Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  Your books lie on this table here, at arm’s length from me, in this old room where I sit all day: and when my head aches or wanders or strikes work […] I […] read, read, read—and just as I have shut up the book and walked to the window, I recollect that you wanted me to find faults there.

  Elizabeth manages to make herself wait a week before responding. She’s struggling against powerful impulses, not just the draw of this particular correspondence. For her, letter writing is no chore: it’s her social life: ‘As for me, I have done most of my talking by the post of late years—’. Her response artfully coaches ‘Dear Mr Browning’ in the art of correspondence:

  Only dont let us have any constraint, any ceremony! Dont be civil to me when you feel rude,—nor loquacious, when you incline to silence,—nor yielding in the manners, when you are perverse in the mind. […] .. & let us rest from the bowing & the curtseying, you & I, on each side. You will find me an honest man on the whole, if rather hasty & prejudging .. […] And we have great sympathies in common, & I am inclined to look up to you in many things, & to learn as much of everything as you will teach me.

  And so Robert realises that he has played it too cool. He writes back, after carefully observing the one-week rule:

  for reasons I know,—for other reasons I don’t exactly know, but might if I chose to think a little, and for still other reasons, which, most likely, all the choosing and thinking in the world would not make me know, I had rather hear from you than see anybody else […] Are not these fates written? There! Don’t you answer this, please, but, mind it is on record.

  Their fates are indeed written. When Robert posts this letter, on 11 February 1845, Elizabeth is about to turn thirty-nine, and established as one of the country’s leading poets. Robert, six years her junior, is regarded as having lost his early gift, and his poetic way, with the rebarbative seven-part verse novel Sordello, published five years before. But reputational mismatch is balanced out by Elizabeth’s loneliness, her gender – and something generous about her imagination. She has the ability to think the best of those she believes in, and believe she does in both Robert’s attitude to poetry, and his ‘genius’ for it.

  Right from the start she writes to him differently from the way she addresses Miss Mitford, hitherto her closest confidant beyond her sisters. It’s as if there’s no time to waste on gossip. She plunges straight into sharing her deepest self with Robert, telling him ‘I am not desponding by nature’, and that, ‘I am essentially better, & have been for several winters’, but ‘a course of bitter mental discipline & long bodily seclusion’ leaves her longing for life experience: ‘If I live on & 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?’ She seems unembarrassed to thus align herself with Homer – and Tiresias – rushing past the hubris with a pent-up frustration that leaps from every line:

  I have lived only inwardly […] Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still […]. I grew up in the country .. had no social opportunities, .. had my heart in books & poetry, .. & my experience, in reveries. […] And so time passed, & passed—and afterwards, when my illness came & I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done […] I turned to thinking with some bitterness […] that I had seen no Human nature […] that I had beheld no great mountain or river—nothing in fact. […] & it was too late!

  In May, after four months and nearly thirty letters, Elizabeth finally lets Robert visit. The old social vertigo seems to have melted away. In the preceding weeks, as he starts to hint at meeting, she doesn’t reject the idea. She even manages to restrain herself from rescheduling. It’s almost as if being honest to him has forced her to be honest with herself about her longing ‘for some experience of life & man, for some …’ – as she adds in a cheeky ellipsis.

  So what does she expect at 3pm on 20 May 1845, as Wilson shows the visitor in? Kenyon has spoken ‘warmly of his high cultivation & attainments, & singular humility of bearing’, while also giving a somewhat false impression that Robert suffers from ill health. Elizabeth already knows his long nose and youthful, vulnerable face framed by ample sideburns, the way he parts his hair to the side. She knows he’s not handsome like that other rising young poet, Alfred Tennyson. She’s had portraits of them both, along with matching engravings of Wordsworth, Carlyle and Martineau, hanging on her walls for the last year. (Another link, though she doesn’t yet know it, since all are taken from Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age, to which both she and Robert have contributed.)

