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.’121
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 …”.122 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.’123
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’.124 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.’125 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’.