Browning
Browning
Iain Finlayson
This edition does not include illustrations.A major biography of the most modern and the most underrated of English Literature's Great Victorians.Henry James called Robert Browning (1812–89) 'a tremendous and incomparable modern', and the immediacy and colloquial energy of his poetry has ensured its enduring appeal. This biography sets out to do the same for his life, animating the stereotypes (romantic hero, poetic exile, eminent man of letters) that have left him neglected by modern biographers. He has been seen primarily as one half of that romantic pair, the Brownings; and while the courtship, elopement and marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning remains a perennially seductive subject (and one Finlayson evokes vividly, quoting extensively from their daily letters and contemporary accounts) there is far more to Browning than that.Chronological in structure, this book is divided into three sections which deal with his life's major themes: adolescence and ambition, marriage and money, paternity and poetry. Browning explores the many experiences that inspired his writing, his education and passions, his relationships with family and friends, his continual financial struggles and revulsion at being seen as a fortune-hunter, his most unVictorian approach to marriage (sexual equality, his helping wean Elizabeth off morphine and nursing her through various illnesses), fatherhood and fame (inviting a leading member of the Browning Society to watch him burning a trunk of personal letters): all of which contribute to a fascinating portrait of a highly unconventional Victorian. At once witty and moving, this critical biography will revolutionise perceptions of the poet – and of the man.
BROWNING
A Private Life
IAIN FINLAYSON
DEDICATION (#u558bd85d-cb0d-5e46-8d02-a258a0df692d)
to Judith Macrae,
Good Friend and Good Samaritan
CONTENTS
Cover (#u3c1672c7-d687-528c-857d-6b318b6eeace)
Title Page (#ue9645622-fb7e-518f-b6c2-bb5808102e5b)
Prologue (#ua7dde85f-9b6f-542c-ba3a-97ed80a8b80d)
Part 1: Robert and the Brownings 1812–1846 (#uf955e16d-146c-55da-83fb-9139cde46fe7)
Part 2: Robert and Elizabeth 1846–1861 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 3: Robert and Pen 1861–1889 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliographical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Abbreviations and Short Citations of Principal Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_0f3c1dfb-c6af-58ff-b250-209fcca5cb44)
HENRY JAMES, a man of sound and profound literary and personal judgements, provided the most epigrammatic epitaph for Robert Browning. On the occasion of the poet’s burial in Westminster Abbey, on 31 December 1889, he remarked: ‘A good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey, but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd.’
The immortal voice having been condemned to final silence by disinterested Nature, and the mortal dust committed to elaborate interment by a respectful nation, James reflected that only Browning himself could have done literary justice to the ceremony:
‘The consignment of his ashes to the great temple of fame of the English race was exactly one of those occasions in which his own analytic spirit would have rejoiced, and his irrepressible faculty for looking at human events in all sorts of slanting coloured lights have found a signal opportunity … in a word, the author would have been sure to take the special, circumstantial view (the inveterate mark of all his speculation) even of so foregone a conclusion as that England should pay her greatest honour to one of her greatest poets.’
Browning’s greatness and his oddity, his great value, in James’ view, was that ‘in all the deep spiritual and human essentials, he is unmistakably in the great tradition—is, with all his Italianisms and cosmopolitanisms, all his victimisation by societies organised to talk about him, a magnificent example of the best and least dilettantish English spirit’. That English spirit does not, generally, delight in literary or psychological subtleties; nevertheless, stoutly and steadfastly, ‘Browning made them his perpetual pasture, and yet remained typically of his race … His voice sounds loudest, and also clearest, for the things that, as a race, we like best—the fascination of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of the great human passion.’
James particularly distinguished Browning as ‘a tremendous and incomparable modern’ who ‘introduces to his predecessors a kind of contemporary individualism’ long forgotten but now, in their latest honoured companion, forcefully renewed. These predecessors, disturbed in the long, dreaming serenity of Poets’ Corner and their ‘tradition of the poetic character as something high, detached and simple’ by the irruption of Browning, are obliged to measure their marmoreal greatness against Browning’s irreverent inversions and subversions that blew the spark of life into those poetic traditions. But death diminishes the force and power of any great man until—James observed—‘by the quick operation of time, the mere fact of his lying there among the classified and protected makes even Robert Browning lose a portion of the bristling surface of his actuality’. The stillness of silence and marble smooths out the poet and his work. The Samson who would crack the pillars of poetry is subsumed into the fabric of Poets’ Corner, of the Abbey, and of an Englishness that eventually, by force of the simplicity of its legends and the ineffable character of its traditions, stifles the vitality of the poet’s words and corrupts the subtle colours of their maker.
‘Victorian values’ has become a loaded phrase in recent times, sometimes revered, sometimes reviled. At best, the epithet for an age has provoked a revived interest not only in eminent Victorians but also, perhaps more so, in their ethical beliefs and social structures—though in our current perceptions those values are often misunderstood and misinterpreted when set against present-day values, which in turn are too often misapprehended by interested parties seeking to adapt them to their particular advantage and to the confusion of their opponents. Henry James gives the cue when he states that Robert Browning was a modern. Browning survives in the ‘great tradition’ as a ‘modern’ and, in his earlier life, he suffered for it. Matthew Arnold characterized Browning’s poetry as ‘confused multitudinousness’, and at first sight it is often bewildering. To cite the rolling acres of verse, the constantly (though not deliberately) obscure references, the occasional archaisms, is but to highlight a few surface difficulties.
To anyone unfamiliar with or still unseized by Robert Browning, his reputation as a serious, intellectual, difficult, and prolific writer is an impediment to reading even the most accessible of his poems. To the extent that he was serious—as he could be—he was serious because of his insistence on right and justice and the honest authenticity of his own work. To the extent that he was intellectual, he confounded even the most thoughtful critics of his day, and only now, with the perspective of time that enables more objective critical understanding of Victorian themes and thought, can his poetry be more deeply appreciated. To the extent that he was difficult, he was difficult because of his paradoxical simplicity. To the extent that he was prolific—well, he had a great deal to say on a great number of ideas and ideals, themes and topics.
The length of much of Browning’s poetry is daunting. The attention span of modern readers is supposedly more limited than that of the Victorians, though even the attention of the most persistent, discriminating intellects of the literary Victorians was liable to flag: George Eliot, noting advice to confine her own poetic epic, The Spanish Gipsy, to 9,000 lines, remarked in a letter of 1867 to John Blackwood, ‘Imagine—Browning has a poem by him [The Ring and the Book] which has reached 20,000 lines. Who will read it all in these busy days?’ The diversity, too, is intimidating: ‘You have taken a great range,’ remarked Elizabeth Barrett admiringly, ‘from those high faint notes of the mystics which are beyond personality—to dramatic impersonations, gruff with nature.’
To understand Henry James’s assertion that Browning was ‘a tremendous and incomparable modern’, it is necessary to understand the Victorian world as modern, as a dynamic, experimental, excitingly innovative age of achievements in exploration (internal and external) and advances in invention, but also as a time of doubts raised by experiments and enquiries. Browning himself is a prime innovator, an engineer of form, an explorer of history and the human heart, revolutionary in his art and of lasting importance in his achievements. One critic has suggested that Browning’s masterpiece, The Ring and the Book, may be viewed as a ‘heroic attempt to fuse Milton with Dickens, the modern novel with the epic poem’. Certainly, the comparison with Dickens is sustainable: Browning’s poetry is conspicuously democratic, rapid, colloquial, and modern in its preoccupation with individuals and the social, religious, and political systems in which they find themselves obliged to struggle, to progress throughout the history of humanity’s efforts to develop.
Words like ‘develop’ and ‘progress’ raise the matter of Browning’s optimism, which is usually taken at face value to mean his apparently consoling exclamations on the level of ‘God’s in his heaven—All’s right with the world’, ‘Oh, to be in England/Now that April’s there’, ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?’, and so on. These are positive enough, and over-familiar to those who seek moral, theological, or nationalistic uplift from Browning. They have become the stuff of samplers and poker-work, tag lines expressive of a pious sentimentality (‘It was roses, roses all the way …’) he rarely intended, a jingoistic English nationalism (‘Oh, to be in England …’) he hardly felt, and a shining Candidean optimism (‘God’s in his heaven …’) that was the least of his philosophy. Browning’s poetry too often survives miserably as useful material to be raided and packaged for books of inspirational verse-in-snippets and comfortable quotations. This is a permanent fame, perhaps, but not Parnassian glory.
Browning’s optimism was a more robust and muscular characteristic, deriving not at all from sweet-natured sentimentality or rose-tinted romanticism. Rather, it was rooted in a profound, passionate realism—naturalism, some claim—and tremendous psychological analysis that looked unsparingly, with a clear eye, at the roots and shoots of good and evil. Unlike most Victorians, Robert Browning was more matter-of-factly medieval or ruthlessly Renaissance in his assessments and acceptance of matters from which fainter, or at least more emollient, spirits retreated and who drew a more or less banal moral satisfactory to the pious, who tended to prefer the possibility of redemption through suffering. For some readers, suffering was quite sufficient in itself—a just reward and retribution for the sin or moral failure, for example, of being poor.
Browning’s innate Puritanism, as Chesterton remarks, stood him in good stead, providing a firm foothold ‘on the dangerous edge of things’ while he investigated ‘The honest thief, the tender murderer.’ The early attempts of the Browning Society and others to construct a ‘philosophy’ for Browning, a redeeming and inspirational theological and ethical system to stand as firmly as that imposed by Leslie Stephen on Wordsworth, is bound to be suspect in specifics and should be distrusted in general.
That Browning was a lusty optimist is rarely doubted in the popular mind, but the evidence adduced to support the theory is too often selective and superficial. His optimism was in fact an appetite and enthusiasm for life in all its aspects, inclusive rather than exclusive, from the highest joy to the darkest trials. His optimism was an expression of endurance, of acceptance, of the vitality of living and loving, of finding value in the extraordinary individuality and oddity of men and women. Robert Browning is, in the judgement of G. K. Chesterton, ‘a poet of misconceptions, of failures, of abortive lives and loves, of the just-missed and the nearly fulfilled: a poet, in other words, of desire’. Ezra Pound insists on Browning’s poetic passion. Men and Women, the collection of poems that redeemed Browning from obscurity in middle-age, is a demotic, democratic piece of work that reflects his distance from his early reliance on the remote Romantic imagery of Shelley and adopts a firmer insistence on the mundane life of city streets and market-places.
This interest in the apparently tawdry, temporal life of fallible men and women somewhat disconcerted his more elevated, intellectual contemporaries. Of The Ring and the Book, George Eliot (who should have known better, and might have had more sympathy for the poem in her youth) commented: ‘It is not really anything more than a criminal trial, and without anything of the pathetic or awful psychological interest which is sometimes (though very rarely) to be found in such stories of crime. I deeply regret that he has spent his powers on a subject which seems to me unworthy of them.’ She was not the only contemporary critic to make such a point, or adopt such an aesthetic view: Thomas Carlyle declared the poem to be ‘all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and only wants forgetting’.
In short, Browning shocked his contemporaries. The shock consequent on his choice of subject matter was perhaps compounded by the novelty of his poetic approach to its treatment. Pippa Passes, startlingly unlike in form to anything contemporaneous in English poetry, is regarded by Chesterton, aside from ‘one or two by Walt Whitman’, as ‘the greatest poem ever written to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity’. Like Whitman, Browning was responsive to the spirit of his age. For all his learning and his familiarity with the past, and for all his choice of antique subject matter and foreign locations, Browning is no funeral grammarian of a past culture, of spent history. His portrait of the Florentine artist Fra Lippo Lippi is as living, as vibrant, and as relevant as might be a current account of the life of the modern painters Francis Bacon or Damien Hirst. The speeches in The Ring and the Book might, with some adjustments, make a modern television or radio series examining a murder case from the points of view of all the protagonists. The form of serial views of one event was not new when Browning revived it from Greek classic models, but he infused it with modernity and it has since become a staple model for dramatists.
Browning did not bestride the peaks of poetry like a Colossus with a lofty and noble eye for the prospect at his feet. He rambled like a natural historian, peering and poking in holes and corners, describing minutely and drawing his particular conclusions; he visited the courtroom with a reporter’s notebook, and the morgue with the equipment of a forensic scientist. He was an entomologist of humanity in all its bizarre conditions of being. His great subjects were philosophy, religion, history, politics, poetry, art, and music—a few more than even Ezra Pound later marked out as the fit and proper preoccupations of serious poetry. They were all encompassed in Browning’s studies of modern society and the men and women of a universal humankind.
Browning’s poetry is often of a period, but in no sense is it period poetry, nor is Browning a period poet. In this he differs from the more consciously archaic writers and works of the Pre-Raphaelites who admired him, strove to imitate him, and embedded themselves in a literary aspic. Whereas his successors became conscious, perhaps dandified and decadent, Browning himself was largely and serenely unconscious, vigorous, and often matter-of-fact. He had principles and opinions, at first devoutly and latterly didactically held. But Browning was learned and assimilative rather than rigorously intellectual. His poetry suffers often from obscurities that puzzle intellectuals because Browning was, above all, a widely and profoundly literate, well-read man.
Once he had absorbed a fact or a thesis, he subsumed it in his mind where it found useful and congenial company. Joined with a mass of other facts and theses, it became so inextricably enmeshed with its fellows that, when it was eventually pulled out to illustrate, embellish, or point up a phrase in Browning’s work, it was comprehensible only—though not always afterwards, when he had done with it—to the mind of the poet. Being already so personally familiar with it, he thought nothing of its unfamiliarity to his readers. Chesterton regards this as the greatest compliment he could have paid the average reader. There are many who may feel too highly complimented. In this sense, his poetry is devoid of intellectual arrogance or one-upmanship. Perfectly innocently and without conscious affectation, Browning’s work arises from and is coloured with what Henry James identified as an ‘all-touching, all-trying spirit … permeated with accumulations and playing with knowledge’.
For all his modernity, now increasingly acknowledged and admired by literary critics, Browning has recently been somewhat neglected by literary biographers. ‘What’s become of Waring?’ is a well-known line from one of his best-known poems. What, one may reasonably ask, has become of Browning? There is no lack of interest in him in one sense—in the sense of Robert Browning as one half of that romantic pair, the Brownings. The marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning remains a perennially seductive subject, and not only for biographers. One difficulty for the modern biographer is that Robert Browning’s reputation has never quite lived down being cast as a great romantic hero, the juvenile lead, as it were, in Rudolph Besier’s 1934 stage play The Barretts of Wimpole Street and subsequently in the Hollywood movie, where Robert Browning was played dashingly and dramatically by Fredric March. This has become his principal claim to popular fame. For various reasons, Robert has become the dimmer partner, Elizabeth the brilliant star. The romantic hero of fiction or drama is, in any case, generally only a foil for the romantic heroine.
There are big modern biographies of most of Browning’s contemporaries, and more are published every year, but Browning himself is comparatively unknown to present-day readers. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is, to be realistic, the more immediately colourful and engaging character—the drama of her early years as a supposed invalid, the romance of her marriage to Robert Browning and their escape to Italy, the currently fashionable interest in her as an early feminist and as a radical in terms of her views on politics and social justice. Her husband, by contrast, is perceived as a more reactionary and conventional, a more prudish and private character. If judged solely by the quantity and quality of their letters to friends and acquaintances, his personality is less immediately engaging, and, for all his superficial sociability, more introverted and private.
In contrast to the relative scarcity of biographies of Robert Browning, there is an astonishing quantity of critical monographs and papers hardly penetrable to any but the Browning academic specialist. What has recently been lacking, is a chronological narrative of Browning’s life as an upstage drama to complement the downstage chorus of critics of his work. This present book is a conventional, chronological biography of Browning. Despite the enormous and constant critical attention paid to Browning, and the number of books about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the marriage of the Brownings, there have been few modern biographies that give themselves over mostly to the life and character of the man himself.
The standard late twentieth-century biography of Robert Browning that confidently, authoritatively, and entertainingly treats his life as thoroughly as his poetry is The Book, the Ring, and the Poet by William Irvine and Park Honan, published in 1974. Robert Browning: A life within life, Donald Thomas’s biography, published in 1982, is the conscientious work of a scholar who combines a life of the poet with critical analysis of his work. Clyde de L. Ryal’s 1993 biography, The Life of Robert Browning, is an attractive, authoritative literary critical work that provides an overview of Browning’s life and work as a bildungsroman without the distraction of—for the purposes of his book—unnecessary domestic detail.
In this present biography, I have of course been heedful of as much recent biographical work on Browning as seemed to me relevant to my purposes—specific references are gratefully (and comprehensively, I hope) acknowledged—but I have not neglected earlier biographies in my search for such materials as Nathaniel Hawthorne might have characterized as the ‘wonderfully and pleasurably circumstantial’.
A principal resource for any Browning biographer must be the official Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891) by Mrs Alexandra Sutherland Orr, a close friend of the poet. Mrs Orr wrote her biography at the request of Browning’s son and sister. Besides the obvious constraints of these two interested parties at her shoulder, she was writing, too, soon after Browning’s death, as a close friend as much as a conscientious critic. She is thus, and naturally, tactful. Though she is not deliberately misleading, nevertheless she will occasionally suppress materials when she considers it discreet to do so, and will sometimes turn an unfortunate episode to better, more positive account than we might now consider appropriate. A close, long-standing friend of Browning’s, William Wetmore Story, supplied Mrs Orr with details of their long friendship. On reading the published biography in 1891, he commented that it seemed rather colourless, but admitted that Browning’s letters ‘are not vigorous or characteristic or light—and as for incidents and descriptions of persons and life it is very meagre’. Subsequent biographers have supplied the deficit.
My second principal biographical authority is Gilbert Keith Chesterton, whose short book about Browning, published in 1903, is valuable less for strict biographical fact, which now and again he gets wrong, than for consistently inspired and constantly inspiriting psychological judgements about the poet and his work, which he gets right. Like Mrs Orr, Chesterton’s value is that he was closer in time and thought to the Victorian age, more attuned to the Browning period and the psychology of the protagonists than we are now, closer to the historical literary ground than we can be. Chesterton’s Robert Browning has never been bettered. It remains unarguably perceptive and uniquely provocative. Besides its near-contemporaneity to its subject, Chesterton’s book is valuable because it evokes Browning’s character with the very ironies and psychological inversions that Browning himself often employed in his poetry. Time and again Chesterton proposes the converse to prove the obverse, exactly as Browning could easily—with poetic prestidigitation—prove black to be white or red.
Two lively, thoughtful women—Betty Miller and Maisie Ward—have contributed more recent biographies that sometimes convincingly and sometimes controversially propose psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of Robert Browning, his poetry, and his life. Their insights are regularly disputed, and perhaps for that very reason they regularly startle their readers out of complacency. They ask questions, raise points, that—right or wrong—are still worth serious consideration by Browning’s critics and biographers.
I should also say that I have generally relied on earlier Browning criticism, which retains much of its vigour and sparky originality. This is by no means to belittle latter-day critics, many of whom write ingeniously and excitingly, but merely to indicate that for the purposes of this biography I have for the most part personally preferred period sources and contemporary authorities. An exception has to be made for The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Daniel Karlin’s close and authoritative study of the love-letters that preceded the marriage. This book is indispensable to any modern biographer of Browning, not just for Karlin’s detailed analysis of the voluminous correspondence but also for the tenderness and imagination he brings to its interpretation.
There is—or has been—a discussion about how far the biography of an objective poet is necessary, in contrast to the permissible biography of a subjective poet. Browning gave his own views on this in his essay on Shelley. Since Browning himself is generally reckoned to combine subjective and objective elements in his work, then it probably follows that a biography detailing the day-to-day activities of the poet may be as relevant as a critical commentary on his poetry. G. K. Chesterton remarked that one could write a hundred volumes of glorious gossip about Browning. The Collected Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when the full series is finally published, will be exactly that. But for all the froth and bubble of Browning’s social life, not a great deal happened to him—there is a distinct dearth of dramatic incident. One is inclined to sigh with relief, like Joseph Brodsky who says of Eugenio Montale, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975 for the poetry he had written over a period of sixty quiet years, ‘thank God that his life has been so uneventful’.
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And yet, as Chesterton concedes of Browning biography, ‘it is a great deal more difficult to speak finally about his life than his work. His work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much greater mystery which belongs to the simple.’ By and large, my biographical preference has been for a straightforward (I won’t say simple) chronological narrative rather than a series of thematic chapters. And so, this biography is divided into three major sections. These large sections deal successively with three subjects associated with three themes: adolescence and ambition, marriage and money, paternity and poetry.
I like, too, the unfashionable Victorian biographical convention of ‘Life and Letters’. Much of this book is based on the correspondence of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, from which I have quoted lengthily and freely. Where either of them have written personally, or their words have been otherwise recorded by others, I have often preferred to quote them directly rather than make my own paraphrase. Their own voices are important—the tone, the vocabulary, the tempo of the sentences, the entire texture of their poetry, letters, and recorded conversation: all contribute to our understanding of character. The Brownings’ letters are not referenced to the various collections in which they have appeared over the years, since chronological publication of their complete collected correspondence is currently in progress. All dated letters will finally be found there in their proper place.
My reliance on previous biographical materials is deliberate. Far from studiously avoiding them, I have sedulously pillaged them. Biographies are a legitimate secondary source just as much as the first-hand memoirs of those who once saw Shelley, Browning, or any other poet plain and formed an impression that they set down in words or pictures for posterity. It might be argued that a scrupulous biographer who is familiar with all the details of his or her subject’s life may indeed be better informed as to the subject’s character than those friends and enemies who knew him in his outward aspect but were less intimately acquainted with his private life. An enemy of Browning’s, Lady Ashburton, is a case in point. She formed a view of a Miss Gabriel that proved to be wrong. Lady Ashburton, to her credit, thereupon fell to wondering that two views of Miss Gabriel’s character could be so contrary. As a starting-point for biography, her surprised surmise could hardly be bettered. Her latterly-held opinion of Robert Browning could have benefited from some similar consideration of his contrarieties.
‘A Poet’, wrote John Keats, ‘is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually informing and filling some other Body.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This remark, though referring to poets in general, seems to justify the view of Henry James and others that Robert Browning the public personality and Robert Browning the private poet were two distinct personalities. When the biographer stops to point to an image or a word that is apparently autobiographical (or at least seems open to a subjective interpretation), it is because biography imposes a structure and perceives a coherence that the subject himself cannot fully be aware of. The literary biographer neither need be completely contre Sainte-Beuve, nor feel officiously obliged to seek biographical meaning in a text. And yet, of course, Robert Browning is one man, not a series of discrete doppelgängers inhabiting parallel universes. To quote Joseph Brodsky again, ‘every work of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author … a lyrical hero is invariably an author’s self-projection … The author … is a critic of his century; but he is a part of this century also. So his criticism of it nearly always is self-criticism as well, and this is what imparts to his voice … its lyrical poise. If you think that there are other recipes for successful poetic operation, you are in for oblivion.’
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I have avoided, so far as possible, attributing feelings to Browning or anyone else that they are not known to have felt. I have tried to suppose no emotions that are not supported by the statement of anyone who experienced them personally or observed them in others and interpreted their effects. I have stuck so far as possible to the facts insofar as they are known and can be supported, if not ideally by first-hand sources, at least credibly by reliable hearsay; and—where facts fail and supposition supersedes—by creditable biographical consensus and, in the last resort, my own fallible judgement.
Nevertheless, and despite all best intentions, biography is a form of fiction, and successive biographies create, rather like the monologuists in The Ring and the Book, a palimpsest of their subject. Like a Platonic symposium, all the guests at the feast will have their own ideas to propound. A biography, like a novel, tells a story. It contains a principal subject, subsidiary characters, a plot (in the form, normally, of a more or less chronological narrative), and subplots, and it unfolds over a certain period of time in various locations. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, however much these elements may be creatively juggled. That the biographer is not his subject is the point at which the narrative takes on the aspect of fiction. The subject lived his or her life for, say, threescore years and ten, and—allowing for various forms of psychological self-defence—he or she may be regarded as the first authority for that life. Autobiography, however, is generally even more fiction than biography, even less trustworthy than biography. If we put not our faith in princes or poets, even less should we trust an apologist pro vita sua. As Jeanette Winterson puts it, ‘autobiography is art and lies’.
Poetry, of course, may be said to be art and truth. The poet, even if he lies in every other aspect of his life, cannot consistently lie in his work. Robert Browning’s poetry tells the truth not only about Robert Browning, but about the men and women he loved and the common humanity he shared with them and sought to understand. Says Chesterton, with an irresistible conviction and authority:
Every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. Every one on this earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the human race, to be the friends of God … With Browning’s knaves we have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and may at any moment begin to speak poetry.
Lacking the vanity and hypocrisy of the age, Browning was blind to no one, and to the best and the worst of them in their inarticulacy he gave the voice of his own understanding, compassion, and love as few had done so sincerely since Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Burns.
PART 1 ROBERT AND THE BROWNINGS 1812–1846 (#ulink_2de07354-9147-5c62-bd54-c3fe7dd2284e)
ONLY ONE THING is known for certain about the appearance of Sarah Anna Browning, wife of Robert Browning and mother of Robert and Sarianna Browning: she had a notably square head. Which is to say, its uncommon squareness was noted by Alfred Domett, a young man sufficiently serious as to become briefly, in his maturity, Prime Minister of New Zealand and sometime epic poet. Mr Domett, getting on in years, conscientiously committed this observation to his journal on 30 April 1878: ‘I remembered their mother about 40 years before (say 1838), who had, I used to think, the squarest head and forehead I almost ever saw in a human being, putting me in mind, absurdly enough no doubt of a tea-chest or tea-caddy.’
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Many people have square heads. There is little enough to be interpreted from this characteristic, though to some minds a square head may naturally imply sturdy common sense and a regular attitude to life. A good square head is commonly viewed as virtually a guarantee of correct behaviour and a restrained attitude towards vanity and frivolity. Lombroso’s forensic art of physiognomy being now just as discredited as palmistry or phrenology, we may turn with more confidence to Thomas Carlyle’s shrewd and succinct assessment of Mrs Browning as being ‘the type of a Scottish gentlewoman’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The phrase is evocative enough for those who, like Carlyle, have enjoyed some personal experience and acquired some understanding at first hand of the culture that has bred and refined the Scottish gentlewoman over the generations. She is a woman to be reckoned with. Since we know nothing but bromides and pleasing praises of Sarah Anna’s temperament beyond what may be conjectured, particularly from Carlyle’s brief but telling phrase, we may take it that she was quieter and more phlegmatic than Jane Welsh, Carlyle’s own Scottish gentlewoman wife whose verbal flyting could generally be relied upon to rattle the teeth and teacups of visitors to Carlyle’s London house in Cheyne Walk.
Mrs Browning’s father was German. Her grandfather is said to have been a Hamburg merchant whose son William is generally agreed to have become, in a small way, a ship owner in Dundee and to have married a Scotswoman. She was born Sarah Anna Wiedemann in Scotland, in the early 1770s, and while still a girl came south with her sister Christiana to lodge with an uncle in Camberwell. Her history before marriage is not known to have been remarkable; after marriage it was not notably dramatic. There is only the amplest evidence that she was worthily devoted to her hearth, garden, husband, and children.
Mrs Browning’s head so fascinated Alfred Domett that he continued to refer to it in a domestic anecdote agreeably designed to emphasize the affection that existed between mother and son: ‘On one occasion, in the act of tossing a little roll of music from the table to the piano, he thought it had touched her head in passing her, and I remember how he ran to her to apologise and caress her, though I think she had not felt it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Sarah Anna Browning’s head was at least tenderly regarded and respected by Robert, her son, who—since he has left no description of it to posterity in prose or poetry—either refrained from disobliging comment or regarded its shape as in no respect unusual.
Mrs Browning was a Dissenter; her creed was Nonconformist, a somewhat austere faith that partook of no sacraments and reprobated ritual. She—and, nine years into their marriage, her husband—adhered to the Congregational Church, the chapel in York Street, Walworth, which the Browning family attended regularly to hear the preaching of the incumbent, the Revd George Clayton, characterized in the British Weekly of 20 December 1889 as one who ‘combined the character of a saint, a dancing master, and an orthodox eighteenth-century theologian in about equal proportions’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Before professing Congregationalism, she had been brought up—said Sarianna, her daughter, to Mrs Alexandra Sutherland Orr—in the Church of Scotland. One of the books that is recorded as a gift from Mrs Browning to her son is an anthology of sermons, inscribed by him on the flyleaf as a treasured possession and fond remembrance of his mother. As a token of maternal concern for her son’s spiritual welfare it was perfectly appropriate, and might perhaps have been intended as a modest counterweight to the large and eclectic library of books—six thousand volumes, more or less—that her husband had collected, continued to collect, and through which her precocious son was presently and diligently reading his way.
Sarah Anna Browning doubtless had cause to attempt to concentrate young Robert’s mind more narrowly. He had begun with a rather sensational anthology, Nathaniel Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World, published in 1678, and sooner rather than later would inevitably discover dictionaries and encyclopedias, those seemingly innocent repositories of dry definitions and sober facts but which are, in truth, a maze of conceits and confusions, of broad thoroughfares and frustrating cul-de-sacs from which the imaginative mind, once entered, will find no exit and never in a lifetime penetrate to the centre.
But Mrs Browning’s head, square with religion and good intentions, was very liable to be turned by kindly feeling towards her son and poetry. Robert, in 1826, had already come across Miscellaneous Poems, a copy of Shelley’s best works, published by William Benbow of High Holborn, unblushingly pirated from Mrs Shelley’s edition of her husband’s Posthumous Poems. This volume was presented to him by a cousin, James Silverthorne, and he was eager for a more reliable, authoritative edition. Having made inquiries of the Literary Gazette as to where they might be obtained, Robert requested the poems of Shelley as a birthday present.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Browning may be pictured putting on her gloves, setting her bonnet squarely on her head and proceeding to Vere Street. There, at the premises of C. & J. Ollier, booksellers, she purchased the complete works of the poet, including the Pisa edition of Adonais in a purple paper cover and Epipsychidion. None of them had exhausted their first editions save The Cenci, which had achieved a second edition.
On advice, as being in somewhat the same poetic spirit as the works of the late Percy Bysshe Shelley who had died tragically in a boating accident in Italy but three years before, Sarah Anna Browning added to her order three volumes of the poetry of the late John Keats, who had died, also tragically young, in Rome in 1821. Her arms encumbered with the books of these two neglected poets, her head quite innocent of the effect they would have, she returned home to present them to her son. There being not much call for the poetry of Shelley and Keats at this time, it had taken some effort to obtain their works. Bibliophiles, wrote Edmund Gosse in 1881 in the December issue of the Century Magazine, turn almost dazed at the thought of these prizes picked up by the unconscious lady.
The Browning family belonged, remarked G. K. Chesterton, ‘to the solid and educated middle-class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert Browning senior, husband to Sarah Anna Wiedemann, was certainly educated, undeniably middle-class, and interested in literature not so much for its own sake—though he was more literate and widely read, it may safely be said, than many of his colleagues at the Bank of England—but more from the point of view of bibliophily and learning. There was always another book to be sought and set on a shelf. The house in Camberwell was full of them.
Literature and learning are not precisely the same thing, and Mr Browning senior, according to the testimony of Mr Domett, was accustomed to speak of his son ‘“as beyond him”’—alluding to his Paracelsuses and Sordellos; though I fancy he altered his tone on this subject very much at a later period’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Poetry safely clapped between purple paper covers is one thing, poets are quite another—and an experimental, modern poet within the confines of one’s own family is bound to be unsettling to a traditionalist, try as he may to comprehend, proud as he may be of completed and published effort. Mr Browning senior may initially have been more pleased with the fact of his son’s work being printed and bound and placed in its proper place on his bookshelves than with the perplexing contents of the books themselves.
That said, introductory notes by Reuben Browning to a small volume of sketches by Robert Browning senior refer kindly to his stepbrother’s bibliophily and store of learning—however much at random and magpie-like it may have been acquired: ‘The love of reading attracted him by sympathy to books: old books were his delight, and by his continual search after them he not only knew all the old books-stalls in London, but their contents, and if any scarce work were spoken of, he could tell forthwith where a copy of it might be had. Nay, he would even describe in what part of the shop it was placed, and the price likely to be asked for it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) So, ‘with the scent of a hound and the snap of a bull-dog’ for an old or rare book, Mr Browning acquired learning and a library.
‘Thus his own library became his treasure,’ remarked Reuben Browning. ‘His books, however, were confessedly not remarkable for costly binding, but for their rarity or for interesting remarks he had to make on most of them; and his memory was so good that not infrequently, when a conversation at his table had reference to any particular subject, has he quietly left the room and in the dark, from a thousand volumes in his library, brought two or three illustrations of the point under discussion.’ The point under discussion, however esoteric, would rarely defeat Mr Browning senior’s search for an apposite reference: ‘His wonderful store of information,’ wrote Reuben Browning, ‘might really be compared to an inexhaustible mine. It comprised not merely a thorough scholastic outline of the world, but the critical points of ancient and modern history, the lore of the Middle Ages, all political combinations of parties, their descriptions and consequences; and especially the lives of the poets and painters, concerning whom he ever had to communicate some interesting anecdote not generally known.’
A portrait of Mr Browning senior, preserved throughout their lives by his children, was ‘blue-eyed and “fresh-coloured”’ and, attested Mr Browning’s daughter Sarianna to Alfred Domett, the man himself ‘had not an unsound tooth in his head’ when he died at the age of 84. In his youth he had been a vigorous sportsman, afflicted only by sore throats and a minor liver complaint. Altogether, his general health and recuperative powers were strongly marked. Alfred Domett took these facts of paternal health and heredity seriously, on the ground that ‘they have their significance with reference to the physical constitution of their son, the poet; which goes so far as to make up what is called “genius”’.
So far as Domett was aware, no cloud shadowed the home life of the Brownings: ‘Altogether, father, mother, only son and only daughter formed a most suited, harmonious and intellectual family, as appeared to me.’ Mr Browning senior, to Domett, was not often a physically significant presence: his friend’s father, ‘of whom I did not see much, seemed in my recollection, what I should be inclined to call a dry adust [sic] undersized man; rather reserved; fond particularly of old engravings, of which I believe he had a choice collection.’ Mr Browning took pleasure not only in collecting pictures but also in making them. He was liable to sketch the heads of his colleagues and visitors to the Bank of England, a habit so much encouraged by his employers that hundreds of these whiskered heads survive to this day.
Mr Browning also wrote poetry of a traditional kind. His son in later life praised his father’s verses to Edmund Gosse, declaring ‘that his father had more true poetic genius than he has’. Gosse, taking this with scarcely too gross a pinch of salt and allowing for filial piety, kindly but rigorously comments that, ‘Of course the world at large will answer, “By their fruits shall ye know them,” and of palpable fruit in the way of published verse the elder Mr Browning has nothing to show.’ The elder Browning’s poetic taste was more or less exclusively for double or triple rhyme, and especially for the heroic couplet, which he employed with ‘force and fluency’. Gosse goes on to quote the more celebrated son describing the moral and stylistic vein of the father’s vigorous verses ‘as that of a Pope born out of due time’. Mr Browning had been a great classicist and a lover of eighteenth-century literature, the poetry of that period having achieved, in his estimation, its finest flowering in the work of Alexander Pope. Though his son’s early poetry, Pauline and Paracelsus, confounded him, Mr Browning senior forgave the otherwise impenetrable Sordello because—says William Sharp in his Life of Browning—‘it was written in rhymed couplets’.
Pope, according to the critic Mark Pattison, ‘was very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant; that is, of everything but the one thing which he laboured with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonyms, and pretty turns of language.’ Mr Browning senior’s satirical portraits of friends and colleagues are said to be very Pope-ish in expression, quick sketches reminiscent in their style of Pope’s rhetorical (often oratorical) couplets. It is further said that he was incapable of portraying anyone other than as a grotesque. The sketch of his wife is certainly none too flattering.
This domestic, middle-class idyll, quiet-flowing and given muted colour by art, poetry, music, bibliophily and decent religious observances, was touching to Alfred Domett, who recollected his serene memories of the Browning family in the tranquillity that fell upon him after leaving public office in New Zealand and returning to London to look up an old friend now celebrated as an important poet and public figure.
Mr Browning, like his wife, became a Dissenter and a Nonconformist in middle life, though it had taken Sarah Anna Browning time and energy to persuade him from the Episcopal communion. In his youth, he had held principles and expressed opinions, uncompromisingly liberal, that had all but brought him to ruin—certainly had distanced him from the prospect of maintaining at least, perhaps increasing, the family fortune that derived from estates and commercial interests in the West Indies. His father, the first Robert Browning, had been born the eldest son in 1749 to Jane Morris of Cranborne, Dorset, wife to Thomas Browning who in 1760 had become landlord of Woodyates Inn, close to the Dorset-Wiltshire border, which he had held on a 99-year lease from the Earl of Shaftesbury. Thomas and Jane Browning produced five more children, three sons (one of whom died young) and two daughters.
