Browning

Flush, when he arrived in January 1841, was six months old and irresistibly pretty. Of course, he became thoroughly spoiled and as devoted to his new mistress as she to him. Vitally, Flush became the object of her adoring attentions; Elizabeth became responsible for this scrap of excitable animal life. Flush pulled her out of her self-absorption, relieving some of her guilt about Bro—though not entirely. She pushed the painful memory of Bro to the back of her mind, to inhabit some dark place where nobody was permitted to enter. For the rest of her life, she would not talk of him and others learned not to refer, within her hearing, to Bro or the tragedy at Torquay.

Elizabeth returned to London on 11 September 1841. Her three years’ absence had been the most wretched of her life. The house in Wimpole Street, and her niche within it, seemed a haven of security from which she intended never again to be plucked and thrown into the difficult, dangerous world beyond it. Even to let anyone beyond Elizabeth Wilson (known as Lily), her capable and companionable personal maid who had replaced Crow, her immediate family and Flush into her room seemed unnecessarily hazardous. Not that visitors were encouraged or made welcome to the house at all: Mr Barrett, who had been reasonably outgoing, cheerful, and obliging in the days of his great prosperity, had withdrawn into himself as his resources had been depleted. His confidence had diminished and he turned, as it appeared to those who had known him in better days, gruff in manner with friends, grudging and curmudgeonly with strangers.

Elizabeth attributed his change of manner to shyness, about which she expressed some exasperation; but the truth of the matter was that Edward Barrett now felt inadequate. To compensate, he refused all occasions on which he thought he might not act with advantage—worse, be perceived to his disadvantage. Within his own house and family circle, he generally showed kindness and tenderness and was persuaded by Elizabeth to permit the amiable John Kenyon to visit and to meet Miss Mitford, who was also regularly admitted to Elizabeth’s room. He was delighted with Mary Mitford, but his success with her did not encourage him to push his luck further with others, such as Mrs Anna Jameson, who thrust herself into 50 Wimpole Street in November 1844.

There was no keeping Mrs Jameson out. She had read and admired Elizabeth’s latest publication, Poems, and nothing would do but that she should meet the author. Anna Jameson was not unknown in her own right among respected and respectable London society. Obliged to make her own living, she had established herself as a popular authority on art, travel, and literary criticism (mostly about women in Shakespeare and poetry), producing well-received, profitable books that enabled her to travel widely at a fast clip and in modest comfort to research more books on these improving subjects. Her works were not scholarly, perhaps, but they demonstrated some artistic taste and good sense; they were well researched at first hand, vividly written, and they sold well.

As a self-sufficient woman, Mrs Jameson was a convinced feminist in the Harriet Martineau mould, and naturally wished to exchange sisterly views with the celebrated Miss Barrett. She saw no good reason why this ambition should not be achieved, and so she politely left a note at 50 Wimpole Street announcing herself. But many people had left notes at the Barrett house, to no positive advantage. Mrs Jameson, turned away unsatisfied from the doorstep the first time, made a second attempt. She left another note, and this time she was admitted by Wilson. Elizabeth had read at least one of Mrs Jameson’s dozen books and her curiosity about the woman’s determination seems to have overridden her habitual inclination to close the door against even the most distinguished callers.

Anna Jameson was no beauty—Elizabeth, who paid close attention to physical appearance, noted that her complexion was pale and so were her eyes, she possessed no eyebrows to speak of, her lips were thin and colourless, and her hair was a very pale red. Carlyle briskly described her as ‘a little, hard, brown, red-haired, freckled, fierce-eyed, square-mouthed woman’. But Carlyle was not one to varnish a plain portrait. He spoke as he found—and so, for that matter, did Mrs Jameson. She was Irish, which largely accounts for her colouring and partly for her character. Like Miss Mitford, Anna Jameson was of middling years. But with the coincidence of their ages, any resemblance to Miss Mitford ended.

Whereas Mary Mitford indulged Elizabeth’s taste for writing and receiving long, confidingly effusive letters rapturously devoted, for the most part, to the incomparable beauties of Flush, his adorable character, and detailed accounts of his daily doggie activities, Anna Jameson spoke forth uncompromisingly and brusquely on all manner of matters within her competence, and they were many, including the subject of women’s superiority of mind and the uselessness of what she called ‘carpet work’ to which the female sex was condemned and confined. ‘Carpet work’ was injurious to the female mind, she said, because it led, fatally, to the vapid habit of reverie. Elizabeth faintly protested this blanket condemnation, though she had never worked a carpet, far less knitted or plied a needle and thread, in her life. Mrs Jameson, taking stock of Elizabeth, generously made an exception for her on the ground that she might do carpet work with impunity because she could be writing poetry at the same time. Anna Jameson’s vigorous, sharply intelligent, unreserved discourse, and the underlying kindliness of her nature, endeared her immediately, and so this good woman was admitted to the small, exclusive pantheon of Elizabeth’s closest and most trusted allies. She could hardly have chosen anyone truer in friendship or more stout-hearted in the defence of her reputation and interests than Anna Jameson when such unqualified support was required and mattered most.

