Browning

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Porphyria’s lover waits quietly for the rain to stop and the wind to die down, the girl’s ‘smiling rosy little head’ propped up on his shoulder.

And thus we sit together now,

And all night long we have not stirred,

And yet God has not said a word! (ll. 58–60)

Just so the Duke goes down to—possibly—dinner with his guest, calling attention casually on the stairs to another interesting work of art:

Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (ll. 53–6)

The Duke gave commands and his wife died; Porphyria’s lover wound her hair around her neck and strangled her: in neither case was there remorse or retribution; no police to break down the ducal door, no God to strike down Porphyria’s murderous lover with a thunderbolt. Like Johannes Agricola, similarly complacent, the murderers may have felt:

I have God’s warrant, could I blend

All hideous sins, as in a cup,

To drink the mingled venoms up;

Secure my nature will convert

The draught to blossoming gladness fast: (ll. 33–7)

The point about these characters—ruthless, cold, passionate, hot—is their natures, fully and subtly realized. Their actions depend upon in the act, and are informed in the aftermath, by their characters, and not vice versa. Murder is banal enough: it is the character who commits it who is the interesting subject, and Robert Browning is so much in complete control of the poem that gives the character to us fully-formed that we are largely unaware, on a first reading, of the artistry—the poetic authenticity, the artistic integrity—with which he does it.

Robert Browning, if his works were not often or generally read, was frequently and widely discussed among his friends. He breakfasted with John Kenyon, took six o’clock tea with the Carlyles, dined with Serjeant Talfourd, supped with Macready and William Johnson Fox. All these were social occasions that broadened his acquaintance and at which he was welcome for his confidence in conversation and aptitude for anecdote. Harriet Martineau, though mystified by Sordello, admitted that in conversation ‘no speaker could be more absolutely clear and purpose-like’ than Browning. ‘He was full of good sense and fine feeling, amidst occasional irritability, full also of fun and harmless satire, with some little affectations which were as droll as anything could be. A real genius was Robert Browning assuredly.’

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Joseph Arnould, writing in 1845 to Alfred Domett, described a dinner party at which Robert was also a guest: ‘Glorious Robert Browning is as ever—but more genial, more brilliant and more anecdotical than when we knew him four years ago.’ And yet, and yet, in this year, 1845, the polished social performance was becoming tedious to Robert, as though he were Macready toiling through a familiar role, night after night, in the same company of players, speaking the same words, throwing in a few ad-libs, in a long run of a popular play. Too often, it felt like an exercise in public relations.

In ‘Respectability’, published in Men and Women on 10 November 1855, Robert wrote:

How much of priceless time were spent

With men that every virtue decks,

And women models of their sex,

Society’s true ornament.

In a letter of 12 March 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett, he wrote, ‘So you have got to like society, and would enjoy it, you think? For me, I always hated it.—have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by foregoing it I should let some unknown good escape me, in the true time of it, and only discover my fault when too late; and now that I have done most of what is to be done, any lodge in a garden of cucumbers for me!’ He does not ‘even care about reading now’, he confesses. ‘But you must read books in order to get words and forms for “the public” if you write, and that you needs must do, if you fear God. I have no pleasure in writing myself—none, in the mere act—though all pleasure in fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other!’ He supposes Miss Barrett likes ‘the operation of writing as I should like that of painting or making music … After all, there is a great delight in the heart of the thing; and use and forethought have made me ready at all times to set to work—but—I don’t know why—my heart sinks whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it.’

A month earlier, Robert had been writing to Miss Barrett about critics, trying to be fair-minded and even-handed in response to her inquiry about his ‘sensitiveness to criticism’. What he had said then was, ‘I shall live always—that is for me—I am living here this 1845, that is for London.’ For himself—‘for me’—he writes from a thorough conviction of duty, and he does his best: ‘the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope in nowise affect me.’ And yet, ‘I must, if for merely scientific purposes, know all about this 1845, its ways and doings’, and if he should take a dozen pages of verse to market, like twelve cabbages (or pomegranates, he might have said, but didn’t) he had grown himself, he should expect to get as much as any man for his goods. If nobody will buy or praise, ‘more’s the shame … But it does so happen that I have met with much more than I could have expected in this matter of kindly and prompt recognition. I never wanted a real set of good hearty praisers—and no bad reviewers—I am quite content with my share. No—what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place—enough to make an apostle swear.’

In this selfsame letter to Miss Barrett, a few lines previously, Robert had seized eagerly on her wish that they should ‘rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and I, on each side’

(#litres_trial_promo) and given himself up to her—and their developing correspondence—entirely: ‘I had rather hear from you than see anybody else. Never you care, dear noble Carlyle, nor you, my own friend Alfred over the sea, nor a troop of true lovers!—Are not these fates written? there!’ These fates were written—what about Robert’s own? The work—far less, or far more, the life, the entire fate of Robert Browning—seemed in 1845 to be in the balance: the achievement so far, what did it amount to? ‘What I have printed gives no knowledge of me—it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will—and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion … that I think—But I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end—“R. B. a poem”—’. At most, ‘these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you.’