Robert the First, as he may here be styled, was to become grandfather of the poet. He was recommended by Lord Shaftesbury for employment in the Bank of England, where he served for the whole of his working life, fifty years, from August 1769, when he would have been about the age of twenty, becoming Principal of the Bank Stock Office, a post of some considerable prestige which implied wide contact with influential financiers. This first Robert Browning was no man, merely, of balance sheets and bottom-polished trousers: at about the age of forty, he vigorously assisted, as a lieutenant in the Honourable Artillery Company, in the defence of the Bank of England during the Gordon Riots of 1780.
In 1778, he married Margaret Morris Tittle, a lady who had been born in the West Indies, reputedly a Creole (and said, by some, to have been darker than was then thought decent), by whom he sired three children—Robert, the eldest, being born on 6 July 1782 at Battersea. A second son, William, was born and died in 1784. A daughter, Margaret—who remained unmarried and lived quietly until her death in 1857 (or 1858, according to a descendant, Vivienne Browning)—was born in 1783. Nothing more is heard of Margaret, beyond a reference by Cyrus Mason, a Browning cousin, who in later life composed a memoir in which he wrote that ‘Aunt Margaret was detected mysteriously crooning prophecies over her Nephew, behind a door at the house at Camberwell.’
The picture of an eccentric prophetess lurking at keyholes and singing the fortunes of the future poet is not conjured by any other biographer of Robert Browning. Cyrus Mason is not widely regarded as a reliable chronicler of Browning family history. He begins with his own self-aggrandizing agenda and sticks to it. His reputation is rather as a somewhat embittered relation who took the view that the poet Robert Browning and his admirers had paid inadequate attention and given insufficient credit to the more remote branches of the family. The contribution of the extended family to the poet’s early education, he considered, had been cruelly overlooked and positively belittled by wilful neglect.
However, since the reference to Margaret Browning does exist, and since Margaret has otherwise vanished from biographical ken, a possible—rather than probable—explanation for this single recorded peculiarity of the poet’s aunt is that she may have been simple-minded and thus kept in what her family may have regarded (not uncommonly at the time) as a decent, discreet seclusion. The extent to which they succeeded in containing any public embarrassment may—and it is no more than supposition—account for Margaret’s virtually complete obscurity in a family history that has been otherwise largely revealed.
Margaret Morris Tittle Browning died in Camberwell in 1789, when Robert (who can be referred to as Robert the Second), her only remaining son, was seven years old. When Robert was twelve, his father remarried in April 1794. This second wife, Jane Smith, by whom he fathered nine more children, three sons, and six daughters, was but twenty-three at the time of her marriage in Chelsea to the 45-year-old Robert Browning the First. The difference of twenty-two years between husband and wife is said, specifically by Mrs Sutherland Orr, Robert Browning’s official biographer, sister of the exotic Orientalist and painter Frederic Leighton, and a friend of the poet, to have resulted in the complete ascendancy of Jane Smith Browning over her husband. Besotted by, and doting upon, his young darling, he made no objection to Jane’s relegation of a portrait (attributed to Wright of Derby) of his first wife to a garret on the basis that a man did not need two wives. One—the living—in this case proved perfectly sufficient.
The hard man of business and urban battle, the doughty Englishman of Dorset stock, the soundly respectable man who annually read the Bible and Tom Jones (both, probably, with equal religious attention), the stout and severe man who lived more or less hale—despite the affliction of gout—to the age of eighty-four, was easily subverted by a woman whose gnawing jealousy of his first family extended from the dead to the quick. Browning family tradition, says Vivienne Browning, a family historian, also attributes a jealousy to Robert the First, naturally anxious to retain the love and loyalty of his young wife against any possible threat, actual or merely perceived in his imagination. Their nine children, a substantial though not unusual number, may have been conceived and borne as much in response to jealousy, doubt, and fear as in expression of any softer feelings.
Jane Browning’s alleged ill-will towards Robert the Second, Robert the First’s son by his previous marriage to Margaret Tittle, was not appeased by the young man’s independence, financial or intellectual. He had inherited a small income from an uncle, his mother’s brother, and proposed to apply it to a university education for himself. Jane, supposedly on the ground that there were insufficient funds to send her own sons to university, opposed her stepson’s ambition. Then, too, there was some irritation that Robert the Second wished to be an artist and showed some talent for the calling. Robert the First—says Mrs Orr—turned away disgustedly when Robert the Second showed his first completed picture to his father. The household was plainly a domestic arena of seething discontents, jealous insecurities, envious stratagems, entrenched positions on every front, and sniper fire from every corner of every room.
Margaret Tittle had left property in the West Indies, and it was Robert the First’s intention that their son should proceed, at the age of nineteen, to St Kitts to manage the family estates, which were worked by slave labour. He may have been glad enough to go, to remove himself as far as possible from his father and stepmother. In the event, he lasted only a year in the West Indies before returning to London, emotionally bruised by his experience of the degrading conditions under which slaves laboured on the sugar plantations. Robert the Second’s reasonable expectation was that he might inherit perhaps not all, but at least a substantial proportion of his mother’s property, had he not ‘conceived such a hatred of the slave system’.
Mrs Sutherland Orr states: ‘One of the experiences which disgusted him with St Kitts was the frustration by its authorities of an attempt he was making to teach a negro boy to read, and the understanding that all such educative action was prohibited.’ For a man who, from his earliest years, was wholly devoted to books, art, anything that nourished and encouraged inquiry and intellect, the spiritual repression of mind and soul as much—perhaps more than—physical repression of bodily freedom, must have seemed an act of institutionalized criminality and personal inhumanity by the properly constituted authorities. He could not morally consider himself party to, or representative of, such a system.
Certainly as a result of the apparent lily-livered liberalism of his son and his shocking, incomprehensible disregard for the propriety of profit, conjecturally also on account of a profound unease about maintaining the affection and loyalty of his young wife—there were only ten years between stepmother Jane and her stepson—Robert the First fell into a passionate and powerful rage that he sustained for many years. Robert Browning, the grandson and son of the protagonists of this quarrel, did not learn the details of the family rupture until 25 August 1846, when his mother finally confided the circumstances of nigh on half a century before.
‘If we are poor,’ wrote Robert Browning the Third the next day to Elizabeth Barrett, ‘it is to my father’s infinite glory, who, as my mother told me last night, as we sate alone, “conceived such a hatred to the slave-system in the West Indies,” (where his mother was born, who died in his infancy,) that he relinquished every prospect,—supported himself, while there, in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father’s profound astonishment and rage—one proof of which was, that when he heard that his son was a suitor to her, my mother—he benevolently waited on her Uncle to assure him that his niece “would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged”!—those were his very words. My father on his return, had the intention of devoting himself to art, for which he had many qualifications and abundant love—but the quarrel with his father,—who married again and continued to hate him till a few years before his death,—induced him to go at once and consume his life after a fashion he always detested. You may fancy, I am not ashamed of him.’
As soon as Robert the Second achieved his majority, he was dunned by his father for restitution in full of all the expenses that Robert the First had laid out on him, and he was stripped of any inheritance from his mother, Margaret, whose fortune, at the time of her marriage, had not been settled upon her and thus had fallen under the control of her husband. These reactions so intimidated Robert the Second that he agreed to enter the Bank of England, his father’s territory, as a clerk and to sublimate his love of books and sketching in ledgers and ink. In November 1803, four months after his twenty-first birthday, he began his long, complaisant, not necessarily unhappy servitude of fifty years as a bank clerk in Threadneedle Street.
A little over seven years later, at Camberwell on 19 February 1811, in the teeth of his father’s opposition, Robert the Second married Sarah Anna Wiedemann, whose uncle evidently disregarded Robert the First’s predictions. She was then thirty-nine, ten years older than her husband and only one year younger than his stepmother Jane. They settled at 6 Southampton Street, Camberwell, where, on 7 May 1812, Sarah Anna Browning was delivered of a son, the third in the direct Browning line to be named Robert. Twenty months later, on 7 January 1814, their second child, called Sarah Anna after her mother, but known as Sarianna by her family and friends, was born.
William Sharp, in his Life of Browning, published in 1897, refers briskly and offhandedly to a third child, Clara. Nothing is known of Clara: it is possible she may have been stillborn or died immediately after birth. Mrs Orr never mentions the birth of a third child, and not even Cyrus Mason, the family member one would expect to seize eagerly upon the suppression of any reference to a Browning, suggests that more than two children were born to the Brownings. However, William Clyde DeVane, discussing Browning’s ‘Lines to the Memory of his Parents’ in A Browning Handbook, states that ‘The “child that never knew” Mrs Browning was a stillborn child who was to have been named Clara.’ The poem containing this discreet reference was not printed until it appeared in F.G. Kenyon’s New Poems by Robert Browning, published in 1914, and in the February issue, that same year, of the Cornhill Magazine. Vivienne Browning, in My Browning Family Album, published in 1992, declares that her grandmother (Elizabeth, a daughter of Reuben Browning, son of Jane, Robert the First’s second wife) ‘included a third baby—a girl—in the family tree’, but Vivienne Browning ‘cannot now find any evidence to support this’.
It is known that Sarah Anna Browning miscarried at least once. In a letter to his son Pen, the poet Robert Browning wrote on 25 January 1888 to condole with him and his wife Fannie on her miscarriage: ‘Don’t be disappointed at this first failure of your natural hopes—it may soon be repaired. Your dearest Mother experienced the same misfortune, at much about the same time after marriage: and it happened also to my own mother, before I was born.’ Unless Sarah Anna’s miscarriage occurred in a very late stage of pregnancy, it seems improbable that a miscarried child should have been given a name and regarded, in whatever terms, as a first-born—but natural parental sentiment may have prompted the Brownings to give their first daughter, who never drew breath, miscarried or stillborn, at least the dignity and memorial of a name.
The small, close-knit family moved house in 1824, though merely from 6 Southampton Street to another house (the number is not known) in the same street, where they remained until December 1840. Bereaved of his mother at the age of seven, repressed from the age of twelve by his father and stepmother, denied further education and frustrated in his principles and ambitions in his late teens, all but disinherited for failure to make a success of business and to close a moral eye to the inhumanity of slavery, set on a high stool and loaded with ledgers in his early twenties, it is hardly surprising that Robert the Second sought a little peace and quiet for avocations that had moderated into hobbies. He settled for a happy—perhaps undemanding—marriage to a peacable, slightly older wife, and a tranquil bolt-hole in what was then, in the early nineteenth century, the semi-rural backwater of Camberwell.
His poverty, counted in monetary terms, was relative. His work in the Bank of England, never as elevated or responsible as Robert the First’s, was nevertheless adequately paid, the hours were short and overtime, particularly the lucrative night watch, was paid at a higher rate. There was little or no managerial or official concern about the amount of paper, the number of pens, or the quantity of sealing wax used by Bank officials, and these materials were naturally regarded as lucrative perquisites that substantially bumped up the regular salary. Though Mrs Orr admits this trade, she adds—somewhat severely—in a footnote: ‘I have been told that, far from becoming careless in the use of these things from his practically unbounded command of them, he developed for them an almost superstitious reverence. He could never endure to see a scrap of writing-paper wasted.’
He could count on a regular salary of a little more than £300 a year, supplemented by generous rates of remuneration for extra duties and appropriate perks of office. He may have been deprived of any interest in his mother’s estate, but his small income from his mother’s brother, even after deductions from it by his father, continued to be a reliable annual resource. Over the years, Robert the Second acquired valuable specialist knowledge of pictures and books, and certainly, though he was no calculating businessman and willingly gave away many items from his collection, he occasionally—perhaps regularly—traded acquisitions and profited from serendipitous discoveries.
In the end, though it was a long time coming, Robert the First softened towards his eldest son. That he was not wholly implacable is testified by his will, made in 1819, two years before his retirement from the Bank: he left Robert the Second and Margaret ten pounds each for a ring. This may seem a paltry inheritance, but he took into account the fact that Robert and Margaret had inherited from ‘their Uncle Tittle and Aunt Mill a much greater proportion than can be left to my other dear children’. He trusted ‘they will not think I am deficient in love and regard to them’. As a token of reconciliation, the legacy to buy rings was a substantial olive branch.
It may be assumed that the patriarch Browning’s temper had begun to abate before he made his will, and that the Brownings had resumed some form of comfortable, if cautious, communication until the old man’s death. There is certainly some indication that Robert the First saw something of his grandchildren—the old man is said by Mrs Orr to have ‘particularly dreaded’ his lively grandson’s ‘vicinity to his afflicted foot’, little boys and gout being clearly best kept far apart. After the death of Robert the First in 1833, stepmother Jane, then in her early sixties, moved south of the river from her house in Islington to Albert Terrace, just beyond the toll bar at New Cross. In the biography of Robert Browning published in 1910 by W. Hall Griffin and H.C. Minchin, it is said that the portrait of the first Mrs Browning, Margaret Tittle, had been retrieved from the Islington garret and was hung in her son’s dining room.
The most familiar photograph of Robert the Second, taken—it looks like—in late middle age (though it is difficult to tell, since he is said to have retained a youthful appearance until late in life) shows the profile of a rather worried-looking man. A deep line creases from the nostril to just below the side of the mouth, which itself appears thin and turns down at the corner. The hair is white, neatly combed back over the forehead and bushy around the base of the ears. It is the picture of a doubtful man who looks slightly downward rather than straight ahead, as though he has no expectation of seeing, like The Lost Leader, ‘Never glad confident morning again!’. He still bled, perhaps, from the wounds inflicted upon him as a child and young man: but if he did, he suffered in silence.
As some men for the rest of their lives do not care to talk about their experiences in war, so Robert the Second could never bring himself to talk about his bitter experiences in the West Indies: ‘My father is tenderhearted to a fault,’ wrote his son to Elizabeth Barrett on 27 August 1846. The poet’s mother had confided some particulars to him three days before, but from his father he had got never a word: ‘I have never known much more of those circumstances in his youth than I told you, in consequence of his invincible repugnance to allude to the matter—and I have a fancy to account for some peculiarities in him, which connects them with some abominable early experience. Thus,—if you question him about it, he shuts his eyes involuntarily and shows exactly the same marks of loathing that may be noticed if a piece of cruelty is mentioned … and the word “blood,” even makes him change colour.’
These ‘peculiarities’ observed in his father by the youngest Browning did not go unremarked by others who, with less fancy than his son to seek an origin for them, were content to observe and to wonder at this marvellous man. Cyrus Mason, as an amateur historian of the Browning family, speaks specifically of Robert the Second’s ‘imaginative and eccentric brain’. It seems likely that he is not only confessing his own bewilderment, which becomes ever more apparent as his memoir proceeds, but a general incomprehension within the wider Browning family. Inevitably, mild eccentricities of character become magnified by family and friends otherwise at a loss to account for the somewhat detached life of a man who is for all practical, day-to-day intents and purposes a conscientious banker and responsible family man, but whose domestic and inner life, so far as it is penetrable by others, exhibits a marked degree of abstraction and commitment to matters that harder, squarer heads would not regard as immediately profitable in the conduct of everyday life—‘Robert’s incessant study of subjects perfectly useless in Banking business’, to quote Cyrus Mason. Such minor aberrations are naturally inflated in the remembrance and the retelling, particularly when it becomes evident that such a man has become, indirectly, an object of interest and attention through efforts made by admirers or detractors to trace the early influences upon his remarkable son.
Mrs Orr tells us that Robert the Second, when he in turn became a grandfather, taught his grandson elementary anatomy, impressing upon young Pen Browning ‘the names and position of the principal bones of the human body’. Cyrus Mason adds considerably to this blameless, indeed worthy, anecdote by claiming that ‘Uncle Robert became so absorbed in his anatomical studies that he conveyed objects for dissection into the Bank of England; on one occasion a dead rat was kept for so long a time in his office desk, awaiting dissection, that his fellow clerks were compelled to apply to their chief to have it removed! The study of anatomy became so seductive that on the day Uncle Robert was married, he disappeared mysteriously after the ceremony and was discovered … busily engaged dissecting a duck, oblivious of the fact that a wife and wedding guests were reduced to a state of perplexity by his unexplained absence.’
This story has the air of invention by a fabulist—Mr Browning, being a little peckish, might merely have been carving a duck—and earlier echoes of preoccupied, enthusiastic amateur morbid anatomists recur to the mind (in the annals of Scottish eccentricity, there are several instances of notable absence of mind of more or less this nature at wedding feasts); there is even a faint, ludicrous hint of Francis Bacon fatally catching a cold while stuffing a chicken with snow by the roadside in an early endeavour to discover the principles of refrigeration. The patronizing tone is one of barely-tolerant amusement, of reminiscence dressed up with a dry chuckle, of family anecdote become fanciful.
‘Uncle Robert’, in short, was held—more or less exasperatedly—to be something of a whimsical character. His seeming inclination to desert the ceremonies and commonplace observances of ‘real life’, of family life, for abstruse, even esoteric researches—all those books!—may be exaggerated, but the metamorphosis of memory into myth is generally achieved through the medium of an actuality. The pearl of fiction accretes around a grain of actuality, and in this case the attitudes and behaviour of Robert Browning, father of the poet, achieve a relevance in respect of his attitude towards the education, intellectual liberty, and the vocation of his son.
Robert the Second, frustrated in his own creative ambitions, did not discourage his son from conducting his life along lines that he himself had been denied. Cyrus Mason declares that, from the beginning, the ‘arranged destiny’ of Robert and Sarah Anna’s son was to be a poet. His life and career, says Mason, were planned from the cot. The infant Robert’s ‘swaddling clothes were wrapped around his little body with a poetic consideration’, his father rocked his cradle rhythmically, his Aunt Margaret ‘prophecied [sic] in her dark mysterious manner his brilliant future’, and women lulled him to sleep with whispered words of poetry. Whether unconsciously or by design, Mason here introduces the fairy-story image of the good or bad fairy godmothers conferring gifts more or less useful.
Allowing for the Brothers Grimm or Perrault quality of these images conjured by Mason, and his patent intention in writing his memoir to arrogate a substantial proportion of the credit for the infant Robert’s development to a wider family circle of Brownings, there is a nub of truth in his assertion. There is some dispute as to how far it may be credited, of course. Mrs Orr merely states that the infant Robert showed a precocious aptitude for poetry: ‘It has often been told how he extemporised verse aloud while walking round and round the dining room table supporting himself by his hands, when he was still so small that his head was scarcely above it.’ Some children naturally sing, some dance, some draw little pictures and some declaim nonsense verse or nursery rhymes: Robert Browning invented his own childish verses. Doting family relations would naturally exclaim over his prospects as a great poet and genially encourage the conceit.
That he was raised from birth as—or specifically to become—a poet is improbable: more unlikely still is the assertion that he was raised ‘poetically’ by parents whose inclinations in the normal run of things were kindly and indulgent in terms of stimulating their son’s natural and lively intelligence, but not inherently fanciful: they were respectably pious, middle-class, somewhat matter-of-fact citizens of no more and no less distinction than others of their time, place, and type. They were distinctive enough to those who loved them or had cause to consider them, but they were not—in the usual meaning of the word—distinguished.
They were what G.K. Chesterton calls ‘simply a typical Camberwell family’ after he sensibly dismisses as largely irrelevant to immediate Browning biography all red herrings such as the alleged pied-noir origins of Margaret Tittle (which may have been true), a supposed Jewish strain in the Browning family (now discounted, but which would have been a matter of extreme interest to the poet), and the suggestion, from the fact that Browning and his father used a ring-seal with a coat of arms, of an aristocratic origin dating from the Middle Ages for the family name, if not for the family itself.
Nevertheless, in thrall to the romance of pedigree and the benefits that may be derived from a selective use of genealogy, Cyrus Mason’s memoir is motivated not only by a gnawing ambition to associate himself and his kinsfolk more closely with the poet Browning and to aggrandize himself by the connection, but also, vitally, to give the lie to the ‘monstrous fabrication’ by F.J. Furnivall, a devoted admirer and scholar of the poet Browning, that the Brownings descended from the servant class, very likely from a footman, later butler, to the Bankes family at Corfe Castle before becoming innkeepers. Cyrus Mason claims to trace the Browning lineage back unto the remotest generations—at least into the fourteenth century—to disprove any stigma of low birth. He even manages to infer, from some eighteenth-century holograph family documents, the high cost of binding some family books, the good quality of the ink used, and, from the evidence of ‘fine bold writing’, a prosperous, educated, literary ancestry. These elaborate researches were of the greatest possible interest to Cyrus Mason: they consumed his time, consoled his soul, confirmed his pride, and confounded cavilling critics.
Cyrus Mason was satisfied with his work, and it is to his modest credit that he has amply satisfied everyone else, most of whom are now content to acknowledge this monument to genealogical archaeology and pass more quickly than is entirely respectful to more immediate matters. We consult Mason’s book much as visitors to an exhibition browse speedily through the well-researched but earnest expository notes at the entrance and hurry inside to get to the interesting main exhibit. ‘For the great central and solid fact,’ declared G. K. Chesterton, ‘which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class.’ Allowing, naturally, for his mother’s Scottish-German parentage and his grandmother’s Creole connection, Robert Browning was certainly brought up as a middle-class Englishman.
Chesterton’s argument, scything decisively through the tangled undergrowth of genealogy and the rank weeds of heterogeneous heredity, becomes a spirited, romantic peroration, grandly swelling as he praises Robert Browning’s genius to the heights, then dropping bathetically back as he regularly nails it to the ground by constantly reminding us that Browning was ‘an Englishman of the middle class’; until, finally, he sweeps to his breathtaking and irresistible conclusion that Browning ‘piled up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity.’
Robert Browning’s mother was no bluestocking: she was not herself literary, nor was she inclined to draw or paint in water-colours. Her husband did enough book collecting and sketching already. Though she had a considerable taste for music and is said to have been an accomplished pianist (Beethoven’s sonatas, Avison’s marches, and Gaelic laments are cited as belonging to her repertoire), she was very likely no more than ordinarily competent on a piano, though her technique was evidently infused with fine romantic feeling. Sarah Anna Browning tended her flower garden (Cyrus Mason remarks upon ‘the garden, Aunt Robert’s roses, that wicket gate the Robert Browning family used by favor, opening for them a ready way to wander in the then beautiful meadows to reach the Dulwich woods, the College and gallery’) and otherwise occupied herself, day by day, with domestic matters relating to her largely self-contained, self-sufficient family. Other biographers beg to differ when Mrs Orr tells us that Mrs Browning ‘had nothing of the artist about her’. In contrast to her husband, she produced nothing artistic or creative, but partisans speak warmly of her tender interest in music and romantic poetry. She possessed at least an artistic sensibility.
Mrs Orr remarks, cursorily but not disparagingly: ‘Little need be said about the poet’s mother’, the implication—quite wrong—being that there was little to be said. Her son’s devotion to Sarah Anna was very marked: habitually, when he sat beside her, Robert would like to put his arm around her waist. When she died in early 1849, he beatified her by describing her as ‘a divine woman’. Most biographers and others interested in the poet Browning make a point of the empathetic feeling that developed between mother and son: when Sarah Anna Browning was laid low with headaches, her son dreadfully suffered sympathetic pains. ‘The circumstances of his death recalled that of his mother,’ says Mrs Orr, and adds, however ‘it might sound grotesque’, that ‘only a delicate woman could have been the mother of Robert Browning’.
She was certainly religious, and none doubted that her place in heaven had long been marked and secured by her narrow piety, commonsense good nature, and her stoical suffering of physical ailments. Sarah Anna Browning endured debilitating, painful headaches, severe as migraines (which indeed they may have been). In contrast to her vigorously hale husband, she is portrayed by Mrs Orr as ‘a delicate woman, very anaemic during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia which was perhaps a symptom of this condition’.
Robert, her son, was not so delicate in health or attitude. He established an early reputation not only for mental precocity but vocal and physically boisterous expression of it. In modern times, his vigour and fearlessness, his restlessness and temper, might worry some as verging on hyperactivity. ‘He clamoured for occupation as soon as he could speak,’ says Mrs Orr and, though admitting that ‘his energies were of course destructive till they had found their proper outlet’, she discovers no inherent vice in the child: ‘we do not hear of his having destroyed anything for the mere sake of doing so’. A taste for lively spectacle rather than wilful incendiarism is adduced as the motive for Robert’s ‘putting a handsome Brussels lace veil of his mother’s into the fire’ and excusing himself with the words, ‘a pretty blaze, mamma’ (rendered as ‘a pitty baze’ by Mrs Orr, prefiguring the lisping baby-talk that so rejoiced the ears of the poet and his wife when their own son, Pen, first began to speak).
To quiet the boy, Sarah Anna Browning’s best resource was to sit him on her knees, holding him in a firm grip, and to engage his attention with stories—‘doubtless Bible stories’, says Mrs Orr, as a tribute not only to Mrs Browning’s natural piety, her vocation as a Sunday School teacher, and her subscription to the London Missionary Society but also, no doubt, to the improving effect of religion in general, Nonconformism in particular, and its associated morality. If, as Cyrus Mason suggests, Robert was raised to be a poet, quiet introspection was not a notable characteristic of his infancy—though music (he liked to listen to his mother play the piano and would beg her to keep up the performance) and religion (Sarah Anna Browning could curb her son’s arrogance until quite late in his life by pointing out the very real peril and lively retribution awaiting those who failed in Christian charity) could soothe the savage child and bind them together, mother and son, in a delicate balance of love and apprehension. Maternal indulgence, too, was a reliable ploy: Robert could be induced to swallow unpleasant medicine so long as he was given a toad which Mrs Browning, holding a parasol over her head, obligingly searched for in her strawberry bed—a memory of childhood that never faded in her son’s recollection.
A recollection of his mother’s garden very likely informs the idyllic first section—‘The Flower’s Name’—of the poem ‘Garden-Fancies’, a revised version of which was included in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, published in 1845:
Here’s the garden she walked across,
Arm in my arm, such a short while since:
Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss
Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!
She must have reached this shrub ere she turned,
As back with that murmur the wicket swung;
For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned,
To feed and forget it the leaves among.
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As she walks with little Robert through her garden, talking to him, Sarah Anna Browning’s gown brushes against a bush or hedge of box. She stops, hushes her words, and points out ‘a moth on the milk-white phlox’. Here roses, there rock plants, elsewhere a particular flower with a ‘soft meandering Spanish name’ that inspires an ambition in the boy to learn Spanish ‘Only for that slow sweet name’s sake’. Above all, the roses ‘ranged in valiant row’ where Sarah Anna always pauses—
… for she lingers
There like sunshine over the ground
And ever I see her soft white fingers
Searching after the bud she found.
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There are any number of anecdotes that attest to a happy childhood and none that imply any serious cause for parental or official reprobation—saving only the exasperation of the Revd George Clayton who, in the course of a church service, had cause to admonish ‘for restlessness and inattention Master Robert Browning’. The boy had been reduced by impatience to gnawing on a pew.
The question of Robert the Third’s education was settled when his head became filled with so much random information that it increased what Mrs Orr describes as his ‘turbulent activity’ and it was thought desirable that he should be off-loaded for an hour or two every day into the care of a ‘lady of reduced fortunes’ who kept a dame school or local kindergarten. There, Robert’s precociousness so dispirited the mothers of the other children in the school, who reckoned that Robert was getting all the poor lady’s attention to the disadvantage of their own dullard sons, that they complained and demanded his removal. Thereafter, until the age of eight or nine, Robert enjoyed the advantages of a home education. His mother mostly took care of his moral, musical, and religious education, his father fired up his imagination with his own squirrelled store of learning and his inspired, fanciful methods of imparting it.
Robert the Second, thoroughly versed in the Greek poets, is conjured irresistibly in his son’s poetic memory: the poem ‘Development’, first published in Asolando, probably dates from 1888 or 1889, and is often quoted to illustrate Browning’s first encounter with Homer in 1817 or thereabouts.
My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
‘What do you read about?’
‘The siege of Troy.’
‘What is a siege and what is Troy?’
Whereat
He piled up chairs and tables for a town,
Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat
—Helen, enticed away from home (he said)
By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close
Under the footstool, being cowardly,
But whom—since she was worth the pains, poor puss—
Towzer and Tray,—our dogs, the Atreidai,—sought
By taking Troy to get possession of
—Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk,
(My pony in the stable)—forth would prance
And put to flight Hector—our page boy’s self.
Adds Browning,
This taught me who was who and what was what:
So far I rightly understood the case
At five years old:
And when, after two or three years, the game of Troy’s siege had become familiar,
My Father came upon our make-believe.
‘How would you like to read yourself the tale
Properly told, of which I gave you first
Merely such notion as a boy could bear?’
whereupon, at about the age of eight, Robert the Third opened Pope’s translation of The Iliad and
So I ran through Pope,
Enjoyed the tale, what history so true?
Attacked my Primer, duly drudged,
Grew fitter thus for what was promised next—
The very thing itself, the actual words,
in Greek by the age of twelve. Thereafter, for a lifetime, there was no end to Homer and Greek and the worm casts of scholarship, the dream-destroying detritus of peckers through dust and texts, winnowers of grain from chaff, who tumbled the towers of Ilium more surely to rock and sand than the hot force of vir et armis, desiccating the blood of heroes and giving the lie at Hell’s Gate to Hector’s love for his wife.
‘Development’ raises questions as to whether Robert the Second was to blame for encouraging his son’s learning through play and—strictly speaking—falsehood rather than, in Gradgrind fashion, sticking strictly to the facts:
That is—he might have put into my hand
The ‘Ethics’? In translation, if you please,
Exact, no pretty lying that improves
To suit the modern taste: no more—no less—
The ‘Ethics’.
In no mistrustful mind of dry-as-dust nonagenarian scholarship, unburdened by the Ethics, bubbling with guiltless, childlike nine-year-old innocence of any distinction between accredited reality and mythological falsehood, between truth-to-fact and truth-to-fiction, Robert was sent to school.
Browning’s biographers can become thoroughly intoxicated in the well-stocked cellar of fine vintage learning that their subject laid down from his earliest years and drew upon in draughts for the rest of his working life as a poet. He read everything and ‘could forget nothing’—except, as he claimed later, ‘names and the date of the Battle of Waterloo’. The boy’s virtual self-education at home rather than his formal schooling informed a lifetime’s poetry and play-writing. School was the least of it—a pretty perfunctory performance lasting only some five or six years. Robert boarded, from Mondays to Fridays, with the Misses Ready, who with their brother, the Revd Thomas Ready, kept an elementary school for boys at number 77 Queen’s Road, Peckham.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was reputedly the best school in the neighbourhood, highly regarded both in respect of pedagogy and piety. Mr Ready instructed the older boys while the younger boys, up to the age of ten, were physically and spiritually improved by the two Ready sisters, who sang the hymns of Isaac Watts as they oiled and brushed out the hair and brushed up the moral fibre of their charges. Robert attended the Ready school until he was fourteen.
His distress at leaving his mother was more than he thought he could bear. And what was it for, this dolorous separation? He later remarked to Alfred Domett,
(#litres_trial_promo) whose two elder brothers had been at the Ready school, that ‘they taught him nothing there, and that he was “bullied by the big boys”’. John Domett recalled to his brother Alfred for his memoir, ‘young Browning, in a pinafore of brown holland such as small boys used to wear in those days, for he was always neat in his dress—and how they used to pit him against much older boys in a “chaffing” match to amuse themselves with the “little bright-eyed fellow’s” readiness and acuteness at retort and repartee’. Robert distinguished himself not only by a smart mouth but also by occasional sharp practice: when the master’s attention was diverted, he would close the Revd Ready’s lexicon, obliging him to open it again to look for the word he’d been referring to. He also learned how to suck up to Mr Ready, composing verses that earned him some privileges and would have warmed the heart of the great Dr Arnold of Rugby. ‘Great bosh they were,’ Robert said, quoting two concluding lines:
We boys are privates in our Regiment’s ranks—
’Tis to our Captain that we all owe thanks!
and followed this piece of blatant toadying by reciting from memory to Alfred Domett, while they were walking by a greenhouse discernible behind the walls of the school playground, a disrespectful epigram he had also made:
Within these walls and near that house of glass,
Did I, three (?) years of hapless childhood pass—
D—d undiluted misery it was!
He got his revenge, though, by taking off the Misses Ready in full Watts voice, ‘illustrating with voice and gesture’ the ferocious emphasis with which the brush would sweep down in the accentuated syllables of the following lines:
‘Lord, ’tis a pleasant thing to stand
In gardens planted by Thy hand
…
Fools never raise their thoughts so high
Like brutes they live, like BRUTES they die.’
Mrs Orr, uncorseting a little in citing this anecdote, obligingly admits that Robert ‘even compelled his mother to laugh at it, though it was sorely against her nature to lend herself to any burlesquing of piously intended things’. She quickly snaps back, though, Mrs Orr, remarking that Robert’s satirical swipe—even if it demonstrated some falling away from ‘the intense piety of his earlier childhood’—evidenced merely a momentary triumph of his sense of humour over religious instincts that did not need strengthening. His humour took a sharper, drier tone when, in 1833, some years after leaving the school, he heard of a serious-minded sermon delivered by the Revd Thomas Ready and commented:
A heavy sermon—sure the error’s great
For not a word Tom utters has its weight.
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The quality of the education at the Ready school was probably perfectly adequate for its times and most of its pupils. If it threatened to stultify the brilliance of Robert Browning, and if his contempt for it has condemned it in the estimation of posterity, the fault can hardly be heaped on the heads of the diligent Readys. Robert himself, quickly taking his own measure of the school in contrast to the pleasure of his father’s exciting, fantastic excursions into the education of his son, seems not to have bothered to make close friends with any of his slower-witted contemporaries, though he did dragoon some of his classmates into acting difficult plays, mostly way above their heads, some of which he wrote specially for them. He conspicuously failed to win a school prize (though, according to Mrs Orr, ‘these rewards were showered in such profusion that the only difficulty was to avoid them’) and took a somewhat de haut en bas attitude towards the school in general.
His satirical impulse was not entirely lacking in some grandiose, theatrical sense of his own superiority, to judge by Sarianna Browning’s later description to Mrs Orr of an occasion when her brother solemnly ‘ascended a platform in the presence of assembled parents and friends, and, in best jacket, white gloves, and carefully curled hair, with a circular bow to the company and the then prescribed waving of alternate arms, delivered a high-flown rhymed address of his own composition’. Such a performance was very likely not unknown at home.
It is hardly surprising that Robert was bullied at school, nor that he sometimes played up, nor that he learned virtually nothing that he later considered useful. If one of the purposes of such a school was to ‘knock the nonsense’ out of a boy, iron him out and apply his mind to the Ethics—as it were—there was a lot of knocking out to be done, since the boy Robert was immediately filled up again and creased with the learnedly fantastic ‘nonsense’ he got at home. ‘If we test the matter,’ wrote Chesterton, ‘by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, over-educated.’
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Robert’s scorn for the Ready school (despite acknowledging, on the later word of Sarianna in 1903, that ‘the boys were most liberally and kindly treated’), though perhaps fair enough in terms of his own needs, which the world and its books—far less an elementary school in Peckham and its primers—were not enough to satisfy, was conceived from what Chesterton acutely perceives as his elementary ignorance in one vital respect: Robert was ignorant of the degree to which the knowledge he already possessed—‘knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provençal Troubadors, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages’—was exceptional. He had no idea that he himself was exceptional, that the world in general neither knew nor cared about what he knew and, according to its own lights, got along without it very well. He never was wearied by knowledge and never was troubled by the effort taken to acquire it: learning was pleasure and increase, it never was a dispiriting chore or a burden to his brain. ‘His father’s house,’ commented Sarianna Browning to Mrs Orr, ‘was literally crammed with books; and it was in this way that Robert became very early familiar with subjects generally unknown to boys.’ ‘His sagacious destiny,’ remarked Chesterton, ‘while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.’
The books Robert read ‘omnivorously, though certainly not without guidance’ before and during his schooldays are known mostly on the authority of Mrs Orr, who gives a part-catalogue of them. In addition to Quarles’ Emblems in a seventeenth-century edition which Robert himself annotated, there may be counted ‘the first edition of Robinson Crusoe; the first edition of Milton’s works, bought for him by his father; a treatise on astrology published twenty years after the introduction of printing; the original pamphlet Killing no Murder (1559) [sic], which Carlyle borrowed for his Life of Cromwell; an equally early copy of Bernard de Mandeville’s Bees; very ancient Bibles … Among more modern publications, Walpole’s Letters were familiar to him in boyhood, as well as the Letters of Junius and all the works of Voltaire.’ Later, when Robert had sufficient mastery of ancient languages, Latin poets and Greek dramatists (including Smart’s translation of Horace, donated by his step-uncle Reuben) crowded his mind together with Elizabethan poets and playwrights, scraps from the cloudily romantic Ossian (by James Macpherson, another poet who had difficulty separating fact from fiction),
(#litres_trial_promo) Wordsworth and Coleridge (representatives of the English Romantics) and—to crown the glittering heap—the inimitable (though that stopped no one, including Robert Browning, from trying) poetry of Byron.