  She puts Robert’s portrait away for his visit. And the young man who steps into the room has a kindly, open, unformed appearance, the sort that invites confidences. His rather helpless, puppy-dog look is just the kind to draw out her protective side after a lifetime’s lavishing of affection on younger brothers. Two years from now, in a comment in which jealousy is all but audible, and to which we’ll return, Miss Mitford will describe the young Browning as emasculated: ‘He resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes—[…] he seemed to me about the height & size of a boy of twelve years old.’ She’s remembering a twenty-four-year-old: now Robert is thirty-three and has filled out a little. But there’s still something boyishly untried about him. Despite the bravura adventure of two trips to Italy, and one to the Baltic, he still lives at home with his parents, refusing to take up a profession and writing poetry all day.

  To Elizabeth, this way of life looks like pure dedication. She finds other things to recognise in Robert too. Like Papa, he hated school and has been home-educated – as indeed has she. The Brownings, like the Barretts, are Whigs and religious Nonconformists. Like Elizabeth, Robert is the grandchild of a Caribbean plantation owner; also like her, he may have the suspicion that he has African-Caribbean heritage through his paternal grandmother. Not all of this common ground is apparent at first sight of course, but it’s there in the ease with which the two poets talk to each other, in the little book-lined study-cum-sitting room hung with images of their distinguished literary mutual friends, and – as if demonstrating the succession – busts of the classical greats. And if the air around them is electric, well, since both are equally passionate in their determination to be the leading poets of their day, they share a sense that, simply by meeting, they’re making literary history.

  Robert stays for an hour and a half, ‘And there was everything right—as how shd there not be?’ Elizabeth’s rigorous intellect and greater maturity is a perfect fit for his yielding uncertainty and emotional awareness. But both of them are evidently shaken by the realisation that something more than just the literary is going on, and both become defensive. Robert sends a note the same evening anxiously checking he didn’t overstay his welcome, and Elizabeth responds with sudden formality. Whether she’s protecting herself from a repetition of past effusiveness or simply from the sense that, as an invalid, she’s shut out of the game of love, she resorts to frosty talk of ‘kindness’ and ‘gratitude’ for friendship from someone who inhabits a ‘brilliant happy sphere’. And not a little self-pity, too: ‘It is hard for you to understand what my mental position is after the peculiar experience I have suffered, & what a [‘What have I to do with thee’] sort of feeling is irrepressible from me to you.’

  Which works better, and more electrically, than she could have imagined. The next day, 22 May, Robert calls her bluff by making a declaration of love. Of course she repudiates this; as she must, in order for him to be able to continue to visit her – above all unchaperoned, and in what is in effect a bed-sitting room. Eighteen months from now, when she tells Mary Russell Mitford the truth about the relationship, she will say that, ‘I would not listen—I could not believe even. […] I conceived it to be a mere poet’s fancy .. an illusion of a confusion between the woman & the poetry.’ For now, whether her disbelief is absolute or has something of a fig leaf about it, she italicises and uses a charming image to underline the fact that he must not breathe a word of this to anyone. The misstep must
be forgotten and so ‘will die out between you & me alone, like a misprint between you and the printer.’ Realising that he risks losing access to Elizabeth altogether, Robert plays along, claiming in his response that he was just being hyperbolic.

  With all this cleverly sorted – they’re both intelligent as well as passionate, after all – the couple arrange to meet again, ‘you & me alone’, and then again – a total of ninety-one times.

  [Sixth Frame]

  ‘Perception has an intellectual tail and is closely linked to insight’, the artist Bridget Riley tells Paul Moorhouse in the course of a 2017 conversation. I’m reading her collected writings, The Eye’s Mind, after seeing her work in a touring exhibition of prints. In the small, white-cube gallery where it had been hung her print sung and dazzled. Its colours were welcoming, related, generous: blue, red and green. Its plaited verticals – not stripes, unless stripes can wax and wane – teased and throbbed.

  It’s as if Riley has found the secret of chromatology, a secret as important as the invention of perspective for creating images to work upon eye and brain. The way Riley’s colours react with each other, in the forms she gives them, go right into the mystery of perception – just as the rules of perspective do. She calls this tonal organisation, and says she learnt it from the post-impressionist Georges Seurat.