This is the letter of a man whose lightning or lighthouse flashes illuminate his world fitfully and reveal himself, though captain of his own ship, becalmed on a dark flood. Robert’s perplexity and discouragement was of long standing. In short, he was depressed: the weeks passed, Carlyle talked wisely and beautifully, there had been quarrels with Macready and Forster, the rarely positive critical response to his work was pleasing enough but misguided, the plays were defunct, the poems had sold disappointingly. On 9 October 1843 he wrote to Alfred Domett, who had thrown up the law and disappeared to the colonies, to New-Zealand, ‘People read my works a little more, they say, and I have some real works here in hand; but now that I could find it in my heart to labour earnestly, I doubt if I shall ever find it in my head, which sings and whirls and stops me even now—an evening minute by the way.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps to still his whirligig head, or to give it something substantial to dance around, Robert sailed for Naples in the late summer of 1844.

As is the case with his previous journeyings abroad, precious few relics survive to substantiate the itinerary or illuminate the events. There is some dispute as to whether Robert wrote the poems ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’ and ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ on this voyage or on the first voyage to Italy—Robert himself said the one, then the other. And if he could not remember, then attribution by others is just as credible one way or the other. Mrs Orr is virtually the sole source of information for Robert’s second trip to Italy, and she gives no circumstantial detail about how he met ‘a young Neapolitan gentleman’, by name of Scotti, ‘who had spent most of his life in Paris’ and with whom, very likely, Robert talked his proper French and improved his vernacular Italian. Quickly becoming good friends, they travelled together from Naples to Rome, Scotti helpfully haggling over their joint expenses. ‘As I write’, reported Robert in a letter to Sarianna, ‘I hear him disputing our bill in the next room. He does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.’

(#litres_trial_promo) One can see why Robert, who had learned to be careful of money, should warm to a man with a mind similarly concentrated on his own short purse. Says Mrs Orr of Scotti, ‘he certainly bore no appearance of being the least prosperous’. In Rome, Scotti was judged by Countess Carducci—an acquaintance of Robert’s father—‘the handsomest man she had ever seen.’ But Mr Scotti ‘blew out his brains soon after he and his new friend had parted; and I do not think the act was ever fully accounted for’.

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We could wish to pause there, at that sensational moment, to inquire further about the impoverished Signor Scotti and his suicide: he sounds just the man, and his death just the circumstance, to stop Robert in his tracks to add his friend and his end to his repertory company of characters fit for a poem. But all we know of Robert’s time in Rome is that he visited Shelley’s tomb in the New Protestant Cemetery, in commemoration of which he wrote the few lines on ‘Fame’ which form the first part of ‘Earth’s Immortalities’, inspected the grotto of Egeria, the scene imagined by Byron of the supposed interview between King Numa Pompilius of Rome and the advisory nymph, and the recently restored church of Santa Prassede, close by Santa Maria Maggiore, where the tomb of Cardinal Cetive may have partly inspired the poem ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’. These are all occasions of the most tantalizing interest, and about which too little—if any—first-hand evidence exists.

We fall back upon Mrs Orr, too, for information about the journey home to Hatcham, via Livorno where he found Edward John Trelawny who had been an intimate of the poets Shelley and Byron. Trelawny might have been in a better condition to discuss the poets had he not been stoically—‘indifferently’, says Mrs Orr—enduring a painful operation to have a troublesome bullet dug from his leg by a surgeon. Trelawny’s cool fortitude struck Robert very much. That the veteran was able to talk at all, far less reminisce about poets and poetry, was very remarkable.

Robert returned from Italy in December 1844. During his absence, he had missed the much-acclaimed publication of Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s Poems in the summer of that same year; but once back in Hatcham he read the volumes, which, if they had not in themselves been of the greatest interest, would certainly have caught—or been brought to—his attention on account of two delicately allusive lines that ran:

Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate’, which, if cut deep down

the middle,

Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

What, in 1844, did Robert know of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett? No more than anyone else, which wasn’t much in the way of first-hand information, far less reliable gossip—though uninformed speculation (it was said that Miss Barrett was completely crippled, unable to move) was never short as a negotiable commodity. The poet, essayist, and former seafaring man Richard Hengist Horne, who had experienced enough maritime and military adventure to qualify him as a Baron Munchausen (except that most of his tales, like those of ‘Abyssinia’ Bruce, were largely true) put it about that she was in very delicate health and had lived for years hermetically sealed in her room, her only contact with the outside world being through the medium of letters very erudite and literary in tone. He was more authoritative than most, since she had recently collaborated with him on a two-volume book, A New Spirit of the Age, in which ‘Orion’ Horne, ably assisted by the contributions of others (including Robert Browning as well as Elizabeth Barrett) had aspired to make a general estimate of contemporary literature without, alas!, possessing much literary ability or even critical faculty himself.

