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’,128 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