That, I cannot help thinking now.”

  Still, she was obedient to her father’s wishes. She would stay home. But Moulton Barrett’s reaction to her obedience was to complain of the “undutifulness & rebellion (!!!) of everyone in the house.” She asked her father if he meant her, and he answered that he meant every one of them. This seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. “He would not even grant me the consolation of thinking that I sacrificed what I supposed to be good, to HIM. I told him that my prospects of health seemed to me to depend on taking this step, but that through my affection for him, I was ready to sacrifice those to his pleasure if he exacted it—only it was necessary to my self-satisfaction in future years, to understand definitely that the sacrifice was exacted by him & was made to him, . . & not thrown away blindly & by a misapprehension. And he would not answer that. I might do my own way, he said—he would not speak—he would not say that he was not displeased with me, nor the contrary:—I had better do what I liked:—for his part, he washed his hands of me altogether—”

  Should she give up the idea? She certainly didn’t want to involve Arabel and Stormie in displeasing their father for her own gain. But George had counseled that whether she stayed or went “there will be displeasure just the same.” She asked Browning, “Think for me.”

  He thought. “All our life is some form of religion, and all our action some belief.… In your case I do think you are called upon to do your duty to yourself; that is, to God in the end.… Will it not be infinitely harder to act so than to blindly adopt his pleasure, and die under it? Who can not do that?”

  The wisdom of that advice was then balanced by Browning’s rashness in going beyond his vow of silence. “You are in what I should wonder at as the veriest slavery—and I who could free you from it, I am here—scarcely daring to write.” He took the plunge. “I would marry you now.” Her physical condition was no impediment. “I would be no more than one of your brothers— ‘no more’—that is, instead of getting to-morrow for Saturday, I should get Saturday as well—two hours for one—when your head ached I should be here.”

  This time she blessed him for his words, those he had written and those of the visit that had just transpired on September 26—a visit that seemed to have settled her heart. “Henceforward I am yours for everything but to do you harm.… A promise goes to you in it that none, except God & your will, shall interpose between you & me, . . I mean that if He should free me within a moderate time from the trailing chain of this weakness, I will then be to you whatever at that hour you shall choose . . whether friend or more than friend . . a friend to the last in any case. So it rests with God & with you—Only in the meanwhile you are most absolutely free . . ‘unentangled.’ ”

  And at the end of this letter, which changed both of their fates, she almost asked a “boon.” No, she could not. Another day. She was not that brave. Many days would pass in fact before she gained the courage to ask Browning for a lock of his hair.

  Once Elizabeth Barrett chose love over death, she did everything in her power to live. Some contemporary critics fault her for not having the courage to tell her father of Robert Browning’s love. Browning at first wondered if he shouldn’t meet the father face-to-face and declare his intentions. But the oldest child of Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett had one iron rule herself: Her father must not know of her attachment to Browning; the scenes, such as the one in which Henrietta’s knees were made to ring upon the floor, must be avoided if at all possible. After hearing of these incidents, Robert understood her caution and wrote: “The one trial I know I should not be able to bear,—the repetition of those ‘scenes’—intolerable—not to be written of, even—my mind refuses to form a clear conception of them.”

  Perhaps if she had been twenty-one rather than thirty-nine she might have believed the power of love would cause her father to change. Perhaps if she had known herself less, if she had thought the power of her love could keep her from a dead faint should her knees be made to ring upon the floor or if the thunder of the father’s voice rang through the house, she might have told her father. Perhaps if she loved Browning less, were less committed to living and to writing poetry that concerned the new day, she would have. Or perhaps if she were less certain of herself, if deep down she wasn’t sure of her intentions. Browning had said it. It is harder to act than to submit to someone else’s pleasure and die. “Who can not do that?”

  And then the biggest perhaps. What if she hadn’t been able to accept the limitations implicit in her father’s love? “The bitterest ‘fact’ of all is, that I had believed Papa to have loved me more than he obviously does—: but I never regret knowledge . . I mean I never would unknow anything … & this must be accepted like the rest.” How many a child has grown old refusing that knowl
edge and staying put? In any of the cases above, Elizabeth might have somehow declared, or let slip, her secret love. But instead she faced reality, faced her choices, and lived to effect them.

