Dared and Done Page 9
“I REALLY BELIEVE I have saved her life by persuading her to rest.” Anna Jameson was sitting in her hotel room in Paris on September 24, 1846, writing to her dear friend Lady Noel Byron, widow of the Romantic poet. On Monday, while Anna Jameson and her young niece Gerardine were out in the City of Light, most probably at a picture gallery, a British gentleman had come looking for her at her hotel and had left a cryptic note: “Come to see your friend & my wife EBB … RB.”
She had stood in a daze trying to comprehend. What logic she could make out of the initials, out of the handwriting itself, made no sense. How could she piece together the incredible possibility?
Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson had gained entrance to Elizabeth Barrett’s room through her own insistence and through an introduction from Mary Russell Mitford. It was Anna’s close friendship with Robert Browning that subsequently opened Elizabeth’s affections toward her. She was now on her way past Pisa to Rome to write her most renowned work, the voluminous Sacred and Legendary Art, with her seventeen-year-old niece Gerardine Bate as her assistant.
Anna Jameson’s father had been an artist, a portrait painter of miniatures. An Irishman married to an Englishwoman, he emigrated from Dublin to England when Anna was four. With a well-to-do British wife and five daughters to support, Denis Brownell Murphy had trouble making ends meet. Precocious Anna, with her love of Italian art and literature, helped him by going to work. Perhaps it was from her lively and witty father that she developed the idea of the impractical, childlike nature of all artists, which made them unfit to handle the daily responsibilities of life. From the earliest age she was accustomed to managing these ethereal creatures’ daily affairs.
Denis Murphy was poor because of his calling. Dr. Mitford was strapped because of his gaming. Two daughters, Anna Brownell, born in 1794, and Mary Russell Mitford, born seven years earlier, found themselves as young women with fathers to support.
Anna Brownell hadn’t her older friend’s proclivity for the wonders of nature that drew her to the English countryside. The sophisticated, cultivated city life, the art centers of the world, were for Anna. She was an intelligent woman who prided herself on her practicality, yet certainly she was high-spirited as well, and had the imagination to make the most of what life brought her. For fifteen years off and on she was employed as a governess by some of England’s finest families. She was frugal and spent her money on helping her siblings (a lifelong endeavor) as well as her parents. Traveling through Europe with a wealthy family on the grand tour, she kept two journals of the trip—almost as one might keep two sets of books. One was a factual record, the other a fictionalized travel journal—that paid off. It was published anonymously as A Lady’s Diary. In 1826, titled Diary of an Ennuyée, the book had popular success in England. Its heroine died of the heartbreak of having to leave her love behind her, not the practical Anna. She resumed the relationship she had severed before leaving England and indeed married the man she had left behind, Robert Sympson Jameson, who later became Upper Canada’s first Vice-Chancellor. Unlike her heroine, she lived to experience the heartbreak of a failed marriage. It was a rocky marriage from the beginning, and her husband, in Canada finally, and a terminal drunk, seemed to have disappeared from her life. “Why should we urge these young people to marry and get into want and perplexities and ill humour?” asked Denis Murphy before his daughter’s wedding. Where are the good marriages? Elizabeth Barrett once asked Robert Browning.
Anna Jameson had to support herself, which she did, as a writer on art and women’s rights. She was fifty-two years old at the time Robert Browning appeared at her hotel in Paris and left her the enigmatic note. She was no longer the fiery-haired young woman who had begun to make her mark on the world, but rather a more maternal figure—an aunt. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Italy, described her ten years later as old and dumpy. In her fifties, she appeared in Elizabeth’s letters generous of figure as well as heart. Hawthorne and Barrett Browning agreed that in matters of art she was an eager teacher who assumed her pupil’s total ignorance and at picture galleries attempted to wash it away in a flood of talk. Both writers assessed it was breadth of knowledge, rather than originality of mind, that characterized her intellectually—a charge that might have pleased her. “Genius,” as we’ve seen in the love letters, did not impress her. Lady Byron’s husband had been a genius!