As Elizabeth’s spirits improved, as her work became more widely known and widely appreciated, and as she took more interest in the activities and gossip of London’s social, political and literary life—in response to her frequent letters, friends wrote back despatches from all these fronts and her chosen ambassadors reported to her in person—so her health also improved. In her letter to Robert of 5 March 1845, she wrote: ‘I am essentially better, and have been for several winters; and I feel as if it were intended for me to live and not die, and I am reconciled to the feeling … I am not desponding by nature, and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion, I come out with two learnt lessons (as I sometimes say and oftener feel),—the wisdom of cheerfulness—and the duty of social intercourse.’

In her darker moments, Elizabeth felt she had been deprived of social and intellectual opportunities, ground to a husk in the mill of suffering, and she contrasted Robert’s luckier, fatter experience of life to date: ‘I do like to hear testimonies like yours, to happiness … it is obvious you have been spared, up to this time, the great natural afflictions, against which we are nearly all called, sooner or later, to struggle and wrestle … Remember that as you owe your unscathed joy to God, you should pay it back to His world. And I thank you for some of it already.’ She made some judicious criticism of attitudes towards her: ‘People have been kind to me, even without understanding me, and pitiful to me, without approving of me’: and now Robert—‘How kind you are!—how kindly and gently you speak to me! Some things you say are very touching, and some, surprising; and although I am aware that you unconsciously exaggerate what I can be to you, yet it is delightful to be broad awake and think of you as my friend.’

Robert retorted in his letter post-marked 12 March that ‘You think—for I must get to you—that “I unconsciously exaggerate what you are to me.” Now, you don’t know what that is, nor can I very well tell you, because the language with which I talk to myself of these matters is spiritual Attic, and “loves contradictions,” as grammarians say … but I read it myself and know very well what it means, that’s why I told you I was self-conscious—I meant that I never yet mistook my own feelings, one for another—there! … Do you think I shall see you in two months, three months? I may travel, perhaps.’ That last, apparently throwaway but more probably well calculated, line had its effect. Elizabeth replied eight days later, ending her letter by saying, ‘If you mean “to travel”, why, I shall have to miss you. Do you really mean it?’ She knew she was being pressed, that Robert’s patience had been tried and was running short. This long letter of 20 March opened with the assurance that ‘Whenever I delay to write to you, dear Mr Browning, it is not, to be sure, that I take “my own good time,” but submit to my own bad time … I have not been very well, nor have had much heart for saying so.’

The weather—‘this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and the moon!’—had been implacable and ‘I only grow weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal, in a corner—and then all this must end! April is coming. There will be both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps, after all, we may. And as to seeing you besides, I observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? You are learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such a secluded life as mine—notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about social duties and the like—well—if you have such knowledge or if you have it not, I cannot say, but I do say that I will indeed see you when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth “to rights” again so as to make pleasures of the sort possible.’

The letter goes on, very affectingly, very emotionally, and in important respects quite misleadingly, to summarize her life, to draw comparisons between Robert’s full, heady experience of an active, happy life—‘You are Paracelsus’—and the life that Elizabeth has lived ‘only inwardly; or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country—had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped towards the ground like an untrained honeysuckle—and but for one, in my own house—but of this I cannot speak.’ Here Elizabeth drew a veil over the memory of Bro.

It was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it. Books and dreams were what I lived in—and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass. And so time passed and passed—and afterwards, when my illness came and I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done, and no prospect (as it appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and time to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave—that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact. I was as a man dying who had not read Shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand? And do you also know what a disadvantage this is to my art? Why, if I live on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under signal disadvantages—that I am, in a manner, as a blind poet? Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main. But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some …

And here she gives up, helpless and speechless after such a powerful passage of self-confession and self-revelation. She felt, perhaps, she had gone too far and cut it off with a bathetic moral banality—‘But all grumbling is a vile thing’—promptly followed by a pious platitude—‘We should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them enough for each of us.’

We can read all this more objectively than subjectively, Elizabeth wrote it with passion, some element of self-pity and, in the light of what we now know about her early life, some self-delusion and self-dramatization. To take only the most glaringly self-serving example, if she had been lonely it had been through her own choice to avoid company. The impression she gave (by omission rather than direct statement) of being all but a solitary orphan child brought up by the fairies, was hardly fair to her two devoted parents or the eleven younger brothers and sisters who doted upon their demanding older sister. She might have felt solitary from time to time, she might have longed to be less alone sometimes, she might have felt intellectually isolated, but rarely could she have felt lonely in a social sense. At some cost to others, Elizabeth had bought time and space for her reveries, for her inner life, beyond which the Barretts buzzed like bees in the domestic environment, conscientious and generous in their efforts to care for her health, keep her amused, run her errands, and cater to her every comfort.

Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that what she wrote on 20 March 1845 was true to her deepest feelings, to her perceptions of her situation, if not strictly accurate as to domestic reality and psychological truth. The letter also seemed to mark a real and profound desire that she should move towards a more active life, that time was no longer on her side—‘I, who am scarcely to be called young now’. In March 1845, on her thirty-ninth birthday, she entered her fortieth year, though the anniversary merited no mention in her letters to Robert. There is a suggestion, in Elizabeth’s appeals to Robert to make the imaginative effort to understand, to believe her self-assessment, after her observation that he distrusted her, that personal revelations had by now become necessary and that Robert, himself free to move, represented some hope (not yet quantifiable) of her own release to her personal benefit and the benefit of her poetry.

On the contrary, Robert, surfeited with being active in the world, understood that inwardness and seclusion were desirable and essential conditions for creative activity, for the poetic art, and that the products of the cultivated imagination were of more value than mere representations of reality. Elizabeth’s ‘lamentable disadvantage’ was in fact her most priceless advantage. Robert valued very highly the ‘visionary utterances’ in Elizabeth’s poetry and exalted her professed ‘disadvantage’ above what Daniel Karlin characterizes as ‘the process of interaction between the mind and “external influences” out of which his own “dramatic” poetry was made.’134 Elizabeth had the measure of Robert and his poetry when she wrote on 17 April, ‘I have a profound conviction that where a poet has been shut from most of the outward aspects of life, he is at a lamentable disadvantage. Can you, speaking for yourself, separate the results in you from the external influences at work around you, that you say so boldly that you get nothing from the world? You do not directly, I know—but you do indirectly & by a rebound. Whatever acts upon you, becomes you—& whatever you love or hate, whatever charms you or is scorned by you, acts on you & becomes you.’ No critic was ever more acutely perceptive about the well-springs of Robert’s work than Elizabeth.

Her estimations of his character were, at this early stage, less sure—though, to be fair, she was working with inadequate information. Elizabeth had read Robert’s poems, but she had not yet fully read the man. The two were not, as he had warned her, to be confused. Robert had provided some personal information about himself and his family, of course, and she had gleaned a little more from John Kenyon and Miss Mitford: the former biased in Robert’s favour, the latter mildly prejudiced against him. The curtain had been rung up on the play, but neither of the principals had yet made their first entrances. They were still exchanging dialogue as offstage voices.

The preliminary scenes had been carefully set, principally by Robert. He had posed himself solitary at his desk with spiders and skull; he had pictured himself amidst a glittering crowd of celebrated men and women—a wealth of writers, an amplitude of artists, a surfeit of society beauties—weary of their dinner tables and ballrooms. Elizabeth had already conjured him, largely through his poetry, as a heroic figure, and Robert himself had impressed upon her his resolve in getting his own way in whatever he set his heart and mind upon gaining. What she did not yet fully understand, but had begun to suspect, was that he had cast her, sight unseen, as his leading lady, the romantic heroine. There were several objections to this, and she managed to play for time whenever Robert pressed for a meeting. Robert at first tended to assume that she deferred a face to face encounter on account of her invalidity, which, not having inquired too closely of Kenyon for particulars, he took to be greater and more debilitating than it was. In Robert’s letter, postmarked 13 May, he wrote to say, ‘I ask you not to see me so long as you are unwell or mistrustful of—No, no that is being too grand! Do see me when you can, and let me not be only writing myself.’

In her reply to Robert post-marked 16 May, she protested: ‘But how “mistrustfulness”? And how “that way?” What have I said or done, I, who am not apt to be mistrustful of anybody and should be a miraculous monster if I began with you!’ She excused herself: ‘I have made what is vulgarly called a “piece of work” about little; or seemed to make it. Forgive me. I am shy by nature:—and by position and experience by having had my nerves shaken to excess, and by leading a life of such seclusion, … by these things together and by others besides, I have appeared shy and ungrateful to you. Only not mistrustful.’ She relented: she said that if Robert cared to come to see her, he could come. It would be her gain, she said, and not Robert’s. She did not normally admit visitors because, she wrote, ‘putting the question of health quite aside, it would be unbecoming to lie here on the sofa and make a company-show of an infirmity, and hold a beggar’s hat for sympathy.’ To the extent that she did exploit her condition of health, she was obscurely repulsed by it herself and thus certain that others would also be disgusted.