These works are not the end of it—hardly even the beginning. Wanley’s aforementioned Wonders of the Little World: or, A General History of Man in Six Books forever gripped Robert Browning’s imagination, its title-page advertising the contents as showing ‘by many thousands of examples … what MAN hath been from the First Ages of the World to these Times in respect of his Body, Senses, Passions, Affections, His Virtues and Perfections, his Vices and Defects.’ Nathaniel Wanley, Vicar of Trinity Parish in the City of Coventry published his Wonders in 1678, in an age when reports of wonder-working strained credulity less than they might now. The book furnished Robert’s poetry with morbid material for the rest of his life. He came across Wanley’s Little World of Wonders pretty much as Robert Louis Stevenson came across Pollock’s toy theatre and characters, ‘penny plain and tuppence coloured’.
The Emblems of Francis Quarles, first published in 1635, was relatively wholesome by comparison, though as a work of intense piety and severely high moral tone, it naturally directed the attention of readers (‘dunghill worldlings’) to the dreadful consequences of any lapse from the exemplary conduct of early and medieval Christian saints. The text was decorated with little woodcuts of devils with pitchforks, the Devil himself driving the chariot of the world and attending idle pursuits such as a game of bowls. Mythology and folklore were mixed with biblical allusions, the whole rich in an extensive, imaginative vocabulary. We have more qualms today about exposing young minds to the grim, the ghastly, the grotesque and the gothic, even the fairy tales of Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and the brothers Grimm in the unexpurgated version, though children will generally seek out and sup on horrors for themselves. Robert Browning’s early exposure to morbid literature and its fine, matter-of-fact and matter-of-fiction examples of casual and institutionalized cruelties, injustices, and fantastical phenomena was balanced by early immersion in more authoritative works, among them—notably—the fifty volumes of the Biographie Universelle, published in 1822, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, The Art of Painting in All its Branches by Gérard de Lairesse, and Principles of Harmony by John Relfe.
Mrs Browning contributed a worthy work of 1677 by Elisha Coles, A Practical Discourse of Effectual Calling and of Perseverance (the only book in the house, according to Betty Miller, to bear her signature)
(#litres_trial_promo) and Cruden’s Concordance to the Holy Scriptures. Mrs Miller comments that these two works of religious dedication testify not only to Mrs Browning’s ingrained piety but point up ‘something of the divided atmosphere in which Robert Browning was brought up. On the one hand he was given the freedom of a liberal and erudite library; on the other, he found himself, like Hazlitt, who counted it a misfortune, “bred up among dissenters who look with too jaundiced an eye at others, and set too high a value on their own particular pretensions. From being proscribed themselves, they learn to proscribe others; and come in the end to reduce all integrity of principle and soundness of opinion within the pale of their own little communion”.’
This may be generally true, and not only of Dissenters; but it is too harsh when applied to the Brownings in particular. In this sense, as characterized by Hazlitt, it is difficult to believe that Robert the Second adhered quite as limpet-like as his wife to the rock of Nonconformism or that her son Robert’s self-confessed passionate attachment in childhood to religion would not wane in the light of opinions other than those sincerely expressed by Congregationalists and other Nonconformists who were drilled into dutiful observance and stilled into attention by the ‘stiffening and starching’ style of the Revd George Clayton and the hectoring manner of Joseph Irons, minister of the Grove Chapel, Camberwell. Alfred Domett was reminded, in conversation with Dr Irons (‘the clever but apparently bigoted High Churchman’), ‘how we used to go sometimes up Camberwell Grove of a Sunday evening, to try how far off we could hear his father (Mr Irons, an Independent Minister or Ranter) bawling out his sermon, well enough to distinguish the words; and how on one occasion, taking a friend with him, they stood outside at a little distance and clearly heard, “I am sorry to say it, beloved brethren, but it is an undoubted fact that Roman Catholicism and midnight assassin are synonymous terms!”.’
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The religion of the Brownings, the Congregationalism of the nineteenth century, was a moderate Calvinism, shading later to liberal Evangelicalism, that derived from the first Independents of the Elizabethan age. These spring-pure Puritans, persecuted in England, disclaimed any duty to the hierarchy of the Church over their duty to God and conscience. They sailed, some of them, into exile to found pilgrim colonies in New England, and others later came to power in the Cromwellian Commonwealth. The long history of Protestant dissent had been vividly, violently marked by persecution, fanaticism, exile, torture, death, and the blood of their martyrs persisted as a lively tang in the nostrils of zealous Nonconformists.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, dissenters from the established Church of England still suffered some remnants of political and social disability—legal penalties for attending their chapels were not abolished until 1812; they were subject to political disenfranchisement until 1832 and—fatefully for Robert Browning as the son of a Dissenter and not himself a communicant of the Anglican church—the ancient universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, until 1854 were open only to members of the Established Church of England. These were serious matters that inclined Nonconformists, most of whom belonged—in East Anglia, the South Midlands, the West country and South Wales—to the respectable working classes, to support the Liberal Party led later in the century by William Gladstone.
Nevertheless, there was a difference in practice between the proscriptive Puritanism bawled from the pulpit and the less rigid, more charitable observance of its dogma in the busy social life and generous-minded charitable organization of the Congregationalists who were as strong in the Lord as they were in the practical virtues of education, evangelism, care of the sick, fundraising bazaars, music, and self-improvement. Robert Browning was born in a period between the early, bleak, and joyless fervour of the seventeenth-century Puritans and the moral hypocrisy of the late Victorians, whose conformity to social conventions characterized virtually every deviation from the norms of Evangelical fundamentalism as either morally reprehensible or criminal, and probably both. In 1812, Mrs Grundy (who had been invented in 1800 by the playwright Thomas Morton as a character in Speed the Plough) was still a laughing-stock and had not then become the all-powerful, repressive deity of respectable late Victorian middle-class society. The domestic tone of the Browning household was nicely moderated between the mother’s religious principles and the father’s cultural enlightenment. In any case, there is no liberty like an enquiring mind that recognizes no limits, and the young Browning’s mind was made aware of no obstacles, beyond the blockheads of school who temporarily impeded his progress, to the accumulation of knowledge.
The violent, at least turbulent, and colourful life of Browning’s mind was tempered—though, more likely, all the more stimulated—by vigorous physical activity: he learned to ride and was taught dancing, boxing, and fencing,
(#litres_trial_promo) and he walked about the surrounding countryside. It was two miles, a ‘green half-hour’s walk over the fields’
(#litres_trial_promo) and stiles, past hedges and picturesque cottages, from Camberwell to Dulwich where, in 1814, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, attached to Dulwich College, had been opened. In that year, the two-year-old Robert was making his first picture of ‘a certain cottage and rocks in lead pencil and black currant juice—paint being rank poison, as they said when I sucked my brushes’.
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London, as Griffin and Minchin take pains to describe, was by no means well furnished with public art galleries. Neither the National Gallery nor Trafalgar Square then existed. Dulwich Picture Gallery, designed by Sir John Soane, had been specially commissioned for the exhibition of some 350 European paintings—Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, and English. Children under the age of fourteen were, according to regulations, denied entry, but somehow young Robert Browning was allowed to enter with his father, who, said Dante Gabriel Rossetti later in Paris, ‘had a real genius for drawing—but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors’. This was not quite fair: Mr Browning also had a distinct relish for Hogarth grotesques. But it was true that, according to his son, Mr Browning would ‘turn from the Sistine altarpiece’ in favour of the Dutch artists Brouwer, Ostade, and the Teniers (father and son), who were amply represented at Dulwich.
The Dutch School did not detain the interest of young Robert, whose love of Dulwich was suffused, as he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett on 3 March 1846, with ‘those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music lesson group, all the Poussins with the “Armida” and “Jupiter’s nursing”—and—no end to “ands”—I have sate before one, some one of those pictures I had predetermined to see, a good hour and then gone away ….’ Enthusiasm for favourites did not mean an uncritical eye for failures. Familiarity bred contempt for works ‘execrable as sign-paintings even’. For a ‘whole collection, including “a divine painting by Murillo,” and Titian’s Daughter (hitherto supposed to be in the Louvre)’ he would ‘have cheerfully given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing’.
In his letter of 27 February 1846 to Elizabeth Barrett, Robert had asked the pertinent question, ‘Are there worse poets in their way than painters?’ There is a subtle difference in the ‘melancholy business’; a poet at least possesses resources capable of being adapted to other things: ‘the bad poet goes out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do afterwards—but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning even how to produce such monstrosities as these, and to what other good do his acquisitions go? This short minute of our life our one chance, an eternity on either side! and a man does not walk whistling and ruddy by the side of hawthorn hedges in spring, but shuts himself up and comes out after a dozen years with “Titian’s Daughter” and, there, gone is his life, let somebody else try!’
The point of this rushing reflection is only partly to do with art: it also makes a none-too-subtle reference to Robert Browning’s seizing the moment, ‘the short minute of our life, our one chance’, with his beloved Miss Barrett, as he finishes with the line:
I have tried—my trial is made too!
But this is in the future. The boy Robert had only just begun, on first acquaintance with the Dulwich pictures, to try his hand at poetry, good, bad, or indifferent, excepting some early extemporized lines of occasional verse for domestic or school consumption. The critic—tutored by the work of de Lairesse—was being formed, but the artist was still mostly whistling, ruddy by the hawthorn hedges, on the way to Dulwich. It was difficult to know which way to turn, which vocation to pursue: painting and drawing, for which young Robert had a facility, inspired by his father and the works of de Lairesse; music, which he dearly loved, inspired by his mother, Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression, and two distinguished tutors—Relfe, who taught theory, and Abel, who was proficient in technique; poetry, for which he not only had an aptitude but also a taste fuelled in several languages (Greek, Latin, French, some Spanish, some Italian, German later, even a smattering of Hebrew in addition to English) by the great exemplars—Horace, Homer, Pope, Byron—of the art of happy expression.
In the event, at the age of twelve, in the very year, 1824, of Byron’s death at Missolonghi, Robert the Third produced a collection of short poems entitled Incondita. The title, comments Mrs Orr, ‘conveyed a certain idea of deprecation’; Griffin and Minchin suggest an ‘allusion to the fact that “in the beginning” even the earth itself was “without form”’. The title may have been modest, but the principal stylistic influence—Byronic—was not, and at least one of the poems, ‘The Dance of Death’, was, on the authority of Mrs Orr, who was told of it, ‘a direct imitation of Coleridge’s “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter”’ (1798). A letter of 11 March 1843 from Robert the Second to a Mr Thomas Powell, quoted by Mrs Orr, testified that his son had been composing verses since ‘quite a child’ and referred to a great quantity of ‘juvenile performances’, some of which ‘extemporaneous productions’ Robert the Second enclosed.
The sample sheet of verses, taken at the time and for some while after at face value, was subsequently identified to Mrs Orr by Sarianna Browning as ‘her father’s own impromptu epigrams’. The attempt to pass off the father’s effusions as the work of the son is baffling, and Mrs Orr kindly directs us to suppose that ‘The substitution may from the first have been accidental.’ The letter is, however, valuable for its affirmation that Robert the Third was remarkably precocious in poetry and the credible information—borne out by his habitual practice in later life—that he deliberately destroyed all instances of his first efforts ‘that ever came in his way’.
Sarianna being too young at the time—no more than ten years old—never saw the poetry of Incondita, but it impressed Mr and Mrs Browning to the extent that they tried, unsuccessfully, to get the manuscript published. Disappointment in this enterprise may have been one reason that led Robert to destroy the manuscript, but it had already got beyond him into the world: Mrs Browning had shown the poems to an acquaintance, Miss Eliza Flower, who had copied them for the attention of a friend, the Revd William Johnson Fox, ‘the well-known Unitarian minister’. Robert, with an adult eye for reputation, retrieved this copy after the death of Mr Fox and, additionally, a fragment of verse contained in a letter from Miss Sarah Flower. He destroyed both.
Mrs Orr, though regretting the loss of ‘these first fruits of Mr Browning’s genius’, supposes that ‘there can have been little in them to prefigure its later forms. Their faults seem to have lain in the direction of too great splendour of language and too little wealth of thought’, an echo of Mr Fox’s opinion. Fox admitted later to Robert that ‘he had feared these tendencies as his future snare’. Two poems, said to have survived from Incondita’s brief and limited exposure, are ‘The First-Born of Egypt’, in blank verse, and ‘The Dance of Death’, in tetrameters. They are certainly gorgeous, richly allusive, spare no wrenching emotion or sensational effect, and ascend to dramatic climax. A distinct gust from the graveyard scents the relentless progress of grisly calamities that would give suffering Job more than usual pause for thought.
Nevertheless, the Byronic, perhaps less so the Coleridgean, influences were not merely juvenile infatuations. In a letter of 22 August 1846 to Miss Barrett, Robert commented that ‘I always maintained my first feeling for Byron in many respects … the interest in places he had visited, in relics of him. I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure—while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were condensed into the little China bottle yonder, after the Rosicrucian fashion … they seem to “have their reward” and want nobody’s love or faith.’ (The reference to Finchley as a place of ultimate pilgrimage is attributable to the fact that two days previously Miss Barrett had driven out as far as that fascinating faubourg.)
The death of Byron was as climactic in its effect as either of the surviving poems of Incondita, which take the fold of death as their theme. It may have been the stimulus that prompted the twelve-year-old Browning’s manuscript. The fallout was great on other poets, other idealists, who subsided into plain prose and practical politics—it was the death, too, at least in England, of any idea of romantic revolution. Alfred Tennyson, we are told, memorialized the event by carving the words ‘Byron is dead’ on a rock near Somersby. He was fifteen. Thomas Carlyle, approaching thirty, felt as though he had lost a brother. It is not too much to say that the death of Byron had as profound an effect in England and Europe in 1824 as the death of President John F. Kennedy had for America and the world in 1963. It was like an eclipse of the sun that stills even bird song, or the silence after a thunderclap. There were few who were unaffected. ‘The news of his death came upon my heart like a mass of lead,’ wrote Carlyle to his wife Jane.
Equally tremendous was the year 1832: Goethe died, and so did Sir Walter Scott. Robert maintained a high regard for Scott the polymathic author, often quoting from him and occasionally reflecting Scott’s work in his own poetry. The death of Keats in 1821 had been quickly followed by that of Shelley in 1822. Wordsworth was to die in 1850, and Heinrich Heine in 1856. These losses amounted, in the case of poetry, to the death of European Romanticism. ‘Though it is by no means clear what Romanticism stood for,’ the historian Eric Hobsbawm points out in a chapter on ‘The Arts’ in The Age of Revolution, ‘it is quite evident what it was against: the middle.’ Isaiah Berlin, in The Roots of Romanticism, supposes that, had one ‘spoken in England to someone who had been influenced by, say, Coleridge, or above all by Byron’, one would have found that ‘the values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying’. This attitude, says Berlin, was relatively new. ‘What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.’
The middle, then, famously distrustful of extremes, did not apparently stand much chance, squeezed between the reactionary, traditional elements of the old order and the revolutionary, idealistic instincts of the avant-garde. Yet society has an irresistible tendency to compromise, to assimilate and settle into social stability—albeit radically altered, both right and left—when shaken by destructive events and stirred by disturbing philosophies. Nowhere is this more marked than in the mobile middle class, the eternally buoyant bourgeoisie, which confidently came into its own following the French and Industrial Revolutions.
This middle class was perceived by pre-Revolutionary enthusiasts as equipped with reason, sentiment, natural feeling, and purpose in contrast to the sterility, decrepitude, reactionary instincts, and corrupt clericalism of pre-Revolutionary society. The artificiality of the Court was in theory to be replaced by the spontaneity of the people—whereupon, of course, by the inevitable evolutionary law of society, the new society in practice naturally stiffened into a bureaucratic, bourgeois respectability, in its own time and triumphant style stifling fine romantic feeling with its own brand of philistinism. Revolutions, like romantic poets, die young. Byron astutely recognized that an early death would save him from a respectable old age.
G. K. Chesterton points to what is now known as the ‘percolation theory’ or the ‘trickle down effect’ that supposedly occurs when society is in some way shaken out from top to bottom or from bottom to top. Robert Browning, says Chesterton, was ‘born in the afterglow of the great Revolution’—the French Revolution of 1789, that is—the point of this observation being that the Jacobin dream of emancipation had begun ‘in the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of society’. By the time of Robert’s boyhood, ‘a very subtle and profound change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the Brownings … A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the middle classes which had nothing at all in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth … On all sides there was the first beginning of the aesthetic stir in the middle classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired office-boys.’
With this famous portmanteau phrase, Chesterton sweeps together such marvellous boys as John Ruskin ‘solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts’, Charles Dickens toiling in a blacking factory, Thomas Carlyle ‘lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire’, and John Keats, who ‘had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon’. Add to these Robert Browning, the son of a Bank of England clerk in Camberwell. These men, born to fame but not to wealth, were the inheritors of a new world that gave them a liberty that, in Robert Browning’s case, ‘exalted poetry above all earthly things’ and which he served ‘with single-hearted intensity’. Browning stands, observed Chesterton, ‘among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else’.
The matter of poetry as Robert’s sole vocation was mostly decided by the revelation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the atheistical poet. The effect was tremendous. It was like coming across a hitherto unknown brother who had thought everything, experienced everything, accomplished everything that Robert Browning, fourteen years old, living in Camberwell, had as yet only dimly felt and begun to put, somewhat derivatively of admired models, into words. Robert had read the cynical, atheistical Voltaire without obvious moral corruption; he had read of the world’s virtues and vices, irregularities and injustices, in the words of Wanley, Shakespeare, Milton, and in other works of dramatic historical fiction, without becoming contemptuous of virtue; he had read the sensational Byron without becoming mad or bad; he had read the waspish Horace Walpole without becoming overwhelmingly mannered. But the cumulative effect was bound, in some degree, to be unsettling. Shelley—who had, like young Robert, read Voltaire and encyclopedias, and who had consorted with Byron—ratcheted up the adolescent tension one notch too far.
Shelley’s musical verse hit every note. With exquisite Shelleyan technique, all the airs that had been vapouring in Robert’s head were given compositional form—delicate, forceful; and as the concert performance proceeded, Shelley’s genius, his creative spirit, played out the great work of the ideal world in which infamy was erased, God rebelled against Satan, and in which—as Chesterton remarks—‘every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy’. All things in heaven and on earth proclaimed the triumph of liberty. ‘O World, O Life, O Time,’ Robert in later life apostrophized with deliberate irony on the flyleaf of Shelley’s Miscellaneous Poems given to him by his cousin Jim Silverthorne, a book he vigorously annotated in his first enthusiasm and then thought better of in his maturity when he tried, on 2 June 1878, to erase ‘the foolish markings and still more foolish scribblings’ that ‘show the impression made on a boy by this first specimen of Shelley’s poetry’. What he could not vehemently blot out or rub at or scratch away or scribble over, he hacked at with a knife or finally—all these obliterating resources being inadequate—cut out with scissors. It seems an excessive reaction, some fifty years later, but the first enthusiasm had evidently come to seem itself embarrassingly excessive. Not only did Robert not wish to remember it, he was determined to efface it from memory—his own or posterity’s—absolutely, though without actually, as was his usual resort, burning the book to ashes. He could burn his own poetry, perhaps, but not another’s.
‘Between the year 1826, when Browning became acquainted with the work of Shelley, and 1832, when Pauline was written,’ says Betty Miller in Robert Browning: A Portrait, ‘there took place in the life of the poet a crisis so radical that everything that followed upon it, including his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett, was qualified in one way or another by the effects of that initial experience.’ This sums up the biographical consensus that began with Mrs Orr’s pronouncement that Robert held Shelley greatest in the poetic art because ‘in his case, beyond all others, he believed its exercise to have been prompted by the truest spiritual inspiration’.
The souls of Keats and Shelley were identified in Robert’s mind with two nightingales which sang harmoniously together on a night in May—perhaps his birthday, the 7th of May in 1826—one in a laburnum (‘heavy with its weight of gold’, as William Sharp says Browning told a friend) in the Brownings’ garden, the other in a large copper beech on adjoining ground. ‘Their utterance,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was, to such a spirit as his, the last, as in a certain sense the first, word of what poetry can say.’ The image was no doubt prompted in Robert’s mind by Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. At any rate, whether or not these birds were the transmigrated souls of Keats and Shelley, as Robert reverently convinced himself, they ‘had settled in a Camberwell garden’, says Chesterton less reverently, ‘in order to sing to the only young gentleman who really adored and understood them’.
The major impact on the tender sensibilities of young Robert Browning was made by Shelley’s Queen Mab, which later achieved a reputation, when issued in a new edition by the publisher Edward Moxon, for being that most horrid—indeed, criminal—thing, a blasphemous libel. ‘The Shelley whom Browning first loved,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was the Shelley of Queen Mab, the Shelley who would have remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became a professing atheist and, for two years, a practising vegetarian. He returned to his natural diet when he found his eyesight becoming weak. The atheism cured itself; we do not exactly know when or how.’ In a letter to Elizabeth Barrett on 13 September 1845, Robert wrote of having lived for two years on bread and potatoes—a regime that, if strictly adhered to, would have tested the faith and asceticism even of the Desert Fathers.
Queen Mab is a lecture in poetic form to Ianthe, a disembodied spirit, on the sorry state of the temporal universe. Mab is a bluestocking fairy queen who takes intense issue with the various shortcomings of contemporary politics, conventional religion, and cankerous commerce, all of which are judged to be more or less hopelessly misguided when not actually corrupt. Queen Mab’s denunciation convinces less by rational argument than by the irresistible force of her—Shelley’s—convictions. She barely stops for breath (only now and then pauses for footnotes), fired by ideas and ideals that combine termagant intensity with tender sentiment, fiercely heretical in her inability to accept a creating Deity but spiritually softer in her recognition that there could be ‘a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe’ which might or might not, according to religious belief, be identified with the supreme maker, sometimes called God.
In an aside, dealing with the matter in a footnote, Shelley argued abstinence from meat as a means whereby man might at a stroke eliminate the brutal pleasures of the chase and restore an agricultural paradise, improve himself physically and morally, and probably live forever in health and virtue. The spiritual and the corporeal were virtually synonymous. Shelley recommended himself and the pure system of his ideas to youth whose moral enthusiasm for truth and virtue was yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. Queen Mab was pouring out a song which, if not of innocence, at least was addressing innocents. The force of Shelley’s expression rather more than the systematic reason of his argument is still powerfully appealing to idealists, and most of his vehement agitprop (as it might be called today) speaks to succeeding generations even unto our own times—so much so that the utterances of Queen Mab sound not unlike the conventional wisdom of modern environmentalists, new-agers, and bourgeois bohemians. It is difficult for us now to appreciate the thrilling horror with which Shelley’s words were received by his unnerved contemporaries who read not only blasphemy—bad enough—but revolution between, as much as upon, every irreverent line.
Vegetarianism worried Robert’s mother; atheism worried the Revd George Clayton. Robert stuck to his beliefs for a while, but forgave himself his youthful excesses, characterizing them later in his life as ‘Crude convictions of boyhood, conveyed in imperfect and unapt forms of speech,—for such things all boys have been pardoned. They are growing pains, accompanied by temporary distortion of soul also.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He regretted the anxiety caused to his mother, whose strong-minded inclination that her son should not compromise his physical health was resisted by Robert’s insistence that meat-eating was a symptom of spiritual disease and argued, presumably, ‘what should it profit a man if he feed his body but starve his soul’. Besides, the new diet was also a symptom of liberty, a badge of freedom, a symbol of release from dependence.
Atheism served much the same purpose. That his speculative beliefs were sincerely held and admitted of no counter-persuasion from those who expressed concern for his physical and spiritual welfare was perhaps secondary to their practical effect. Robert Browning had got out into the world, and he would deal with it on his own terms. He might still be living within the narrow propriety of his parents’ house, which increasingly rubbed at his heels and elbows, but he was his own man. Sarianna, his sympathetic sister, admitted to Mrs Orr that ‘The fact was, poor boy, he had outgrown his social surroundings. They were absolutely good, but they were narrow; it could not be otherwise; he chafed under them.’
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Robert had left the Ready school at the age of fourteen, and for two years thereafter he was educated privately at home, in the mornings by a tutor competent in the general syllabus; in the afternoons by a number of instructors in music, technical science, languages (French particularly), singing, dancing, exercise (riding, boxing, fencing), and probably art.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the evenings, if his father did not entertainingly contribute to the educational process, Robert worked at his own pleasure, voraciously reading, assiduously writing, sometimes composing music. None of his musical compositions have survived the incinerating fire he so loved to feed. Robert ‘wrote music for songs which he himself sang’, states Mrs Orr, citing three: Donne’s ‘Go, and catch a falling star’, Hood’s ‘I will not have the mad Clytie’, and ‘The mountain sheep are sweeter’ by Peacock. These settings were characterized to Mrs Orr, by those who knew of them, as ‘very spirited’.
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Robert also acquired a social life, associating with three Silverthorne cousins—James, John and George, the sons of Christiana Wiedemann, Sarah Anna Browning’s sister, who had married Silverthorne, a prosperous local brewer. All three were musically gifted and sometimes described as ‘wild youths’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Silverthornes lived in Portland Place, Peckham. James came to be Robert’s particular friend, and his name is written in the register of Marylebone Church as one of the two witnesses at the wedding in 1846 of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. James, who succeeded to the family brewery, died in 1852. To mark his passing, Robert wrote the poem ‘May and Death’ which lovingly commemorates the friendship between himself and James (called Charles in the poem).
In addition to association with cousins, Robert acquired improving acquaintance with, notably, Alfred Domett and Joseph Arnould (later to become Sir Joseph Arnould of the High Court bench of Bombay, but meanwhile something of a youthful radical and an admirer of Carlyle). Both were clever, ambitious young men of his own age, sons of established Camberwell families. He had, too, independent adventures. Stories are told—and credited by some—of his ramblings, following the tracks of gypsy caravans far across country. William Sharp, in his biography of Browning (1897), seems to think that Robert kept company with ‘any tramps, gypsies or other wayfarers’, though Mrs Orr in her more authoritative (less lyrical and very much less airily romantic) biography, published in 1891, quashes any suggestion that he caught them up or was detained in parleyings with them: ‘I do not know how the idea can have arisen that he willingly sought his experience in the society of “gipsies and tramps”.’
Both Sharp and Mrs Orr knew Robert Browning personally, and it must be admitted that the latter can lay claim to longer, more intimate and more extensive acquaintance with the poet. There is no doubting it from the tone of her book that Mrs Orr strives for a scrupulous fidelity to the facts—some of which, if deplorable, are omitted—but some caution is required when dealing with her inclination to polish the poet to his brightest lustre and to put the best and brightest face on failure. She can sometimes, in her emphases and suppressions, be inspired to what we now recognize as spin. However, Sharp invites comparison with Browning’s poem ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ and a song which Robert heard on a Guy Fawkes night, 5 November, with the refrain, ‘Following the Queen of the Gipsies oh!’ that rang in his head until it found appropriate poetic expression years later. Chesterton sufficiently credits or relishes Sharp’s literary association as to repeat it in his own biography. It seems likely that, whatever romantic fascination Robert may have had with the itinerant life of gypsies, they represented his then feelings of freedom as a desirable thing rather than as an actuality in his life or as an alternative to it. He had neither any incentive to run away with the ‘raggle-taggle gypsies-o!’, nor any inclination to inquire too closely into the reality of lives less privileged, in conventional terms, than his own.
There is talk, too, of Robert’s taste for country fairs. This is elaborated by Griffin and Minchin, who charmingly describe how, ‘For three days each summer the Walworth Road from Camberwell Gate to the village green—a goodly mile—was aglow after sunset with candles beneath coloured shades on the roadside stalls: on the Green itself, besides the inevitable boats and swings and merry-go-rounds, there was the canvas-covered avenue with its gingerbread booths, there was music and dancing, and best of all, there was the ever-popular Richardson’s Theatre—appreciated, it is said, by the poet in his younger days. Peckham also had its fair, which was held just opposite Mr Ready’s school; and Greenwich, noisiest and most boisterous of fairs, was close at hand.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Again, with an implied note of reproof, Mrs Orr dampens any speculative fervour about Robert’s bohemian instincts by insisting that ‘a few hours spent at a fair would at all times have exhausted his capacity for enduring it. In the most undisciplined acts of his early youth, were always present curious delicacies and reserves.’
She is keen to return Robert to his books and his work, away from any suggestion of irreverent or—spare the mark—inappropriate interests and activities: ‘There was always latent in him the real goodness of heart which would not allow him to trifle consciously with other lives.’ Fifine might go to the fair, but Robert should stay home and satisfy himself with the habit of work as his safeguard and keep tight control of an imagination that, rather than mastering him, would serve him. This seems a little censorious, not to say apprehensive that Robert might have had yearnings that, if not severely restrained, would have led him into even more ‘undisciplined acts’. We must close our eyes in holy dread at the very thought and be thankful that nothing unworthy soiled the blameless page he worked upon, far less sufficiently overcame his ‘curious delicacies and reserves’ to distract him from it.
Better to think of Robert no longer incited by his early adherence to Byron—that libertine and sceptic who roamed at large as much in the world as in his meditations—but at sundown, on the brow of the Camberwell hill (now known as Camberwell Grove), among the spreading elms, suffused with the spiritual light of Shelley and looking down, deliriously, on the darkling mass of London sprawled at his feet, lit by the new gas lamps. For the time being, Robert remained safely distant from the snares and entanglements of the beautiful but seductive city: so many lives to refrain from toying with, so much noisy, messy—maybe vicious—life to assault curious delicacies and reserves should he dare to descend to put them to the test. Byronism, as Chesterton remarks, ‘was not so much a pessimism about civilized things as an optimism about savage things’. But now Robert was Byronic only in the dandyism of his dress. It was Shelley who suited his soul. And so, turning, Robert would go home to bed, sleeping in a bedroom that adjoined his mother’s, the door always open between them, and to give her a kiss—every night, even in the worst of their disputes—before retiring. He never willingly spent a night away from home.
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Robert’s fascination with and attachment to the natural as contrasted with the artificial world was innate. It took inspiration from his mother’s intense sympathy with flora and fauna, if we are to credit W. J. Stillman, in his Autobiography of a Journalist (quoted by Griffin and Minchin), who states that Mrs Browning had that ‘extraordinary power over animals of which we hear sometimes, but of which I have never known a case so perfect as hers. She would lure the butterflies in the garden to her, and domestic animals obeyed her as if they reasoned.’ The Browning household at times approximated to a menagerie: Griffin and Minchin speak respectfully of Browning’s learning early to ride his pony, playing with dogs, keeping pets and birds including a monkey, a magpie, and—improbably—an eagle. The collection of toads, frogs, efts, and other ‘portable creatures’ that is said to have filled his pockets gives some additional substance to the story already quoted that Mrs Browning induced Robert to take medicine by finding a toad for him in the garden. He could whistle up a lizard in Italy, chuck a toad under its chin in Hatcham, and later kept a pet owl in London as well as geese that would follow him around and submit to being embraced by the middle-aged poet.
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William Sharp describes Browning’s occasional long walks into the country: ‘One particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge, or deep in meadow-grasses, or under a tree … and there give himself up so absolutely to the life of the moment that even the shy birds would alight close by, and sometimes venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings for a brief space on his recumbent body.’ Sharp, in this pastoral mode, quotes Browning himself as having said that ‘his faculty of observation at that time would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iroquois’.
(#litres_trial_promo) His faculty of absorption and repose, in this imagery, would have done credit to a St Francis. His love for his mother’s flowers—particularly the roses and lilies that later he would gather to send to Elizabeth Barrett—was perhaps one contributory factor in his brief vegetarianism.
In a letter of 24 July 1838 to Miss Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, he makes a significant confession: ‘I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves—some leaves—that I every now and then,—in an impatience at being able to possess myself of them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent—bite them to bits.’ This devouring quality of Browning’s desire for sensation, to the extent of attempting to consume it literally in the form of vegetable matter, is remarkable. It is as though Browning’s passion to possess the world could only be achieved by eating it, by incorporating it within himself. In Pauline, he recognized some of this when he identified
a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all.
and he declared that,
I have lived all life
When it is most alive.
How apposite, then, to come upon the charmingly-named Flower sisters, Eliza and Sarah. It was to Eliza that Mrs Browning had confided the text of Incondita and it was Eliza, so taken with it, who had copied it for Mr William Johnson Fox, a friend of her father, Benjamin Flower, ‘known’, says Mrs Orr, ‘as editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer’. Robert, encouraged by her enthusiasm for his poems, began writing to Eliza Flower at the age of twelve or thirteen.
(#litres_trial_promo) She was nine years his senior. These letters, which she kept for her lifetime, were eventually and effortfully retrieved and destroyed—all but a few scraps—by Robert. It seems likely, even without the confirmation of the correspondence, that Eliza was his first, immature love, though the boyish, romantic attachment died out ‘for want of root’. Sentimental love, if that was what it amounted to, subsided into a lasting respect and affection for ‘a very remarkable person’ who, with her sister, was responsible for a number of popular hymns such as ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’, written by Sarah Flower Adams and set to music by Eliza. These were composed for Mr Fox’s chapel where Eliza ‘assumed the entire management of the choral part of the service’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Eliza, though Robert denied it, seems to have been the major identifiable inspiration for his second excursion into verse: the long confessional poem entitled Pauline.
Mrs Orr conventionally regrets that the headstrong Robert Browning was not sent to a public school where his energies might have been efficiently directed; but Griffin and Minchin take the more sensible view that a pre-Arnoldian public school education, if only and unrepresentatively to judge by the boy’s experience of the Ready school, would have been been ‘hardly encouraging … Nor were public schools in good odour.’ The reforms inspired by Dr Arnold of Rugby were a thing of the future.
Meantime, Robert’s father in 1825 had subscribed £100 to the foundation of the new London University, an investment that brought no dividends but procured one particular advantage: since Mr Browning was one of the original ‘proprietors’, he was entitled to a free education for a nominee. Robert, his son, could be admitted to London University as a student. In contrast to Oxford, Cambridge, and the other ancient universities, which required subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles as a necessary prerequisite to admission, London University was nonsectarian, the education was less costly than at other academic institutions, and it was possible to combine the university education with private home study.
Robert was earnestly recommended by his father, describing himself as ‘a parent anxious for the welfare of an only Son’ who deemed admission to the University ‘essential to his future happiness’. Furthermore, Mr Browning testified to Robert’s impeccable moral character (‘I never knew him from his earliest infancy, guilty of the slightest deviation from Truth’) and to his ‘unwearied application for the last 6 years, to the Greek, Latin & French languages’. Mrs Orr draws a discreet veil over the upshot, confining herself to the information that ‘In his eighteenth year he attended, for a term or two, a Greek class at the London University’—he registered for the opening session, 1829–30—and that ‘It was at about the time of his short attendance at University College that the choice of poetry as his future profession was formally made.’ The phrase ‘short attendance’ implies some length of time more than a week, which was the period Robert survived lodging away from home and his mother with a Mr Hughes in Bedford Square, and perhaps a little longer than the few months he endured the pedestrian German, Greek, and Latin classes for which he registered before quitting the college entirely. He was seventeen years old, an age at which, as Mrs Orr frankly acknowledges, he was naturally ‘not only more restless, but less amiable than at any other’.
‘The always impatient temper assumed a quality of aggressiveness,’ she reports. ‘He behaved as a youth will who knows himself to be clever, and believes that he is not appreciated, because the crude or paradoxical forms which his cleverness assumes do not recommend it to his elders’ minds.’ This is judiciously put. A little less indulgent is the bald admission that Robert ‘set the judgements of those about him at defiance, and gratuitously proclaimed himself everything that he was, and some things that he was not.’ School and college simply wearied him: the pedantic routine was stifling. It was not that he lacked aptitude for study, more that he lacked inclination to confine it to the well-worn track. Which is not to say Robert was unpopular: William Sharp quotes a letter from The Times of 14 December 1889, in which a friend loyally testified that ‘I attended with him the Greek class of Professor Long, and I well remember the esteem and regard in which he was held by his fellow-students.’
Poetry was the thing—a foregone conclusion, at least according to Robert. Some attempts seem to have been made to promote the professions of barrister (chosen by his friends Domett and Arnould), clergyman (though Robert had given up regular church attendance), banker (employment in the Bank of England and Rothschild’s bank being the family business), even desperately—it is said—painter or actor. For a short while, when he was sixteen years old, Robert attended medical lectures given by the celebrated physician Dr Blundell at Guy’s Hospital. These are said to have aroused in him ‘considerable interest in the sciences connected with medicine’,
(#litres_trial_promo) but perhaps more from a fascination with the morbid, since ‘no knowledge of either disease or its treatment ever seems to have penetrated into his life’. At any rate, there seems to have been no positive belief that Robert might be suited to the medical profession. The tentative suggestions of anxious parents—the adamantine refusal of a strong-willed son—sulks and silences: it is a familiar-enough scenario, distressing to Mrs Browning, worrying to Mr Browning, a matter of some well-concealed anxiety, no doubt, to Robert Browning himself, who made a conspicuous effort to prepare himself for the profession of poet by reading Johnson’s Dictionary from cover to cover.