In retrospect, from the distance of our own times, Horne’s judgement in 1844, when the book appeared, was naturally coloured by the florid taste of his age, lengthily praising the likes of Talfourd, who is now not much more than a literary footnote to the period. But critical perspectives inevitably alter: to Horne’s credit, he did rate highly those big guns who have survived as literary heroes: Carlyle, Macaulay, Tennyson, and Dickens—though he’d have found it difficult not to notice them respectfully at appropriate length; and he devoted generous space to the ‘little known works of Mr Robert Browning’, whose Paracelsus he praised over five pages and whose Sordello, at the length of a dozen pages, he sorrowfully judged would remain obscure but to have been treated unjustly by critics since the poem, in Horne’s estimation, ‘abounded with beauties’. And so, her hand dabbled in Horne’s book, Elizabeth Barrett, the famously reclusive poetess, would have known not only of Mr Robert Browning’s work but, less intimately, something of the poet himself.

In his book, Horne reflected upon his collaborator’s invisibility among her contemporaries, supposing that future generations might doubt her very existence. But some, he knew, had actually seen her. Miss Mitford, for one, told him that Miss Barrett ‘lies folded in Indian shawls upon her sofa with her long black tresses streaming over her bent-down head, all attention’ while having her new poems read to her by an unnamed gentleman who, we suppose, must have been John Kenyon. Through the medium of Kenyon, then, we may also suppose that Robert learned more even than Horne gleaned from the gossiping Miss Mitford about the interesting lady poet who preferred to call herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett rather than to use her full family name of Barrett Moulton Barrett. From Kenyon, Robert received a manuscript poem, ‘Dead Pan’, written by Elizabeth, and Kenyon was happy to communicate Robert’s enthusiasm to its author.

In 1820, aged fourteen years, Elizabeth Barrett had privately published an epic, The Battle of Marathon, dedicated to her father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett. She had begun writing this at the age of eleven. Though imitative of the styles of Homer, Pope, and Byron, it was an impressive achievement—and would have been so if only by reason of its pastiche and precocious learning, far less as evidence of genuine poetic ability. This effort was followed the next year by ‘Stanzas, Excited by Some Reflections on the Present State of Greece’, published in the New Monthly Magazine (1821), and ‘Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron’ in 1824. In 1826, at the age of twenty, she published an Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, the printing costs being paid by Mary Trepsack, a Barrett slave from Jamaica, who lived in the Barrett household. Elizabeth’s correspondence with a family friend, Sir Uvedale Price, contributed substantially to Price’s Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages, published in 1827. On her own account, in 1832, she translated Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, published with Miscellaneous Poems in 1833.

All these were given anonymously to the world, until she finally put her name to The Seraphim, and Other Poems in 1838, and followed these verses with occasional poems and translations published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and in the Athenaeum. In 1842, she published three hymns translated from the Greek of Gregory Nazianzen and ‘Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets’. In 1844, there appeared her Poems, which famously included ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ (the story of a beautiful, talented, high-born lady who chooses to marry Bertram, a low-born poet, rather than a suitor of her own rank) and, within that poem, the references to Robert Browning’s own poems. Elizabeth Barrett was, by 1844, esteemed by the best and most influential literary magazines. Her classical and metaphysical learning, her poetic accomplishments, her mysterious reluctance to make any public appearances, all astonished and somewhat intimidated the literary establishment. There were some who muttered ungraciously about poetical obscurity and mysticism, but by and large her work was treated more reverently, more indulgently, than the irredeemable obscurities and impenetrable mystifications of Robert Browning’s poetry.

Some three years before, John Kenyon had attempted to arrange a meeting between Robert and Elizabeth. He had enthusiastically told her about him, him about her; he had discussed his poetry with her, hers with him; and at one point this middle-aged romantic go-between had almost brought his plan to a satisfactory conclusion, only to have it frustrated by Elizabeth putting off the encounter with a perfectly plausible, believable plea of indisposition—though in fact, as she admitted, it was because of her ‘blind dislike to seeing strangers’. Still, there it was—the reference to Robert Browning, in ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, and in the best poetic company, his work linked favourably, equal in rank, with ‘poems/Made by Tuscan flutes … the pastoral parts of Spenser—or the subtle interflowings/Found in Petrarch’s sonnets’.

On 10 January 1845, Robert—having read the copy of Elizabeth’s Poems given to Sarianna by John Kenyon, having punctiliously asked Kenyon if it would be in order for him to write, and having been assured by Kenyon that she would be pleased to hear from him—posted a letter from New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey, to Elizabeth Barrett at 50 Wimpole Street. The first sentence of his first letter to her is this:

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,—whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a graceful and natural end of the thing.

Several sentences further into the letter, Robert declares, ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too.’

And so it began.