  The real circumstances of the courtship decry the myth of the helpless damsel in distress being saved despite herself. What was in Elizabeth Barrett’s power was her deep and intimate knowledge of her father and of herself. It was important that her siblings be kept in the dark as much as possible. Friends must not be told. John Kenyon could not be trusted with the burden of the knowledge, nor Anna Jameson, nor her correspondent Mary Russell Mitford. The only way to keep a secret was to keep a secret. Suppose Robert told someone and someone told someone and someone … leaked their relationship to the press! Wouldn’t that be nice for her father to read while relaxing at the Jamaican Coffee House.

  The day that Browning came to visit her on Wimpole Street she would come to call “my great Compensation Day.” Life, in fact, had had to invade her sick room and physically yank her by the hair, the image she used in the first of the Sonnets from the Portuguese. If she were to marry Browning she would have to get well. And from that first sonnet, through all forty-four, there was hardly a hint of the father. These deeply personal poems, filled with a profound sadness and morbidity, shared with no one, not even Browning, prove that the long reclusive period and the tragic losses of the first forty years of her life had taken their toll on her spirit and her self-confidence. In making the choice between death and love, it was not her father whom she battled but her pain, her memories, herself. Her father or Browning? She had already chosen.

  LOVERS’ LUCK

  THE LONDON WINTER became their ally. “What weather it is! & how the year seems to have forgotten itself into April,” Elizabeth Barrett wrote in November. In January it was like summer. “The weather is as ‘miraculous’ as the rest.” Without going to Pisa, her health was improving steadily. The couple was also given a period of unrushed time. Letters were exchanged daily; visits occurred now twice a week with regularity. There were no false starts, unannounced visitors, or unforeseen complications. Instead, warm days, time to get to know each other, time for Elizabeth to heal. There was no doubt that in the winter and spring of 1846, the poets were having lovers’ luck—that uncanny suspension of the outside forces that can upset the most heartfelt and most careful plans.

  One January day, the temperature reading sixty-eight degrees, Elizabeth felt a burst of well-being, put on her cloak, and walked out of her room where she had spent the last six years. Even in the days before Bro’s death when she did go downstairs, she was carried by one of her brothers. She stood at the head of the stairs in the dark hallway, paused a moment, took a look around, and then, holding on to the railing, she walked two flights down. Her siblings were in the drawing room; she could hear them. In her cloak, but hatless, she walked in. Her sisters and brother were speechless. It was her brother Stormie, the one with a stutter, who broke the silence, addressing her in poignant understatement as the guest she was: “That kind dear Stormie who with all his shyness & awkwardness has the most loving of hearts in him, said that he was ‘so glad to see me’!”

  From that day in 1846, though she would never dine with the family, she was up and down the stairs. In the context of this physical recovery in winter turned spring, the love between the poets grew. Like lovers before and after, they felt they knew each other so well that they could intuit each other’s deepest thoughts. They actually shared an uncanny sympathy; still, like lovers before and after, their assumptions could lead them down some dark roads.

  Robert thought he knew why Elizabeth took opium. She had had a prescription since the first illness at fourteen. By early February she must have told him during a visit that she was using less, because he was delighted enough to write: “I never dared, nor shall dare inquire into your use of that—for knowing you utterly as I do, I know you only bend to the most absolute necessity in taking more or less of it.”

  She was quite honest in her reply. That “you should care so much about the opium—! Then I must care, & get to do with less . . at least.” She wrote as if he had just given her the idea to use less. However, his utter knowledge was mistaken, and she built a graceful path in pointing it out. It might seem strange that she should need “opium in any shape,” since she did not need it to keep down pain. “But I have had restlessness till it made me almost mad—at one time I lost the power of sleeping quite.” Even in the daytime, her weakness, her palpitations, were so severe “as if one’s life, instead of giving movement to the body, were imprisoned undiminished within it, & beating & fluttering impotently to get out, at all the doors & windows.” For this feeling of impotent revolt against imprisonment, the medical men prescribed opium, “a preparation of it, called morphine, & ether—& ever since I have been calling it … my elixir . . the tranquillizing power has been so wonderful.”

  Her nervous system, “irritable naturally, & so shattered by various causes,” made her need it “until now.” And she had been told it was dangerous to leave off except slowly and gradually. Browning was “to understand that I never increased upon the prescribed quantity . . prescribed in the first instance—no!—Now think of my writing all this to you!”