Robert had become accustomed to the standards of early nineteenth-century suburban middle-class comfort, but he had been educated as a mid-to-late eighteenth-century gentleman, not only in the breadth of his acquired learning but equally in the departments of upper-class sporting activities such as riding, boxing, and fencing, the social graces of singing, dancing, music, and art, and the civilized values of a man of fine feeling in dress and deportment. The acquisition of these benefits was one thing—they required no financial outlay on his own part; to maintain them would be quite another. Refined tastes are generally expensive to indulge as a permanent style of life.
In his late teens and early twenties, Robert cut a noticeable figure: his appearance was dapper and dandified, verging in some respects on the Byronic, particularly in the manner of his hair, which he wore romantically long, falling over his shoulders and carefully curled. He was of middle height, neither tall nor short, slim, dark-haired, sallow-complexioned, brightly grey-eyed, charming in his urbane, self-confident manner. Robert presented himself to society as ‘full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what’s more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success.’ He was a model of punctilious politeness, good-looking, light-footed and—remarked Mrs ‘Tottie’ Bridell-Fox, daughter of William Johnson Fox, of his appearance in 1835 to 1836—‘just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid-gloves and such things: quite “the glass of fashion and the mould of form”.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He grew, when able to do so, crisp whiskers from cheekbone to chin.
In the absence of an assured annual unearned income, Robert made up his mind to a calculated economy in his private needs: writing to Elizabeth Barrett on 13 September 1845, he would later comment, ‘My whole scheme of life (with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down) was long ago calculated … So for my own future way in the world I have always refused to care’—though that was then, without any responsibility other than to his own material maintenance. The Brownings were not poor, but neither were they rich—they were generous not only in keeping Robert at home but equally in the confidence they displayed in allowing him to devote himself to writing poetry. They might, of course, have been merely marking time, hoping that something would turn up, catch Robert’s attention, fire his imagination and provide him with a good living. But on the best interpretation, his parents were large-minded and great-hearted in their confidence that this was the right thing to do for their son in particular and for the larger matter of literature in general. There was not much prospect of any financial return on their expenditure: it could hardly have been regarded as an investment except in the most optimistic view, poetry then, as now, being a paying proposition only in the most exceptional cases—Lord Byron being one in his own times; Sir Walter Scott, who also benefited from his activity as a novelist, being another.
But no doubt Mr Browning would have looked back on his own career and felt again the sigh of responsibility, of inevitability, with which he had given up his own artistic ambitions for routine employment as a banker. Robert ‘appealed to his father’, says Edmund Gosse, ‘whether it would not be better for him to see life in the best sense, and cultivate the powers of his mind, than to shackle himself in the very outset of his career by a laborious training foreign to that aim’. And, says Gosse, ‘so great was the confidence of the father in the genius of the son’ that Mr Browning acquiesced—though perhaps by no means as promptly as Robert Browning later convinced himself and Gosse to have been the case. But acquiesce he did. Whatever Mr Browning might have felt he owed his son, perhaps he felt he owed himself another chance, albeit at second-hand. It was an indulgence, no doubt, but Mr Browning was not a man to invite difficulties or disputes. It was also a matter of simple fact: Robert remained rooted at home.
William Sharp makes the point that the young Robert Browning is sometimes credited with ‘the singular courage to decline to be rich’, but that Browning himself ‘was the last man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision as “singular courage”’. He had, says Sharp, ‘nothing of this bourgeois spirit’. Money, for money’s sake, was not a consideration—as his letter of 13 September 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett later testified. He would prefer ‘a blouse and a blue shirt (such as I now write in) to all manner of dress and gentlemanly appointment’. He could, ‘if necessary, groom a horse not so badly, or at all events would rather do it all day long than succeed Mr Fitzroy Kelly in the Solicitor-Generalship’, though by 1845 that youthful insouciance was changing in the light of love and its prospective attendant domestic expenses and obligations. Nevertheless, for the time being, in 1830, he ‘need not very much concern himself beyond considering the lilies how they grow’. Or how the roses might blow in his mother’s garden.
In Robert Browning: A Portrait, Betty Miller reviews the Brownings’ financial situation, pointing remorselessly to the comparatively humble origins of Robert’s mother as the daughter of a ‘mariner in Dundee’ rather than aggrandizing her as the daughter of a more substantial ship owner, and playing down the status and salary of the Bank of England clerkship enjoyed by Robert’s father. She also instances some contemporary critics who perceived Robert’s lack of apparent professional middle-class occupation as disgraceful. The prevailing attitude of respect for what is now identified as the ‘Protestant work ethic’ was as incorrigible then as now: poverty was generally considered to be morally reprehensible and fecklessness was regarded as a moral failing. The ‘deserving poor’ (a fairly select minority of the hapless and the disadvantaged) received pretty rough charity, grudging at best and rarely without an attached weight of sanctimony.
An accredited gentleman with an adequate fortune might blamelessly lead a life of leisure and pleasure, but the Brownings pretended to no giddy gentility. They were of the middle class, and the men of the middle class contributed their work to the perceived profit (moral and pecuniary) of society and to their own interests (much the same). Faults in character evidenced by apparent idleness were probably vicious and not easily glossed over by any high-tone, high-flown talk of devotion to poetry or art as a substitute for masculine resolve or absolution from a moral and material responsibility to earn a decent living. There is in this a suggestion that a poet must be, if not effeminate, at least effete—in contrast to the virtuous character of the common man committed to his daily labour who takes his ‘true honourable place in society, etc. etc.’, as Robert himself remarked. He was not wholly indifferent to conventional social values and expectations.
His position as a family dependent, nevertheless, did not unduly worry Robert: he acknowledged his father’s generosity and airily supposed that, with a little effort, he might make ‘a few hundred pounds which would soon cover my simple expenses’; and furthermore he felt, too, ‘whenever I make up my mind to that, I can be rich enough and to spare—because,’ he wrote later to Elizabeth Barrett, ‘along with what you have thought genius in me, is certainly talent, what the world recognises as such; and I have tried it in various ways, just to be sure that I was a little magnanimous in never intending to use it.’ Robert could do it if he had to, but for the time being he didn’t see, or perhaps acknowledge, the necessity—he continued never to know ‘what it was to have to do a certain thing to-day and not to-morrow’, though that did not imply any inclination to do nothing. As Edmund Gosse reported from a conversation with Robert in his later life, ‘freedom led to a super-abundance of production since on looking back he could see that he had often, in his unfettered leisure, been afraid to do nothing’. For the time being, however, Robert settled back into the familiar routines of family life and his proper application to poetry. He gave up vegetarianism as damaging to his health and atheism as damaging to his soul. The prodigal had returned, though in this case he could barely be said ever to have been away.
In January 1833, Robert completed a poetic work entitled Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession. It had been written as the first item in a projected grander master plan conceived at Richmond on the afternoon shading to evening of 22 October 1832 when he had seen Edmund Kean, once a great actor, by then in decline and disrepair but still powerfully impressive even when debilitated by drink and tuberculosis, play Shakespeare’s Richard III. The poem, consisting of 1,031 lines, took Robert three months to write. He was twenty years old. Chesterton’s dry comment is that ‘It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old.’ Robert himself, in a note inserted in 1838 at the beginning of his own copy, remarks that, ‘The following Poem was written in pursuance of a foolish plan which occupied me mightily for a time, and which had for its object the enabling me to assume and realize I know not how many different characters;—meanwhile the world was never to guess that “Brown, Smith, Jones & Robinson” (as the spelling books have it) the respective authors of this poem, the other novel, such an opera, such a speech, etc., etc., were no other than one and the same individual. The present abortion was the first work of the Poet of the batch, who would have been more legitimately myself than most of the others; but I surrounded himself with all manner of (to my then notion) poetical accessories, and had planned quite a delightful life for him. Only this crab remains of the shapely Tree of Life in this fool’s paradise of mine,—R.B.’
If Christiana, Aunt Silverthorne, had not kindly and unpromptedly paid £30 for its publication (£26 and 5 shillings for setting, printing and binding, £3 and 15 shillings for advertising), Pauline might have experienced the fate of Incondita—burned by its author to ashes. As it was, Sarianna had secretly copied, in pencil, particularly choice passages during Robert’s composition of the poem.
(#litres_trial_promo) She knew already the irresistible attraction for her brother of a fire in an open grate. She, indeed, was the only other person in the household who knew that Robert had begun writing the work at all. But then, five months later, there it was, published by Saunders and Otley, born and bound and in the hands of booksellers in March 1833. The author remained anonymous. Readers might suppose it to be the work of Brown, Smith, Jones, even Robinson, if they pleased: Robert Browning perhaps wisely elected for privacy over fame, though possibly only, batedly, preferring to anticipate the moment of astonishing revelation.
The book fell, not by chance, into the hands of reviewers. The Revd William Johnson Fox had read Incondita, and had reacted with a response that, if it stopped somewhat short of fulsome praise, had not been discouraging. Fox had acquired, in the interim, the Monthly Repository which, under his ownership and editorship, had achieved a reputation as an influential Unitarian publication. Its original emphasis had been theological, but Fox was eager not only to politicize its content but equally to give it a reputation for literary and dramatic criticism. Space could be found to notice improving literature: ten pages had recently been devoted in January 1830 to a review of the Poems of Tennyson by the 24-year-old John Stuart Mill (editor of Jeremy Bentham’s Treatise upon Evidence and founder of the Utilitarian Society, activities that had unsettled him to the point of madness until the poetry of Wordsworth restored to him the will to live). On receipt of a positive reply to the letter reintroducing himself—though he seems only to have been aware, to judge by his letter, that Fox contributed reviews to the Westminster Review—Robert had twelve copies of Pauline sent to Mr Fox, together with a copy of Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen which, afterwards wishing to retrieve, he later used as an excuse to call personally on Fox.
Fox’s review was delightful. It admitted Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession to be ‘evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch’. Nevertheless, ‘In recognising a poet,’ wrote Fox, ‘we cannot stand upon trifles, nor fret ourselves about such matters. Time enough for that afterwards, when larger works come before us. Archimedes in the bath had many particulars to settle about specific gravities and Hiero’s crown; but he first gave a glorious leap and shouted Eureka!’ Fox’s own leap was of faith that he had discovered a true poet. Of the work of genius before him, he had no doubt: he recommended the whole composition as being ‘of the spirit, spiritual. The scenery is in the chambers of thought; the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another.’ There was ‘truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius.’ Tennyson had passed the Fox test of genius, and now so did Browning. Both had raised the hair on the back of his neck. Mrs Orr begs to differ in respect of Fox’s acceptance of the ‘confessional and introspective quality of the poem as an expression of the highest emotional life—of the essence, therefore, of religion’. But she gives her full approbation to the ‘encouraging kindness’ of the one critic who alone, discerning enough to cry Eureka!, discovered Robert Browning in his first obscurity.
Allan Cunningham in the Athenaeum noticed Pauline with some graceful compliments—‘fine things abound … no difficulty in finding passages to vindicate our praise … To one who sings so naturally, poetry must be as easy as music is to a bird.’ This was gratifying stuff, gilding the Fox lily which scented the air Robert Browning breathed and which he acknowledged as ‘the most timely piece of kindness in the way of literary help that ever befell me’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Fox had, however, given a copy of Pauline to John Stuart Mill who, besides being Fox’s friend and assistant on the Monthly Repository, contributed reviews and articles to the Examiner and to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, where, in August 1830, in an omnibus review of some dozen books, Mill briefly dismissed the poem as ‘a piece of pure bewilderment’.
This might not have been so bad as a glancing cuff at an author’s head by a reviewer too pressed for time to have read the poem properly and too squeezed for space to give it more than a line. But Mill, either then or later, had taken trouble to read Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession very thoroughly, and more than once. At the end of his copy, on the fly-leaf, he made a long note presumably for his own reference. What he wrote was this:
With considerable poetic powers, the writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being. I should think it a sincere confession, though of a most unlovable state, if the ‘Pauline’ were not evidently a mere phantom. All about her is full of inconsistency—he neither loves her nor fancies he loves her, yet insists upon talking love to her. If she existed and loved him, he treats her most ungenerously and unfeelingly. All his aspirings and yearnings and regret point to other things, never to her; then he pays her off toward the end by a piece of flummery, amounting to the modest request that she will love him and live with him and give herself up to him without his loving her moyennant quoi he will think her and call her everything that is handsome, and he promises her that she shall find it mighty pleasant. Then he leaves off by saying he knows he will have changed his mind by to-morrow, and despite ‘these intents which seem so fair,’ but that having been thus visited once no doubt he will be again—and is therefore in ‘perfect joy’, bad luck to him! as the Irish say. A cento of most beautiful passages might be made from this poem, and the psychological history of himself is powerful and truthful—truth-like certainly, all but the last stage. That, he evidently has not yet got into. The self-seeking and self-worshipping state is well described—beyond that, I should think the writer has made, as yet, only the next step, viz. into despising his own state. I even question whether part even of that self-disdain is not assumed. He is evidently dissatisfied, and feels part of the badness of his state; he does not write as if it were purged out of him. If he once could muster a hearty hatred of his selfishness it would go; as it is, he feels only the lack of good, not the positive evil. He feels not remorse, but only disappointment; a mind in that state can only be regenerated by some new passion, and I know not what to wish for him but that he may meet with a real Pauline. Meanwhile he should not attempt to show how a person may be recovered from this morbid state, for he is hardly convalescent, and ‘what should we speak of but that which we know?’
This is raw, unedited—though by no means unreflecting—stuff, the sort of thing a reviewer or critic will write for himself before dressing it up or toning it down for publication. It shows Mill’s mind working largely on spontaneous impressions, though—or therefore—fresh and certainly, in this particular instance, acute in literary and psychological insights into a poet whose name and very existence were unknown to Mill. Just six years older than Robert Browning, he was already making a name for himself in literary, political, and journalistic circles. Just as well, then, that Mill’s notes were never polished up and printed. It was quite enough that Mill’s annotated copy of Pauline was included among the review copies that Fox returned to Robert on 30 October 1833. It is surmised that Mill’s words, when Robert read them, prompted his own holograph note on his own copy of Pauline, referring to the poem as an ‘abortion’ and as a ‘crab’ on the Tree of Life in his paradise. Robert refused to permit republication of Pauline for nigh on thirty-five years, acknowledging merely his authorship of the poem ‘with extreme repugnance and indeed purely of necessity’. Not only the review copies were returned to him by Fox; the publishers also sent Robert a bundle of unbound sheets. Not a single copy of Pauline had been sold.
If Mill had been a little too harsh in his disparagement, Fox had perhaps been a little too generous in his praise. Mrs Orr pointedly says of Mill that, ‘there never was a large and cultivated intelligence one can imagine less in harmony than his with the poetic excesses, or even the poetic qualities, of Pauline’; and she acutely recognizes that Fox ‘made very light of the artistic blemishes of the work … it was more congenial to him to hail that poet’s advent than to register his shortcomings’. Mill recognized what Fox did not: the poet’s morbid self-consciousness and the self-seeking state of his mind, the poem as a sincere confession, and its power and truth as a psychological history of its author. For in truth, Pauline was written, says Mrs Orr, whose view is enthusiastically confirmed in turn by Betty Miller, in a moment of ‘supreme moral or physical crisis’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nobody, then or since, has doubted this for a minute. Mill may have been right to suggest that the poet was barely convalescent, far less recovered, from his morbid state of introspection, of self-examination—for Pauline, real or imagined as Browning’s confessor, occupied his attentions as a woman less than his own interesting condition as a young man, slicing himself into an infinity of thin tissue samples and inspecting the results under a microscope of forensic self-analysis.
Robert claimed Pauline to be ‘dramatic in principle’. It is gorgeous in imagery, but it is dramatic in the sense that a philosophical inquiry by Plato is dramatic: a scene is set; time, place, and characters are perfunctorily established before it proceeds to discussion of a moral crisis or conundrum and its resolution. The poem is of course—in view of Robert’s preoccupation with him—heavily influenced by Shelley (invoked in Pauline as ‘Sun-treader’ and ‘Apollo’). Scholarly consensus has it that the dramatic principle of Pauline is a lyrical narrative inspired by the form of Shelley’s Alastor, and deriving elements from that poet’s Epipsychidion. Robert Browning confesses his guilty history to Pauline, who is made privy to disappointing experiences in life and disappointed experiments with living—the poet’s loss of honour in disloyalty to all he held dear, to Pauline herself (who represents women he has loved, including his mother, representing familiar, comfortable domesticity), to a lapse from his inherited religious faith and the substituted creed of Shelley (who taught him to believe in men perfected as gods and the earth perfected as heaven), the sinking of the good estimation of his family (disappointed by his spurning of conventional education and a conventional career). It is a sorry catalogue, all in all.
The examination of the poet’s soul reveals the accumulation of guilt and regret, initially a cause of despair and self-doubt that gradually evolves into a more positive source of self-confidence and optimism. Robert, in the course of Pauline, heals himself, though his renewal necessarily involves an alteration in personal consciousness. To become what he is, it has been necessary to be what he was. On a note of self-definition, he relinquishes his Shelleyan delusions; he returns to his love of God (with some qualifications and reservations), to his love for Pauline (and her domestic virtues and comforts), to art (Shelley, the ‘Sun-treader’, is installed in the firmament—a star in eternity—his ideals renounced but his supremacy as a poet maintained), and to himself in the space he has cleared for future manoeuvre. Read autobiographically, rather than as art, Pauline probably did an effective therapeutic job for the poet; as art, the poem is generally agreed to be a precociously subjective failure.
Robert’s return to religion was not corseted by the narrow confines of Congregationalism. He sought out colourful, dramatic, evangelizing preachers whose theatricality appealed to his taste not merely for their rhetorical flourishes of eloquence, but for imaginative reasoning splendidly dressed with a generous garnish of allusions, references, myth, metaphor, and metaphysics. One of the most celebrated was William Johnson Fox himself, who spoke with a liberal tongue and conscience. Following on Fox’s review of Pauline, Robert paid an evening call at Stamford Grove West, near Dalston in Hackney, where he renewed acquaintance not only with Fox but with Eliza and Sarah Flower, both nearing thirty years of age, who were living with him as his wards after the death of their father in 1829.
They hardly recognized Robert after four years: now almost twenty-one years old, he was a sight to behold—becomingly whiskered, elegantly gloved and caped, drily witty. The sisters had read Pauline and were interested to see the author. Sarah, in a letter of June 1833, remarked to a cousin that the ‘poet boy’ had turned up, ‘very interesting from his great power of conversation and thorough originality, to say nothing of his personal appearance, which would be exceptionally poetic if nature had not served him an unkind trick in giving him an ugly nose’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Quite what was wrong with Robert’s nose is not specified, though perhaps it was merely less ‘unmatured’ than the poet who, Sarah considered, ‘will do much better things’. Her estimation of Pauline was evidently more critical than that of her guardian, Mr Fox, though William Sharp suggests that the enthusiasm of the Flower sisters influenced Fox’s own partiality for the poem. Sarah herself wrote poetry, so probably knew what she was talking about, and she had doubtless discussed Pauline with her sister Eliza, who was acknowledged to be an excellent critic.
Eliza Flower makes only brief appearances in Mrs Orr’s Life and Letters of Robert Browning, but she acknowledges that, ‘If, in spite of his [Browning’s] denials, any woman inspired Pauline, it can have been no other than she.’ Vivienne Browning offers the alternative suggestion, in an essay, ‘The Real Identity of Pauline’, published in the Browning Society notes in 1983, that Robert might have had in mind his Aunt Jemima, only a year older than himself, described by Mrs Orr as ‘very amiable and, to use her nephew’s words, “as beautiful as the day”’. But whoever may have been the model for Pauline is hardly relevant: she was, as Mill understood, ‘a mere phantom’. Pauline was a womanly compound: if not Woman herself, she was at least a combination of friend, lover, Sophia, sister, mother, and even—since it is possible to identify some subtle adolescent homophile lines in the poem—the inspiration may sometimes, just as likely, have been Shelley as well as any woman. The point being, rather, that Robert probably felt some tender adolescent attraction to Eliza, who was nine years his elder—the first of the older women after his mother to engage his attentions and affections throughout his life. The poetic figure of Pauline, a mature figure of a woman with abundant dark hair and a rather sultry eroticism, very likely represented—personified—the sexual image, ideals, and desires that Robert was beginning to form for himself.
Eliza, who was in love with William Johnson Fox, was pleased to see Robert again, though her initial admiration was exceeded by his own self-admiration. She began to think, ‘he has twisted the old-young shoot off by the neck’ and that, ‘if he had not got into the habit of talking of head and heart as two separate existences, one would say that he was born without a heart’. At any rate, any prospect of romance between them was fairly improbable, though they continued to be friends. Ever afterwards, Robert maintained for Eliza a sentimental friendship that was rooted in loyalty to his admiration for her music, respect for her mind, and tender affection for her goodness. She died of consumption in 1846, the year of Robert’s marriage to Elizabeth Barrett.
For all Robert’s later repugnance for Pauline, for all his thwarted attempts to recover the copy of the book that Mill had written in, for all his reluctance to authorize any further publication even of extracts from it in his lifetime, for all his resistance to inclusion of an amended version of the poem in a collected edition of his work in 1868, and for all revisionist tinkerings with the poem to render it fit for an edition of 1888, his dissociation from it could never be complete. The secret of his authorship soon leaked out and, in fact, initially did him some good. It brought him at least some limited literary recognition (albeit of a mixed nature) and established something of a style that twenty years later was recognized by the young painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had read Browning’s Paracelsus and, coming across Pauline in the British Museum library, was astute enough to understand that it was by the hand of the same author—though he was careful enough to copy it out and ask for Browning’s confirmation of authorship, which Robert duly supplied.
(#litres_trial_promo)
Biographers of Browning now fall down a hole of unknowing for two years, pulling themselves back into the light of biographical day with some difficulty, finding occasional toeholds in scattered references throughout Browning’s later work that give clues to his activities from publication of Pauline in 1833 to publication of his next production, Paracelsus, in 1835. William Sharp suggests that during this period Robert began to go out and about in ‘congenial society’, specifically citing new acquaintance with ‘many well-known workers in the several arts’,
(#litres_trial_promo) including Charles Dickens and Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd, a notable lawyer—the title ‘Serjeant’ derived from his position in the Inns of Court as a barrister—who was to publish Ion in 1836 and several more blank verse tragedies that do not much detain the attention of posterity but gave pleasure in their own time. Talfourd was then famous, nevertheless, for his wide acquaintance with literary men, later on account of his elevation to the judiciary and his work as a Member of Parliament in securing real protection for authors’ copyright, and always for his loquacity and conviviality.
If Robert did indeed meet Talfourd at this time, he would have been a good man for a young author to know—though Sharp says that Browning’s first reputation among such company was as an artist and musician rather than as a poet, and residence south of the river in remote, rural Camberwell made night engagements impracticable. During the day, says Sharp, Robert consulted works on philosophy and medical history in the British Museum Library and very often visited the National Gallery (unlikely, since that institution did not open until 1838). Certainly Robert was fortifying his friendships with men like Alfred Domett, Jim Silverthorne, his cheerful young uncle Reuben Browning (who was an elegant scholar of Latin and an accomplished horseman), and he may at this time have joined a circle of young men who clustered around a Captain Pritchard of Battersea, who had met Robert when he was sixteen and had introduced him to the medical lectures given at Guy’s Hospital by a cousin, Dr Blundell.
In the winter of 1833–4, at the age of twenty-one going on twenty-two, Robert found himself on an expedition to Russia, specifically to St Petersburg, nominally as secretary to the Chevalier de Benkhausen, the Russian consul-general in London. How on earth he wangled this trip, how on earth indeed he made the acquaintance in the first place of the Russian consul-general—who ‘had taken a great liking to him’
(#litres_trial_promo)—is not clear, though Mrs Orr says that ‘the one active career which would have recommended itself to him in his earlier youth was diplomacy … He would indeed not have been averse to any post of activity and responsibility not unsuited to the training of a gentleman.’
These remarks suggest that Robert was by then perhaps chafing and fretting at home even more than before and may have been thinking better of his decision to commit himself exclusively to poetry and financial dependence on his family. Mrs Orr does not spell out the reasons for this aspiration to diplomacy as a career, and there are no surviving letters from this period to add substance to speculation. William Shergold Browning worked as a Rothschild banker in Paris at this time, while his brother Reuben Browning, Robert’s favourite uncle, worked for Nathan Rothschild in the Rothschild London banking house. It is tempting to assume a connection between international banking and diplomacy that could have brought Robert to the attention of the consul-general. At any rate, there must have been some personal recommendation and introduction, more likely to have derived from a family connection than any other.
Of the Russian expedition, of its official purpose and its immediate personal importance for Robert, we know next to nothing: Robert wrote regularly and lengthily to Sarianna, but he burned the letters in later life. He set off with Benkhausen, say Griffin and Minchin, contradicting by a few months Mrs Orr’s version of an earlier, winter journey, on Saturday 1 March 1834. Early spring seems more likely; they would still be travelling through snow, but would reach Russia just as a thaw was setting in. They travelled, it is estimated, 1500 miles on horseback and by post carriage. In 1830, Stephenson’s Rocket, a marvel of modern technology, had made the first journey on the Liverpool to Manchester railway, and The General Steam Navigation Company operated a basic, bucketing, piston-thumping packet service from London to Ostend and Rotterdam; but there the transport system ran, literally, out of steam. ‘We know,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘how strangely he was impressed by some of the circumstances of the journey: above all by the endless monotony of snow-covered pine forest through which he and his companion rushed for days and nights at the speed of six post-horses, without seeming to move from one spot.’
‘How I remember the flowers—even grapes—of places I have seen!’ wrote Robert to a friend, Fanny Haworth, on 24 July 1838, ‘—some one flower or weed, I should say, that gets some strangehow connected with them. Snowdrops and Tilsit in Prussia go together’; and throughout Browning’s work there are associations of this sort that testify to the power of his memory for detail: ‘Wall and wall of pine’ and, from the poem ‘A Forest Thought’:
In far Esthonian solitudes
The parent firs of future woods
Gracefully, airily spire at first
Up to the sky, by the soft sand nurst …
and so on until he reached St Petersburg where he looked at pictures in the Hermitage, no doubt as thoroughly and with as critical an eye as at the Dulwich Gallery.
In a letter to Elizabeth Barrett, on 11 August 1845, Robert described a play he had written, in about 1843, entitled ‘Only a Player Girl’: ‘it was Russian, and about a fair on the Neva, and booths and droshkies and fish pies and so forth, with the Palaces in the background’. The play is not known to have survived either the destroying hand of time or that of the author. He says, furthermore, that at St Petersburg he met a Sir James Wylie who ‘chose to mistake me for an Italian—“M. l’Italien” he said another time, looking up from his cards.’ Others regularly made the same assumption, whether sincerely or satirically, taking their cue from Robert’s sallow-complexioned, dandified appearance. Another acquaintance in St Petersburg, say Griffin and Minchin,
(#litres_trial_promo) was a King’s Messenger called Waring whose name Robert borrowed eight years later in Dramatic Lyrics to cover for the identity of Alfred Domett as the eponymous subject of the poem ‘Waring’ and imagined as,
Waring in Moscow, to those rough
Cold northern climes borne, perhaps.
Before leaving Russia, after an absence from England of some three months, Robert watched the solid ice crack on the frozen Neva and heard the boom of guns that accompanied the governor’s journey on the now navigable river to present a ceremonial goblet of Neva water to the tsar. ‘St Petersburg, no longer three isolated portions,’ say Griffin and Minchin, ‘was once more united, as the floating wooden bridges swung into place across the mighty stream, and the city was en fête’. Robert, presumably delighting in Russian fairs, which may have occupied his interest rather more than Mrs Orr would have approved, kept an attentive and recording ear open to the music of Russia, folk songs in particular. Fifty years later in Venice, by the account of a friend, Katherine Bronson, he was able to recollect perfectly and accurately sing some of these songs to the elderly Prince Gagarin, a retired Russian diplomat, who exclaimed delightedly and wonderingly at Browning’s musical memory that, he declared, surpassed his own.
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In Russia, and shortly after his return to London, Robert had not overlooked his poetic vocation: besides storing up materials for future work, he wrote a number of poems—notably the grimly dramatic monologue ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, with its quietly sensational last line; a sonnet, ‘A Forest Thought’, which most early Browning biographers and critics have passed by tight-lipped and with a sorrowful shake of the head; a song (beginning, ‘A King lived long ago …’) that he incorporated a few years later into Pippa Passes; a lyric (beginning, ‘Still ailing, wind? Wilt be appeased or no?’) that was later introduced into the sixth section of ‘James Lee’ (in Dramatis Personæ); and the poem ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ (later published in Dramatic Lyrics), which might be thought of, in its theme of Calvinistic predestination, as Browning’s equivalent of ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ by Robert Burns. All these were submitted to Fox’s Monthly Repository and accepted for publication. They appeared there, anonymously over the initial ‘Z’, from 1834 to 1836.
Whether to support his life as a poet or seriously to begin a diplomatic career, or simply to reinforce the independence that the visit to St Petersburg had probably aroused, Robert felt confident enough after his three months as aide or secretary, or whatever role he played in attendance to the Russian consul-general, to apply ‘for appointment on a mission which was to be despatched to Persia’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was disappointed to be passed over, the more so since the response to his application had, on a misreading, appeared to offer him the position which in fact—he learned only in the course of an interview with ‘the chief’—was offered to another man, whom Robert damned in a letter to Sarah Flower, suggesting that ‘the Right Hon. Henry Ellis etc., etc., may go to a hotter climate for a perfect fool—(that at Baghdad in October, 127 Fahrenheit in the shade)’.
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Still, to be realistic, the failure was maybe all to the good. Diplomacy was certainly a creditable profession for a gentleman, though that gentleman needed not only financial assets to back it up, at least in the beginning, and, to advance it, the social contacts that most successful young diplomats had either acquired on their own account at Oxford or Cambridge or naturally possessed through upper-middle-class and aristocratic family relationships. To cut a career as a diplomat was as difficult and expensive as to make progress as a barrister (Alfred Domett and Joseph Arnould were already finding this out in their first years as young lawyers) or gain promotion as a military officer in a regiment of any social consequence. The cost to the Browning family purse of maintaining Robert as an embassy attaché would have weighed even more heavily than keeping him at home as a poet. Maisie Ward supposes that the Silverthornes would have found a place for Robert in the family brewery, but ‘this would have meant no less drudgery, no better future prospects than the bank, and if [Cyrus] Mason’s view of the worldliness of the family is correct, they would certainly have aimed at something more socially acceptable’.
A certain sense of heightened social awareness is imputed to the Brownings by Maisie Ward and by Cyrus Mason: it may fall short of social snobbery, but attitudes and aspirations do tend to suggest at least an impetus towards gentility—what we now regard more positively as ‘upward mobility’. Mrs Orr’s definite and regular distaste for any possibility of Robert’s being tarred by association with ‘lowlife’; the horror with which Cyrus Mason (and other Brownings even into the mid twentieth century) regarded any suggestion that even distant ancestors might have been of the servant class; the gentleman’s education that Robert enjoyed—these are pointers that perhaps speak more of prevailing social values in mid nineteenth-century England than of the particular case of the Brownings, though of course the Brownings were of the middle rank of the powerful middle classes that mostly subscribed without question to the desirability of self-improvement in their lives.
There were no awkward assertions of social superiority, however, to make any visitor to the Browning household feel ill at ease (Mrs Browning was no Mrs Wilfer, with her head tied up in a handkerchief and her aspirations affirmed in a superior sniff); it was a sociable house and many of Robert’s friends have recorded warm memories of happy evenings there among good company. Cyrus Mason gnashed his teeth in the darkness of outer family, dismally nursing into old age his own exclusion from this cheerful company—more than likely, says Maisie Ward, he simply bored the Brownings to death—and took his revenge cold as his abiding bitterness when he wrote of the ‘misty pride’ that hung like a dampness in the ‘genteelly dreary’ Browning household and shrouded its inhabitants, whose single, self-absorbed concern was to develop a poet of genius to the obliteration of natural affection within the near family and shameful neglect of its extended members. The fact that Reuben Browning and the Silverthornes, close family, were welcome guests, and are known to have been generous to Robert, would tend to put paid to Cyrus Mason’s more extreme accusations.
It is true, nevertheless, that Robert took the trouble to cultivate good acquaintance. A letter written in 1830 by Robert to a close friend, Christopher Dowson, refers to ‘the unfortunate state of our friend P[ritchard]’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Pritchard is not a significant figure in Browning’s correspondence—the letters that have survived the conflagration of Browning’s personal papers contain only minor references to him—and nobody but Griffin and Minchin is interested in poor old Pritchard as a character in Browning’s life, either at this time or later. They describe him as ‘a brisk, dapper, little, grey-haired sea-captain, with a squint and a delightful fund of tales of adventure’. He lived at Battersea, and it was his whim to keep his address a close secret. However, he was the focus of a set, known as ‘The Colloquials’, of young men into whose orbit Robert was attracted and with whom he struck up lasting friendships. Pritchard’s ‘elasticity of mind bade defiance to advancing years and enabled him to associate unconstrainedly with those who were very considerably his juniors’, say Griffin and Minchin, and they further state that he had a chivalrous regard for women, to the extent of leaving his money to two maiden ladies on the ground that ‘women should be provided for since they cannot earn their living’.
(#litres_trial_promo) One of these maiden ladies was Sarianna Browning, who later inherited £1000 by Pritchard’s will.
Through Pritchard, Robert met and associated with Christopher and Joseph Dowson, William Curling Young and his younger brother Frederick Young, Alfred Domett, and Joseph Arnould. The Dowsons knew Pritchard through shipping, their family business; Christopher Dowson later married Mary, Alfred Domett’s sister; Joseph Dowson associated himself with the Youngs through business interests; in short, the group developed close family and business ties that bound them together longer than their youthful debates—their ‘boisterous Colloquies’, as Arnould later characterized them—about politics, poetry, theatre, philosophy, science, and the business of the group magazine, Olla Podrida, which they produced to publish their own essays, poems, and whatever other of their effusions pleased them. Robert himself contributed ‘A Dissertation on Debt and Debtors’, an essay which characteristically quoted from Quarles and uncharacteristically—for a man whose horror of debt was later well known and to become deeply ingrained—defended debt as a necessary condition of human life.
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A less regular member of the group was Field Talfourd, an artist and brother of Thomas Noon Talfourd, and it has been suggested that Benjamin Jowett, the future celebrated Master of Balliol College, Oxford, may have attended some Colloquial meetings—though his name is introduced more on the basis that he was then a native of Camberwell than on any sure evidence of his participation in the group’s activities. The Colloquials seem to have been a kindly, good-natured set of young, middle-class men whose aspirations and ambitions variously took them into the middle ranks of the law, politics, and business, at home and in the service of the Empire. Several of them, notably Arnould and Domett, wrote poetry for the rest of their lives: Arnould, while at Wadham College, Oxford, won the Newdigate Prize for poetry; Domett turned out stuff such as Ranolf and Amohia: a South-Sea Day Dream, inspired by his Antipodean travels and career, not wholly disrespected by public regard in his own day but entirely unknown to present fame. Of them all, Robert was forever closest to Alfred Domett.
Diplomacy had not yet done with Robert Browning, though Robert may have all but done with diplomacy. In 1834, a young Frenchman presented himself to the Brownings. This was Count Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, then in his mid-twenties. He was socially affable, urbane, cosmopolitan, and intellectually impressive, literate in European art and poetry, and interested in finance. He had been recommended to William Shergold Browning, of Rothschild’s in Paris, by the Marquis of Fortia, his uncle, who shared with William Browning an interest in literature. William in turn recommended young Ripert-Monclar to his brother Reuben in London, who introduced him into the Browning household. Ripert-Monclar claimed to be spending his summers in England, ostensibly for pleasure.
(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, the young aristocrat was a Royalist, an active supporter of the dethroned Bourbons now living in England as a result of the French revolution of July 1830 that made Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, King of France until he in turn was toppled in 1848. Ripert-Monclar, as he confessed to the Brownings, was acting as a private agent of communication between the royal exiles and their legitimist friends in France. He was not himself an exile, though it can be assumed that he was no favourite of Louis-Philippe. There is a suggestion that he may have been briefly held in jail in 1830. It was diplomacy of a thrilling sort—clandestine, subversive, and romantic.
Amédée and Robert struck up an immediate, intimate friendship: they talked no doubt of royalty and republicanism, though they probably discussed art and poetry more than politics; they would have talked of France, particularly of Paris, and Robert’s French—already reliable enough to have enabled him to write part of Pauline in good French—would have become even more polished. The young Frenchman introduced Robert to the works of Balzac and the new French realist writers, he sketched his new friend’s portrait, and at some point or other he suggested the life of Paracelsus, the Renaissance alchemist and physician, as the subject of Robert’s next major poem. He then thought better of the idea, ‘because it gave no room for the introduction of love about which every young man of their age thought he had something quite new to say’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But too late, too late to withdraw the suggestion: besides, Robert had already dealt with love in Pauline, and there had been precious little profit in that. Better, perhaps, to steer clear for the time being, take another tack.