ANNA JAMESON (1794–1860) at age sixteen, from an engraving of the miniature by her father, the artist Denis Brownell Murphy. When her friend Lady Byron saw it in 1841—Jameson was then forty-seven—she wrote a poem to the once fiery-haired young woman that began:
In those young eyes, so keenly bravely bent
To search the mysteries of the Future hour,
There shines the will to conquer, and the power
Which makes the conquest sure.
Anna Jameson’s views about women (such as their being equal in intelligence to men) were more radical than Elizabeth’s; at times, for example, when Elizabeth spoke of the masculine mind being at its best stronger than the feminine, Elizabeth knew Mrs. Jameson wouldn’t agree or approve. Anna Jameson was an early feminist. She had to work hard to make a life for herself, and she wished to help other women (as well as all art lovers). Visiting Elizabeth Barrett at Wimpole Street, she had a vivid example of how one child prodigy had fared, a genius who also happened to be a woman. She had sincerely wanted to accompany her away from that closed life, that cramped and deathly room. Her nature attracted her to the messes in other people’s lives.
She hadn’t the genius of Elizabeth or of the heroine of Elizabeth’s last long work, her novel in verse, Aurora Leigh—Aurora shared that with her creator as well as with her namesake, George Sand. But Anna Jameson did share with Aurora Leigh her independence of spirit.
She was one of that band of English-speaking travelers, both women and men, who found on the continent a way of life that was less constrained by Puritan values and much more economical than in England or the United States. With taste one could travel very well on very little—as the Brownings planned to do. By happy coincidence that worldly woman was now in Paris, pondering over “Come to see your friend & my wife EBB … RB” and “wondering what the two things could mean.” While she pondered, night fell, and Elizabeth insisted that Robert go into a separate room of their hotel where he could not be disturbed and get some sleep. He was thoroughly worn out and had scarcely eaten anything for three weeks. In those weeks he planned the secret marriage, and then, in his own way, executed the travel arrangement. That he listened to his wife, left her to wait for Anna Jameson alone, revealed the depth of his exhaustion.
The Brownings had had a rough channel crossing at Southampton. The Havre passage had been “a miserable thing in all ways.” She and Robert and Wilson arrived exhausted “either by the sea or the sorrow.” They hired a diligence to get them to Rouen, and Elizabeth’s description of the ride painted a morphine-tinged picture. “It was as comfortable & easy as any carriage I have been in for years—now five horses, now seven . . all looking wild & lovely— . . some of them white, some brown, some black with the manes leaping as they galloped & the white reins drifting down over their heads . . such a fantastic scene it was in the moonlight—& I who was a little feverish with fatigue & the violence done to myself, in the self control of the last few days, began to see it all as in a vision & to doubt whether I was in or out of the body—they made me lie down with feet up—Robert was dreadfully anxious about me.”
After that haunting, feverish, and vision-ridden journey, they arrived at Rouen to find they had been confused by the customs of the country. Although they could stay overnight, their luggage must leave directly. “What was to be done? So I prevailed over all the fuss,—we should continue on route, after a rest of twenty minutes at the Rouen Hotel,” and of course after some coffee. What a spectacular sight they made, she wrote to Arabel: “You would have been startled, if in a dream you had seen me, carried in & out, as Robert in his infinite kindness would insist
on between the lines of strange foreign faces of the travellers room back again to the coupe of the diligence which we placed on the railway . . & so we rolled on towards Paris.” One wonders what went on behind those foreign faces as they stared at the feverish British lady carried in to coffee and out by her husband, and followed by her maid and her dog. Did they know they were poets? From those strange British on tour, one could expect just about anything.
The Brownings arrived in Paris on Monday at ten in the morning, lacking their visas, which the mayor of Rouen promised they’d have in two days, and also lacking two nights of sleep. They settled into small rooms in the first hotel they could find. Elizabeth didn’t mind the hotel at all, she wrote to her sister. The coffee was good and everything was clean. Robert went out to speak to Mrs. Jameson. From Elizabeth’s view they had agreed to this because “her goodness to me deserved some passing look & sign.” From Robert’s point of view it might have been also the case of genius seeking guidance. He must have been quite alarmed by his wife’s state and her persistent desire to make this trip from Wimpole Street to Italy as fast as she could. She had, in Anna Jameson’s words, “a feverish desire to go on on—as if there was to be neither peace nor health till she was beyond the alps.”