  Elizabeth had perhaps forgotten the physical pain of her childhood illness, which her father recorded at the time. Or was the pain of the fourteen-year-old in fact the result of a restlessness so severe that it was maddening? Whatever the answer, for twenty-five years a mixture of morphine and ether had been calming her down—physically. Three months earlier, rather defensively, she told Robert, “My opium comes in to keep the pulse from fluttering & fainting,” to balance the nervous system. “I don’t take it for ‘my spirits’ in the usual sense,—you must not think such a thing.”

  By the end of February, Robert was thanking her for “the good news of the increasing strength and less need for the opium.” But it would remain her elixir, this drug that seemed to have the property of indefinitely prolonging her life. For her shattered nerves and by extension her damaged lungs, she had her medicine.

  Elizabeth also had her own concerns about Robert’s health. He was given to bad headaches. The remedy she suggested for them was one she used herself—good, strong coffee. And that paleness of his—perhaps it was related to his abstemious nature. She suggested a cure. Wine. “Perhaps it would be better for your health to take it habitually—It might, you know—not that I pretend to advise.”

  The only disagreement that touched live nerve during the courtship started innocently enough. While visiting Elizabeth, the art historian and feminist Anna Jameson had said, “Artistical natures never learn wisdom from experience.” She considered artists “like children, all of them,—essentially immature.” Elizabeth told Robert “she did not persuade me.” Anna Jameson could have had no idea that two of her favorite children were five months from matrimony, nor that she would precipitate their one big spat.

  Browning, in answering the older woman’s charge, was stoical concerning the world’s mistrust of genius: “we will live the real answer” of “all the stupidity against ‘genius’ ‘poets’ and the like.” Not that he was immature enough to have the boyish expectation that at their marriage “our happiness will blaze out apparent to the whole world lying in darkness, like a wondrous ‘Catherine-wheel,’ now all blue, now red, and so die at the best amid an universal clapping of hands.” He looked forward instead to “a long life of real work ‘begun, carried on and ended,’ as it never otherwise could have been (certainly by me …).”

  After that blazing image he lost his thread, and associated the word genius with an issue in the day’s news. Both poets had vowed not to cross out or rethink their words in their letters, but to share emotions and thoughts as they arose. The daily news, often in his new life to be a source of his poetry, in this case became a thorn in his relationship. That day’s Athenaeum (April 4, 1846) was full of the “French Duel.” The manager of a colorful Parisian newspaper had been murdered
in a duel that developed during a party in a Paris restaurant. The trial was causing a sensation, involving such witnesses as Alexandre Dumas and Lola Montez. Browning’s mention of the scandal led Elizabeth to believe he looked down on dueling, but that misreading was apparently cleared up on Browning’s next visit, which he noted as on “+ Monday, Apr. 6/ 3–5¾ p.m.” and which he counted as visit “(57).” During it he upheld that a man’s honor might demand a duel.

  If Robert thought his future wife overpraised his poetry, he should realize she told him only the truth. “For instance, did I flatter you & say that you were right yesterday? Indeed I thought you as wrong as possible” on the subject of dueling. “You would abolish the punishment of death too . . & put away wars, I am sure! But honourable men are bound to keep their honours clean at the expense of so much gunpowder & so much risk of life . . that must be, ought to be.” Why, even setting Christian principle aside, there’s no rational basis to justify or excuse such behavior. Dueling was so terribly wrong that Robert’s defense of it was disturbing in a universal way. “If you are wrong, how are we to get right, we all who look to you for teaching?” How could a great poet believe in dueling? Should Robert even be involved in a duel, “instead of opening the door for you & keeping your secret, as that miserable woman did last year, for the man shot by her sister’s husband, I would just call in the police, though you were to throw me out of the window afterwards. So, with that beautiful vision of domestic felicity (which Mrs. Jameson would leap up to see!), I shall end my letter.”

  By that evening she punned on her “disagree . . able letter this morning.” But she was quite worried by the end of the letter: “Tell me if you are angry, dearest! I ask you to tell me if you felt (for the time even) vexed with me . . I want to know . . I NEED to know.” If Browning believed a man was right to defend his honor through a duel, then should such a situation arise, nothing would stop him from dueling and either killing or being killed. “So I spoke my mind—& you are vexed with me which I feel in the air.… Forgive, as you can, best, Your Ba.”