Though two or three months of preliminary research (‘in the holes and corners of history’, as Chesterton likes to put it) had been necessary, Paracelsus was already a familiar-enough character to Robert: there was the entry in the Biographie Universelle on his father’s shelves; there was the Frederick Bitiskius three-volume folio edition of Paracelsus’ works; there were relevant medical works to hand, including a little octavo of 1620, the Vitœ Germanorum Medicorum of Melchior Adam, with which he was already acquainted from his recent interest in medicine. By mid-March 1835, interrupting a work in progress called Sordello, which he had begun a couple of years earlier in March 1833, Robert had written a full manuscript entitled Paracelsus, a poem of 4,152 lines which was ‘Inscribed to Amédée de Ripert-Monclar by his affectionate friend R.B.’. This dedication was dated ‘London: 15 March 1835’. Paracelsus, divided into five scenes and featuring four characters, had taken Robert just over five months to complete. It was published at his father’s expense by Effingham Wilson, of the Royal Exchange, on 15 August 1835. Saunders and Otley had declined the privilege of publishing the poem, and it had taken some trouble and influence to induce even Effingham Wilson, a small publisher, to undertake the job. Wilson published Paracelsus, says Mrs Orr, more ‘on the ground of radical sympathies in Mr Fox and the author than on that of its intrinsic worth.’
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In a preliminary letter of 2 April
(#litres_trial_promo) to William Johnson Fox, Robert requested an introduction to Fox’s neighbour, Edward Moxon, printer and publisher of Dover Street, Piccadilly, ‘on account of his good name and fame among author-folk, besides he has himself written—as the Americans say—“more poetry ’an you can shake a stick at”’. Moxon was a high-flying old bird to be expected to notice a fledgling fresh out of the nest and bumping near to the ground like Robert Browning. Thirty-four years of age in 1835, when he gave up writing his own poetry, Moxon was less distinguished as a poet than as a publisher and bookseller. Leigh Hunt wittily described him as ‘a bookseller among poets, and a poet among booksellers’. The remark has stuck to Moxon, who in 1830 had established his business which quickly acquired a reputation for publishing poetry of high quality by a remarkable list of poets including Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb (who introduced many of them to Moxon), Southey, Clare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, who became Moxon’s close friend. Leigh Hunt remarked that ‘Moxon has no connection but with the select of the earth’, which was intended satirically but may have been true enough in literary terms, implying a discrimination that has proved itself in posterity and went far beyond the terms of mere business in Moxon’s defence of his poets against the famous attacks by Lockhart and the rest of the Scots critics of Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly reviews.
On 16 April 1835
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert again wrote to Fox to report on a visit to Moxon, whose ‘visage loured exceedingly’ and ‘the Moxonian accent grew dolorous’ on perusal of a recommendatory letter by Charles Cowden Clarke (who had been a close friend of Keats, and was now a friend of Fox) which Robert presented to him. This was not encouraging; even less encouraging was Moxon’s view of the poetry written by some of Robert’s tremendous contemporaries, far less a work by someone virtually unknown. Moxon gloomily revealed that Philip von Artevelde, a long dramatic poem by Sir Henry Taylor that had excited the Athenaeum, normally decorous, to rave enthusiastically in fifteen columns just the year before, had ‘not paid expenses by about thirty odd pounds’. Furthermore, ‘Tennyson’s poetry’, said Moxon, ‘is “popular at Cambridge” and yet of 800 copies which were printed of his last, some 300 only have gone off: Mr M[oxon] hardly knows whether he shall ever venture again, etc. etc., and in short begs to decline even inspecting, etc. etc.’ Poetry could no longer be relied upon as a paying proposition.
Robert offered to read his poem to Fox some morning, ‘though I am rather scared of a fresh eye going over its 4000 lines … yet on the whole I am not much afraid of the issue … I shall really need your notice on this account’; and finished off his letter with some heavy humorous flourishes that included a discreet swipe at John Stuart Mill advising him not to be an ‘idle spectator’ of Robert’s first appearance on a public stage (‘having previously only dabbled in private theatricals’). Paracelsus was to be Robert’s première, his big first night with the critics, who were invited to attend and advised to pay attention, ‘benignant or supercilious’ as Mill in particular should choose, but ‘he may depend that tho’ my “Now is the winter of our discontent” be rather awkward, yet there shall be occasional outbreaks of good stuff—that I shall warm as I get on, and finally wish “Richmond at the bottom of the seas,” etc. in the best style imaginable.’
Paracelsus received mixed reviews from those critics who did not pass it over in silence entirely. The reviewer for the Athenaeum gave the poem a brief, lukewarm notice in 73 words on 22 August 1835, reluctantly recognizing ‘talent in this dramatic poem’ but warning against facile imitation of Shelley’s ‘mysticism and vagueness’ in a work the reviewer found ‘dreamy and obscure’. There was worse from some other reviewers whose notices Robert, if he did not take them to heart as guides to future good poetic conduct, at least bore as scabs on his mind and as scars in his soul. He still scratched at them a decade later. On 17 September 1845, in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett, he recalled ‘more than one of the reviews and newspapers that laughed my “Paracelsus” to scorn ten years ago’ and contrasted, in a further letter to her of 9 December 1845, ‘that my own “Paracelsus”, printed a few months before, had been as dead a failure as “Ion” [by Thomas Noon Talfourd] a brilliant success … I know that until Forster’s notice in the Examiner appeared, every journal that thought it worth while to allude to the poem at all, treated it with entire contempt.’ Fox contributed a tardy review in the Monthly Repository in November: Robert had read Paracelsus aloud to him and they had discussed the poem, so he had had the benefit of the poet’s own industry, ideas and intentions to draw upon in his favourable notice, which declared the work to be ‘the result of thought, skill and toil’ and not—as the Athenaeum had judged it—a dreamy and obscure effusion. Paracelsus was not only a poem, declared Fox, but a poem with ideas.
His bold, informed defence of the poem had its effect: John Forster, in an article in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal early in 1836, promoted Robert to Parnassus: ‘Without the slightest hesitation we name Mr Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth.’ A vacancy had recently occurred, since Samuel Taylor Coleridge had died in 1834. But Forster had needed little or no prompting from a sympathetic review by Fox. As chief dramatic and literary reviewer of the Examiner, he had already dealt generously with Paracelsus in that publication: ‘Since the publication of Philip von Artevelde,’ he wrote, ‘we have met with no such evidences of poetic genius, and of general intellectual power, as are contained in this volume.’ Forster closed his review of Paracelsus with these words: ‘It is some time since we read a work of more unequivocal power than this. We conclude that its author is a young man, as we do not recollect his having published before.’ He was evidently, perhaps mercifully, unacquainted with Pauline, now immured in the British Museum Library. ‘If so, we may safely predict for him a brilliant career, if he continues true to the present promise of his genius. He possesses all the elements of a fine poet.’ Forster, unlike Fox, had not enjoyed the benefit of Robert Browning’s acquaintance, and his review is all the more valuable for that reason. He assumed Browning to be a young man, though it was difficult to tell from the poem itself: to repeat Chesterton’s line, Robert could have been anything between twenty and a thousand years old if the evidence of Paracelsus were the only criterion by which to judge his age.
Forster, says Mrs Orr, ‘knew that a writer in the Athenaeum had called it rubbish, and he had taken it up as a probable subject for a piece of slashing criticism’. A young critic (Forster was twenty-three years old in 1835, only five months younger than Browning) will sometimes adopt this tactic—an acknowledged means of getting on in literary society by bringing one’s own talent more prominently to the attention of fellow-critics, editors, and publishers than the work being reviewed. However, intending to bury Browning, Forster paused to praise, though ‘what he did write’, says Mrs Orr, ‘can scarcely be defined as praise. It was the simple, ungrudging admission of the unequivocal power, as well as brilliant promise, which he recognized in the work.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This in turn is perhaps a little grudging of Forster’s real recognition that here was a poet, perhaps not yet fully formed but promising great things. Robert himself, weighing the laurel crown awarded by Forster in the balance against the ashes heaped on his head by others, did not feel as pleased as he might otherwise have done if Forster’s had been but one voice amongst a full chorus singing in praiseful tune. Though he privately enjoyed the wholehearted applause of family and friends for his ‘private theatricals’, his public reception, now that he had put himself stage front, was more problematical.
Paracelsus was important to Robert. If Pauline had been a preview, in theatrical terms, the aspiring player would have performed to an empty house before being hooked off the stage by dissatisfied critics. But now—as he himself had written to Fox—this latest poem was his ‘first appearance on any stage’. It had been better, maybe, to start again and afresh. However, Robert specifically disclaimed in the preface any intention to promote Paracelsus as a drama or a dramatic poem. It was, he insisted, a poem and of a genre very different from that undertaken by any other poet. He warned critics off judging it ‘by principles on which it was never moulded’ and subjecting it ‘to a standard to which it was never meant to conform’.
What he meant by this was his intention ‘to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of mind or the passions by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects along and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded.’
No doubt this sentence made his meaning entirely clear to his contemporaries. What in effect Browning did in Paracelsus was to divide the poem into five sections or scenes, each a monologue by Aureolus Paracelsus, ‘a student’, with occasional interruptions by three other characters—Festus and Michal, husband and wife, described as ‘his friends’, and Aprile, thought to be inspired by Shelley, described as ‘an Italian poet’. These three took the roles, mostly, of auditors and sometimes prompts, iterating his moods at a critical point in his life. In each section, Paracelsus examines the state of his own inner life. By means of the insights he successively gains, he is enabled to act.
Rather more clearly, in his preface to the poem, Browning defined its intended form: ‘I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such only so long as the purpose for which they were first instituted is kept in view. I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all those restrictions, only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves and all new facilities placed at an author’s disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected. It is certain, however, that a work like mine depends more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success: indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, should connect the scattered lights into one constellation—a Lyre or a Crown.’
The poem is not notably dramatic, nor is it a linear narrative, nor is it lyric. It is light years away in its obscure allusions, recondite references, novel form, and difficult philosophy from the comparatively undemanding verse narratives of, say, Sir Walter Scott (who was nevertheless considered difficult even by some contemporary critics) or, for that matter, the familiar brio and theatricality of Byron’s verses. If it required strenuous mental effort from a perceptive critic, it stretched to incomprehension the limits of the common reader whom Browning, however flatteringly, expected to co-operate with him, engage with him, in the very creation of the poem. Paracelsus was, in the modern term, ‘interactive’—it depended, as Browning said in his preface, ‘more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success’.
For the meantime, however, the common reader confirmed the most dolorous expectations of Moxon. The light-minded reader in 1835 preferred the sentimental verse of Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (who died in 1838 at the age of 36, styled herself in life for the purposes of authorship as ‘L.E.L.’, wrote several novels and copious poetry, attracted to herself a reputation for indecorous romantic attachments that caused her to break off her engagement to John Forster) and Felicia Dorothea Hemans (who was responsible in 1829 for the poem ‘Casabianca’ and its famous first line, ‘The boy stood on the burning deck …’); preferred, too, gift books of mawkish poetry, and other such comforting, easily digestible products, after-dinner bon-bons or bon-mots that demanded no effort or response more than an easy smile, a wistful sigh, a romantic tear or any momentary rush of unreflecting, commonplace feeling. Nothing but the most banal expression of sentimental emotion was likely to succeed in the market for new poetry. Robert accepted that a work such as Paracelsus, even if lucky enough to find a publisher ready to print it, would be not only a short-term casualty of the early nineteenth-century crisis in poetry publishing but even, in the long term, might stand more as a succès d’estime than as a source of short-term financial profit or a lasting resource of popular taste. It would have to be enough in the mid-1830s that a few discriminating readers should read Robert Browning and—so far as they were able—appreciate what he was trying to do and say.
Paracelsus partook of the times not only in the experimental nature of its form, for the first half of the nineteenth century was an age of experiments and advances: it positively incorporated new thinking and new ideas and conflated them with the occult wisdom of the Renaissance, another distinct period of new thinking, new art, new science, and new technology. In The Life of Robert Browning, Clyde de L. Ryals
(#litres_trial_promo) points to Browning’s assimilation of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century scientific findings in biology, geology, and other sciences, to the extent that he was later to claim, very reasonably, that Paracelsus had anticipated Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (published in 1859) by some quarter of a century. Objecting to an assertion that he had ever been ‘strongly against Darwin, rejecting the truths of science and regretting its advance’, Robert only had to look back to find ‘all that seemed proved in Darwin’s scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning: see in Paracelsus the progressive development from senseless matter to organized, until man’s appearance.’
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Since all things are in nature, and Paracelsus was a natural philosopher and scientist, inexhaustibly desirous to plumb the secrets of nature (in Renaissance terms, an alchemist), it is hardly surprising that he appealed to Robert Browning as a bridge between science as it had been understood by the ancients and the perception of science by savants in his own age. Science itself was appropriate as a convenient vehicle for comment upon the facts of life that have always been known in one way or another, in one philosophy or another, but have been variously interpreted, when not entirely lost or forgotten or ignored, from generation to generation.
When Paracelsus died in 1541, he disappeared from the ken of all but the most esoteric scholars. Chesterton comments, wonderingly, on Browning’s choice of poetic protagonists—‘the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as that they are of no importance in ours’. In his choice of Paracelsus, Browning’s ‘supreme type of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful misers of dust. But for all that’, says Chesterton, ‘Browning was right.’ There could have been no better choice than Paracelsus, claims Chesterton, for Browning’s study of intellectual egotism and, he says, the choice equally refutes any charge against Browning himself that he was a frigid believer in logic and a cold adherent of the intellect—the proof being that at the age of twenty-three Browning wrote a poem designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy.
The entire poem is daringly experimental in form and philosophy: in both respects, it attempts to strip away the phenomenal world to reveal the noumenal world; to strip man of his physical integuments and reveal his psychical nakedness; to bare nature and reveal the natural. In the process, Robert Browning somewhat stripped himself psychologically bare: Paracelsus, for all his resolution after the personal revelations in Pauline, could not help but import some of his own state of mind and being into his work. Authors almost invariably write out of their own state of mind and being—there’s no help for it except rigorous self-awareness which is difficult consciously to attain, improbable to try to impose, and almost impossible thereafter to maintain.
The last thing Paracelsus was intended to be was confessional, but as Betty Miller acutely points out, two of the characters in the poem—Michal (M for Mother) and Festus (F for Father)—can be interpreted as Mr and Mrs Browning. They speak ‘out of the social and domestic environment of Robert Browning himself’. They ‘reveal, and with a singular candour on the part of their creator, the attitude of Browning’s own father and mother towards their brilliant, if ill-comprehended son’. In the discussions between the sober Festus, the gentle Michal, and the impatient, aspiring student Paracelsus, she says, ‘we catch an echo of the family conflict that preceded … the renunciation of a practical for a poetic career’.
Anyone familiar even with the barest biographical details of Robert’s life at this time, and beginning to read Paracelsus, will immediately grant the truth of Betty Miller’s astute psychological insight. It is perfectly plain, the entire difficult crisis; there it is, unmistakably recognizable in the pages, more harrowingly true to the turbulent family emotions and Browning’s own deepest feelings than any second-hand biographical fact and fancy can conjure. But then, too, as Ryals suggests, Paracelsus moves ‘back and forth between enthusiastic creation of a construct or fiction and sceptical de-creation of it when as “truth” or mimesis it is subjected to scrutiny’.
(#litres_trial_promo) With a poet as self-conscious at this time as Robert Browning, it should not easily be assumed that he would be unaware of using, even in disguise, his own life, its events and emotions; that he was not capable of a conjuror’s sleight-of-hand with a pack of cards, or an alchemist’s trick of turning lead into gold; that he would not make and unmake even these materials—now you see them, now you don’t; now lead, now gold—with as much ruthless facility as any others.
There is no real dispute, either, about Betty Miller’s judgement that, ‘In form, Paracelsus lies between the confessional of Pauline and the theatrical on which Browning wasted so many years. It is the closest of his early works to the dramatic monologues of his best period.’ Paracelsus did not make money for Browning, but it profited his reputation mightily. Future works would be styled and recommended as being ‘By the author of Paracelsus’. At the age of twenty-three, Robert Browning was a candidate for fame within London literary and theatrical circles. Paracelsus did not entitle him to a named and reserved seat in the Academy, far less the Siege Perilous at the literary round table; but he went confidently out and about, elegant and accomplished, affable and amusing, loquacious and learned, marked by those who mattered in the contemporary court of the London literati.
On 6 May 1835, the great actor-manager William Charles Macready was catching up with the most improving new books, reading ‘the pleasing poem of Van Artevelde’ that had so distressed Edward Moxon by its failure to recoup its costs. Reaching his London chambers, he found ‘Talfourd’s play of Ion in the preface to which is a most kind mention of myself’. Later in the day he called on the famously provocative young dramatic and literary critic John Forster, who was agitatedly considering a duel in Devonshire before thinking better of it.
(#litres_trial_promo) Macready was forty-two years old, and had succeeded to the place vacated on the English stage by the death of the actor Edmund Kean, whose grotesque, pathetic last performance of Richard III at Richmond had so much impressed and inspired Robert.
Macready was less barnstorming than Kean, who had acted vividly in the best Romantic manner, and he was certainly more seriously, in terms of intellect and artistry, attentive to the texts he produced and performed. He was ambitious, not only personally but for the English stage as a whole. Kean’s behaviour and attitudes, Macready considered, had brought the business of acting (‘my pariah profession’) into disrepute—though the low reputation of the English stage had never been higher than the sensational moral history of its best-known reprobates and its lowest hangers-on. It was Macready’s duty, as a rectitudinous Victorian—and, as he privately admitted, a reprehensibly envious rival of the disgraceful Kean—to raise the cultural level of the theatre to the virtue attained by the finest of the fine arts, to the most salubrious literary heights; in short, to purge the theatre of its most vicious elements and inspire it to the highest moral and artistic standards.
This ideal represented Macready’s conventional middle-class Victorianism crossed with his passionate egalitarianism, which, much as it reprobated the vile standards of the stage, also snobbishly scorned the high disdain and low virtue of society. Unfortunately for Macready, the English stage and its audiences resisted his energetic idealism.
On 27 November, Macready presented himself for dinner at the house of William Johnson Fox in Bayswater. ‘I like Mr Fox very much,’ wrote Macready in his diary entry for that day; ‘he is an original and profound thinker, and most eloquent and ingenious in supporting the penetrating views he takes.’ From which encomium we may take it that Macready and Fox harmoniously agreed, or amiably agreed to disagree, on most political, religious, and artistic matters. The evening got better still. ‘Mr Robert Browning, the author of Paracelsus, came in after dinner; I was very much pleased to meet him. His face is full of intelligence. My time passed most agreeably. Mr Fox’s defence of the suggestion that Lady Macbeth should be a woman of delicate and fragile frame pleased me very much, though he opposed me, and of course triumphantly. I took Mr Browning on, and requested to be allowed to improve my acquaintance with him. He expressed himself warmly, as gratified by the proposal; wished to send me his book; we exchanged cards and parted.’ The acquaintance warmed to the degree that on 31 December, the last day of 1835, Browning and five other guests were regaled with a dinner at Macready’s house where ‘Mr Browning was very popular with the whole party; his simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention and won opinions from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.’
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Macready thought it noteworthy to write in his diary on 1 February 1836 that John Forster ‘was talking much of Browning, who is his present all-in-all’. On 16 February, after one or two casual meetings, the acquaintance between Macready and Robert began to catch in earnest, to develop from personal friendship to professional association: ‘Forster and Browning called, and talked over the plot of a tragedy which Browning had begun to think of: the subject, Narses—a victorious general in the time of the Roman Emperor Justinian. He said that I had bit him by my performance of Othello, and I told him I hoped I should make the blood come. It would indeed be some recompense for the miseries, the humiliations, the heart-sickening disgusts which I have endured in my profession if, by its exercise, I had awakened a spirit of poetry whose influence would elevate, ennoble, and adorn our degraded drama. May it be!’
Robert was not only balm for Macready’s suffering professional soul; he found him personally soothing. Forster and the rest could be rumbustious and depressing: ‘My nerves and spirits were quite quelled by them all’; but Browning’s ‘gentle manners always make his presence acceptable’.
(#litres_trial_promo)Paracelsus, on the evidence of Macready’s diary entry for 8 December 1835—the day he finished reading the poem and set himself to considering it with the same professional eye of a player that he had brought to Talfourd’s Ion—would not do as drama—(which Robert had never intended that it should). The ‘main design of the poem’, according to Macready, ‘is not made out with sufficient clearness, and obscurity is a fault in many passages’. That said, however, he admitted the poem’s ‘most subtle and penetrating search into the feelings and impulses of our nature, some exquisite points of character, the profoundest and the grandest thoughts and most musically uttered. The writer is one whom I think destined for very great things.’
John Forster had been invited as a guest to Macready’s New Year’s Eve dinner at Elm Place, his house in the rural village of Elstree, and so it was by no remote chance that both Forster and Robert happened to be waiting with other Macready invitees earlier in the day at the ‘Blue Posts’ in Holborn, a boarding stage, for the same rumbling and bumping Billing’s coach that Macready himself used almost daily in his journeys to his London chambers from his country home and back again. Mrs Orr says that the introduction between Forster and Robert took place at Macready’s house, whereupon Forster inquired, ‘Did you see a little notice of you I wrote in the Examiner?’ From this point on, Forster and Robert seem to have been pretty constantly together. It was at Elm Place, too, that Robert first met Miss Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, a neighbour of Macready’s, a young woman some ten or eleven years older than Robert, interested in art and literature.
Narses was abandoned as a probable dramatic subject, and no more was heard of Forster’s and Browning’s interest in writing for the theatre, and for Macready in particular, until a few months later in 1826, when Macready acted in a production of Talfourd’s Ion at Covent Garden. The first night, dedicated as a benefit night for Macready (who, after thirteen years, had just abandoned Drury Lane and its abominable manager Alfred Bunn), was on 26 May. Macready, having taken the principal role before a starry audience of literary and legal luminaries, social celebrities, politicians, and peers, was ‘called for very enthusiastically by the audience and cheered on my appearance most heartily. I said: “It would be affectation to conceal the particular pleasure in receiving their congratulatory compliment on this occasion. It was indeed most gratifying to me; and only checked by the painful consideration that this might be perhaps the last new play I ever might have the honour of producing before them. (Loud cries of ‘No No!’) However that might be, the grateful recollection of their kindness would never leave me.”’
Macready repaired after the performance to Talfourd’s house in nearby Russell Square, where he ‘met Wordsworth, who pinned me; Walter Savage Landor, to whom I was introduced, and whom I very much liked; Stanfield, Browning, Price, Miss Mitford—I cannot remember them all.’
(#litres_trial_promo) There were some sixty people in all, crowding around one another in congratulatory mode. Macready was placed at the supper table between Landor and Wordsworth, with Browning opposite—which speaks well for Robert’s own status in the company. Macready perhaps forgot or omitted to give some detail in his diary for this tremendous day, but Mrs Orr supplies the information that when Talfourd proposed a toast to the poets of England, Robert was included in their number, named by his host as the author of Paracelsus, and he stayed put in his chair while glasses were raised to him; according to Griffin and Minchin, Wordsworth ‘leaned across the table and remarked, “I am proud to drink your health, Mr Browning!”’
(#litres_trial_promo) This story is rubbished by Betty Miller, who points out that Robert had never much liked Wordsworth’s poetry or his politics and would not have been particularly flattered by the grand old placeman’s compliment—even if Wordsworth had been there to make it: he had gone home before the toasts were offered. The story has survived even the firm evidence that contradicts it.
Years later, on 24 February 1875, Robert wrote to the Revd Alexander B. Grosart to explain, with some embarrassment, why he had attacked Wordsworth in ‘The Lost Leader’, a poem published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845: ‘I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerable personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account: had I intended more, above all, such a boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about “handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon.” These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet; whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular about-face of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore.’
Wordsworth had abandoned liberalism, Robert’s preferred political position, and by so doing he had proved himself, in Robert’s estimation, that most disgraceful and detestable thing—a traitor. Throughout Robert’s poetical canon there are hissing references to the turpitudinous characters of turncoats. Unpleasant revenges, as unsparing as in Dante’s Inferno, are invented for them.
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote …
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There will be further occasions on which we will recognize that Robert Browning could be a good hater for the sake of conscience; this is one of the first and most significant. Wordsworth, heaped with honours, eulogized by friends and literary partisans such as Harriet Martineau, had become Poet Laureate in 1843. He had become, too, an object of absolute disgust for Robert, whose poem pulled no punches. This was not satire, this was not an elegant swipe: ‘The Lost Leader’ was a seriously-intended piece of lethal invective that found its mark not only through Robert’s authentic outrage but through his authentic poetic voice. His counterblast has stood as long as Wordsworth’s poetic reputation, and its venomous sting still poisons the old man in posterity.
There are other contradictions and misapprehensions concerning Talfourd’s famous party, none of them too surprising. It was a party celebrating a significant occasion; it was a party boiling and roiling with writers, actors, quantities of poets, lawyers, and journalists; and if it wasn’t an occasion for binding up old wounds and gouging open new ones, settling old scores and setting new grudges, for giving gossip and getting things wrong, then it can’t have been much of a party. But in fact it was all those things and more—it was a wonderful party. The more it is recalled, the more legends it accretes. The Ion supper is a sort of early Victorian charabanc, standing room only, for every notable of the period bundled and bumped together and bowled along, fired by their own fissiparous energies. Robert was noticed by one of the guests, Miss Mitford, who never forgot how he looked that night. Ten years or more later, in a letter of 1847,
(#litres_trial_promo) she wrote, ‘I saw Mr Browning once and remember thinking how exactly he resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes—and as to his poetry I have just your opinion of it—It is one heap of obscurity, confusion and weakness … I met him once as I told you when he had long ringlets and no neckcloth—and when he seemed to me about the height and size of a boy of twelve years old—Femmelette—is a word made for him. A strange sort of person to carry such a woman as Elizabeth Barrett off her feet.’
‘Femmelette’, applied to a man or a woman, means a feeble creature, lacking force and energy, a languishing, listless person, in distinct contrast to Miss Mary Russell Mitford herself, who tended to be pert. In 1836, she was a successful, middle-aged dramatist associated with Macready (who had taken roles in her plays); essayist; sometime poet (set on that path by the encouragement of Coleridge), and famous as the author of the sketches and stories that were published in 1832 as Our Village. Her nature was generally sunny, though she was as capable as anyone—and possibly more than some—of asperity and decided views. Perhaps Robert merely struck Miss Mitford as a little insipid, as at least modestly reserved: it was not his manner then to be full-voiced or conspicuously hearty. He would stand up for himself when necessary, but his mode was essentially placatory, as would be evident later to Macready when he noted Robert’s moderating, calming reaction to the impetuosity and hot-headedness of Forster.
The talk tended towards the literary and theatrical, and Macready ‘overtook Mr Browning as they were leaving the house and said, “Write a play, Browning, and keep me from going to America.” The reply was, “Shall it be historical and English: what do you say to a drama on Strafford?”’
(#litres_trial_promo) The Earl of Strafford had been in Robert’s mind, and even more to the fore in Forster’s mind since he happened to be writing the lives of Strafford and other statesmen of the period of Charles I, the Civil War, and the Commonwealth. Forster had temporarily stalled on his biographies, due partly to some personal difficulties with the fascinating Laetitia Landon, and Robert had been assisting him with some of the literary work on Strafford. Forster’s Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth was published in parts between 1836 and 1839 and his Life of Strafford had been published just a few weeks before the Ion party. Strafford was very much dans le vent.
Robert, seized by the idea of a great play for a great contemporary actor, delivered a full text some ten months later in March 1837. It might have been sooner—he was a fast writer once he had settled on his subject and theme—had he not been simultaneously working on the poem Sordello, which he had begun shortly after writing Pauline and which had already been displaced, to an extent, by the intervention of Paracelsus.
(#litres_trial_promo) Macready was willing to credit that Strafford, the play, would be his own salvation from some personal professional difficulties and rescue the English stage from the wretched condition into which it had sunk. Any play by Browning, for that matter, might do the trick, for he had surely seen John Forster’s imaginative, puffing article in March, in the New Monthly Magazine, entitled ‘Evidences of a new genius for Dramatic Poetry’, which declared, among other emphatic assertions, that ‘Mr Browning has the powers of a great dramatic poet’ and that his genius ‘waits only the proper opportunity to redeem the drama and elevate the literary repute of England’.
Macready, with his actor’s head sunk into his hands, might have felt his spirits rise a little. On 3 August 1836 Forster told Macready that ‘Browning had fixed on Strafford for the subject of a tragedy’. On 1 November, when Forster reported to Macready on the progress of Browning’s play, he praised it highly, but Macready feared that the young critic and would-be biographer of Strafford might be ‘misled as to its dramatic power; characters to him having the interest of action’. However, ‘Nous verrons! Heaven speed it! Amen!’ Despite pious sentiments, Macready began to feel faintly uneasy.
On 23 November, Macready confided to his diary that he ‘Began very attentively to read over the tragedy of Strafford, in which I find more grounds for exception than I had anticipated. I had been too carried away by the truth of character to observe the meanness of plot, and occasional obscurity.’ On 21 March 1837, when Macready and Robert read through Strafford together, he felt his heart fail. He is frank in his diary entry for that day: ‘I must confess my disappointment at the management of the story. I doubt its interest.’ Familiarity did not improve it. ‘I am by no means sanguine, I lament to say, on its success.’
On 30 March, Macready read the play to Osbaldistone, manager of Covent Garden, ‘who caught at it with avidity, agreed to produce it without delay on his part, and to give the author £12 per night for twenty-five nights, and £10 per night for ten nights beyond … Browning and Forster came in;’ records Macready in his diary for 30 March, ‘I had the pleasure of narrating what had passed between Mr Osbaldiston [sic] and myself, and of making Browning very happy.’ Macready suggested some further revisions that Robert ‘was quite enraptured with.’ Forster said he was trying to induce Longman to publish the text of the play. Robert asked if he could dedicate the play to Macready, who said ‘how much I should value such an honour, which I had not anticipated or looked for’. All of them, thoroughly pleased and in the highest good humour with one another and their prospects, looked forward to the production of Strafford, that most interesting new play by that great new dramatic poet Mr Robert Browning, and a stage success on the scale of, or surpassing, Talfourd’s Ion.
Dramatists, even authors of books, will repress a grim smile when they hear of a celebratory mood in which congratulations are exchanged in circumstances such as these. Elation is excusable, euphoria is understandable—it is the very air that is breathed in a moment of head-spinning optimism and rare agreement: it’s like bouncing on a spring mattress before the bed frame gives way and the whole company is tumbled down, some coming off with worse bruises than others. Macready held fast to his first and subsequent doubts about the stage worthiness of the play that Osbaldistone’s enthusiasm had made all the more urgent to resolve. He went over the play laboriously with Robert himself, and even drafted in Forster to meddle with the text and structure in an attempt to relieve Strafford of what he perceived as its ‘heaviness’ and stiffen what he felt to be its ‘feebleness’. He had read it to his wife Catherine and his children, who were ‘oppressed by a want of action and lightness; I fear it will not do.’
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Quarrels were not unfamiliar to Macready. On 12 April there was positively a dust-up between Macready, Forster, and Browning: ‘There were mutual complaints—much temper—sullenness, I should say on the part of Forster, who was very much out of humour with Browning, who said and did all that man could to expiate any offence he might have given.’ Forster, at Macready’s behest, had been worrying for a while at the text of Strafford and—by Macready’s account—seemed to agree with the great actor’s cuts and alterations. ‘He thought my view of the work quite a clear one, and in the most earnest spirit of devotion, set off to find and communicate with Browning on the subject—a fearful rencontre.’ In fact, Macready seems to have been anxious to ‘furnish Browning with a decent excuse to withdraw the play’, to the extent of trying to find out if the actors who had been engaged were ‘restive about their parts’. But no luck there: Macready was ‘disappointed at their general acquiescence’. In his diary for 13 April, Macready acknowledged that, when Forster returned with Robert in tow, ‘Forster … showed an absence of sense and generosity in his behaviour which I grieved to see. There was a scene.’
Quite what the dispute was about is not entirely clear. Whatever offence had been taken by Forster, and whatever its cause, he blew up and—not for the first time—lost his considerable temper. This feature of Forster’s personality was well known, and it was a worry to Robert, who confided in Macready ‘how much injury he did himself by this temper’. The dispute ended when Robert ‘assented to all the proposed alterations, and expressed his wish, that coûte que coûte, the hazard should be made and the play proceeded with’. This seemed satisfactory.
Until the next day. Macready wrote a detailed report in his diary on 14 April of how he found Robert at Forster’s where the poet-dramatist ‘produced some scraps of paper with hints and unconnected lines—the full amount of his labour upon the alterations agreed on. It was too bad to trifle in this way, but it was useless to complain; he had wasted his time in striving to improve the fourth act scene, which was ejected from the play as impracticable for any good result. We went all over the play again (!) very carefully, and he resolved to bring the amendments suggested by eleven o’clock this evening. Met Browning at the gate of my chambers; he came upstairs and, after some subjects of general interest, proceeded to that of his tragedy. He had done nothing to it; had been oppressed and incapable of carrying his intentions into action. He wished to withdraw it.’ Macready sent Robert for Forster and they both came back. They turned over all the pros and cons, for acting the play, for not acting the play. Finally they all decided to go ahead with Strafford, though Robert asked for more time to complete his alterations. ‘It was fixed to be done. Heaven speed us all!’ wrote Macready at the end of a difficult day.
It was one thing to deal with writers and critics, but that was not the end of it for Macready or the fate of Strafford: hardly even the beginning. For as soon as it was decided to perform the play, the complications and intrigues of staging it took over. On 20 April, all Macready’s doubts about the play recurred. He read Strafford again. He groaned. He sweated. He strongly feared its failure: ‘it is not good.’ He had had five days for his fears to be fed by the fact that Osbaldistone was on the verge of bankruptcy and had imposed ‘parsimonious regulations’. That is to say, the production budget had been slashed to the bone. The actors were playing up. Miss Helen Faucit, a fine young actress, only twenty years old and already a popular favourite with audiences, complained to Macready that ‘her part in Browning’s play was very bad, and that she did not know if she should do it. She wanted me to ask her to do it. But I would not, for I wish she would refuse it, that even at his late point in time the play might be withdrawn—it will do no one good.’
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Even as he learned his own part, Macready’s spirits fell further: he felt a certain obligation to Robert Browning that compromised his better judgement that he should withdraw for his own benefit; but he could not help hoping for an accident that should prevent performance, relieve his own decision to proceed, avoid the play and—worse—his own performance in the leading role being grievously hissed by a disappointed house, bringing down his own reputation as much as that of Browning to damnation. Browning might recover some ground and rescue himself with Sordello, but in his worst moments the worried actor considered that the inevitable failure of Strafford would mean it would be all up for the great Macready. ‘It will strike me hard, I fear. God grant that it may not be a heavy blow.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The sole chance for the play, he thought, would be in the acting: his own, at least. He had his doubts about the performances of some of his co-players.
And sure enough, the notices of the première of Strafford in the newspapers of 2 May, the morning after the first night, were nothing like as bad as Macready had anticipated: he was gratified to find them ‘lenient and even kind to Browning. On myself—the “brutal and ruffianly” journal observed that I “acquitted myself exceedingly well”.’ When Macready called that day on Forster and found Robert with him, he told him candidly that ‘the play was a grand escape, and that he ought to regard it only as such, a mere step to that fame which his talents must procure him.’ It had been, in Macready’s estimation, a narrow squeak. Some small ill-feeling still rankled between the three of them: Forster had written up the play in the Examiner, judging it more poetic than dramatic, which was to Macready’s mind a ‘very kind and judicious criticism’, though the judiciousness thereof was evidently not to Robert’s liking. Robert suggested that if Forster wanted any future tragedies, he should write them himself. Forster expressed himself hurt by Robert’s ‘expressions of discontent at his criticism’ which Macready thought had, if anything, verged on indulgence ‘for such a play as Strafford’ and he was cross at Robert’s ingratitude ‘after all that has been done for Browning’.
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The first night, on 1 May, had been a triumph: a full house; the end of each act attended with the plaudits of an enthusiastic audience; calls of ‘Author! Author’ from a partisan claque to which Robert did not respond—it is not clear whether he was even in the house—so that the hubbub took some time to die down; the critics generally positive, despite some serious shortcomings in the staging and the general dilapidation of Covent Garden. William Sharp writes sadly that ‘the house was in ill repair: the seats dusty, the “scenery” commonplace and sometimes noticeably inappropriate, the costumes and accessories almost sordid’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The less said about the acting and understanding of the actors, the better: though Robert himself had something to say in remarks he made to Eliza Flower, who communicated them eagerly in a letter to Sarah Fox: ‘he seems a good deal annoyed at the go of things behind the scenes, and declares he will never write a play again, as long as he lives. You have no idea of the ignorance and obstinacy of the whole set, with here and there an exception; think of his having to write out the meaning of the word impeachment, as some of them thought it meant poaching.’
