I pray that the Italians may be a more tolerant people in this regard than the English. They are after all a darker-skinned race than we.
Wimpole Street,
October, 1846
IV
Until now I have resisted all temptations to add to the foregoing. I subjoined not a word even on that blackest day in November, 1850 when Elizabeth’s Poems in two volumes appeared in a new edition that contained a section entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese, evidently addressed to the man now her husband. I could bring myself to do no more than hastily glance through these poems; they seemed to me of a most improper, indeed disgusting intimacy, but it was not that which wounded my feelings. The title is intended to puzzle or misdirect the reader, but if it had been specifically meant to cause me pain it could not have been more artfully devised. For ‘little Portuguese’ was my own personal pet-name for her, kept a secret between the two of us, an affectionately teasing allusion to her pale honey-coloured skin. The thought of her violation of this precious confidence, of my name for her being, so to speak, filched away and handed to a man who, whatever else may be said of him, had known her for only five of her forty-four years — there are no fitting words. The first shock brought a return of the asthma from which I had suffered earlier in the year, and even now the hurt remains keen.
But for the moment, in the face of a second, graver blow, I am incapable of such Stoical forbearance. Yesterday I was in my dining room at 50 Wimpole Street when I heard from the hall the unmistakable sound of a child’s laughter and screams of delight. These were noises quite foreign to my house. I at once connected them with the known presence in London, not merely of my estranged daughter and her husband on their third visit, but of their six-year-old son, the child whose very existence I had tried to efface from my mind. Knowing what I must do, I inhaled several deep breaths; then, willing my head not to renew its trembling, I opened the dining-room door and strode into the hall.
There, on all fours in imitation of a lion or some such beast, was my son George Moulton-Barrett, and, retreating from him in feigned alarm, there was my grandson, Robert Wiedemann Browning. We stared at each other for what seemed an eternity, but was probably no more than two minutes. I could think of nothing to say and doubt whether, in any case, I could have spoken a word. The little lad facing me, whose looks reminded me strongly of my dead son Edward’s, could have served as artist’s model for a picture of a typical English boy, with the unambiguous fair colouring that that implies.
At last I turned and went back into the dining room, having mastered my strong desire to pick the youngster up and hug him to my breast. When I was breathing more or less normally I summoned George there. He stood before me, serious, dependable, the one of my sons I most respected.
‘Whose child is that, George?’ I asked, still not finding speech easy.
‘Ba’s child, father,’ he answered.
‘And what is he doing here, pray?’
‘He is waiting, sir, waiting until it’s time to return to his mother. I mean to take him on the short journey in a few moments. Would you come with us?’
‘I fear not, George. Truly I cannot.’
‘Papa, I beg of you. It would make Ba so happy.’
‘No, my boy. Leave me. And kindly remove the child forthwith.’
When I heard the front door shut after the two, I lowered my head into my hands and may possibly have shed a tear. So it had all been for nothing, I said to myself. What I had taken for facts had not all been facts, that or my conclusions from them had been erroneous. But if I truly thought I had been wrong, why had I refused to go to Ba with George and her son?
After a troubled night, I awoke this morning with the answer rising to my lips. My daughter is now forty-nine years old and some months. In the nature of things, it must be unlikely that she could bear another child, so unlikely that I can rule it out, feel untroubled by any possibility. But I find I still cannot bring myself to come face to face with her, and with him. I could bear her silent reproaches, his silent triumph, but not their pity. Her pity.
Wimpole Street,
August, 1855
V
The above is of course fiction, but it contains much fact, the prime example being Mr Barrett’s ten points.
With the exception of (4), all are matters of record. (9) and (10) certainly hold for the mid-nineteenth century, and I was told of (8) by a Jamaican friend in the 1970s. As regards (4), Mr Barrett had undoubtedly seen something in Browning’s work which many would agree was there without thinking it the result of being an untrue-born Englishman. Further, it might be instructive to produce suitably recondite but representative extracts from Browning and, say, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Byron, Keats, Hood, Beddoes, Tennyson, Clough and Arnold, and present them blind to a good class with the instruction to pick out which one was the work of a West Indian. The Browning sample might be the following excerpt from ‘Nationality in Drinks’, which Mr Barrett could easily have read, since it was first collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845:
Up jumped Tokay on our table,
Like a pygmy castle-warder,
Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,
Arms and accoutrements all in order;
And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South,
Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,
Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather,
Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,
Jingled his huge brass spurs together,
Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,
And then, with an impudence nought could abash,
Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder,
For twenty such knaves he should laugh but the bolder;
And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting,
And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting,
Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!
Other facts in my story include Browning’s first letter to Elizabeth and the extracts from it; the paraphrase of her reply; Mr Barrett’s membership of the Reform Club; his asthmatic weakness, including the severe attack of 1850; Browning’s visit in August, 1846 and the reason offered for its prolongation; and Mr Barrett’s meeting with his grandson. ‘The Portuguese’ was certainly Browning’s pet-name for Elizabeth; there is no evidence it was ever her father’s.
With one exception, I mean the thoughts and feelings I attribute to Mr Barrett to be sincere on his part, truthful. The exception is his final paragraph, where his explanation for not wanting to face Elizabeth and Browning strikes me as distinctly thin. His ‘real’ motive is more likely to have been fear of betraying his jealousy at seeing the two unequivocally together, with their offspring. (Not a sexual jealousy: I have never believed that he harboured a guilty passion for his daughter.) And perhaps he was still obsessed by his theory. Anyhow, he died in 1857 at the age of seventy-two; Elizabeth survived him by only four years.
I myself think it most unlikely that Browning, any more than Elizabeth, had some ‘Creole’ blood, though, if he had had, Victorian literature and the world in general would be that much more interesting. He would have been the English member of a great trio of European coloured writers of the nineteenth century, the others being Alexander Dumas père (black grandmother) and Alexander Pushkin (black great-grandfather), both of whom can be taken as sharing something of his spirit.