“I promised to receive Mrs. Jameson myself . . imagine with what terrors.” She would come face-to-face for the first time with a response to her act of voluntary will. Anna Jameson “came in with her hands stretched out & eyes opened as wide as Flush’s—‘Can it be possible? is it possible? You wild, dear creature.’ ” Never a woman of few words, she went on, “all this in intensified interjections.” Why, they were poets: each should have married a good provider “ ‘to keep you reasonable.’ ” But no matter, “ ‘he is a wise man in doing so—& you are a wise woman, let the world say as it pleases. I shall dance for joy both on earth & in heaven my dear friends.’ ” She was “the kindest, the most cordial, the most astonished, the most out of breath with wonder—& I could scarcely speak.”
Anna Jameson looked at silent, anxious Elizabeth and realized, as she’d tell her later, that the poet appeared to be “ ‘frightfully ill.’ ” She “would not stay . . I was to rest … nor to think for the second of travelling all night in that wild way any more.” The older woman took over. Good sense prevailed. She arranged rooms for the couple at her Hôtel de la Ville de Paris. Wilson had a separate room above them, she and Gerardine the apartment below them; the Brownings had privacy and Anna Jameson had letters to write to Lady Byron.
The art historian who spent much of her life caring for others (an occupation fraught with disappointment) had quite a healthy sense of her own importance as well. “I really believe I have saved her life by persuading her to rest” has been interpreted as an example of this. But more miraculous than Elizabeth Barrett’s marrying was that a woman who had hardly left her room as an adult survived the trip to Pisa. Anna Jameson really may have saved the poet by getting her to abandon her frantic race from Wimpole Street.
During the courtship Elizabeth and Robert had wondered if they should tell their friend of their relationship and then travel with her and her niece—she had already asked to accompany Elizabeth to Italy, but the offer had been declined. After one day of rest in Paris, it was the Brownings’ turn to request Anna’s company on the trip. Now the hesitation was the older woman’s. Would such travel arrangements be a proper environment for her niece Gerardine? Her good heart came to her rescue, and she agreed quickly. Luckily, Elizabeth did not know of her doubts. As Anna observed, Elizabeth appeared “nervous, frightened, ashamed, agitated, happy, vulnerable.” Not to be considered proper company to the “serious” Gerardine, whom Elizabeth had met a few times and liked, would have been a blow to a nature that was extremely vulnerable at this time.
“You may think how grateful we are, I am—& he is still more, perhaps … for it lifts from him a good half of the anxiety about moving me from one place to another, which well as I bear it all,” he feels is too much.
If Anna Jameson was “out of breath with wonder” at the marriage, what a shock it must have been to the public. In England, John Forster, editor of the London Daily News, did not want to print the wedding announcement the couple had labored over, thinking it some cruel joke. He stopped it angrily, before finding out that the couple had indeed married and the announcement should run. The secret of their love, as Elizabeth had insisted, had been well kept.
In Paris their marriage was consummated. “Now he is well . . I thank god . . & I am well . . living as in a dream . . loving & being loved better everyday—seeing near in him, all that I seemed to see afar. Thinking with one thought, pulsing with one heart.”
They kept to a leisurely schedule. “We see Mrs Jameson at certain hours, but keep to ourselves at others.” They breakfasted alone and then had “bread & butter at one (& coffee)” and in the evening they dined with their friend at the restaurants, as the Parisians do, walking to meet her, and walking home afterward. “He will carry me upstairs.” Then alone again, they watched “the stars rise over the high Paris houses” or told each other “childish happy things,” or made “schemes for work” that they would achieve once they reached Pisa. Everybody told her, she reassured her sister Arabel, that she looked well. “The first fatigue has passed & the change & the sense of the Thing Done (assuming the place of a painful recollection) & the constant love … have done me good.”