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The exceptions were very likely Miss Faucit as Lady Carlisle and Macready as Strafford. Both had acquitted themselves well; she tender and affectingly pathetic, he majestic in bearing and bearded to resemble a Vandyke courtier of the period. Mr Vandenhoff as Pym had taken a purely perfunctory interest in his part, which he reportedly played with a nauseating, whining drawl; Mr Dale as Charles I was deaf as a post; and ‘The Younger Vane’, says Sharp, ‘ranted so that a hiss, like an embodied scorn, vibrated on vagrant wings throughout the house’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The part of the Queen, Henrietta Maria, was taken by Miss Vincent, fresh from her triumph at Drury Lane where she had played with Burmese bulls to the greatest satisfaction of her audiences. It was thus all the more to the credit of the play itself that it transcended these ignoble obstacles. The second night, when Robert sat ‘muffled up in the pit to feel the pulse of the audience’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the house received the play with warm-enough applause.
And so on through to the fourth night’s ‘fervid applause’ from an ‘admirably filled house’ and playbills announcing two further performances, one of which took place as advertised, the second fatally handicapped by the absence of Vandenhoff, who, having secured a better offer in America, jumped stage and took ship. He failed to turn up to play the important part of Pym, Strafford’s principal antagonist. The performance was cancelled. The play’s run was terminated. The precarious financial condition of the Covent Garden theatre collapsed entirely, and the promising young author, for his pains, got not a penny of his promised reward of £12 for even four, five, far less the projected first twenty-five nights, and he might whistle forever for the £10 for each of the ten nights further envisioned.
It was something, however, never mind if Robert had made little or no money from the play’s performances, that Longman had at least published the text of his play on the occasion of the first night of Strafford, 1 May. The Brownings had not been required to dip into their own purse to pay for the honour, though neither the book nor the play brought any profit to either party. Five months later, Macready took over the management of the Covent Garden theatre from Osbaldistone with a troupe of good actors, and for two years thereafter indulged his mission and pursued his ambition to improve the English stage. Robert himself stuck for a decent while to the vow of renunciation he had made in the hearing of Eliza Flower: it was to be six years before he next ventured near a stage or a theatre except as a regular spectator.
The blank verse tragedy that was Strafford took as its principal character the English statesman Sir Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford (1593–1641), who from 1639 was chief adviser to Charles I. In 1640, Strafford was impeached by the House of Commons. On a Bill of Attainder, and with the assent of the king, he was executed on Tower Hill. The action, such as it is, of Browning’s play—rather, the course of events from which the drama derives—is centred around the character of Strafford himself; his monarch, Charles I; his antagonist, John Pym, formerly Strafford’s closest friend; and his would-be lover, Lady Carlisle. It is a drama of crossed loves and conflicted loyalties, passions and prejudices, public and personal: Strafford loves Pym, who considers himself betrayed by his friend’s defection to the royalist cause; Strafford loves Charles I whose unworthiness and weakness betray his adviser’s loyalty and send him to the block; Strafford is loved by the unhistorical character Lady Carlisle, whose devotion he does not perceive, blinded as he is by his fatal commitment to the king.
Strafford had not been a critical failure—that the production had abruptly stalled due to external circumstances was no fault of Robert Browning’s, but the fiasco of the fifth night and the abrupt, untimely termination of the play’s intended run has tended to colour posterity’s judgement of its success. Of course posterity has also had an extended opportunity to judge the published text of the play and to review it in the light of developments in drama since 1837. It does not stand out conspicuously in the modern, revised history of the English theatre. It has enjoyed occasional amateur college productions, but it has never been professionally revived—nor is it likely to be. But for all that, Strafford in its time was well-enough received by contemporary critics and those playgoers who happened to see it before it fell off the stage into the pit of English literary and theatrical history.
Robert retired hurt—by the stage, by Forster, by the low conduct of venal and inadequate actors, by a general disgust—though his disappointment did not stop him associating with the many new friends he had made, frequenting the backstage green room when he attended the theatre, dining with Macready and Forster and Talfourd and the rest, all of whom welcomed his good company. He retired for extended periods to Camberwell where, in his room, succoured by his immediate family and surrounded by his familiar and fetish objects, pictures, and books, an idea for another historical play occurred to him. But mostly he set himself back to work on his interrupted poem, Sordello, which he intended to finish during a visit to Italy.
Prompted perhaps by his theatrical disappointments (it is good form to remove oneself abroad temporarily after an embarrassing dramatic disaster), and probably also to add colour not only to his own life but to his poetic work in progress, he embarked on his adventure in the afternoon of Good Friday, 13 April 1838. He sailed from London’s St Katharine’s Docks as the only passenger on the Norham Castle, a merchant vessel bound for Trieste on Rothschild business. It may be supposed that passage had been arranged for Robert by Reuben Browning.
The journey to Trieste, where he was dropped off by the ship’s Captain, Matthew Davidson, took seven weeks. It was as terrible in its episodes of almost Byronic high drama as in constantly wretched periods of dispiritingly low seasickness. It took a full week of gales and snow before they even reached Start Point, Devon. On 26 April, they were off Lisbon; the next day they were sixteen miles north-west of Cape St Vincent. They passed the Straits of Gibraltar on Sunday 29 April, and on 6 May they came upon an upturned boat off the coast of Algiers. On 13 May, they were seven miles from Valetta; the next day they sailed close to Syracuse and were briefly becalmed on 16 May within sight of Mount Etna. It took another fortnight before they reached Trieste. The next evening, 31 May, Robert left by steamer for Venice, where he arrived early on the morning of 1 June.
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A letter to Fanny Haworth in Elstree is normally quoted in full in any account of Browning’s life. It is worth repeating as a rare early example of Robert’s narrative prose. It is dated 24 July 1838, by which time he was back in Camberwell. The introductory passage has been partly quoted already—‘I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves … bite them to bits … snowdrops and Tilsit …’; it is a charming, literally flowery, preface to saying:
You will see Sordello in a trice, if the fagging-fit holds. I did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed thro’ the Straits of Gibraltar)—but I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you, two to the Queen … the whole to go in Book 3—perhaps. I called you ‘Eyebright’—meaning a simple and sad sort of translation of ‘Euphrasia’ into my own language: folks would know who Euphrasia, or Fanny, was,—and I should not know Ianthe or Clemanthe. Not that there is anything in them to care for, good or bad. Shall I say ‘Eyebright’? I was disappointed in one thing, Canova. What companions should I have? The story of the ship must have reached you ‘with a difference’ as Ophelia says,—my sister told it to a Mr Dow who delivered it, I suppose to Forster, who furnished Macready with it, who made it over etc. etc. etc.—As short as I can tell, this way it happened: the Captain woke me one bright Sunday morning to say there was a ship floating keel uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some floating canvas, and towed her towards our vessel. Both met half-way, and the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. Our men made the wreck fast, and went to breakfast in high glee at the notion of having ‘new trousers out of the sails,’ and quite sure that she was a French boat, broken from her moorings at Algiers, close by. Ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk) round her stanchions, and after a quarter of an hour’s pushing at the capstan, the vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were in the forecastle, and had probably been there a month—under a blazing African sun … don’t imagine the wretched state of things. They were, these six, the ‘watch below’—(I give you the results of the day’s observation)—the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard at first. One or two were Algerines, the rest Spaniards. The vessel was a smuggler bound for Gibraltar; there were two stupidly-disproportionate guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and [here Browning inserts three small drawings of the ship, noting (‘All the “bulwarks,” or sides at the top, carried away by the waves’)]—nay, look you, these are the gun rings, and the black square the place where the bodies lay. Well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up the aft deck, hauled up tobacco and cigars, good lord such heaps of them, and then bale after bale of prints and chintz, don’t you call it, till the Captain was half frightened—he would get at the ship’s papers, he said; so these poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the sea, the very sailors calling to each other ‘to cover the faces’: no papers of importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder and ball enough for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton &c that would have taken a day to get out, but the Captain vowed that after five-o’clock she should be cut adrift; accordingly she was cast loose, not a third of her cargo having been touched; and you can hardly conceive the strange sight when the battered hulk turned around, actually, and looked at us, and then reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some scoundrel French surgeon’s lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world: there—only thank me for not taking you at your word and giving you the whole ‘story.’
The image of the loosed boat as a ‘mutilated creature’ turning to look at Robert Browning and his shipmates before reeling off into a luridly effulgent sunset is stunning—worthy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, or any of the tuppence-coloured gothic horrors in Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World. Mrs Orr provides some supplementary detail, which Robert confided to Sarianna but withheld from Fanny as too sensational:
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Of the dead pirates, one had his hand clasped as if praying; another, a severe gash in his head. The captain burnt disinfectants and blew gunpowder, before venturing on board, but even then, he, a powerful man, turned very sick with the smell and the sight. They stayed one whole day by the side, but the sailors, in spite of orders, began to plunder the cigars, etc. The captain said privately to Robert, “I cannot restrain my men, and they will bring the plague into our ship, so I mean quietly in the night to sail away.” Robert took two cutlasses and a dagger; they were of the coarsest workmanship, intended for use. At the end of one of the sheaths was a heavy bullet, so that it could be used as a sling. The day after, to their great relief, a heavy rain fell and cleansed the ship. Captain Davidson reported the sight of the wreck and its condition as soon as he arrived at Trieste.’
Robert’s letter to Fanny continues with a brisk itinerary: ‘“What I did?” I went to Trieste, then Venice—then thro’ Treviso and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles, you will see.’ Presumably Robert means that Fanny will see them if not first in poetical form in Sordello, then certainly in other poems in due course—Pippa would soon and significantly pass, in April 1841, through delicious Asolo. ‘Then to Vicenza, Padua and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Inspruck (the Tyrol) Munich, “Wurzburg in Franconia”! Frankfort and Mayence,—down the Rhine to Cologne, thence to Aix-la-Chapelle, Liège, and Antwerp—then home.’ Robert here carefully blots out four lines, asking Fanny Haworth to ‘Forgive this blurring, and believe it was only a foolish quotation:—shall you come to town, anywhere near town, soon? I shall be off again as soon as my book is out—whenever that will be.’
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It may or may not have been true that Robert had written only four for sure, no more than six, lines of poetry: while the Norham Castle passed through the Pillars of Hercules (Robert being hauled up to the deck by Captain Davidson and supported in his tottering, nauseous state so that he might see the tremendous Rock of Gibraltar), and skirted the north African coast, he wrote either now on this first journey to Italy, or later on a second trip, one of his best known poems, ‘How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, written in pencil on the cover of Bartoli’s De’ Simboli Trasportati al Morale, according to Mrs Orr a favourite book and constant companion of Robert’s.
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert himself declared, in a letter of 20 October 1871 responding to an inquiry about the antecedents of the journey from Ghent to Aix, ‘I have to say there were none but the sitting down under the bulwark of a ship off the coast of Tangiers, and writing it on the fly-leaf of Bartoli’s Simboli; the whole “Ride” being purely imaginary.’ This seems definite, but Robert could be often contradictory and sometimes plain wrong in his recollections about where and when and how a particular poem was written.
‘We can imagine,’ says Mrs Orr with a sympathetic shudder, ‘in what revulsion of feeling towards firm land and healthy motion this dream of a headlong gallop was born in him.’
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three …
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
Better, perhaps, to think of happier times, of Robert inspired by this floundering journey on the swell of the sea to recall the first journey into Russia, and hear again in the slap of water against the sides of the Norham Castle the rhythmic beat of his own and Benkhausen’s galloping horses as they ran through northern Europe, their hooves thudding through the silences of white snow and green firs. He wrote, too, ‘Home Thoughts, from the Sea’, a short poem ‘written at the same time, and in the same manner’
(#litres_trial_promo)—in pencil on the cover of a book—a colourful riot of geography (‘Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away’), history (‘Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay’), and triumphant English victory (‘Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?—say’) in eight rhythmic, rhyming, ringing lines.
Not much remains of first-hand information about Robert’s first excursion to Italy and his journey home through Germany and the Low Countries. On his return, he was back in touch with William Johnson Fox, that great man who, as Robert wrote to Fanny Howarth in April 1839, ‘is my Chiron in a small way’, referring to him as the possessor of a ‘magnificent and poetical nature’. Robert regarded Fox as ‘my literary father’ and took care to maintain the connection with him and his family. William Sharp
(#litres_trial_promo) reports a reminiscence of Fox’s daughter ‘Tottie’ (later Mrs Bridell-Fox), who wrote: ‘I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palaces, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced.’
Robert had spent two weeks in Venice out of his four in Italy, and images of his impressions would surface later in poems such as Pippa Passes, ‘In a Gondola’, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, and—significantly for the time being—in the work in hand, Sordello, the poem that is confirmed as having been in the making since at least 1835, and probably for a while before, very likely soon after Pauline. Robert wrote to Fox on 16 April 1835, in a letter referring to Paracelsus, that ‘I have another affair on hand, rather of a more popular nature, I conceive, but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two.’ This ‘other affair’, Sordello, had already been subject to several revisions since its inception in or about 1833, and would again be revised to incorporate first-hand impressions of the Italian sites and sights still remaining, however much altered, some six hundred years after the thirteenth-century troubador (trovatore or, more literarily, trouvère) Sordello had walked and talked among them.
On the day of his departure for Italy, Robert had written to John Robertson, a friend who was connected with the Westminster Review, to say, ‘I sail this morning for Venice—intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes.’
(#litres_trial_promo)Sordello, the poem, is also referred to in a letter to Fanny Haworth that Mrs Orr cannot date precisely but is likely to have been written in the summer of 1838 or 1839: ‘I am going to begin finishing Sordello—and to begin thinking a Tragedy (an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticism on Strafford) and I want to have another tragedy in prospect, I write best so provided: I had chosen a splendid subject for it, when I learned that a magazine for next, this, month, will have a scene founded on my story; vulgarizing or doing no good to it: and I accordingly throw it up. I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love, to contrast with the one I mean to have ready in a short time.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The plays he had in mind were to be King Victor and King Charles, and The Return of the Druses. With his hopes for the popular appeal of Sordello, and the prospective play devoted to a theme of ‘the most wild and passionate love’, it can be taken that Robert was aiming now at the wild hearts as well as the impassioned minds of the market for poetry and plays.
Which begs a question about the condition of his own heart: love, remarks Mrs Orr very astutely at this point, had played a noticeably small part in Robert’s life. His adolescent feelings of affection for Eliza Flower were never very serious, nor likely to be taken very seriously, considering her long-standing devotion to William Fox. No woman—so far as we know from the scant evidence remaining of Robert’s early years—detained his romantic attention or redirected it from the affection he maintained for his mother. Nobody else, for the time being, could count on being kissed goodnight every night by Robert Browning. Mrs Orr suggests that, in the absence of any personal experience of ‘wild and passionate love’, Robert turned to Fanny Haworth to supply the deficit, though what he supposed she might know of it is beyond conjecture. There was a lively sympathy, but no romantic feeling, between Robert and Fanny, and it would certainly have been indelicate, if not improper, for him to inquire too closely into the passions of an older, unmarried woman living cloistered at home with her mother. In a letter of April 1839, he tells Fanny direct, ‘Do you know I was, and am, an Improvisatore of the head—not of the hort [sic] …—not you!’
In March 1840, Edward Moxon, at the expense of Robert’s father, published Sordello—‘that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry’, as even the partisan William Sharp is obliged to describe the poem. Alfred Tennyson read the first line:
Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told,
and finally he read the last line:
Who would, has read Sordello’s story told,
whereupon he famously said that the first line and the last line were the only two lines of the poem that he understood and they were lies since nothing in between made any sense to him. Douglas Jerrold, at the time a well-known playwright and later an original staff member and contributor to Punch, is said to have started reading Sordello while recuperating from illness. No sooner had he picked up the book than he put it down, saying, ‘My God! I’m an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind’s gone. I can’t understand two consecutive lines of an English poem.’ He called his family to his bedside and gave them the poem to read. When they sadly shook their heads and could make no more of it than he could himself, he heaved a sigh of relief and, confirmed in his sanity, went to sleep. Thomas Carlyle wrote to say that he had read Sordello with great interest but that Jane, his wife, wished to know whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book.
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It is as well to get these three memorably funny stories dusted off at the start. They live forever in Browning’s life and legend, not just because they are sharply humorous or because they comfort our own confusion on reading the poem with the satisfaction of knowing that it confounded even the greatest intellects of its time, but also because they express a genuine, general bewilderment that explanations by critics of the poem’s form and expositions by researchers of the poem’s references have not wholly redeemed. Sordello has been incorporated into the fabric of English literature, but—still and all—its reputation persists, unfairly say some modern revisionary critics, as a notoriously difficult work, a monument to obscurity and a testament to tedium.
Robert Browning himself, says Sharp, came to be resigned to the shortcomings of Sordello as an accessible work of art: years later, ‘on his introduction to the Chinese Ambassador, as a “brother-poet”, he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression he particularly affected. The great man deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as “enigmatic.” Browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship.’ Sharp adds, rather nicely, that Browning’s holograph dedication of a copy of Sordello to a later friend, the French critic Joseph Milsand, read: ‘My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then or since.’
That was—and remains—simply true. George Santayana, in an essay, ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’, declares that if we are to do justice to Browning’s poetry, we must keep two things in mind: ‘One is the genuineness of the achievement, the sterling quality of the vision and inspiration; these are their own justification when we approach them from below and regard them as manifesting a more direct or impassioned glimpse of experience than is given to mildly blatant, convention-ridden minds. The other thing to remember is the short distance to which this comprehension is carried, its failure to approach any kind of finality, or to achieve a recognition even of the traditional ideals of poetry and religion.’ This latter qualification is now more disputed than the preceding encomium.
However, the estimation of Browning’s contemporaries was naturally foreshortened by the immediate, looming presence of Sordello, which had not then achieved the longer perspective of later critical perception nor the farther horizon of literary history. It was right under their noses. Sharp
(#litres_trial_promo) characterizes the poem as ‘a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan’. He compares its monotony to ‘one of the enormous American inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight’—which is a pretty way of dressing up the word ‘stagnant’. He regrets the ‘fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness’ and this, ‘coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, has been Browning’s ruin here’. Nevertheless, on the charge of Sordello’s obscurity, Sharp admits that ‘its motive thought is not obscure. It is a moonlit plain compared to the “silva oscura” of the “Divina Commedia”’—a tract of open country compared to Dante’s ‘dark wood’.
It is irresistible, though irreverent, to think of comparing Sordello to the smuggler’s ship that Robert came across on his voyage to Italy: the poem first setting sail on publication, heavily armed with emotion and erudition, fully ballasted with all the approved poetic paraphernalia, confident of successfully accosting and overwhelming readers and critics that cross its path, foundering on the unexpected obstacle of public bewilderment and upturned by a sudden storm of critical abuse, all hands dead, wounded, lost in attitudes of frightful prayer, finally righting itself and—with an ineffably battered dignity—turning to look mutely, uncomprehendingly at those critic-surgeons who butchered it and cast it adrift, reeling off into the sunset like a ‘mutilated creature’. It is a painful metaphor for the unsuspected end of a brave adventure.
As Chesterton remarks,
(#litres_trial_promo)Sordello is almost unique in literary history, in the sense that praise or blame hardly figured in its reception: both were overwhelmed by an almighty, universal incomprehension that stopped informed criticism in its tracks. ‘There had been authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with Sordello enters into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding.’ So far in his career, Robert’s reputation as a poet and playwright had seemed to be advancing much in step with those of his contemporaries. Pauline had fallen stillborn and anonymously from the press, but since nobody had noticed, nobody had heard the dull thud, its failure made no difficulties, and it had had the useful result of attracting the interested attention and positive regard of William Johnson Fox. Paracelsus had obtained a reasonable critical reception, though the poem itself had not sold out its first edition; and Strafford had been received with general enthusiasm, though how it would have fared in a longer theatrical run could never be known. So far, so good, all things considered: one undoubted failure, two moderate successes, nothing to be ashamed of (though Pauline remained decently veiled and in a permanent purdah). But Sordello suddenly blighted this promise in the bud.
Chesterton perceptively and properly disputes and demolishes the persistent myth of Sordello’s unintelligibility: its literary qualities, when perceived and understood, render the poem clearer. As Sharp admits, too, ‘its motive thought is not obscure’ and is perceptible to intelligent critical analysis. The final verdict on Sordello’s appeal to posterity may be given by Ezra Pound, who, perhaps exasperatedly, exclaimed, ‘Hang it—there is but one Sordello!’ And yes, there is no getting round it—we could not now or for the future do without Sordello, any more than Robert Browning could then or later have done without it. Since Pound regarded Browning as ‘my poetic father’, it is not irrelevant here to refer to T. S. Eliot, who admitted that Pound himself, in his time, suffered from being simultaneously judged to be ‘objectionably modern’ and ‘objectionably antiquarian’. The fellow-feeling and the sense of paternity that Pound bore for Browning is, in this sense, perfectly understandable.
The charge of Browning’s wilful obscurity, though it does not begin with Sordello, is sometimes attributed to Browning’s intellectual vanity and, by extension, arrogance. Chesterton speaks true when he says that ‘throughout his long and very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man who was intellectually vain.’ It is plain that, in his early career, he had little or no awareness that nobody knew as much as he did, and that that profound ignorance made him unaware that what was perfectly clear to Robert Browning was of the uttermost obscurity to almost everyone else. But that is a different matter: had he been aware of it, and had he made allowance for it, he would have committed a worse sin of being consciously condescending and patronising, of writing de haut en bas—which is one fault for which he is never successfully prosecuted.
‘He was not unintelligible because he was proud,’ says Chesterton, decisively and characteristically turning the difficulty on its head, ‘but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And because they were obvious, he fell into that concision of expression, allusion, and imagery which Sharp perceives as a fault and which, admittedly, compounded the unintelligibility of the poem for his readers. If Browning is accused of intellectual complexity, it is paradoxical that that complexity derives from his efforts to reduce it to a simplicity that, in the event, was fully comprehensible—and then only intermittently—solely to himself. By not writing down to his readership, Browning’s Sordello, says Chesterton, was ‘the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man’. It is a compliment that has not, then or now, been easily understood or greatly appreciated. The compliment was rebuffed, indeed, by the Athenaeum on 30 May with reference to the poem’s ‘puerilities and affectations’, and by the Atlas on 28 May which found Sordello full of ‘pitching, hysterical, and broken sobs of sentences’.
Even Macready finally gave up on the book: ‘After dinner tried—another attempt—utterly desperate—on Sordello; it is not readable.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Only Fanny Haworth had much good to say for it, a kindness to which Robert responded gratefully in a letter to her of May 1840: ‘You say roses and lilies and lilac-bunches and lemon-flowers about it while everybody else pelts cabbage stump after potato-paring—nay, not everybody—for Carlyle … but I won’t tell you what [Richard Monckton] Milnes told me Carlyle told him the other day: (thus I make you believe it was something singular in the way of praise—connu!).’ In fact, it is pleasing to report that Carlyle did have a good word to say.
Nobody now reads Sordello—or if they do, not idly, not without a good reason, and rarely without a concordance conveniently to hand. This is fair enough: Robert himself, in later life, when asked to explain a reference in one of his poems, was obliged to reply that once God and Browning knew what he meant, but ‘now only God knows’. And in modern times, quite aside from the poem’s literary difficulties, its sheer length—divided into six cantos (or ‘Books’) it amounts to five or six lines short of a total of 6,000 lines—is a deterrent to the casual reader. Chesterton is kindly inclined to exonerate Browning, finally, on the grounds of innocence and inexperience: ‘The Browning then who published Sordello we have to conceive, not as a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from each other.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Substitute, then, for Sharp’s image of ‘the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan’, the idea of Robert Browning as a Laocoön entangled in the coils of serpents so intertwined that they become one indistinguishable, roiling mass. Robert, all unwitting, called up leviathans from the vasty deep of his unconscious mind and conjured them off the pages of his conscious reading, so that they devoured him.
‘A very great part of the difficulty of Sordello,’ instances Chesterton, ‘is in the fact that before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of Browning’s actual narrative, he is supposed to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epochs—the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in medieval Italy.’ Griffin and Minchin
(#litres_trial_promo) say that, ‘In 1844, when Browning landed at Naples, among the first sights that met his view were advertisements of the performance of an opera on Sordello’, and that as late as 1910 (the publication date of their biography) ‘in the windows of Italian bookshops, one may see paper-covered volumes on the legend of Sordello and of the Ezzelini family who figure so prominently in Browning’s poem’. This is like saying an Italian arriving in London and seeing advertisements of the performance of a play on the Earl of Strafford would know instantly the historical treat he might expect from a stage version of the story, or that paper-covered volumes on the legend of Richard the Lionheart and Blondel the troubador would immediately engage his attention with a thrill of long familiarity.
Chesterton and others might later, with hindsight, excuse Sordello on several counts, but youth, except by the special indulgence of Mrs Orr,
(#litres_trial_promo) cannot be one of them. In 1840, Robert was twenty-eight years old and henceforth, says Mrs Orr, ‘his work ceases to be autobiographic in the sense in which, perhaps erroneously, we have felt it to be’. Erroneously, certainly, if we take it to be true-to-fact; not so far off the mark if we take it and interpret it, in the light of the known biographical facts about Browning, as perceptive emotional self-confession. His future work will, says Mrs Orr, be ‘inspired by every variety of conscious motive, but never again by the old (real or imagined) self-centred, self-directing Will … in Pippa Passes, published one year later, the poet and the man show themselves full-grown. Each has entered on the inheritance of the other.’
Chesterton picks up this cue from Mrs Orr and runs with it a little further, saying that Sordello ‘does not present any very significant advance in Browning on that already represented by Pauline and Paracelsus. Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent phrase used about the first by Mr Johnson Fox, “confessional” … Browning is still writing about himself, a subject of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant.’ And Chesterton, like Mrs Orr, recognizes Pippa Passes as a significant step forward not only in the technical development of Browning’s poetry but in the personal development of the poet himself. Both speak in a new voice from another place.
Poetry was the principal string to Robert’s bow; but he could not help pulling on another, trying to shoot a true arrow from it. As he had written to Fanny Haworth, it suited his way of working to keep several things on the go simultaneously. This is interesting to know, but nothing to make too much of: it is not uncommon—few writers conscientiously finish one job (book, play, poem or essay), dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s, before committing themselves to the next. Writers tend to work on several (more than one, anyhow) projects in parallel rather than serially or consecutively, and none of them will ever be at the same stage of development at the same time. It is only pedants and plodders and publishers who insist that one cannot do two things (or three, or four or more) at the same time. Since Strafford, Robert had taken his opportunities to keep up and broaden his acquaintance with the theatre and those associated with it. The untimely death of Strafford had been a blow, but his fascination with the stage had not died with it. Somewhat smoke-scented, its feathers a little ruffled, shaking out the ashes and preening the charred tips from its wings, the phoenix of Robert’s theatrical ambition was ready for another flight.
Macready, in his tenure as manager of Covent Garden (he reigned there from 30 September 1837 to 18 July 1839), was one focus of Robert’s attention; another was the well-disposed William Johnson Fox. Between Macready and Fox, two substantial rocks in the social life of London, Robert was naturally pulled by the eddies and currents that flowed around and between them into contact with a wide literary, legal, political, and social acquaintance.
This included men such as Charles Dickens (exactly Browning’s age and already prolific, with Sketches by ‘Boz’, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby under his belt); Walter Savage Landor (the famously and intractably temperamental poet, dramatist, and polemicist, recently returned from Italy after bitter separation from his wife); Edward Bulwer (the fashionable novelist, playwright, and politician who was to become Bulwer-Lytton in 1843, when he inherited the great house Knebworth from his mother, and thereafter first Baron Lytton); Daniel Maclise (the Irish portrait and history painter); Leigh Hunt (who had personally known Byron, Shelley, and Keats and whom Robert liked for his childlike nature and because he had rescued Shelley’s heart from the funeral pyre on the beach at Viareggio and now treasured it, along with a wisp of Milton’s hair, in his collection of literary relics); John Forster, of course, who was by now a close friend of Dickens and was to become his biographer; Richard Henry (sometimes Hengist) Horne (adventurer, critic, sometime editor of the Monthly Repository, author of plays that were never acted); Richard Monckton Milnes (later the first Baron Houghton, a tremendous social swell of wide literary and political acquaintance who amassed a large library of pornography that included the thrillingly wicked works of the Marquis de Sade); the literary and legal lion Thomas Noon Talfourd; and other playwrights, critics, actors, and men and women of fashion who thronged the times, the theatres, the salons and the dinner tables of London.
From the time of Strafford, Robert became a regular diner-out: he seems, indeed, rarely to have refused a decent invitation. Such social activity was useful: having attracted the public eye, he was not about to drop out of its sight. Acquaintance with the author was more sought after than with his books: Robert was talkative, intelligent, personable, and—having got over early reserve in company—was by now confident in conversation and socially assured. By chance, fatefully, when dining at Talfourd’s in 1839, Robert made the acquaintance of John Kenyon, described by Mrs Orr as being at that date ‘a pleasant, elderly man’, who turned out to have been a schoolfellow of Robert’s father.
(#litres_trial_promo) This encounter led to the reunion of Mr Browning and Mr Kenyon, who were as delighted with one another in their advancing years as they had been as schoolboys. This first meeting after so long a break prospered into an enduringly warm friendship with the whole Browning family. Mrs Orr quotes from a letter, dated 10 January 1884, from Robert to Professor Knight of St Andrews, some twenty-eight years after Kenyon’s death: ‘He was one of the best of human beings, with a general sympathy for excellence of every kind. He enjoyed the friendship of Wordsworth, of Southey, of Landor, and in later days, was intimate with most of my contemporaries of excellence.’
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At about this time—even the thorough Mrs Orr cannot put an exact date on it—the Brownings moved to a larger, three-storeyed house, Hanover Cottage, to be near Jane Browning, Robert the First’s widow, who had moved nearby from Islington with her daughter Jemima and son Reuben. A letter conjecturally dated December 1840 by Robert to William Macready specifically states, ‘we remove into a new house, the week after next,—a place really not impossible to be got at’, and another to Macready, which on internal evidence must be dated no earlier than 1840, gives ‘Hanover Cottage Southampton [St]’ as Robert’s address. The reference to Southampton [St] must be provisional. To Laman Blanchard, the author of Offerings, Robert wrote in April 1841 to advise him of his new address: ‘if, in a week or two you will conquer the interminable Kent Road, and on passing the turnpike at New Cross, you will take the first lane with a quickset hedge to the right, you will “descry a house resembling a goose-pie”; only a crooked, hasty and rash goose-pie. We have a garden and trees, and little green hills of a sort to go out on.’ Mr Browning’s books, six thousand and more, were lodged in ‘the long low rooms of its upper storey.’
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Robert’s description of the house as ‘resembling a goose-pie’ has vexed many Browning scholars, who have scoured all of literature to discover an appropriate association. One might offer to this inquiry the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and perruquier Allan Ramsay, who became a bookseller in Edinburgh and promoted the city’s first circulating library. He built a round house known as the ‘Goose-Pie’ on the lower slopes of the Edinburgh Castle hill, above what are now the Princes Street gardens. Perhaps—and it’s not unlikely: Carlyle would have known them—Robert had read Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany, a collection of Scottish songs and ballads, the first volume of which was published in 1723, or The Ever Green (1724), which contained Ramsay’s revisions of representative work by the late medieval Makars of Scotland, notably the great poets Dunbar and Henryson. From Ramsay’s editions of Scottish poetry Robert might have gone on to glean a little gossip about Ramsay’s life, and a house known as the ‘Goose-Pie’ is striking enough to have stuck in anyone’s memory to be retrieved later as an amusing and typically recondite reference.
Mr Browning’s stepbrother Reuben, Robert’s young uncle, was allowed to put up York, his horse, which Robert was encouraged to ride, in the stable and coach-house which was attached to the house and accessible from it. The horse was groomed by the gardener, who was also responsible, with Mrs Browning, for the large garden ‘opening on to the Surrey hills’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sarianna spoke later of trees in the front of the new house, and Mrs Orr refers specifically to a white rose tree in the garden under which lived a toad which became so much attached to Robert that it would follow him about and suffer him to tickle its head. Hanover Cottage was larger than the family’s previous house and is referred to in several literary memoirs of the period, always with affection and respect for the warmth of its welcome to Robert’s guests.
After Strafford, Robert’s brain teemed with ideas for further dramatic productions, including an adaptation of a ballad, ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’, just lately published by John Payne Collier (who in 1840 founded the Shakespeare Society and busied himself thereafter with falsifications and forgeries in folios of Shakespeare’s plays that are the subject of academic debate to this day). His interest in the ballad was eclipsed by another rendering of it in dramatic form by Richard Hengist Horne in 1837, but no matter; there were other subjects. He wrote two plays, King Victor and King Charles and Mansoor the Hierophant (later retitled The Return of the Druses), both of which were submitted to Macready for his attention and refused by the great actor.
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On 5 September 1839, Macready ‘Read Browning’s play on Victor, King of Sardinia—it turned out to be a great mistake. I called Browning into my room and most explicitly told him so, and gave him my reasons for coming to such a conclusion.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert was not best pleased: Macready records in his Diary for 20 September a meeting with Forster who ‘told me of Browning’s intemperance about his play which he read to Fox, Forster, etc.’. On 6 August 1840, Macready was in another dilemma: Robert had delivered the text of The Return of the Druses. Macready sighed and despaired: ‘with the deepest concern I yield to the belief that he will never write again—to any purpose. I fear his intellect is not quite clear. I do not know how to write to Browning.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That he evidently found something to say is evidenced by a letter from Robert to Macready dated 23 August. It begins: ‘So once again, dear Macready, I have failed to please you! The Druzes [sic] return in another sense than I had hoped.’ On 12 August, Robert called on Macready and they talked, Macready giving his frank opinion both on Sordello and The Return of the Druses and ‘expressing myself most anxious, as I am, that he should justify the expectations formed of him, but that he could not do so by placing himself in opposition to the world.’ Nevertheless, Macready promised to read the play again.
On 27 August, Robert called at Elm Cottage, Elstree, to retrieve his manuscript. He came upon Macready before the great actor-manager had finished his bath, ‘and really wearied me with his obstinate faith in his poem of Sordello, and of his eventual celebrity, and also with his self-opinionated persuasions upon his Return of the Druses. I fear he is for ever gone. He speaks of Mr Fox (who would have been delighted and proud in the ability to praise him) in a very unkind manner, and imputed motives to him which on the mere surface seem absurd … Browning accompanied me to the theatre, at last consenting to leave the MS. with me for a second perusal.’
In his letter of 20 August to Macready, Robert had vigorously defended his play, in terms that it is not difficult to imagine he defended it to others, to anyone who would listen indeed, and had finished by hoping that The Return of the Druses might ‘but do me half the good “Sordello” has done—be praised by the units, cursed by the tens, and unmeddled with by the hundreds!’ The failure of Sordello and Macready’s plain misunderstanding of the finer points of his plays, which Robert was more than willing to explicate and exculpate, had caused the poet-dramatist to lose some of his customary aplomb, and the old actor to doubt the man’s sanity. Convinced of the inevitability of his future celebrity, Robert was anxious to promote it in poetry and in performance.
There is a note of panic in his attitude at this time, in his attempts to salvage a career that looked likely to be cut short by the incomprehensible incomprehension not only of the public but of his literary and dramatic peers. Little wonder that his behaviour and remarks (even about those he knew to be his supporters) might be somewhat intemperate and contributed to a reputation in the world that was doing him no good.
After yet another reading of Robert’s ‘mystical, strange and heavy play’, Macready could not revise his original opinion: ‘It is not good.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He wrote to say as much to Robert, who, two days later, on 16 August, turned up to collect his rejected manuscript.
There was no lasting difficulty for the time being between the two men, no serious disruption of their sociability: Robert continued to attend Macready’s plays, met him with mutual friends, dined with him. Mrs Orr supposes that Macready’s Diaries, edited for publication, omit some of the detail surrounding the production of Robert’s third attempt at a performable play—A Blot in the ’Scutcheon—which was produced at Drury Lane on 11 February 1843. This was some three years after Robert had written it, to judge by references in an undated letter to Macready that is likely to have been written before the end of December 1840. In this letter Robert says, in effect, third time lucky: ‘“The luck of the third adventure” is proverbial. I have written a spick and span new Tragedy (a sort of compromise between my own notion [i.e. in the Druses] and yours—as I understand it at least) and will send it to you if you care to be bothered so far. There is action in it, drabbing, stabbing, et autres gentillesses,—who knows but the Gods may make me good even yet? Only, make no scruple of saying flatly that you cannot spare the time, if engagements of which I know nothing, but fancy a great deal, should claim every couple of hours in the course of this week.’
This is a conciliatory, even faintly humble letter. It certainly counts on Macready’s patience and good grace, and concedes that some dramatic action might be required to hold the attention of the playgoing public. He is prepared to give Macready what he wants if Macready will take what Robert wants to give. Such diplomacy had become necessary: Macready was losing faith in his young dramatist. Robert’s correspondence includes a couple of letters to Macready, dated 26 April 1842, in which he tries to drum Macready into stating his intentions towards not only The Return of the Druses but also A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.