But what was begun, and how was it begun? We know the upshot, the happy ending—the lovestruck drama has become the stuff of potent myth; but our sentimentality may misinterpret the beginning and our romantic predisposition may rose-colour our perceptions of the whole courtship correspondence as the simple singing of two flirtatious love birds, the coy cooing of two eroticized turtle doves. In The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Daniel Karlin points out that Robert, from his first letter, from the first sentence of that letter, knew what he was doing. Artless is the very last word that should be adduced to characterize Robert’s letters. Different in kind to Elizabeth’s, they are—insists Karlin—dramatic compositions. They may not be premeditated, but they are not spontaneous. Robert ‘composes his love for Elizabeth in the same terms as he composes the action of his poems’. In all Robert’s letters ‘there is not a single casual allusion, there is not a single pointless digression; an all-embracing objective cannot tolerate unconnected images or associations. Elizabeth Barrett’s best letters remind you of Byron; Browning’s of St Paul.’

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Karlin makes the original and persuasive point—though some, enticed by the fairy-tale aspects of the Browning-Barrett courtship, will find it startling—that Robert, the composer of the initiating letter, stands behind Robert, the character in the letter, whose apparently impetuous, ornamental, gallant sincerity is deliberately presented. Elizabeth also has a role scripted by Robert: ‘though’, says Karlin, ‘it is not made explicit until his second letter. He told her then, “your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely more to me than mine to you—for you do what I always hoped to do … You speak out, you,—I only make men & women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me …”.

(#litres_trial_promo) And so Elizabeth’s poetry, being pure white light, the very essence of her personality, is not dissociated from her being. In this sense, Elizabeth and her poetry are one, indissoluble, and thus Robert could write, ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too.’

Elizabeth thought this fanciful—‘an illusion of a confusion between the woman and the poetry’, as she wrote much later to Mary Mitford. At the time, she remarked, ‘Browning writes letters to me … saying he “loves” me. Who can resist that … Of course it is all in the uttermost innocence.’ Nevertheless, her interest had been stimulated—tickled rather than touched, says Karlin—by this well-mannered, if superficially effusive, letter from a poet whose work she admired and who came well recommended by John Kenyon and Richard Horne, whose judgement she respected. The next day, the 11th, she replied. She responded rather formally as a fellow-poet, beginning by thanking ‘dear Mr Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure by your letter—and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear—very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet, & of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me!’

Thus the correspondence—the long fuse, leading to the startling denouement—was sparked not simply by poetry but by the shared experience of being poets and, crucially, by the differences between them in that respect. Karlin defines this central concern: ‘The ways in which each praised the other’s poetry—Browning because Elizabeth Barrett seemed to him an examplar of “pure” poetry, she because of Browning’s “power” and “experience as an artist”—rapidly acquired a personal as well as an aesthetic edge. Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were to debate their relative status up to and beyond the altar, and it was in and through this debate that their feeling for each other defined and developed itself.’

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It is not to be assumed, from Karlin’s demonstration, that Robert set out deliberately to seduce Elizabeth, though it is plain that he was powerfully attracted by the idea of the woman he identified with her poetry. But they had never met, knowing each other only by literary repute and conversational hearsay. It did not seem improbable to Robert that they would meet. From the very outset he hoped, and very likely intended, that they would. He had been rebuffed (like many others) once: through John Kenyon, Robert had once come so close, ‘so close, to some world’s wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Now, tantalizingly, Elizabeth offered some renewed basis for hope: ‘Winters shut me up as they do dormouse’s eyes; in the spring, we shall see: and I am so much better that I seem turning round to the outward world again.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Their first letters were ‘all in the uttermost innocence’ because, by and large, Robert and Elizabeth were innocents—at least in love.

Neither of them, though they had not been short-changed in their experience of the complete love and whole trust of family and friends, had been properly in love. Robert had fancied himself in love with one or other, or possibly both, of the Flower sisters, though had perhaps only played with the fancy of being in love with them; and he had flirted a little—though not seriously, not with intent—in his lively, youthful, teasing letters to Fanny Haworth, whose mature heart may (but we don’t know) have fluttered at the sight of his handwriting. Elizabeth’s experience of love had been not dissimilar: as Robert was adored and indulged by his mother and father, so Elizabeth was adored with a profoundly protective love by her father, and she in turn deeply loved the large litter of her younger brothers and sisters. As Robert had felt comfortable in the company of older women and was drawn to the values of a good mind complemented by feminine virtues, so Elizabeth had found pleasure in the learned company and erudite correspondence of older men whose intellects interested her and held her attention perhaps more than their persons, though she was not unaware of—greatly valued, indeed—the attractive power of a confident masculinity.