  I still remember the sensation I had as a teenager – it was something like being hurled about – the first time I saw a Riley, one of her multiform, multicoloured acrylics from the 1970s. I also remember the force with which her name struck me: so this was a woman’s mind. But I didn’t yet realise the third dimension that is the magic of Riley’s work. Usually, this third dimension resembles space: the eye makes what looks like a 3-D object appear backward or forward from the picture plane. Sometimes, though, the third dimension is time, and the image itself appears to move. The print I saw recently was like that; it appeared to flow up and down itself. It seemed as though the picture was in process: as though the artist’s process was continuing with us, even through us. It would have been easy to imagine that we were watching Riley at work. And in a way, of course, we were. Riley is adamant that these effects aren’t illusions or tricks, just part of what visible form does. ‘That they will occur cannot be doubted, but precisely how can only be discovered in the context of picture making.’

  It seems to me that the third dimension portraits want us to experience isn’t space or time but narrative. It’s the dimension of human encounter. Sometimes this dimension of encounter isn’t just represented but expressed. Francis Bacon’s portraits of George Dyer are statements of desire (and rage) as much as they are explorations of the irreducible corporeality of his muse. When Riley, an artist of the generation following his, says, ‘Perception has an intellectual tail and is closely linked to insight’, she reminds us that understanding and meaning-making are part of looking at every image, from a child’s drawing stuck up on a fridge to a glossy perfume advert. They’re also part of how we humans encounter each other. Looking at a person also ‘has an intellectual tail and is closely linked to insight’.

  Book Seven: How to desire

  While we two sate together, leaned that night

  So close my very garments crept and thrilled

  With strange electric life.

  Monumental limestone harbour walls bleach in the October sun. They look lichened, though probably those discolourations are barnacles and the marks of Renaissance chisels. Livorno’s Porto Mediceo has withstood the Ligurian Sea since the sixteenth century. Livorno, or Leghorn as Elizabeth and her compatriots call it, has long been Tuscany’s only significant port. On 14 October 1846 its odd, long moles shelter arrivals on the morning tide, among them the little group of English passengers disembarking by tender from the Genoa night steamer. Seasick and faint after a stormy passage during which the engine broke down, they’re looking ‘as miserable as possible’. But not for long. After a reviving hotel breakfast they head for the railway station, eager to keep moving, for just fifteen miles north across a colourless, flat littoral lies their final destination, Pisa, that ‘little city of great palaces, & the rolling, turbid Arno, striking its golden path betwixt them’.

  Elizabeth has been dreaming about the Mediterranean since she was the child who pictured herself liberating the Balkans from Ottoman rule. She was just ten when her role model, Lord Byron, went into the European exile that culminated in his attempt to do exactly this. Before that the poetic results of his earlier Grand Tour of the classical Mediterranean, including the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, had already made him wildly famous, even in the sleepy Herefordshire valley where she was reading him. Her brothers, though, have made no such Grand Tours. In their short lives the pair she was closest too, Bro and Sam, were forced to substitute tours of family duty in Jamaica – and indeed Torquay. (Only Henry, always the family exception, started travelling when he was only eighteen, and recently managed to get Stormie to accompany him to Egypt.) But now here she is, the family invalid, walking in the footsteps of her Romantic heroes.

  For it’s not just Byron who came to live in Italy. Percy Bysshe Shelley emigrated here just as she was turning twelve; John Keats when she was fourteen. Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824; Shelley drowned here, off Livorno, in 1822; tuberculosis claimed Keats in Rome in 1821. But that all three perished in the classical Mediterranean doesn’t diminish its attraction. You might even take the symbolic view that all three poets returned to their spiritual home to die. The south represents more than just a contemporary geography of therapeutic climate, or personal and political freedom. It’s also the location of classical antiquity, which to Elizabeth has long represented the source of poetry: those allusions to the Pierian Spring in her youthful An Essay on Mind weren’t entirely rhetorical. Historic Pisa, with its classical and Renaissance treasures and established English community, stands for both Italian culture and personal liberty. So it’s not entirely surprising that last summer Elizabeth used her returning strength to fight for the chance to come to this city where, a quarter century ago, both Byron and Shelley spent substantial periods.