In Macready’s edited Diaries there is a curious silence about the play he calls Blot until 25 and 26 January 1843, when he refers to reading it. On the Saturday, 28 January 1843, there had been a reading of Blot during which the actors had laughed at the play. Macready told Robert of the actors’ reaction and ‘Advised him as to the alteration of the second act.’
On 31 January, Macready went to the Drury Lane theatre. ‘Found Browning waiting for me in a state of great excitement. He abused the doorkeeper and was in a very great passion. I calmly apologized for having detained him, observing that I had made a great effort to meet him at all. He had not given his name to the doorkeeper, who had told him he might walk into the green-room, but his dignity was mortally wounded. I fear he is a very conceited man. Went over his play with him, then looked over part of it.’ By 7 February, Blot was in rehearsal and Robert had recovered his temper. But there were difficulties looming. Macready, right up to the last minute, was considering significant alterations to the play that were resisted by Robert: on 10 February ‘Browning … in the worst taste, manner and spirit, declined any further alterations … I had no more to say. I could only think Mr Browning a very disagreeable and offensively mannered person. Voilâ tout!’ But Macready thought that about a lot of persons who contradicted or even mildly discomposed him, so this judgement on this playwright at this time can be taken with a pinch of salt. Tempers, in any case, were short all round. The next day, Robert reappeared at the theatre. He ‘seemed desirous to explain or qualify the strange carriage and temper of yesterday, and laid much blame on Forster for irritating him’. Macready ‘directed the rehearsal of Blot in the ’Scutcheon, and made many valuable improvements’, though the acting left something to be desired.
On 11 February the three-act tragedy A Blot in the ’Scutcheon was performed to no great acclaim. The play lasted three nights before it disappeared forever from Macready’s repertoire. The Times shortly declared it to be ‘one of the most faulty dramas we ever beheld’, and on 18 February the Athenaeum unkindly laid into the play: ‘If to pain and perplex were the end and aim of tragedy, Mr Browning’s poetic melodrama called A Blot in the ’Scutcheon would be worthy of admiration, for it is a very puzzling and unpleasant piece of business. The plot is plain enough, but the acts and feelings of the characters are inscrutable and abhorrent, and the language is as strange as their proceedings.’
(#litres_trial_promo) On 18 March, Macready records in his Diary: ‘Went out; met Browning, who was startled into accosting me, but seeming to remember that he did not intend to do so, started off in great haste. What but contempt, which one ought not to feel, can we with galled spirit feel for those wretched insects about one? Oh God! how is it all to end?’ One thing had certainly ended: the association and friendship between Robert and Macready, which was not resumed for some twenty years thereafter. When they did cross one another’s paths, as happened on 4 June 1846 at a garden party, Robert cut Macready: ‘Browning—who did not speak to me—the puppy!’
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Most of the preceding account leading to production of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon has been told from Macready’s point of view, taken from his Diaries (as edited for publication). Robert Browning’s side of the matter is naturally somewhat different in detail and emphasis. Much later in life, he gave his own version to Edmund Gosse, and Mrs Orr
(#litres_trial_promo) publishes in full a letter of 15 December 1884 to Frank Hill, in which Robert thanks Hill, then editor of the Daily News, for suppressing a paragraph referring to A Blot in the ’Scutcheon in an article about the theatre. What Robert had to say to Gosse pretty much corresponds with the frank account he disclosed to Hill. Additionally, a letter from Joseph Arnould to Alfred Domett substantially describes, from his own firsthand observation, the play’s first night; and finally a letter from Charles Dickens recommending the play completes the full knowledge we have of this crisis in Browning’s professional life before his personal life was about to be thrown into upheaval.
Macready, it should be understood by connoisseurs of the backstage drama to A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, was experiencing severe domestic as well as professional difficulties in the early 1840s, some of which were public knowledge, some of which were public gossip, and some of which were nobody’s business but Macready’s. When, in October 1841, he took over the management of the Drury Lane theatre, he needed new plays to add to his existing repertoire and John Forster, on 29 September 1841, had ‘importuned’ him to read A Blot in the ’Scutcheon. Macready, although doubtful of Browning’s ability to write anything ever again, and despite his wavering faith in Forster himself, whose intemperate enthusiasms by now matched not only his intemperance of character but increasingly his intemperate taste for the bottle, read Browning’s Blot and was not impressed. Forster, too, by now had his doubts about the play, which was dispatched to Charles Dickens for a third opinion. Dickens did not reply for a year. When he did, on 25 November 1842, Forster showed the great novelist’s response to Macready. Dickens’ letter read:
Browning’s play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most earnest feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. It is full of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and beautiful in its vigour. I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred’s recurrence to that ‘I was so young—I had no mother.’ I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it. And I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played: and must be played, moreover, by Macready … And if you tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.
This letter, as quoted by Forster in the biography he later wrote of Dickens, was not in fact known to Robert Browning until, some thirty years later, he read it in Forster’s Dickens. This unqualified testimonial to the sublimities of Blot put Macready in a difficult position: Dickens’ opinion could not be ignored. The plot and sentiments of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon had deeply affected Dickens not just as an objective critic, but subjectively for deep-seated reasons of his own that served to heighten his enthusiasm for the play, which took the eighteenth century for its setting and family pride as its theme.
Lord Henry Mertoun, a landowner, asks Lord Tresham for the hand of his sister, Mildred, in marriage. Tresham, delighted, agrees. When Tresham is told by an aged servant that Mildred has been entertaining a secret lover—identity unknown—in her room, he confronts this clandestine cloaked figure and they fight. In the course of the duel, the secret lover—Lord Mertoun himself, whose awe of his idol Tresham has inspired his covert activity—is fatally wounded. Tresham, overwhelmed by remorse, takes poison. Mildred, overcome by her own remorse, dies of grief in her brother’s arms. The stage is littered with three corpses, and a fourth—the play itself—is dead by the time the curtain falls on it. This is to put the matter of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon a little bluntly: it is easy enough to render it ridiculous as melodrama; but the sentiment of pathos and the irony of self-righteousness were not fully realized in its principal characters, who lacked not for Shakespearean speeches but for Shakespearean credibility of character. This, then, is the play that Robert conceived when, two or three years earlier, he had written to Fanny Haworth, ‘I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love.’
Joseph Arnould attended the play’s first night, a lengthy account of which he wrote for the benefit of Alfred Domett in May 1843:
The first night was magnificent (I assume that Browning has sent you the play). Poor Phelps did his utmost, Helen Faucit very fairly, and there could be no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience. The gallery—and of course this was very gratifying, because not to be expected at a play of Browning’s—took all the points as quickly as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the action far more than the boxes, some of whom took it upon themselves to be shocked at being betrayed into so much interest in a young woman who had behaved so improperly as Mildred. Altogether the first night was a triumph. The second night was evidently presided over by the spirit of the manager. I was one of about sixty or seventy in the pit, and we yet seemed crowded compared to the desolate emptiness of the boxes. The gallery was again full, and again, among all who were there, were the same decided impressions of pity and horror produced. The third night I took my wife again to the boxes: it was evident at a glance that it was to be the last. My own delight and hers, too, in the play, was increased at this third representation, and would have gone on increasing to a thirtieth; but the miserable great chilly house, with its apathy and emptiness, produced on us both the painful sensation which made her exclaim that ‘she could cry with vexation’ at seeing so noble a play so basely marred.
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Arnould’s letter also painted in the background, backstage machinations, and mischief-making that, as much as the obvious shortcomings of the play, contributed substantially to its failure. The fault was not all Robert Browning’s, even allowing for the profundity of his anxiety that did him no good in the way it influenced his own behaviour towards Macready. Macready had his own agenda in respect of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon that contributed to its short, disastrous run, and it is possible that he deliberately undermined the play by orchestrating a bad reception for its performances.
Robert Browning’s own scrupulously detailed version to Frank Hill of the Daily News in a letter of 15 December 1884 reads thus:
Macready received and accepted the play, while he was engaged at the Haymarket, and retained it for Drury Lane, of which I was ignorant that he was about to become the manager: he accepted it ‘at the instigation’ of nobody,—and Charles Dickens was not in England when he did so: it was read to him after his return, by Forster—and the glowing letter which contains his opinion of it, although directed by him to be shown to myself, was never heard of nor seen by me till printed in Forster’s book some thirty years after. When the Drury Lane season began, Macready informed me that he should act the play when he had brought out two others—‘The Patrician’s Daughter’ and ‘Plighted Troth:’ having done so, he wrote to me that the former had been unsuccessful in money-drawing, and the latter had ‘smashed his arrangements altogether:’ but he would still produce my play. I had—in my ignorance of certain symptoms better understood by Macready’s professional acquaintances—I had no notion that it was a proper thing, in such a case, to ‘release him from his promise;’ on the contrary, I should have fancied that such a proposal was offensive. Soon after, Macready begged that I would call on him: he said the play had been read to the actors the day before, ‘and laughed at from beginning to end:’ on my speaking my mind about this, he explained that the reading had been done by the Prompter, a grotesque person with a red nose and a wooden leg, ill at ease in the love scenes, and that he would himself make amends by reading the play next morning—which he did, and very adequately—but apprised me that, in consequence of the state of his mind, harassed by business and various trouble, the principal character must be taken by Mr Phelps; and again I failed to understand—, what Forster subsequently assured me was plain as the sun at noonday,—that to allow at Macready’s Theatre any other than Macready to play the principal part in a new piece was suicidal,—and really believed I was meeting his exigencies by accepting the substitution. At the rehearsal, Macready announced that Mr Phelps was ill, and that he himself would read the part: on the third rehearsal, Mr Phelps appeared for the first time, while Macready more than read, rehearsed the part. The next morning Mr Phelps waylaid me at the stage-door to say, with much emotion, that it was never intended that he should be instrumental in the success of a new tragedy, and that Macready would play Tresham on the ground that himself, Phelps, was unable to do so. He added that he could not expect me to waive such an advantage,—but that, if I were prepared to waive it, ‘he would take ether, sit up all night, and have the words in his memory by next day.’ I bade him follow me to the green-room, and hear what I decided upon—which was that as Macready had given him the part, he should keep it: this was on a Thursday; he rehearsed on Friday and Saturday,—the play being acted the same evening,—of the fifth day after the ‘reading’ by Macready. Macready at once wished to reduce the importance of the ‘play,’—as he styled it in the bills,—tried to leave out so much of the text, that I baffled him by getting it printed in four-and-twenty hours, by Moxon’s assistance. He wanted me to call it ‘The Sister’!—and I have before me, while I write, the stage-acting copy, with two lines of his own insertion to avoid the tragical ending—Tresham was to announce his intention of going into a monastery! all this, to keep up the belief that Macready, and Macready alone, could produce a veritable ‘tragedy,’ unproduced before. Not a shilling was spent on scenery or dresses—and a striking scene which had been used for the ‘Patrician’s Daughter,’ did duty a second time. If your critic considers this treatment of the play an instance of ‘the failure of powerful and experienced actors’ to ensure its success,—I can only say that my own opinion was shown by at once breaking off a friendship of many years—a friendship which had a right to be plainly and simply told that the play I had contributed as a proof of it, would through a change of circumstances, no longer be to my friend’s advantage,—all I could possibly care for.
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One can hear Robert, in the course of this letter, warming to his reminiscence, waxing again with the indignation that through long years had not seriously cooled in his breast. If sin there had been in this dolorous sequence of events, it was that Macready had finally, fatally, been false to friendship. The heat of this disgrace flares through the letter, and Robert remarks that ‘my play subsists and is as open to praise or blame as it was forty-one years ago’. He is not about to encourage positively any latter-day production of the play: ‘This particular experience was sufficient: but the Play is out of my power now; though amateurs and actors may do what they please.’ In his account of an interview with Robert Browning on the subject of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, Edmund Gosse gives the Browning version a dramatic, journalistic, jaunty air that somewhat plays up the admittedly farcical aspects of the business that, nevertheless, caused Robert real pain. And Mrs Orr, uncharacteristically, cannot resist a humorous touch: ‘I well remember Mr Browning’s telling me how, when he returned to the green-room, on that critical day, he drove his hat more firmly on to his head and said to Macready, “I beg pardon, sir, but you have given the part to Mr Phelps, and I am satisfied that he should act it;” and how Macready, on hearing this, crushed up the MS., and flung it on to the ground. He also admitted that his own manner had been provocative; but he was indignant at what he deemed the unjust treatment which Mr Phelps had received.’
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The version according to Gosse admits what Robert had confessed in his letter to Hill: that he was not merely deceived in his dealings with Macready, but that his disappointments were founded less on simple misunderstandings than on total ignorance. Macready’s financial embarrassments only became clear to Robert on publication of the old actor’s diaries, and only in the light of these revelations, he wrote to Hill, ‘could I in a measure understand his motives for such conduct—and less than ever understand why he so strangely disguised and disfigured them. If “applause” means success, the play thus maimed and maltreated was successful enough: it “made way” for Macready’s own Benefit, and the Theatre closed a fortnight after.’
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Robert’s final excursion into the legitimate theatre was Colombe’s Birthday, which he finished writing in March 1844 but which was not produced until 1853—by Mr Phelps, as it happened, at the Haymarket Theatre, with Helen Faucit taking the role of the heroine. It played seven nights before vanishing forever from the boards of the London stage. The play had been originally written for Edmund Kean’s son, Charles, who was performing at Covent Garden and who was looking for new parts to play. His wife, Ellen Tree, was designated for the part of Colombe. Kean offered, it is said, £500 to Robert for a play, though Robert himself speaks in a letter to Christopher Dowson of ‘two or three hundred pounds’. But several complications got in the way of production. Kean wanted to postpone the play’s performance until Easter the following year; the engagement at the Haymarket was to be for twelve nights only; Kean was off to Scotland; Kean was a slow studier of new roles (a failing that incited Robert’s scorn as a fast-writing author). Robert was disinclined to ‘let this new work lie stifled for a year and odd, and work double tides to bring out something as likely to be popular this present season’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a disappointment that the play should not go immediately into production, particularly as Robert had been busy turning out other dramas—notably, Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy, which ‘I have by me in a state of forwardness’.
If A Blot in the ’Scutcheon had fragmented Robert’s friendship with Macready beyond ready repair, Colombe’s Birthday was to deal yet another devastating blow, this time to his friendship with John Forster. The play had been published by Edward Moxon as one of a continuing series of Browning’s works, and it was reviewed by Forster on 22 June 1844 in the Examiner. Forster concluded his generally respectful review with the fatal words, ‘There can be no question as to the nerve and vigour of this writing, or of its grasp of thought. Whether the present generation of readers will take note of it or leave it to the uncertain mercies of the future, still rests with Mr Browning himself. As far as he has gone, we abominate his tastes as much as we respect his genius.’ That did it for Robert Browning—until, a year later, Forster apologized, ‘very profuse of graciocities’ as Robert reported to Miss Barrett on 18 September 1845, and so ‘we will go on again with the friendship as the snail repairs its battered shell’. But the friendship was never the same, and much later there were no more than fragments of the shell strewn around to be trodden upon and utterly crushed.
To frustrate Macready’s attempts to edit or alter the text of his plays in production and performance, Robert had had them printed by Edward Moxon, who eventually suggested publishing Browning’s works at the expense of the Browning family as a continuing part work, a series of paper-covered pamphlets: ‘each poem should form a separate brochure of just one sheet—sixteen pages in double columns—the entire cost of which should not exceed twelve or fifteen pounds.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By using the same small, cheap type as was being used to print a low-priced edition of Elizabethan dramatists, Moxon could afford to offer bargain terms which Robert was quick to accept. The umbrella title of Bells and Pomegranates was, as usual, perfectly clear in its symbolism to Robert Browning, but he was obliged to provide some cues and hints to less erudite readers as to its origin. The perplexity of the general astonished Robert, but he finally, graciously explained that the intention was to express ‘something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought; which looks too ambitious thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred’.
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If this was still not clear enough, the reference to bells and pomegranates derived from the Book of Exodus, wherein is described the fashioning of Aaron the priest’s ephod: ‘And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about:/A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about.’ (Exodus 28: 33–4) There is poetry in the rhythm of these words and in their symbols, in the alternating images around the hem of the garment worn by Aaron whose ‘sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the Lord, and when he cometh out, that he die not’ (ibid., verse 35). Robert further explained that ‘Giotto placed a pomegranate fruit in the hand of Dante, and Raffaelle [Raphael] crowned his Theology (in the Camera della Segnatura) with blossoms of the same’—the fruit being symbolic of fine works.
The series of eight pamphlets was published over a period of some five years. It began in 1841 with Pippa Passes, a moderately long dramatic poem which Robert had written while he was finishing Sordello and after his trip to Italy. The second pamphlet, in spring 1842, comprised the text of an unperformed play, King Victor and King Charles. The third was Dramatic Lyrics, in November or December 1842. The Return of the Druses was the fourth pamphlet in January 1843. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, the fifth, was published on the day of its first performance on 11 February 1843. Colombe’s Birthday, published in March 1844, was the sixth pamphlet. The seventh in the series was a collection of short poems, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in November 1845. The final pamphlet, the eighth, on 13 April 1846, was the text of Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy, two unperformed plays.
These successive publications were prefaced in the first, Pippa Passes, with a dedication to Thomas Talfourd. The complete dedication, later omitted except for Talfourd’s name, expressed Robert Browning’s hopes and aspirations and also alluded subtly and ruefully to past experiences: ‘Two or three years ago I wrote a Play, about which the chief matter I much care to recollect at present is, that a Pit-full of goodnatured people applauded it:—ever since, I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. What follows I mean for the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals, and I amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again.’ The Pit-audience was to take its time—some twenty years—to applaud the eager poet-dramatist optimistic of acclaim and certain of celebrity.
A letter from Thomas Carlyle of 21 June 1841, acknowledging Robert’s gift of a copy of Pippa Passes and of Sordello, suggested some difficulties ahead: ‘Unless I very greatly mistake, judging from these two works, you seem to possess a rare spiritual gift, poetical, pictorial, intellectual, by whatever name we may prefer calling it; to unfold which into articulate clearness is naturally the problem of all problems for you. This noble endowment, it seems to me farther, you are not at present on the best way for unfolding;—and if the world had loudly called itself content with these two Poems, my surmise is, the world could have rendered you no fataller disservice than that same! Believe me, I speak with sincerity; and if I had not loved you well, I would not have spoken at all.’
Carlyle, in contemporary critical terms, was perfectly right, and much of what he had read of Robert’s work was obscure to him. On those grounds, critical and public discontent with Browning’s poetry was by no means a bad thing. His view that Robert had not yet come into full inheritance of his ‘noble endowment’ boiled down to a sort of headmaster’s mid-term report—in simple terms, ‘shows promise, could do better’. But of course, in Carlylean terms, it was not that simple. Carlyle continued sincerely but perhaps depressingly: his Scottish, rather Calvinistic, disposition assumed not only the value of struggle in itself but also the enhanced value of achievement as a result of it. What followed was virtually a moral sermon:
A long battle, I could guess, lies before you, full of toil and pain and all sorts of real fighting: a man attains to nothing here below without that. Is it not verily the highest prize you fight for? Fight on; that is to say, follow truly, with steadfast singleness of purpose, with valiant humbleness and openness of heart, what best light you can attain to; following truly so, better and ever better light will rise on you. The light we ourselves gain, by our very errors if not otherwise, is the only precious light. Victory, what I call victory, if well fought for, is sure to you.
Excelsior! was Carlyle’s hortatory word to Robert Browning who, if anyone, bore a banner with a strange, indecipherable device. Mocked and misunderstood, nevertheless the hero’s way led upward through—doubtless—a cold and lonely and desolate territory until the sunlit peak was reached. But even Carlyle recognized the difficulty. He kindly offered the weary wayfarer a short respite, a room for the night, as it were, where he could check his equipment, take his bearings, fully assess his commitment to the arduous journey ahead, consider the true philosophical meaning of the journey rather than be focused upon its artistic, symbolic value:
If your own choice happened to point that way, I for one should hail it as a good omen that your next work were written in prose! Not that I deny you poetic faculty; far, very far from that. But unless poetic faculty mean a higher-power of common understanding, I know not what it means. One must first make a true intellectual representation of a thing, before any poetic interest that is true will supervene. All cartoons are geometrical withal; and cannot be made till we have fully learnt to make mere diagrams well. It is this that I mean by prose;—which hint of mine, most probably inapplicable at present, may perhaps at some future day come usefully to mind.
Carlyle concluded his letter, sugaring the salt, by admitting to Robert that, ‘I esteem yours no common case; and think such a man is not to be treated in the common way. And so persist in God’s name as you best see and can; and understand always that my true prayer for you is, Good Speed in the name of God!’
Whatever Robert may have thought then of this letter would surely have been tempered later by a letter of 17 February 1845 from Elizabeth Barrett. She had sent her poems to Carlyle, who had evidently offered her the same advice as he had given to Robert Browning, and indeed freely to every other poet except Tennyson: ‘And does Mr Carlyle tell you that he has forbidden all “singing” to this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing? And have you told Mr Carlyle that song is work, and also the condition of work? I am a devout sitter at his feet—and it is an effort for me to think him wrong in anything—and once when he told me to write prose and not verse, I fancied that his opinion was I had mistaken my calling,—a fancy which in infinite kindness and gentleness he stooped immediately to correct. I never shall forget the grace of that kindness—but then! For him to have thought ill of me, would not have been strange—I often think ill of myself, as God knows. But for Carlyle to think of putting away, even for a season, the poetry of the world, was wonderful, and has left me ruffled in my thoughts ever since.’ And whatever Carlyle might think about Pippa Passes, the conception of it was, to Miss Barrett’s mind, ‘most exquisite and altogether original—and the contrast in the working out of the plan, singularly expressive of various faculty’.
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Thomas Carlyle was from the beginning, and remained, an important friend to Robert Browning and a significant intellectual influence in his life. On 5 May 1840, Macready attended a lecture by Carlyle. What it was about he could not recollect, ‘although I listened with the utmost attention to it, and was greatly pleased with it’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The title and subject matter of the lecture, which Macready could not well recall, was ‘The Hero as Divinity’. The second, on 8 May, he recollected very well: ‘“The Hero as Prophet: Mahomet”; on which he [Carlyle] descanted with a fervour and eloquence that only a conviction of truth could give. I was charmed, carried away by him. Met Browning there.’ Macready had met Robert at the earlier lecture, too, three days before. Robert also attended the third lecture, ‘The Hero as Poet’. This series of six lectures, the remaining subjects of which were ‘The Hero as Priest’, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, and ‘The Hero as King’, ran from 5 to 22 May. This lecture series, the sensation of the season, was published as that great and curious Carlylean work, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History in 1841.
Carlyle’s first impression of Robert Browning had not been wholly positive. Forty years later, Robert, in a letter of 18 March 1881,
(#litres_trial_promo) candidly admitted that Carlyle ‘confessed once to me that, on the first occasion of my first visiting him, he was anything but favorably impressed by my “smart green coat”—I being in riding costume: and if then and there had begun and ended our acquaintanceship, very likely I might have figured in some corner of a page as a poor scribbling-man with proclivities for the turf and scamphood. What then? He wrote Sartor [Resartus]—and such letters to me in those old days. No, I am his devotedly.’
Carlyle, seventeen years older than Robert, might deplore his dandyism, but he admitted his young friend to be beautiful, striking in his facial features, and possessing a full head of dark, flowing hair. Besides, the ‘neat dainty little fellow’ professed a marked enthusiasm for the philosophy of the Scottish philosopher whose intellectual distinction in London literary society added a lustre to his otherwise gaunt, somewhat dour appearance. As Carlyle got to know Robert better, he formed a close personal attachment to him and a high opinion of his capabilities. To Gavan Duffy, the young Irish nationalist, Carlyle declared Robert Browning to possess not only a powerful intellect but, ‘among the men engaged in England in literature just now was one of the few from which it was possible to expect something’. Browning, said Carlyle, responding in 1849 to Duffy’s suggestion that the poet might be an imitator of Coleridge’s ‘The Suicide’s Argument’ (first published in 1828), ‘was an original man and by no means a person who would consciously imitate anyone’.
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Robert and Thomas Carlyle had certainly met by 27 March 1839, when they are recorded as dining together at Macready’s table.
(#litres_trial_promo) In a letter of 30 December 1841 to Fanny Haworth, Robert tells her that he ‘dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people “dear,” in a hurry, except in letter-beginings!) yesterday—I don’t know any people like them—there was a son of [Robert] Burns’ there, Major Burns whom Macready knows—he sung “Of all the airts”—“John Anderson”—and another song of his father’s.’ This reference speaks confidently of some considerable intimacy and friendship beyond mere literary respect or intellectual hero-worship. In a letter to Robert of 1 December 1841, Carlyle lamented that, ‘The sight of your card instead of yourself, the other day when I came down stairs, was a real vexation to me! The orders here are rigorous. “Hermetically sealed till 2 o’clock!” But had you chanced to ask for my Wife, she would have guessed that you formed an exception, and would have brought me down.’ Carlyle goes on to invite Robert to pay visits on Friday nights for tea at six or half-past six. A letter of 1842 from Robert to Mrs Carlyle accepts an invitation to breakfast. Carlyle’s letters to Robert in this period are those of a man corresponding with an intellectual equal and a friend interested in the common domestic matters of life as well as the more rarefied matters of the mind and the human condition. Browning had, wrote Carlyle to Moncure Daniel Conway, ‘simple speech and manners and ideas of his own’. He was ‘a fine young man … I liked him better than any young man about here.’ And though Carlyle ‘did not make much out of’ Paracelsus, he conceded that ‘that and his other works proved a strong man’.
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Robert not only rode into town to visit Carlyle at his house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, but Carlyle rode out to Hatcham to visit the Brownings, whose decent domestic respectability he admired as much as the tidy trim of ‘the little room’ in which Robert kept his books. Perhaps Mrs Browning played the piano for him, perhaps Carlyle now and again burst into song. It was not unlikely—despite Elizabeth Barrett being convinced of his having ‘forbidden all “singing” to this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing’. Robert revealed to her, in a letter of 26 February 1845, an occasion a couple of weeks before when Carlyle had abruptly asked him, ‘Did you never try to write a Song? Of all the things in the world, that I should be proudest to do.’ It may be that Carlyle was mindful of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun’s remark in 1703, ‘I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Chr—’s sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ If he could not make a song, Carlyle could at least sing one. Six months before, Robert had heard the sage of Ecclefechan, the prophet of Craigenputtock, the great Cham of Chelsea, ‘croon if not certainly sing, “Charlie is my darling” (“my darling” with an adoring emphasis)’.
Of this enduring but improbable friendship, Chesterton puts the matter succinctly: ‘Browning was, indeed, one of the few men who got on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most other poets of the day, had something amounting to a real attachment to him … Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all companies.’
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Dramatic Lyrics had been published, at Mr Browning senior’s expense, in late November 1842. The pamphlet consisted of sixteen poems, fourteen of them new: ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ had already been published in the Monthly Repository in 1836. Moxon had suggested a collection of small poems for popularity’s sake, and so Robert had collected up poems he had written over the past eight years, during and after his trip to Russia. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (first titled ‘The rain set in early to-night …’) and ‘Johannes Agricola’ (first titled ‘There’s Heaven above …’) are said to have actually been written in the spring of 1834, in St Petersburg. ‘Cavalier Tunes’, a set of three poems—‘Marching Along’, ‘Give a Rouse’, and ‘My Wife Gertrude’ (later titled ‘Boot and Saddle’)—was probably written in the summer of 1842, arising out of Robert’s background reading for Strafford and coinciding with the two-hundredth anniversary of the Civil War. Sordello and Robert’s visit to Italy in 1838 had inspired ‘My Last Duchess’ (here titled ‘Italy’) and ‘In a Gondola’. ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is said to have come from reading in his father’s library. These, together with ‘Waring’, were to figure among Robert’s most famous poems and, with ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola’, are among the best known, best loved, and best studied poems in the English language, from high school to high table.
On first publication, Robert had been anxious to allay any interpretation of Dramatic Lyrics as expressing anything that might be construed as personal to the author. A plain disclaimer asserted: ‘Such poems as the following come properly enough, I suppose, under the head of “Dramatic Pieces”; being, though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.’ This was largely true in principle: the poems are not notably introspective but are mostly based on legend or history; they depend on dramatic action more than philosophical themes; and—with the exception of ‘Cavalier Tunes’—they are distinctly flavoured with Robert’s observations of nations and nationalities other than England and the English. The title of the collection also directs readers away from any psychological analysis: the poems are by an author recently known for dramatic works and the word Lyrics in the title specifically casts them back to the lyrical poetry of the Romantic poets. Of course, this is somewhat disingenuous—they are in a distinctively modern, Browning idiom.
Robert might have saved himself all the trouble of dissociating himself personally from the utterances in Dramatic Lyrics since the pamphlet attracted little or no attention from readers or critics. John Forster reviewed it, more or less admiringly, in the Examiner, writing that ‘Mr Browning is a genuine poet, and only needs to have less misgiving on the subject himself.’ But difficult, of course, to believe in one’s genuine poetic ability when nobody else notices it or pays good money to read it. Perhaps Forster meant, however, that Robert had identified his true manner in Dramatic Lyrics. If so, he was right. The pamphlet proved definitively, for the first time, Robert’s personal, inimitable mastery of the dramatic lyric and the monologue.
‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, a last-minute addition to fill up space in the volume, had been written for young Willie Macready, the actor’s eldest son, when the boy was ill in bed. Willie liked to draw pictures and had asked Robert for something to illustrate. His retentive mind recalled a story about the death of the Pope’s Legate at the Council of Trent from Wanley’s The Wonders of the Little World. Willie’s clever drawings inspired the final version of the improvised poem, now a nursery classic, which was perfectly designed to thrill an imaginative little boy:
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats. (ll. 10–20)
The poem is a perfectly structured, perfectly paced, perfectly psychologically judged dramatic story, perfectly suited to the human voice—to recitation, which Robert loved. If we are to look for the cadences of his own voice in conversation, we may look no further than ‘The Pied Piper’. Robert very likely enjoyed it as much as Willie. Indeed, it became one of his party pieces when entertaining at children’s parties. The rhythms are important here, just as they are in another poem in Dramatic Lyrics: ‘Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr’, said to have been composed on horseback in 1842. The thudding phrase ‘As I ride, as I ride’ resonates throughout the poem, just as effectively creating the sense of a rhythmic, steady gallop as the cadences of ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, published in 1845 in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics:
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. (ll. 7–12)
If ‘The Pied Piper’ was aesthetically a great dramatic success, no less were other poems in the pamphlet. Robert had been impressed by Tennyson’s poetry, though he preferred reality to Tennyson’s romance. It is this insistence on reality, rather than romance or sentiment, that gives such power not only in the fantasy of legend to the ambiguously happy though unambiguously moral ending of ‘The Pied Piper’, but also to the grim amorality of poems like ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’. Both these latter poems concern the murder of women. It is possible that the murderers in both are mad—fantasists to whom reality is a mirage; but to suppose any such thing is to flinch from Robert Browning’s insistence on character over the detail of narrative, in contrast to Tennyson’s emphasis on story over characterization. Ian Jack makes this important point: ‘Tennyson tells us that the old man who narrates the story is an artist, but we have to be told—whereas in Browning we would know from the smell of the paint.’
(#litres_trial_promo) G. K. Chesterton had earlier made this point in a different way: Robert knew about painting, sculpture, music, and the rest because he had practised painting, sculpture, and music with his own hands.
And in these two poems of muted horror, just as in the poems of action and adventure, the unemphatic pace of the narrative underlines the matter-of-fact nature of the act and its matter-of-fact acceptance:
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain. (ll. 33–42)
And we, too, are sure: the tenor of the lines might do just as well for telling us that her lover was tying Porphyria’s shoelaces as an act of humble homage. Just so the Duke, in ‘My Last Duchess’, refers to the death of his wife:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.’ (ll. 1–4)
Porphyria’s lover waits quietly for the rain to stop and the wind to die down, the girl’s ‘smiling rosy little head’ propped up on his shoulder.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word! (ll. 58–60)
Just so the Duke goes down to—possibly—dinner with his guest, calling attention casually on the stairs to another interesting work of art:
Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (ll. 53–6)
The Duke gave commands and his wife died; Porphyria’s lover wound her hair around her neck and strangled her: in neither case was there remorse or retribution; no police to break down the ducal door, no God to strike down Porphyria’s murderous lover with a thunderbolt. Like Johannes Agricola, similarly complacent, the murderers may have felt:
I have God’s warrant, could I blend
All hideous sins, as in a cup,
To drink the mingled venoms up;
Secure my nature will convert
The draught to blossoming gladness fast: (ll. 33–7)
The point about these characters—ruthless, cold, passionate, hot—is their natures, fully and subtly realized. Their actions depend upon in the act, and are informed in the aftermath, by their characters, and not vice versa. Murder is banal enough: it is the character who commits it who is the interesting subject, and Robert Browning is so much in complete control of the poem that gives the character to us fully-formed that we are largely unaware, on a first reading, of the artistry—the poetic authenticity, the artistic integrity—with which he does it.
Robert Browning, if his works were not often or generally read, was frequently and widely discussed among his friends. He breakfasted with John Kenyon, took six o’clock tea with the Carlyles, dined with Serjeant Talfourd, supped with Macready and William Johnson Fox. All these were social occasions that broadened his acquaintance and at which he was welcome for his confidence in conversation and aptitude for anecdote. Harriet Martineau, though mystified by Sordello, admitted that in conversation ‘no speaker could be more absolutely clear and purpose-like’ than Browning. ‘He was full of good sense and fine feeling, amidst occasional irritability, full also of fun and harmless satire, with some little affectations which were as droll as anything could be. A real genius was Robert Browning assuredly.’
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Joseph Arnould, writing in 1845 to Alfred Domett, described a dinner party at which Robert was also a guest: ‘Glorious Robert Browning is as ever—but more genial, more brilliant and more anecdotical than when we knew him four years ago.’ And yet, and yet, in this year, 1845, the polished social performance was becoming tedious to Robert, as though he were Macready toiling through a familiar role, night after night, in the same company of players, speaking the same words, throwing in a few ad-libs, in a long run of a popular play. Too often, it felt like an exercise in public relations.
In ‘Respectability’, published in Men and Women on 10 November 1855, Robert wrote:
How much of priceless time were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society’s true ornament.
In a letter of 12 March 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett, he wrote, ‘So you have got to like society, and would enjoy it, you think? For me, I always hated it.—have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by foregoing it I should let some unknown good escape me, in the true time of it, and only discover my fault when too late; and now that I have done most of what is to be done, any lodge in a garden of cucumbers for me!’ He does not ‘even care about reading now’, he confesses. ‘But you must read books in order to get words and forms for “the public” if you write, and that you needs must do, if you fear God. I have no pleasure in writing myself—none, in the mere act—though all pleasure in fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other!’ He supposes Miss Barrett likes ‘the operation of writing as I should like that of painting or making music … After all, there is a great delight in the heart of the thing; and use and forethought have made me ready at all times to set to work—but—I don’t know why—my heart sinks whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it.’
A month earlier, Robert had been writing to Miss Barrett about critics, trying to be fair-minded and even-handed in response to her inquiry about his ‘sensitiveness to criticism’. What he had said then was, ‘I shall live always—that is for me—I am living here this 1845, that is for London.’ For himself—‘for me’—he writes from a thorough conviction of duty, and he does his best: ‘the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope in nowise affect me.’ And yet, ‘I must, if for merely scientific purposes, know all about this 1845, its ways and doings’, and if he should take a dozen pages of verse to market, like twelve cabbages (or pomegranates, he might have said, but didn’t) he had grown himself, he should expect to get as much as any man for his goods. If nobody will buy or praise, ‘more’s the shame … But it does so happen that I have met with much more than I could have expected in this matter of kindly and prompt recognition. I never wanted a real set of good hearty praisers—and no bad reviewers—I am quite content with my share. No—what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place—enough to make an apostle swear.’
In this selfsame letter to Miss Barrett, a few lines previously, Robert had seized eagerly on her wish that they should ‘rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and I, on each side’
(#litres_trial_promo) and given himself up to her—and their developing correspondence—entirely: ‘I had rather hear from you than see anybody else. Never you care, dear noble Carlyle, nor you, my own friend Alfred over the sea, nor a troop of true lovers!—Are not these fates written? there!’ These fates were written—what about Robert’s own? The work—far less, or far more, the life, the entire fate of Robert Browning—seemed in 1845 to be in the balance: the achievement so far, what did it amount to? ‘What I have printed gives no knowledge of me—it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will—and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion … that I think—But I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end—“R. B. a poem”—’. At most, ‘these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you.’