Both Robert and Elizabeth possessed a generous nature and a vitality of expression which informed their everyday lives and coloured their personal letters. For all that Daniel Karlin emphasizes the underlying Pauline rigour of Robert’s letters to Elizabeth, they possess a surface sheen of Robert’s delight in the exercise of writing, certainly, but also of having found a receptive and responsive correspondent—importantly and excitingly, an intelligent woman. Robert wrote spontaneously and instinctively within that Pauline style, being amusing, intelligent, sympathetic, and responsive to the nuances of Elizabeth’s less confident, more impressionistic replies. He was graceful, poetic, provocative, pressing, and often powerfully eloquent in images and assertive attitudes that displayed a degree of sophistication seemingly derived from a worldliness beyond Elizabeth’s personal experience. In short, irresistible even without declarations of love. If she had her doubts and anxieties about the constantly reiterated word ‘love’, Elizabeth was at least allured by Robert’s manner—‘you draw me on with your kindness’.

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At first, Robert and Elizabeth contented themselves more or less with thoughtful, tentative criticism of each other’s work. She frankly admitted her faults (as they seemed to her): ‘Headlong I was at first, and headlong I continue … guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary—tearing open letters, and never untying a string,—and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning. And so, at your half word I flew at the whole one, with all its possible consequences, and wrote what you read.’

(#litres_trial_promo) But, she further admitted, ‘In art, however, I understand that it does not do to be headlong, but patient and laborious—and there is a love strong enough, even in me, to overcome nature.’

In Robert she recognized ‘What no mere critic sees, but what you, an artist know, is the difference between the thing desired and the thing attained … You have in your vision two worlds … you are both subjective and objective in the habits of your mind. You can deal both with abstract thought and with human passion in the most passionate sense. Thus you have an immense grasp in Art … Then you are “masculine” to the height—and I, as a woman, have studied some of your gestures of language and intonation wistfully, as a thing beyond me far! and the more admirable for being beyond.’

This appeal for informed criticism, signifying that Robert, as a masculine poet, had much to teach Elizabeth as a feminine poet, was also about the differences between them, between men and women indeed, and Elizabeth rather tended to assume that she had at last found her great instructor, a kindred poetic spirit whose abilities, deserving of admiration, would communicate themselves advantageously to her own art and abilities. Simultaneously, her use of words—‘passionate’, ‘masculine’—was unconsciously provocative to Robert. He, just as Elizabeth had feared that he conflated her with her poetry and perceived a unity that she did not herself understand to be true, similarly felt that Elizabeth estimated him by his poetry and, in a letter post-marked 28 January, told her, ‘you know nothing, next to nothing of me’.

He elaborated this in his next letter, post-marked 11 February, concluding: ‘when I remember how I have done what was published, and half done what may never be, I say with some right, you can know but little of me’. Elizabeth accepted some of this letter, and protested the rest of it in her reply of 17 February: ‘I do not, you say, know yourself—you. I only know abilities and faculties. Well, then, teach me yourself—you.’

And so it properly begins.

She had found out some small details already—Robert had offered to open his desk for her, that repository of things half begun, half finished. She was interested in the desk. She wrote: ‘if I could but see your desk—as I do your death heads and the spider webs appertaining’,

(#litres_trial_promo) but he had not written of skulls and spider webs. In his reply, post-marked 26 February, Robert inquired, ‘Who told you of my sculls and spider webs—Horne? Last year I petted extraordinarily a fine fellow (a garden spider—there was the singularity,—the thin, clever-even-for a spider-sort, and they are so “spirited and sly,” all of them—this kind makes a long cone of web, with a square chamber of vantage at the end, and there he sits loosely and looks about), a great fellow that housed himself, with real gusto, in the jaws of a great scull, whence he watched me as I wrote, and I remember speaking to Horne about his good points.’

That might have been quite enough about spiders and intimations of mortality; but Robert continued, laying the skull to quiet contemplation of the view from the window in Hatcham and giving some intimate particulars of the room in which the skull reposed and Robert worked. ‘Phrenologists look gravely at that great scull, by the way, and hope, in their grim manner, that its owner made a good end. He looks quietly, now, out at the green little hill behind. I have no little insight to the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same—portraits obliged to face each other for ever,—prints put together in portfolios. My Polidori’s perfect Andromeda along with “Boors Carousing,” by Ostade,—where I found her,—my own father’s doing, or I would say more.’

Robert had rescued the hapless Andromeda from his father’s portfolio, from insalubrious company, and adopted her as his principal muse. Much has been made of this engraving after the painting Perseus et Andromede by Caravaggio di Polidoro—‘my noble Polidori’—which hung in Robert’s room. Elizabeth naturally becomes identified with the captive Andromeda and Robert with her saviour, Perseus. Critics have had no difficulty tracing the powerful emblematic influence of Andromeda and the myth in which she figures throughout Robert’s work. Put shortly, Andromeda was chained to a rock at the edge of the sea by her father as a sacrifice to a monstrous sea serpent. She was saved from death by the hero Perseus, who slew the dragon, released Andromeda, and married her. The figure of Andromeda appears first in Pauline:

Andromeda!