Why, “He loves me better he says than he ever did—& we live such a quiet yet new life, it is like riding an enchanted horse.”
EVEN ON her honeymoon, one thing kept Elizabeth from being “the happiest of human beings”: the “dreadful, dreadful” thought of the letters from home that would catch up with her at Orléans. To both her sisters she confided that the letters with their responses to her act were her “ ‘death warrant’ … I was so anxious and terrified.”
Three years before, she had written to Mary Mitford, “I like letters per se . . & as letters! I like the abstract idea of a letter—I like the postman’s rap at the door—I like the queen’s head upon the paper—and with a negation of queen’s heads (which does’nt mean treason), I like the sealing wax under the seal and the postmark on the envelope. Very seldom have I a letter which I would rather not read.… Even people’s stupidities emit a flash of liveliness to my eyes, between the breaking of the seal & the closing of the letter—and people’s vivacities grow of course more vivacious in proportion. Perhaps this is almost natural considering my solitude.…” Now, at the opposite extreme, letters still loomed larger than life. She heard the postman’s rap, saw the Queen’s head, felt the sealing wax … and mounted the scaffold.
As early as Rouen, as tired as she was, she wrote to her sister about the Thing Done. “That miserable Saturday . . when I had to act out a part to you—how I suffered!” At least her sisters knew that she was involved with Browning and would find her own way of leaving. Her brothers and her father were completely unaware. The friends she didn’t have the time to write to … the friends she did write to … what would their reaction be? Anna Jameson described her state quite well; it bears repeating. She began her marriage “nervous, frightened, ashamed, agitated, happy, vulnerable.”
Her state was balanced by Robert Browning’s sheer joy. “As to him—his joy & delight & his poetical fancies and antics—with every now & then the profoundest seriousness & tenderness intercepting the brilliance of his imagination make him altogether the most charming companion.” This report to Lady Byron was verified by Elizabeth’s letter to her sister. Mrs. Jameson “repeats of Robert that she never knew anyone of so affluent a mind and imagination combined with a nature and manners so sunshiny and captivating, which she well may say . . for he encases us from morning till night—thinks of everybody’s feelings . . is witty and wise . . (and foolish too in the right place), charms cross old women who cry out in the diligence ‘mais, madame, mes jambes!’ talks Latin to the priests who enquire at three in the morning whether Newman and Pusey are
likely ‘lapsare in erroribus’ (you will make out that) and forgets nothing and nobody . . except himself . . it is the only omission.” Here was the portrait of a happy man. A man who at one moment of time had gotten from life exactly what he had wanted—and was able to appreciate it.
Happiness is not the stuff of biography, and to the intellectual and scholar its proximity to simplemindedness often makes it particularly repugnant. Many fine minds have worked out suitable responses to show that this great man of letters wasn’t really happy, or better yet that he knew (or didn’t know) that he wasn’t really happy. Robert Browning just another foolish bridegroom who, on the trip from London to Pisa, shared the overflowing of a full heart with everyone he met? This was not the enigmatic older Browning Henry James would observe in society years later. Where was the ambiguity?
What Robert Browning’s happiness revealed was his character. His abundant, energetic, and supportive love on the wedding trip to Italy was the perfect balance to Elizabeth’s anxiety, and a clear mirror for her of the rightness of her decision. All the world is supposed to love a lover, but this lover appeared to love all the world.
The day before his wife left Wimpole Street, on what she would call “That miserable Saturday,” she wrote to Mary Russell Mitford in the most agitated handwriting. “I who loved Flush for not hating to be near me . . I, who by a long sorrowfulness & solitude, had sunk into the very ashes of selfhumiliation—Think how I must have felt to have listened to [words of love] from such a man. A man of genius & miraculous attainments . . but of a heart & spirit beyond them all!”
In calmer spirits, in Pisa, in late October, she wrote to her friend Julia Martin, her old neighbor from her childhood days at Hope End, an extraordinary account of her earlier inner landscape. She didn’t have to convince her of Robert’s worth, the way she did Mary Russell Mitford, so she could concentrate on her own earlier morbidity: