Browning

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!’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

And that was all he noted. Neither Robert nor Elizabeth directly referred in their letters, then or later, to what passed between them during their times together in her room. It is as though the letters are one dialogue, the conversations quite another. They seem rarely to have overlapped, or flowed into one another; at most, the letters may have continued discussions initiated verbally, but the written correspondence is remarkably self-contained. Perhaps, after all, Robert and Elizabeth at first confined themselves to polite ‘Simpsonisms’ about the weather and politics. We can make some guesses, but we not know. We know, nevertheless, what Robert saw when the door closed behind him and he sat down to talk privately with Elizabeth. The room she had described to a Devonshire friend, Mrs Martin, on 26 May 1843, would not have substantially changed over two years:

The bed, like a sofa and no bed: the large table placed out in the room, towards the wardrobe end of it; the sofa rolled where a sofa should be rolled—opposite the arm-chair; the drawers crowned with a coronal of shelves fashioned by Sette and Co. (of papered deal and crimson merino) to carry my books; the washing table opposite turned into a cabinet with another coronal of shelves; and Chaucer’s and Homer’s busts in guard over these two departments of English and Greek poetry; three more busts consecrating the wardrobe which there was no annihilating; and the window—oh, I must take a new paragraph for the window, I am out of breath.

In the window is fixed a deep box full of soil, where are springing up my scarlet runners, nasturtiums, and convolvuluses, although they were disturbed a few days ago by the revolutionary insertion among them of a great ivy root with trailing branches so long and wide that the top tendrils are fastened to Henrietta’s window of the higher storey, while the lower ones cover all my panes.

For the occasion of Robert’s first visit, Elizabeth had made at least one adjustment to the decor of the room: she had taken down his portrait (reproduced from Horne’s New Spirit of the Age) from the wall where it normally hung with portraits of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlyle, and Harriet Martineau. ‘In a fit of justice’, she also took down the picture of Tennyson.

The room, rich with crimson, was dimly lit: blinds were partly pulled against the afternoon sun, and the ivy (a gift from John Kenyon) further filtered whatever light was left. In this crepuscular atmosphere, perhaps she intended to blend with the shadows and fade, half-glimpsed, into the general obscurity she had pulled around herself. To complement this chiaroscuro, she would have been wearing a black silk summer dress (for winter, she wore black velvet), in perpetual mourning for Bro. Since she never went out, her complexion would have been pallid, in stark contrast not only to the deep black of her dress but to the glossy black of her thick hair, a mass of ringlets framing her small, worn face in which her eyes were sunk like ‘two dark caves’. She looked at Robert directly, caught his gaze, when he made his first entrance, but thereafter, for several months, she averted her eyes from his. Elizabeth reclined on her sofa, a small figure in a large dress. Robert sat on a chair drawn up close to her sofa. He conversed in his confident, resonant voice; she replied in her thin, high, reedy voice. On his sixth visit, on Saturday 28 June, and thereafter, Robert would bring flowers from his mother’s garden, roses especially, their fresh colour and heady scent filling the room with—he deliberately intended—a reminder and invocation of the living world outside.

The result of their first meeting was satisfactory: their letters, each thanking the other for the encounter, will not, however, satisfy those readers who wish for an immediate coup de foudre: ‘I trust to you’, wrote Robert immediately afterwards, ‘for a true account of how you are—if tired, not tired, if I did wrong in any thing,—or, if you please, right in any thing—(only, not one more word about my “kindness,” which, to get done with, I will grant is excessive) … I am proud and happy in your friendship—now and ever. May God bless you!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth replied the next day, the Wednesday morning: ‘Indeed there was nothing wrong—how could there be? And there was everything right—as how should there not be? And as for the “loud speaking,” I did not hear any—and, instead of being worse, I ought to be better for what was certainly (to speak of it, or be silent of it,) happiness and honour to me yesterday.’ And, her fears allayed, she looked forward to seeing Robert again: ‘But you will come really on Tuesday—and again, when you like and can together—and it will not be more “inconvenient” to me to be pleased, I suppose, than it is to people in general—will it, do you think? Ah—how you misjudge! Why it must obviously and naturally be delightful to me to receive you here when you like to come, and it cannot be necessary for me to say so in set words—believe it of your friend, E.B.B.’

(#litres_trial_promo) So far, so good—but no further. One letter is missing from the courtship correspondence, which is otherwise entire: the sixteenth letter from Robert to which Elizabeth replied on Friday evening, 23 May. The letter no longer exists, having been deliberately destroyed by Elizabeth. What it contained, we do not know, only that Elizabeth read it ‘in pain and agitation’.

The supposition has been, by some who wish it to have been so, that it contained a proposal of marriage. Perhaps it did—there is no telling for a certainty that it did not, though Daniel Karlin’s close analysis of the letters immediately following the initial meeting and Elizabeth’s letter of 23 May tends to cast doubt upon the traditional interpretation. My own view is that a proposal of marriage is most unlikely. Robert was rash in his letter, undoubtedly—but not that rash. It is much more likely that Robert’s letter touched, too prematurely and too precipitately, upon Elizabeth’s most vulnerable point of self-estimation, misunderstanding and misinterpreting her perception of herself, possibly expressing overt and over-confident love for what she could not yet find to love in herself. Robert had trampled on sacred ground. A truth she could not face—would not face—was forced upon her and she felt, very acutely, the violation, the attempted ruin, of everything she had so carefully constructed to protect herself.

This is what Elizabeth wrote:

I intended to write to you last night and this morning, and could not,—you do not know what pain you give me in speaking so wildly. And if I disobey you, my dear friend, in speaking (I for my part) of your wild speaking, I do it, not to displease you, but to be in my own eyes, and before God, a little more worthy, or less unworthy, of a generosity from which I recoil by instinct and at the first glance, yet conclusively; and because my silence would be the most disloyal of all means of expression, in reference to it. Listen to me then in this. You have said some intemperate things … fancies,—which you will not say over again, nor unsay, but forget at once, and for ever, having said at all; and which (so) will die out between you and me alone, like a misprint between you and the printer. And this you will do for my sake who am your friend (and you have none truer)—and this I ask, because it is a condition necessary to our future liberty of intercourse. You remember—surely you do—that I am in the most exceptional of positions; and that, just because of it, I am able to receive you as I did on Tuesday; and that, for me to listen to ‘unconscious exaggerations,’ is as unbecoming to the humilities of my position, as unpropitious (which is of more consequence) to the prosperities of yours. Now, if there should be one word of answer attempted to this; or of reference; I must not … I will not see you again—and you will justify me later in your heart. So for my sake you will not say it—I think you will not—and spare me the sadness of having to break through an intercourse just as it is promising pleasure to me; to me who have so many sadnesses and so few pleasures. You will!—and I need not be uneasy—and I shall owe you that tranquillity as one gift of many. For, that I have much to receive from you in all the free gifts of thinking, teaching, master-spirits, … that