And she is with me: years roll, I shall change,

But change can touch her not—so beautiful

With her fixed eyes, earnest and still, and hair

Lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze,

And one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven,

Resting upon her eyes and hair, such hair,

As she awaits the snake on the wet beach

By the dark rock and the white wave just breaking

At her feet; quite naked and alone; a thing

I doubt not, nor fear for, secure some god

To save will come in thunder from the stars. (ll. 656–67)

By some interpretations, the young Robert Browning was saved from despair by Andromeda—superficially a Shelleyan, romantically eroticized image but, more profoundly, a symbol of the feminine, signifying creativity—who came to represent the power of poetry and, by extension, the timelessness and thus the immortality of art. Andromeda, in these terms, continued to influence Robert throughout his work of a lifetime, until finally—in the ‘Francis Furini’ section of Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, a late (1887) poem—the emblematic image of a beautiful, naked woman in art is examined for its deepest significance which, towards the end of his life, Robert asserted to be a vision that ultimately leads us to God and, by implication, redemption. The poet or painter, by representing such an earthly image, one of many fixed immutable symbols, may, through the transmuting power of art, convey a sense of the spiritual in eternity to the modern, temporal, rational evolutionist.

Meanwhile, with his customary omnivorous appetite for experience and knowledge, Robert set himself to knowing and revealing himself to Miss Barrett. Elizabeth had all but said they might meet in the spring, and now, in his letter post-marked 26 February, Robert wrote on ‘Wednesday Morning-Spring!’ to announce signs of its approach: ‘Real warm Spring, dear Miss Barrett, and the birds know it; and in Spring I shall see you, surely see you—for when did I once fail to get whatever I had set my heart upon?’ Such confidence! Elizabeth replied the next day, wittily temporizing. ‘Yes, but dear Mr Browning, I want the spring according to the new “style” (mine), and not the old one of you and the rest of the poets. To me, unhappily, the snowdrop is much the same as snow—it feels as cold underfoot—and I have grown sceptical about “the voice of the turtle,” and east winds blow so loud. April is a Parthian with a dart, and May (at least the early part of it) a spy in the camp. That is my idea of what you call spring; mine in the new style! A little later comes my spring; and indeed after such severe weather, from which I have just escaped with my life, I may thank it for coming at all.’

Elizabeth’s health, as usual, was her most useful, well-worn instrument for digging herself deeper into the life she had created for herself, and which allowed her pretty much to please herself. Illness enabled her to manipulate even, and especially, those she most loved to bind them to her own perceived, however irrational, benefit. To get her own way, she sacrificed much, but at some level she must have conceived the sacrifice to be worthwhile. In his own way, Robert too had established a modus vivendi that enabled him to suit himself as to when, or even if, he should do anything at any time not of his own choosing. He owed this considerable liberty to the largely passive indulgence of his parents and his sister, who, for whatever reasons of their own, colluded with him in the gratification of his personal desires, apparently against the prevailing social values of middle-class self-reliance and self-improvement. It is interesting to consider how these apparently opposed yet very similar character traits—there’s no easily getting around the words ‘selfishness’ and ‘ruthlessness’—contended to get their own way in the great things of their lives at the expense of their conventional personal comforts.

Among her family and friends, Elizabeth was considered ‘delicate’: at least they had become accustomed to her presenting herself as a semi-invalid and had collaborated in treating her as such. In a letter post-marked 6 May, Elizabeth recommended sleep to Robert on the ground that ‘we all know that thinking, dreaming, creating people like yourself, have two lives to bear instead of one, and therefore ought to sleep more than others’; and for herself, ‘I think better of sleep than I ever did, now that she will not easily come near me except in a red hood of poppies.’ What we might now call her habit had been acquired over twenty-five years. In March 1845, Elizabeth was thirty-nine years old. Since the age of fifteen, and perhaps earlier, she had regularly been dosed with opium.

The Barretts, like the Brownings, had derived their fortune from the sugar plantations of the West Indies—though Robert’s father had renounced the trade on moral grounds, while Elizabeth’s father had continued to rely upon it for his income. Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, who came to England in 1792 at the age of seven and married Mary Graham-Clarke on 14 May 1805, was the grandson of Edward Barrett (usually known as Edward of Cinnamon Hill), a hugely rich Jamaican plantation owner who died in 1798. Edward’s father, Charles Moulton, was the son of another Jamaican family that also worked its plantations by slave labour. Charles seems to have been known for his savagery towards his slaves and, even for those times and in that place, acquired a bad reputation. Elizabeth, born to Edward and Mary on 6 March 1806, was formally christened with Edward, her younger brother by fifteen months, in February 1809. By that time, she had become known as Ba, an abbreviation for Baby—but the ‘a’ pronounced as in ‘babby’ rather than as in ‘baby’.

At the time of Elizabeth’s birth, the Barretts were living at Coxhoe Hall, near Durham, close to the Graham-Clarkes, but in 1809 Edward bought a property of some four hundred acres, Hope End, near Ledbury in Herefordshire, and moved his family (which by now included Henrietta, born on 4 March that year) to the house he almost immediately began—with an energy and taste for the exotic that William Beckford would have admired—to embellish, inside and out, in a Turkish style, to the extent of commissioning concrete and cast iron minarets from his architects. Edward’s neighbours might mutter about grandiosity and flamboyance, even of nouveau riche vulgarity, but he didn’t care; and Mary Barrett was captivated by a ‘beautiful and unique’ fantasy she thought worthy of an Arabian Nights story.

This extensive, expensive ornamentation of the house continued for nigh on ten years, in his absence as much as his presence. When Edward was not at Hope End, he was in London and Jamaica, attending to business. Mary’s business consisted in almost constant childbearing and child rearing: after Elizabeth, little Edward (known as ‘Bro’), and Henrietta (‘Addles’), at regular intervals of about eighteen months came Sam (known as ‘Storm’, ‘Stormy’, or ‘Stormie’), Arabella (‘Arabel’), Mary (who died young, aged four), Charles, George (‘Pudding’), Henry, Alfred (‘Daisy’), Septimus (‘Sette’), and—the youngest, born in 1824—Octavius (‘Occie’ or ‘Occy’). It was, by all accounts, not only a large but a mutually loving family, bossed by Elizabeth as the senior sister, and devoted to their sweet-natured, occasionally harassed mother. She in turn devoted herself to her dozen children, who occupied all her time. They were adored by their indulgent father, who took no great offence when his children were affectionately disrespectful. If anything, boldness and curiosity in his brood was encouraged: none of the children felt repressed, and they all looked forward eagerly to the fun they would have with him when he returned home from his business trips. They felt not just materially and emotionally safe, but, like little animals, secure in the predictable domestic routines and the regular disciplines of daily family prayers and other religious observances insisted upon by Mr Barrett. It was a fixed, solid world in which the Barretts, from eldest to youngest, were sure of their proper places—which did not exclude some natural jealousies and jostling for position—in the pecking order of Hope End.

If all this sounds like an idyll, it largely was. Hope End was an isolated rural property, deep in the agricultural west of the country, invisible from any road, silent but for bird song, and hedged from the outer world by dense foliage that to outsiders seemed oppressive. The Barretts lived in a quiet, secure, enclosed little world of their own, pretty much self-reliant and self-sufficient for their amusements. In this situation, Elizabeth discovered books at a very early age and her mother encouraged her to write about what she had read, nagging at her when her handwriting and critical standards didn’t come up to scratch. Supervised by Mary, Elizabeth ate up novels by Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, and begged for more. When a tutor was brought in to prepare Bro for school at Charterhouse, Elizabeth eagerly shared the lessons with her younger brother and learned Greek with him.

In April 1821, Arabel, Henrietta, and Elizabeth fell ill with headaches, pains in their sides, and convulsive twitchings of their muscles. They were treated, on the best medical advice, with a tincture of valerian, whereupon Arabel and Henrietta quickly recovered. Elizabeth did not, and in June she contracted a case of measles. It is at this time that she seems to have decided that she suffered from ‘natural ill health’, and her symptoms increased not only in quality but in quantity. She described her constant headache and her recurrent paroxysms—her ‘agony’—to her local and London doctors; how she swooned, the wild beating of her heart, her feeble pulse, the coldness of her feet, the constant pains in the right side of her chest that travelled round to her back, up to her right shoulder and down the arm. Margaret Forster succinctly describes how, ‘From the onset of menstruation middle-class women were encouraged to regard themselves as delicate creatures who must take great care of themselves. Vigorous exercise was discouraged, rest encouraged. Every ache and pain was taken seriously.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The result, too often, was a debilitated condition—a chronic invalidism at best; at worst, symptoms resulting from hysteria or a narcissistic hypochondria that derived from or provoked the social attitude that women were naturally weak, dependent creatures. Illness was considered to be virtually the norm for upper-and middle-class women: to be ‘pale and interesting’ was quite the thing; robust health was not fashionable.

Elizabeth, whose health in childhood had been good, allowing for seasonal coughs and colds, nothing to worry about in normal circumstances, was prescribed purgatives that gave little or no relief. Advice, of course trustfully taken and dutifully observed, to confine herself ‘in a recumbent posture’ for long hours every day to a sofa or bed probably only reinforced her condition. Her paroxysms continued at the rate of three a day, though none at night, and she began to complain that her spine was ‘swollen’. Though medical examination could detect ‘nothing obviously wrong with the spine’, she was put in a ‘spine crib’—a kind of hammock suspended some four feet off the ground—just in case a disorder of the spine should develop. It was at this point that laudanum—dried and powdered opium dissolved in alcohol—was prescribed for Elizabeth, who took this universal panacea with just as much thought as we might take any mildly palliative over-the-counter nostrum or prescription drug today. A solution of opium or morphine enabled her to sleep in a ‘red hood of poppies’. At first, the dose would have been mild, but in time she would come to depend upon taking up to forty drops a day, a serious quantity, and claim she could not do without it.