  It has rapidly become apparent that Robert Browning is the love of her life, but Elizabeth knows from the off that her father would forbid their romance. In Pisa though, away from parental scrutiny and the dangers of gossip, she could do more or less as she pleases without having to, in effect, choose between the two men she loves best. She also has a more pressing reason to get to Italy. In September 1845 Dr Chambers counsels strongly that she needs to go south for the winter if she is to survive. ‘I was examined with that dreadful stethoscope, & received his command to go without fail to Pisa by sea. He said […] that there was nothing for me but warm air .. no other possible remedy.’ The stakes are high; and so explicit that Elizabeth’s family actually explore a number of ways to make such a move. The patient could afford to run an independent household, as at Torquay, and her need to be chaperoned and supported seems to offer one or more of her siblings a chance of their own to escape the parental roof.

  So the scheme she proposes later this month involves Arabel and George (who becomes her co-advocate) as travelling companions. Papa’s reaction is, perhaps predictably, fury. It embarrasses him that the distinguished doctor he himself directed Elizabeth to consult has prescribed this trip as life-saving. It forces his moral hand and, like all weak men, Papa hates to have his hand forced. He can’t refuse his ailing daughter permission to travel, so instead he punishes her emotionally: ‘I was treated this morning as an undutiful daughter because I tried to put on my gloves.’

  But Elizabeth can’t quite yet accept that her beloved father is being selfish. She has trusted the family’s difficult transitions as necessities, decisions much prayed over by a conscientious and loving parent; and has internalised her father’s harsher judgements, alongside his encouragement and special attention, as corrective facts. The sternly Nonconformist Christianity he now practises aligns the head of the family with a God-the-F
ather whose infallible judgements must be obeyed. If her father proves pettier than this, then everything about family life must be reassessed: Sam’s death in Jamaica and the pressure on Bro to return there, the curtailing of Henrietta’s youthful fun, the uncompromising moves into smoggy central London, the truth or falsity of Papa’s position over the contested will in the legal battle that lost him Hope End, even slave-owning itself. To throw all this in doubt would be overwhelming. It’s no surprise that all the siblings – except that outlier Henry – resist losing faith in their father until long after the tipping point of evidence.

  But while these emotional recalibrations are taking place, autumn marches on. The latest that Elizabeth could safely sail for Italy is early October; as the weeks tick by, discussion turns ‘from steam-packet reasons’ to departing for Malta on 3 October. Her father must realise that if uncertainty can be protracted past this date he won’t have to shoulder the responsibility of directly refusing permission to travel. With a fortnight to go, the invalid tells Miss Mitford that she’s ‘very much in anxiety & tribulation about Pisa—It is all uncertain whether I shall go or not—& in the meantime I am vexed out of patience.’ This uncharacteristic indiscretion reveals just how far her attitude is shifting. A month ago, she was still explaining her father to Robert in the old terms:

  what you cannot see, is the deep tender affection behind & below all those patriarchal ideas of governing grownup children ‘in the way they must go!’—and there never was (under the strata) a truer affection in a father’s heart […]—he takes it to be his duty to rule like the Kings of Christendom, by divine right.

  It’s Robert himself, of course, who is producing this shift. However great Elizabeth’s reluctance to see through her father, her ‘first disobedience’ – which, just as in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, is falling in love – has made a crack in the edifice of paternal authority. And one crack quickly leads to another. For Robert offers a new model of love, a generosity learnt from his own family: ‘I know as certainly as I know anything that if I could bring myself to ask them to give up everything in the world, they would do it and cheerfully’, as he explains. If such generous, undestructive love is possible, Papa’s is not the only way. Not every parent has to be like the Greek god Cronos, consuming his own children; not every love is fundamentally selfish. ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves’, Oscar Wilde will write half a century from now, in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his great poem of violence and betrayal. But this is the very lesson Elizabeth is now unlearning.