It is a convention that romantic and operatic heroines, especially if pale, languorous, and dying of consumption, should be beautiful, and so it is sentimentally assumed that Elizabeth was chiefly worried by the effect her looks might have on Robert. It is difficult to conceive a more banal idea than that Elizabeth, hearing Robert’s footsteps on the stair for the first time, should primp herself, pinch her cheeks for a little colour, and have Wilson, her maid, fuss with her hair to present herself to best advantage. She possessed no idea of herself as a tragic heroine, and still further from her mind was any concept of herself as a flirt, a coquette. Personally, she affected no mystery. To whatever extent she had been invested with glamour and mystery, that image of beauty unrevealed had arisen in the minds of others from her curious reclusiveness and invisibility. Conscious of public interest in her, and perhaps aware that her disinclination to put herself obligingly on show only served to fuel that curiosity, she feared, if anything, a constant troop of rubber-necking visitors curious to inspect her as a sort of freak show.

More to the point, Elizabeth worried that Robert would find her colourless in person, tongue-tied, less interesting than her poetry. He would be disappointed in her. ‘There is nothing to see in me;’ she warned him, ‘nor to hear in me—I never learnt to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark.’ The most he could expect should be ‘truth and simplicity for you, in any case; and a friend. And do not answer this—I do not write it as a fly trap for compliments. Your spider would scorn me for it too much.’135

Having consented to a meeting, Elizabeth promptly took fright and retreated a little, disingenuously procrastinating not on her own account but by offering Robert an excuse for delay, a mediator, or the opportunity to create an obstacle to his visit. In her letter post-marked 16 May she reminded Robert that he had not been well, that he had had a headache and a ringing in his ears, and she entreated him ‘not to think of coming until that is all put to silence satisfactorily. When it is done, … you must choose whether you would like best to come with Mr Kenyon or to come alone—and if you would come alone, you must just tell me on what day, and I will see you on any day unless there should be an unforeseen obstacle, … any day after two, or before six.’

Robert in turn had his anxieties. In his Friday evening reply postmarked 17 May, amusingly as he thought, he played with Elizabeth’s alleged ‘mistrust’ of him—not that he would make away with the Barrett cloaks and umbrellas downstairs, or publish a magazine article about his meeting with her, rather that she mistrusted his ‘commonsense,—nay, uncommon and dramatic-poet’s sense, if I am put on asserting it!—all which pieces of mistrust I could detect, and catch struggling, and pin to death in a moment, and put a label in, with name, genus and species, just like a horrible entomologist; only I won’t, because the first visit of the Northwind will carry the whole tribe into the Red Sea—and those horns and tails and scalewings are best forgotten altogether.’ Robert then conjured an elaborately facetious encounter between himself and an imaginary Mr Simpson, an avid admirer of Mr Browning’s poetry who earnestly wishes to meet its maker and is disappointed in the banality of Robert’s conversation about the weather and politics and makes his excuses to leave after five minutes, saying to himself, ‘Well, I did expect to see something different from that little yellow commonplace man.’ Robert then said that he would call on Miss Barrett—allowing for any adverse circumstances—on Tuesday at two o’clock.

Elizabeth, discontented with his letter, replied the same day that ‘I shall be ready on Tuesday I hope, but I hate and protest against your horrible “entomology.”’ Robert’s light-hearted little fantasy of Simpsonism had not been well received by Elizabeth, who crossly considered that ‘you, who know everything, or at least make awful guesses at everything in one’s feelings and motives, and profess to pin them down in a book of classified inscriptions, … should have been able to understand better, or misunderstand less, in a matter like this—Yes! I think so. I think you should have made out the case in some such way as it was in nature—viz. that you had lashed yourself up to an exorbitant wishing to see me, … (you who could see, any day, people who are a hundredfold and to all social purposes, my superiors!) because I was unfortunate enough to be shut up in a room and silly enough to make a fuss about opening the door; and that I grew suddenly abashed by the consciousness of this. How different from a distrust of you! how different!’136 Elizabeth and Robert had both, by this point, worked themselves up to such a pitch of apprehension that their hypersensitivity crackled like static electricity in the air between them. Of the two, Elizabeth was only marginally the less confident. Mr Barrett had been squared—he did not object to ‘Ba’s poet’ paying her a visit so long as he did not have to meet him. In any case, Mr Barrett, like his sons, was usually out during the afternoons, until about seven o’clock. From two to six was the quietest part of the day in the house. It wasn’t likely, in any case, that anyone would burst unexpectedly into Elizabeth’s room: she saw her brothers and their noisy friends ‘only at certain hours’ and, she later told Robert, ‘as you have “a reputation” and are opined to talk in blank verse, it is not likely that there should be much irreverent rushing into this room when you are known to be in it.’137 At three o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday 20 May 1845, Robert was led up the stairs and shown into Elizabeth’s room. He left ninety minutes later, at half past four. Robert afterwards noted the date and time and length of the first meeting, as he would note all subsequent meetings, on the envelopes of Elizabeth’s letters.