After a few months, Elizabeth recovered some of her usual high spirits. Her appetite improved, her symptoms of upper body pain and paroxysms abated, and she felt rested. But she continued to believe that she was truly suffering from a disease of the spine and, despite medical prognoses that she would make a complete recovery from ailments both real and imaginary, she behaved as though she were a chronic invalid with no hope of cure. Her body was as passive as her mind was active. For the next year, strung up in her spinal crib or recumbent on a sofa, she read voraciously, wrote quantities of gloomy verse, ‘sickly’ as she herself eventually characterized it, in the form of odes dedicated to her family, and continued her study of Greek. She read Shakespeare and the best modern poets—Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth—and became morbidly Romantic. She read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and became enraged about the sufferings of womanhood. Mary Wollstonecraft, in fact, affected her as deeply in her view of wedlock and subservience to men as Shelley’s atheism and vegetarianism had affected Robert. Elizabeth rejected romantic love and marriage as a snare she should take care to avoid. Robert had rejected the prospect of marriage less philosophically, rather as an unlikely adventure which, even if he should find a compatible partner, he could not financially afford.

In common, too, with the young Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett had determined in her teens that to be a poet was an honourable profession, that poetry was real work of deep spiritual and high artistic value, that she herself could become a proper poet—‘one of God’s singers’. Her ambitions extended far beyond the charming verses that young dilettantish women composed as prettily as they painted watercolours. Since Elizabeth’s parents, like Robert’s, were respectful of major poetry and serious poets, they made no difficulty about their eldest daughter’s devotion to such a creditable art and encouraged her aspirations. From the age of eleven, after all, she had shown not just promise, but uncommon ability. However they might privately enjoy the lighter-minded versifying of the other children, her parents and siblings soon learned that Elizabeth’s poems were no laughing matter and to tread warily if ever tempted to take them lightly. By the age of twenty-one, Elizabeth was a published poet. She had proved the worth of her work to herself and enjoyed the regard of those who valued it. To buy time to pursue her high vocation and continue her scholarly studies, she insisted on respect for the importance of her work and indulgence for her precarious state of health.

Her physical condition had markedly improved: she no longer rode or walked great distances or played boisterously with the younger children as she had done before her first illness, but she did stroll around the house and the gardens of Hope End and tutored her younger brothers in Latin. For the best part of the day, however, she closeted herself in her room, writing and reading in bed until late in the morning and preferring not to join the rest of the family when visitors were entertained. Now that her physical frailty had become established, accepted by custom and usage, she no longer had to emphasize her mysteriously non-specific weakness by regular consultations with doctors: coughings and a susceptibility to colds were enough to provoke sympathy and promote a collective agreement within her family that Elizabeth should be protected from anything that might worsen her delicate state of health. For intellectual stimulation, she corresponded lengthily with neighbours, older gentlemen such as Sir Uvedale Price (author, in 1794, of An Essay on the Picturesque, which introduced a new aesthetic category), Sir James Commeline (a local vicar and classical scholar), and especially with Hugh Stuart Boyd, a scholar, translator, and poet who lived at nearby Malvern Wells. She fell half in love with Mr Boyd, who was sadly afflicted with blindness, the only man outside her family that she consented to see and to make the effort to visit. But Mr Boyd, a gentleman of some moderate private means, happened to be married already and the father of children.

Mary Barrett, exhausted by the birth of her twelfth child, Octavius, in 1824, distressed by the death of her mother, Grandmother Graham-Clarke, and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, died at the age of forty-seven in October 1828. Elizabeth was twenty-two years old. As the oldest daughter, she might have been expected to take over the running of the Hope End household, but no such duty was imposed upon her. Instead, Aunt Bummy, Arabella Graham-Clark, an unmarried sister of Mary Barrett, came to live with the Barretts. She was forty-three years old, the same age as her brother-in-law, and capably took over the management of the household, so relieving Elizabeth of any domestic obligations. The death of his wife deeply affected Edward Barrett, who turned to religion for spiritual comfort.

On his trips to London he had fallen under the influence of the powerfully charismatic Scottish preacher Edward Irving who, by 1825, had started to go seriously off his theological head—and not quietly. Irving’s big moment of revelation arrived when, sensationally, he predicted the imminent second coming of Christ. From 1828, he began teaching Christ’s oneness with humanity in all its attributes and thus, heretically, to assert to his followers the sinfulness of Christ’s nature. Edward Barrett’s mind became infused with the Irvingite belief that salvation lay in purity, that translation to the next world, preferment in the afterlife, could be achieved only by remaining uncorrupted by this wretched and sinful world. Irving preached zealously to large crowds that flocked to hear his dramatic denunciations of the errors of turpitudinous humanity. His authority, he claimed, derived directly from God, whose mouthpiece he had become. As an instrument of the divine, Irving was regularly inspired to invoke the wrathful retribution of the Almighty upon the godless and the guilty.