This is the letter of a man whose lightning or lighthouse flashes illuminate his world fitfully and reveal himself, though captain of his own ship, becalmed on a dark flood. Robert’s perplexity and discouragement was of long standing. In short, he was depressed: the weeks passed, Carlyle talked wisely and beautifully, there had been quarrels with Macready and Forster, the rarely positive critical response to his work was pleasing enough but misguided, the plays were defunct, the poems had sold disappointingly. On 9 October 1843 he wrote to Alfred Domett, who had thrown up the law and disappeared to the colonies, to New-Zealand, ‘People read my works a little more, they say, and I have some real works here in hand; but now that I could find it in my heart to labour earnestly, I doubt if I shall ever find it in my head, which sings and whirls and stops me even now—an evening minute by the way.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps to still his whirligig head, or to give it something substantial to dance around, Robert sailed for Naples in the late summer of 1844.
As is the case with his previous journeyings abroad, precious few relics survive to substantiate the itinerary or illuminate the events. There is some dispute as to whether Robert wrote the poems ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’ and ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ on this voyage or on the first voyage to Italy—Robert himself said the one, then the other. And if he could not remember, then attribution by others is just as credible one way or the other. Mrs Orr is virtually the sole source of information for Robert’s second trip to Italy, and she gives no circumstantial detail about how he met ‘a young Neapolitan gentleman’, by name of Scotti, ‘who had spent most of his life in Paris’ and with whom, very likely, Robert talked his proper French and improved his vernacular Italian. Quickly becoming good friends, they travelled together from Naples to Rome, Scotti helpfully haggling over their joint expenses. ‘As I write’, reported Robert in a letter to Sarianna, ‘I hear him disputing our bill in the next room. He does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.’
(#litres_trial_promo) One can see why Robert, who had learned to be careful of money, should warm to a man with a mind similarly concentrated on his own short purse. Says Mrs Orr of Scotti, ‘he certainly bore no appearance of being the least prosperous’. In Rome, Scotti was judged by Countess Carducci—an acquaintance of Robert’s father—‘the handsomest man she had ever seen.’ But Mr Scotti ‘blew out his brains soon after he and his new friend had parted; and I do not think the act was ever fully accounted for’.
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We could wish to pause there, at that sensational moment, to inquire further about the impoverished Signor Scotti and his suicide: he sounds just the man, and his death just the circumstance, to stop Robert in his tracks to add his friend and his end to his repertory company of characters fit for a poem. But all we know of Robert’s time in Rome is that he visited Shelley’s tomb in the New Protestant Cemetery, in commemoration of which he wrote the few lines on ‘Fame’ which form the first part of ‘Earth’s Immortalities’, inspected the grotto of Egeria, the scene imagined by Byron of the supposed interview between King Numa Pompilius of Rome and the advisory nymph, and the recently restored church of Santa Prassede, close by Santa Maria Maggiore, where the tomb of Cardinal Cetive may have partly inspired the poem ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’. These are all occasions of the most tantalizing interest, and about which too little—if any—first-hand evidence exists.
We fall back upon Mrs Orr, too, for information about the journey home to Hatcham, via Livorno where he found Edward John Trelawny who had been an intimate of the poets Shelley and Byron. Trelawny might have been in a better condition to discuss the poets had he not been stoically—‘indifferently’, says Mrs Orr—enduring a painful operation to have a troublesome bullet dug from his leg by a surgeon. Trelawny’s cool fortitude struck Robert very much. That the veteran was able to talk at all, far less reminisce about poets and poetry, was very remarkable.
Robert returned from Italy in December 1844. During his absence, he had missed the much-acclaimed publication of Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s Poems in the summer of that same year; but once back in Hatcham he read the volumes, which, if they had not in themselves been of the greatest interest, would certainly have caught—or been brought to—his attention on account of two delicately allusive lines that ran:
Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate’, which, if cut deep down
the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
What, in 1844, did Robert know of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett? No more than anyone else, which wasn’t much in the way of first-hand information, far less reliable gossip—though uninformed speculation (it was said that Miss Barrett was completely crippled, unable to move) was never short as a negotiable commodity. The poet, essayist, and former seafaring man Richard Hengist Horne, who had experienced enough maritime and military adventure to qualify him as a Baron Munchausen (except that most of his tales, like those of ‘Abyssinia’ Bruce, were largely true) put it about that she was in very delicate health and had lived for years hermetically sealed in her room, her only contact with the outside world being through the medium of letters very erudite and literary in tone. He was more authoritative than most, since she had recently collaborated with him on a two-volume book, A New Spirit of the Age, in which ‘Orion’ Horne, ably assisted by the contributions of others (including Robert Browning as well as Elizabeth Barrett) had aspired to make a general estimate of contemporary literature without, alas!, possessing much literary ability or even critical faculty himself.
In retrospect, from the distance of our own times, Horne’s judgement in 1844, when the book appeared, was naturally coloured by the florid taste of his age, lengthily praising the likes of Talfourd, who is now not much more than a literary footnote to the period. But critical perspectives inevitably alter: to Horne’s credit, he did rate highly those big guns who have survived as literary heroes: Carlyle, Macaulay, Tennyson, and Dickens—though he’d have found it difficult not to notice them respectfully at appropriate length; and he devoted generous space to the ‘little known works of Mr Robert Browning’, whose Paracelsus he praised over five pages and whose Sordello, at the length of a dozen pages, he sorrowfully judged would remain obscure but to have been treated unjustly by critics since the poem, in Horne’s estimation, ‘abounded with beauties’. And so, her hand dabbled in Horne’s book, Elizabeth Barrett, the famously reclusive poetess, would have known not only of Mr Robert Browning’s work but, less intimately, something of the poet himself.
In his book, Horne reflected upon his collaborator’s invisibility among her contemporaries, supposing that future generations might doubt her very existence. But some, he knew, had actually seen her. Miss Mitford, for one, told him that Miss Barrett ‘lies folded in Indian shawls upon her sofa with her long black tresses streaming over her bent-down head, all attention’ while having her new poems read to her by an unnamed gentleman who, we suppose, must have been John Kenyon. Through the medium of Kenyon, then, we may also suppose that Robert learned more even than Horne gleaned from the gossiping Miss Mitford about the interesting lady poet who preferred to call herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett rather than to use her full family name of Barrett Moulton Barrett. From Kenyon, Robert received a manuscript poem, ‘Dead Pan’, written by Elizabeth, and Kenyon was happy to communicate Robert’s enthusiasm to its author.
In 1820, aged fourteen years, Elizabeth Barrett had privately published an epic, The Battle of Marathon, dedicated to her father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett. She had begun writing this at the age of eleven. Though imitative of the styles of Homer, Pope, and Byron, it was an impressive achievement—and would have been so if only by reason of its pastiche and precocious learning, far less as evidence of genuine poetic ability. This effort was followed the next year by ‘Stanzas, Excited by Some Reflections on the Present State of Greece’, published in the New Monthly Magazine (1821), and ‘Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron’ in 1824. In 1826, at the age of twenty, she published an Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, the printing costs being paid by Mary Trepsack, a Barrett slave from Jamaica, who lived in the Barrett household. Elizabeth’s correspondence with a family friend, Sir Uvedale Price, contributed substantially to Price’s Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages, published in 1827. On her own account, in 1832, she translated Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, published with Miscellaneous Poems in 1833.
All these were given anonymously to the world, until she finally put her name to The Seraphim, and Other Poems in 1838, and followed these verses with occasional poems and translations published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and in the Athenaeum. In 1842, she published three hymns translated from the Greek of Gregory Nazianzen and ‘Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets’. In 1844, there appeared her Poems, which famously included ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ (the story of a beautiful, talented, high-born lady who chooses to marry Bertram, a low-born poet, rather than a suitor of her own rank) and, within that poem, the references to Robert Browning’s own poems. Elizabeth Barrett was, by 1844, esteemed by the best and most influential literary magazines. Her classical and metaphysical learning, her poetic accomplishments, her mysterious reluctance to make any public appearances, all astonished and somewhat intimidated the literary establishment. There were some who muttered ungraciously about poetical obscurity and mysticism, but by and large her work was treated more reverently, more indulgently, than the irredeemable obscurities and impenetrable mystifications of Robert Browning’s poetry.
Some three years before, John Kenyon had attempted to arrange a meeting between Robert and Elizabeth. He had enthusiastically told her about him, him about her; he had discussed his poetry with her, hers with him; and at one point this middle-aged romantic go-between had almost brought his plan to a satisfactory conclusion, only to have it frustrated by Elizabeth putting off the encounter with a perfectly plausible, believable plea of indisposition—though in fact, as she admitted, it was because of her ‘blind dislike to seeing strangers’. Still, there it was—the reference to Robert Browning, in ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, and in the best poetic company, his work linked favourably, equal in rank, with ‘poems/Made by Tuscan flutes … the pastoral parts of Spenser—or the subtle interflowings/Found in Petrarch’s sonnets’.
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.’
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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 …”.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
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At first, Robert and Elizabeth contented themselves more or less with thoughtful, tentative criticism of each other’s work. She frankly admitted her faults (as they seemed to her): ‘Headlong I was at first, and headlong I continue … guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary—tearing open letters, and never untying a string,—and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning. And so, at your half word I flew at the whole one, with all its possible consequences, and wrote what you read.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But, she further admitted, ‘In art, however, I understand that it does not do to be headlong, but patient and laborious—and there is a love strong enough, even in me, to overcome nature.’
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’,
(#litres_trial_promo) 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 that enabled him to suit himself as to when, or even if, he should do anything at any time not of his own choosing. He owed this considerable liberty to the largely passive indulgence of his parents and his sister, who, for whatever reasons of their own, colluded with him in the gratification of his personal desires, apparently against the prevailing social values of middle-class self-reliance and self-improvement. It is interesting to consider how these apparently opposed yet very similar character traits—there’s no easily getting around the words ‘selfishness’ and ‘ruthlessness’—contended to get their own way in the great things of their lives at the expense of their conventional personal comforts.
Among her family and friends, Elizabeth was considered ‘delicate’: at least they had become accustomed to her presenting herself as a semi-invalid and had collaborated in treating her as such. In a letter post-marked 6 May, Elizabeth recommended sleep to Robert on the ground that ‘we all know that thinking, dreaming, creating people like yourself, have two lives to bear instead of one, and therefore ought to sleep more than others’; and for herself, ‘I think better of sleep than I ever did, now that she will not easily come near me except in a red hood of poppies.’ What we might now call her habit had been acquired over twenty-five years. In March 1845, Elizabeth was thirty-nine years old. Since the age of fifteen, and perhaps earlier, she had regularly been dosed with opium.
The Barretts, like the Brownings, had derived their fortune from the sugar plantations of the West Indies—though Robert’s father had renounced the trade on moral grounds, while Elizabeth’s father had continued to rely upon it for his income. Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, who came to England in 1792 at the age of seven and married Mary Graham-Clarke on 14 May 1805, was the grandson of Edward Barrett (usually known as Edward of Cinnamon Hill), a hugely rich Jamaican plantation owner who died in 1798. Edward’s father, Charles Moulton, was the son of another Jamaican family that also worked its plantations by slave labour. Charles seems to have been known for his savagery towards his slaves and, even for those times and in that place, acquired a bad reputation. Elizabeth, born to Edward and Mary on 6 March 1806, was formally christened with Edward, her younger brother by fifteen months, in February 1809. By that time, she had become known as Ba, an abbreviation for Baby—but the ‘a’ pronounced as in ‘babby’ rather than as in ‘baby’.
At the time of Elizabeth’s birth, the Barretts were living at Coxhoe Hall, near Durham, close to the Graham-Clarkes, but in 1809 Edward bought a property of some four hundred acres, Hope End, near Ledbury in Herefordshire, and moved his family (which by now included Henrietta, born on 4 March that year) to the house he almost immediately began—with an energy and taste for the exotic that William Beckford would have admired—to embellish, inside and out, in a Turkish style, to the extent of commissioning concrete and cast iron minarets from his architects. Edward’s neighbours might mutter about grandiosity and flamboyance, even of nouveau riche vulgarity, but he didn’t care; and Mary Barrett was captivated by a ‘beautiful and unique’ fantasy she thought worthy of an Arabian Nights story.
This extensive, expensive ornamentation of the house continued for nigh on ten years, in his absence as much as his presence. When Edward was not at Hope End, he was in London and Jamaica, attending to business. Mary’s business consisted in almost constant childbearing and child rearing: after Elizabeth, little Edward (known as ‘Bro’), and Henrietta (‘Addles’), at regular intervals of about eighteen months came Sam (known as ‘Storm’, ‘Stormy’, or ‘Stormie’), Arabella (‘Arabel’), Mary (who died young, aged four), Charles, George (‘Pudding’), Henry, Alfred (‘Daisy’), Septimus (‘Sette’), and—the youngest, born in 1824—Octavius (‘Occie’ or ‘Occy’). It was, by all accounts, not only a large but a mutually loving family, bossed by Elizabeth as the senior sister, and devoted to their sweet-natured, occasionally harassed mother. She in turn devoted herself to her dozen children, who occupied all her time. They were adored by their indulgent father, who took no great offence when his children were affectionately disrespectful. If anything, boldness and curiosity in his brood was encouraged: none of the children felt repressed, and they all looked forward eagerly to the fun they would have with him when he returned home from his business trips. They felt not just materially and emotionally safe, but, like little animals, secure in the predictable domestic routines and the regular disciplines of daily family prayers and other religious observances insisted upon by Mr Barrett. It was a fixed, solid world in which the Barretts, from eldest to youngest, were sure of their proper places—which did not exclude some natural jealousies and jostling for position—in the pecking order of Hope End.
If all this sounds like an idyll, it largely was. Hope End was an isolated rural property, deep in the agricultural west of the country, invisible from any road, silent but for bird song, and hedged from the outer world by dense foliage that to outsiders seemed oppressive. The Barretts lived in a quiet, secure, enclosed little world of their own, pretty much self-reliant and self-sufficient for their amusements. In this situation, Elizabeth discovered books at a very early age and her mother encouraged her to write about what she had read, nagging at her when her handwriting and critical standards didn’t come up to scratch. Supervised by Mary, Elizabeth ate up novels by Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, and begged for more. When a tutor was brought in to prepare Bro for school at Charterhouse, Elizabeth eagerly shared the lessons with her younger brother and learned Greek with him.
In April 1821, Arabel, Henrietta, and Elizabeth fell ill with headaches, pains in their sides, and convulsive twitchings of their muscles. They were treated, on the best medical advice, with a tincture of valerian, whereupon Arabel and Henrietta quickly recovered. Elizabeth did not, and in June she contracted a case of measles. It is at this time that she seems to have decided that she suffered from ‘natural ill health’, and her symptoms increased not only in quality but in quantity. She described her constant headache and her recurrent paroxysms—her ‘agony’—to her local and London doctors; how she swooned, the wild beating of her heart, her feeble pulse, the coldness of her feet, the constant pains in the right side of her chest that travelled round to her back, up to her right shoulder and down the arm. Margaret Forster succinctly describes how, ‘From the onset of menstruation middle-class women were encouraged to regard themselves as delicate creatures who must take great care of themselves. Vigorous exercise was discouraged, rest encouraged. Every ache and pain was taken seriously.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The result, too often, was a debilitated condition—a chronic invalidism at best; at worst, symptoms resulting from hysteria or a narcissistic hypochondria that derived from or provoked the social attitude that women were naturally weak, dependent creatures. Illness was considered to be virtually the norm for upper-and middle-class women: to be ‘pale and interesting’ was quite the thing; robust health was not fashionable.
Elizabeth, whose health in childhood had been good, allowing for seasonal coughs and colds, nothing to worry about in normal circumstances, was prescribed purgatives that gave little or no relief. Advice, of course trustfully taken and dutifully observed, to confine herself ‘in a recumbent posture’ for long hours every day to a sofa or bed probably only reinforced her condition. Her paroxysms continued at the rate of three a day, though none at night, and she began to complain that her spine was ‘swollen’. Though medical examination could detect ‘nothing obviously wrong with the spine’, she was put in a ‘spine crib’—a kind of hammock suspended some four feet off the ground—just in case a disorder of the spine should develop. It was at this point that laudanum—dried and powdered opium dissolved in alcohol—was prescribed for Elizabeth, who took this universal panacea with just as much thought as we might take any mildly palliative over-the-counter nostrum or prescription drug today. A solution of opium or morphine enabled her to sleep in a ‘red hood of poppies’. At first, the dose would have been mild, but in time she would come to depend upon taking up to forty drops a day, a serious quantity, and claim she could not do without it.
After a few months, Elizabeth recovered some of her usual high spirits. Her appetite improved, her symptoms of upper body pain and paroxysms abated, and she felt rested. But she continued to believe that she was truly suffering from a disease of the spine and, despite medical prognoses that she would make a complete recovery from ailments both real and imaginary, she behaved as though she were a chronic invalid with no hope of cure. Her body was as passive as her mind was active. For the next year, strung up in her spinal crib or recumbent on a sofa, she read voraciously, wrote quantities of gloomy verse, ‘sickly’ as she herself eventually characterized it, in the form of odes dedicated to her family, and continued her study of Greek. She read Shakespeare and the best modern poets—Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth—and became morbidly Romantic. She read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and became enraged about the sufferings of womanhood. Mary Wollstonecraft, in fact, affected her as deeply in her view of wedlock and subservience to men as Shelley’s atheism and vegetarianism had affected Robert. Elizabeth rejected romantic love and marriage as a snare she should take care to avoid. Robert had rejected the prospect of marriage less philosophically, rather as an unlikely adventure which, even if he should find a compatible partner, he could not financially afford.
In common, too, with the young Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett had determined in her teens that to be a poet was an honourable profession, that poetry was real work of deep spiritual and high artistic value, that she herself could become a proper poet—‘one of God’s singers’. Her ambitions extended far beyond the charming verses that young dilettantish women composed as prettily as they painted watercolours. Since Elizabeth’s parents, like Robert’s, were respectful of major poetry and serious poets, they made no difficulty about their eldest daughter’s devotion to such a creditable art and encouraged her aspirations. From the age of eleven, after all, she had shown not just promise, but uncommon ability. However they might privately enjoy the lighter-minded versifying of the other children, her parents and siblings soon learned that Elizabeth’s poems were no laughing matter and to tread warily if ever tempted to take them lightly. By the age of twenty-one, Elizabeth was a published poet. She had proved the worth of her work to herself and enjoyed the regard of those who valued it. To buy time to pursue her high vocation and continue her scholarly studies, she insisted on respect for the importance of her work and indulgence for her precarious state of health.
Her physical condition had markedly improved: she no longer rode or walked great distances or played boisterously with the younger children as she had done before her first illness, but she did stroll around the house and the gardens of Hope End and tutored her younger brothers in Latin. For the best part of the day, however, she closeted herself in her room, writing and reading in bed until late in the morning and preferring not to join the rest of the family when visitors were entertained. Now that her physical frailty had become established, accepted by custom and usage, she no longer had to emphasize her mysteriously non-specific weakness by regular consultations with doctors: coughings and a susceptibility to colds were enough to provoke sympathy and promote a collective agreement within her family that Elizabeth should be protected from anything that might worsen her delicate state of health. For intellectual stimulation, she corresponded lengthily with neighbours, older gentlemen such as Sir Uvedale Price (author, in 1794, of An Essay on the Picturesque, which introduced a new aesthetic category), Sir James Commeline (a local vicar and classical scholar), and especially with Hugh Stuart Boyd, a scholar, translator, and poet who lived at nearby Malvern Wells. She fell half in love with Mr Boyd, who was sadly afflicted with blindness, the only man outside her family that she consented to see and to make the effort to visit. But Mr Boyd, a gentleman of some moderate private means, happened to be married already and the father of children.
Mary Barrett, exhausted by the birth of her twelfth child, Octavius, in 1824, distressed by the death of her mother, Grandmother Graham-Clarke, and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, died at the age of forty-seven in October 1828. Elizabeth was twenty-two years old. As the oldest daughter, she might have been expected to take over the running of the Hope End household, but no such duty was imposed upon her. Instead, Aunt Bummy, Arabella Graham-Clark, an unmarried sister of Mary Barrett, came to live with the Barretts. She was forty-three years old, the same age as her brother-in-law, and capably took over the management of the household, so relieving Elizabeth of any domestic obligations. The death of his wife deeply affected Edward Barrett, who turned to religion for spiritual comfort.
On his trips to London he had fallen under the influence of the powerfully charismatic Scottish preacher Edward Irving who, by 1825, had started to go seriously off his theological head—and not quietly. Irving’s big moment of revelation arrived when, sensationally, he predicted the imminent second coming of Christ. From 1828, he began teaching Christ’s oneness with humanity in all its attributes and thus, heretically, to assert to his followers the sinfulness of Christ’s nature. Edward Barrett’s mind became infused with the Irvingite belief that salvation lay in purity, that translation to the next world, preferment in the afterlife, could be achieved only by remaining uncorrupted by this wretched and sinful world. Irving preached zealously to large crowds that flocked to hear his dramatic denunciations of the errors of turpitudinous humanity. His authority, he claimed, derived directly from God, whose mouthpiece he had become. As an instrument of the divine, Irving was regularly inspired to invoke the wrathful retribution of the Almighty upon the godless and the guilty.
Bereft of her mother, Elizabeth adhered emotionally to her father. They had always been close, though never dependent on one another. Edward Barrett’s feelings towards his eldest daughter were sympathetic towards her physical fragility and psychological sensitivity. His general conduct as a good paterfamilias was not exceptional: he could be severe when necessary in his principles of good Christian conduct, and strict, though not abusive, about correcting any backsliding among the young Barretts, though he tended to be more indulgent towards Elizabeth than towards the rest of his children. But now Elizabeth became clinging, resentful of his business trips to London, anxious even when he was out of her sight at home. She wept pitifully when he went away and wept for joy when he returned safely. It is now generally accepted that, in the first years after his wife’s death, Edward Barrett did not become abnormally possessive of Elizabeth: quite the reverse, in fact. If anything, it was Elizabeth who felt, however irrationally, abandoned and insecure to the extent that she became virtually reclusive and sought comfort to an unusual degree in the powerful protective presence and reassuring company of her father.
Mr Barrett, in turn, looked to his family for solace in his grief and loneliness. He was liable to fall into rages, justifiably or not, but he could generally put on a good-humoured face. If he was sometimes a beast, he was at least—like Dr Arnold of Rugby—a just beast. In whatever temper, thunderous or sunny, it was perfectly evident that he greatly missed his wife. As he turned inward upon himself and his children, so he excluded friends and barely tolerated the intrusions by various remote members of the Barrett and Graham-Clarke families. Like Elizabeth, he conceived a horror of visitors and refused to make visits to other houses. His children amply and affectionately returned his love for them, and so for a while their mutual need for security coincided. For the most part, harmony reigned throughout Hope End. Then, in 1830, just two years after the death of his wife, Edward Barrett’s mother died. His shock was unspeakable. He had no words to describe the immensity of his loss. For that matter, the entire Barrett family was shocked to the extent that they were all shackled even more securely together in the isolated house and in their passionate, almost exclusive involvement with one another.
Edward Barrett was experiencing other difficulties, beyond the deeply wounding, irreparable losses in his private life. Some long-standing business and financial worries, caused by sustained mismanagement of his interests in the West Indies and a damaging lawsuit, were brought to a head by a slave rebellion in 1832 on the Jamaican plantations managed by his brother Sam. Additionally, the imminent prospect of the complete abolition of slavery (which eventuated in 1833) implied higher production costs and an inevitable tumult in the price of sugar. The monetary losses would be severe. Hope End, a significant drain on his resources (it was heavily mortgaged and creditors were pressing), would have to be sold. He kept much of the land, but the loss of the house was bad enough. It represented, even worse, a loss of his fundamental security in the world after the deaths of his wife and mother, and a serious loss of face—humiliating evidence of failure. If such precious things could so easily slip from his grasp, what might he lose next? In fact, Edward Barrett was far from ruined: the prospect before him was not that he would be a poor man, but he would no longer be a rich man.
The Barretts left Hope End on 23 August 1832. Mr Barrett had taken a large, comfortable house by the sea at Sidmouth in Devon, and the family settled more or less cheerfully, at least without protest, into their new lives. Elizabeth slept soundly, her appetite increased, and her cough was less troublesome: perhaps the sea air had something to do with the revival of her health, and probably, too, the stimulation of a new, more open and extroverted environment after the backwater of Hope End was beneficial. It was as though a heavy burden of gloom had been lifted from the Barretts. The whole family, buzzing around the beach and enjoying a more active social life, felt better and looked healthier. They received local visitors and returned their calls—all except Elizabeth, who refused to visit or be visited by anyone and mostly stuck to her books.
Bro, Stormie, and George, the older brothers, were by now judged by their father to be adult enough to prepare themselves for employment in the world. Bro, twenty-five years old, travelled to Jamaica to help his Uncle Sam, while Stormie and George, aged sixteen and nineteen respectively, left to attend Glasgow University. Elizabeth experienced her familiar feeling that, as soon as any of the family disappeared from her sight, she might never see them again, lose them altogether; but she put up a brave front, appeared compliant of inevitable changes in family life, and applied herself even more diligently to her proper business of reading and writing until the family situation should, with any luck, return to normal.
The three Barrett brothers returned to Sidmouth in 1835. At the end of the year Mr Barrett announced that, for the sake of his sons, the family would move immediately to London. George, who intended to become a barrister, would enter the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court; Bro (who had acquired first-hand experience of the West Indian estates) and Stormie (who stammered so badly that he could not take his viva voce examination and thus had failed to take his degree) would join the family business; and the younger boys would be properly educated. Elizabeth, who had found little intellectual stimulation in Sidmouth—not that she had made much effort to seek it out—was better pleased than not at the prospect of a literary life in London. For two years the Barretts lived at 74 Gloucester Place before moving permanently, in 1838, to 50 Wimpole Street.
London winters were cold, daylight turned a depressing grey, and dense, chilling fog hung like a malevolent yellow miasma about the streets, clutching at the throat and lungs. Elizabeth’s health deteriorated. In contrast to the open situation of Sidmouth, the reflective light of the sea and the green of the surrounding Devonshire countryside, she felt immured, ‘stuck to the fender’, almost literally bricked in. There was hardly a leaf or a blade of grass to be seen except if she drove out to Hampstead Heath, which hardly qualified as real country. As for acquiring stimulating literary and intellectual acquaintance, her sole resource and only constant visitor was her portly, red-faced, fifty-two-year-old cousin, John Kenyon whose advantage, in addition to a kindly and sociable nature, was that his house in Devonshire Place was a notable focus for literary men and women. He contrived, with some difficulty, to introduce Elizabeth to Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, and—more successfully—Mary Russell Mitford, chatty and opinionated and well-connected with literary persons, who became one of her few close friends and a regular recipient, until her death many years later, of Elizabeth’s most personally confiding and wittily conversational letters.
As the result of a cold contracted in the winter of 1837–8, Elizabeth began to cough again. She continued to feel unwell into the spring. When she consulted the eminent Dr Chambers, he recommended even more rest, to the point that she was rendered virtually immobile, moving only from sofa to bed and back again, hardly stirring from her room, which was closely sealed from the least possibility of a draught. Despite all precautions, she caught another cold, and Chambers gravely diagnosed an affection of the lungs. In August 1838, he advised a change of climate. Elizabeth should winter somewhere warm, and Mr Barrett was persuaded, with some difficulty, that she should go to Torquay with her maid, Elizabeth Crow. During the three years of her convalescence at Torquay, usually attended by one or other of her brothers and sisters, Elizabeth was fairly constantly unhappy. She didn’t like Torquay, she worried about the expense of it all, the climate was not particularly mild, and her health did not noticeably improve. At times, it took decided and distressing turns for the worse. She became increasingly reliant on laudanum to help her sleep. She wanted to be well for her father’s sake, and strenuously put her mind to feeling better, but she was convinced she was dying.
Many explanations have been given for Elizabeth’s chronic ill health: Betty Miller suggests that it derived from sibling rivalry, from jealousy of Bro. As a boy—it seemed to his elder sister—he was given the advantage by being sent to school to be properly, formally educated while she was obliged more or less to instruct herself. It is certainly true that Elizabeth was intellectually much cleverer than Bro. Mrs Miller’s theory implies that Elizabeth was malingering: perceiving herself as largely powerless, she put on suffering and incapacity as a means to obtain control of her life and so avoid the domestic and social duties of a woman of her class (she never liked sewing, for example), perhaps even deliberately to restrict the possibility of being obliged to marry. Illness attracted and focused the attention of her parents, and the household was at least partly run on the basis of her requirements. She imposed what she called a ‘rigid rein’ upon herself in order not to be ‘hurled with Phaeton far from everything human … everything reasonable!’
(#litres_trial_promo) In her own estimation, by imposing the restraint of immobility upon herself, she saved herself from acting upon the ‘violent inclination’ that remained in her ‘inmost heart’. Elizabeth at least partly acknowledged that her ill health might be a desirable condition.
The modern consensus is that Elizabeth was truly ill. There seems little doubt now that she contracted a form of tuberculosis in her mid-teens and, as Daniel Karlin comments, ‘Tuberculosis is an impressionable disease. Elizabeth Barrett’s health fluctuated according to variations in climate and state of mind; she had periods of remission followed by crises, and the crises generally corresponded with times when she was under nervous strain. In these circumstances, there is little point in drawing distinctions between “physical” and “psychological” illness.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This fits very well with Margaret Forster’s view that ‘It is impossible to over-emphasise how tension of any kind—pleasurable excitement just as much as unpleasant—had an immediate physical effect on Elizabeth. She was, as she described herself, “intensely nervous”.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
In February 1840, the Barretts learned that Sam had died in Jamaica at the age of twenty-eight. The loss of a brother struck Elizabeth down instantly. She became delirious, fainting into unconsciousness when she was not in an opium-induced sleep, and could be comforted only by her father, who came down to Torquay to stay with her for several weeks. He rallied her with pious exhortations. He urged Christian submission to God’s will and invoked devotional feeling for His grace. She gave pious thanks for Sam’s life and everything she had loved in him—his amiability, his goodness, his wit, his delight in dandyish dress—but it was difficult not to be overwhelmed by his loss. She made the effort, however, to such an extent that Mr Barrett was gratified by his beloved daughter’s beauty of character as revealed in her staunch belief that love never dies, that Sam was but in another room, in another, better world, not dead to those who loved him. What she did not yet (if she ever did) know was that Sam had died—or so it was reported by missionaries who had worked to save his soul—of evil influences: the tropical climate, in part, but more perniciously of having resorted to native women and other carnal pleasures that had broken his health and imperilled his soul.
At about this time, Arabel and Bro had discovered romance. Bro’s affair seems to have been the more serious of the two, or perhaps it was merely more advanced than Arabel’s. Bro was thirty-three years old, an age at which his father had been married for eleven years and had sired eight children. Bro was refused paternal permission to marry. Mr Barrett set his face against any argument: he would hear no plea in favour of his son’s proposed nuptials. This was not unexpected. First of all, the fact was that Bro had no money of his own and stood in no position to marry without financial support from his father. Secondly, there exists the possibility that Mr Barrett had reasonable objections to the proposed bride, though we know no grounds on which they might have been well founded. Thirdly, it was well known among the Barretts that Mr Barrett had adopted the Irvingite principle, bolstered by his own reading of the Bible, that a father exercised absolute authority over his children. It was his first duty to lead them from the paths of corruption, to save them from sin, to preserve their purity. He might grieve for Sam, but—and we may assume he knew the disgraceful details of the wage Sam had earned from sin—the circumstances leading to his son’s spiritual ruin and consequent death would have surely confirmed his moral beliefs. For Mr Barrett to permit Bro to marry a woman who did not meet the exacting standards of the most rigorous morality would be to risk losing another son to perdition.
To an extent, from love, rather than from fear, the Barrett children were somewhat awed by the implications of their father’s attitude: no suitor other than a saint would be worthy of any of them, and a saint would hardly be the most likely material from which a spouse might be made. They might privately, among themselves, poke affectionate fun at their father’s protective concern for their spiritual salvation; but it was one thing to feel proud that they were special in his eyes, quite another when his interdict, as final as a ruling of the Last Judgement, frustrated their genuine emotions and commonplace desires. In a letter of 12 December 1845 to Robert Browning, Elizabeth summed up a situation that had unexpectedly arisen to affect her personally and to which she had once referred in jest to Arabel:
‘If a prince of Eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, & a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel, in the other’ …
‘Why even then,’ said my sister Arabel, ‘it would not do.’ And she was right, & we all agreed that she was right. It is an obliquity of the will—& one laughs at it till the turn comes for crying.
The rectitudinous Mr Barrett was not in principle opposed to the institution of marriage—he was himself a living testament to its virtues, beauties and benefits; but he was absolutely opposed to any occasion for sin, and, in that respect, an inappropriate attachment could not be countenanced. Where he suspected sin he generally discovered it. When one looks for devils, it is not difficult to find them. His religious principles had not descended upon him suddenly. There had been no voice in a thunderclap or vision in a lightning flash. He had experienced no moment of sudden revelation. They had waxed gradually within him, secreted like amber that, on exposure to the moral dilemmas of life, had hardened and trapped the insects of his intolerance. Irvingism had taken deep root, nourished by Edward Barrett’s naturally devout Protestantism and his cautious, conservative Liberal politics. It was partly this slow evolution of his character into something grim and forbidding that inhibited the Barrett children from recognizing the process of transformation until it was too late to do anything to modify it. And so, by and large, it had become accepted as an element influencing their own lives.
The Barretts might admit that their father had their own good at heart, but that concept of the absolute good was utterly inflexible and did not yield to the more elastic idea of good as conceived by weaker characters. Edward Barrett’s love was as oppressive as his ire. G. K Chesterton puts it precisely: ‘He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism, not that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability … The worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In his deep anxiety about loss, to prevent any further harm to the Barrett family, he perversely suffocated the children by his insistence on the family’s self-sufficiency, by his efforts to exclude any external threat to their well-being, and by his belief that they should be all in all to one another and be kept together.
Elizabeth, though strong-willed as a child, perfectly capable of throwing books and other objects around a room when she fell into a pet at being thwarted in her desires, did not as a mature woman challenge her father’s authority directly in the matter of marriage. Instead, she secretly attempted to make over her own money to Bro so that he could marry as he pleased. She was foiled in this underhand strategy. Mr Barrett had no legal right to stop any of his children marrying, but his personal wishes and his threats to disinherit any of them who defied those wishes were intimidating enough. He would cut any of them off without a shilling and cast them out of his life—regretfully, no doubt, but unhesitatingly.
For one thing, Elizabeth was afraid of her father’s anger and would not confront it directly. She could not in general bear, as she wrote to her brother George after her own marriage, ‘agitating opposition from those I tenderly loved—& to act openly in defiance of Papa’s will, would have been more impossible for me than to use the right which I believe to be mine, of taking a step so strictly personal on my own responsibility.’ For another thing, she retreated into her perceived weakness less as a self-professed invalid and more as a helpless woman. To Robert Browning, who had lost his temper over Mr Barrett’s apparent tyranny, she wrote on 12 June 1846: ‘You said once that women were as strong as men, … unless in the concurrence of physical force. Which is a mistake. I would rather be kicked with a foot, … (I, for one woman! …) than be overcome by a loud voice speaking cruel words … being a woman, & a very weak one (in more senses than the bodily), they would act on me as a dagger would … I could not help dropping, dying before them—I say it that you may understand.’ So much for the invigorating spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism. There was a third factor, however: Elizabeth, like the rest of her brothers and sisters, had been inculcated with a strong sense of family, and the Barretts were not only profoundly loyal to one another, they loved one another deeply. The children’s loyalty and love for their father was no less real and no less committed than among themselves.
Bro, who had come to Torquay to be with Elizabeth, went sailing with three friends at midday on 11 July 1840. The sea was calm and the weather was fine, except for a brief squall that blew up suddenly in the afternoon. By nightfall, the boat had not returned. It never did. The Barretts explored every strategy they could devise to convince themselves that Bro could be alive. Every possible eventuality was examined and analysed until, at last and reluctantly, they gave up hope after three days. Bro’s body was not discovered until three weeks later when it was washed ashore, with the corpses of one of his friends and the boatman, in Babbacombe Bay on 4 August. They were buried in a local churchyard two days later. Elizabeth despaired: she had quarrelled with Bro on the morning of the 11th. Her last words to her beloved brother had not been friendly. She convinced herself, too, that her illness had been the primary—the only—reason for Bro being in Torquay at all. He had stayed with her at her request, and she felt responsible for having kept him with her. It was her fault that he had been there, she reasoned, and so it was her fault that he had died. The blame was hers. Her guilt was fathomless.
For the three weeks between Bro’s disappearance and his funeral, Elizabeth was scarcely conscious. Her mind, when not blank, was tormented—delirious visions of ‘long dark spectral trains’ and ‘staring infantine faces’ filled it; dreams were ‘nothing but broken hideous shadows and ghastly lights to mark them’, driving her, she said later, almost to ‘madness, absolute hopeless madness’. For three months, she did nothing. Her father stayed with her, every bit as despairing and suffering as his daughter in their mutual loss. He returned to London in December. Elizabeth had finally felt strong enough to write a letter to Miss Mitford in October. Mary Mitford offered very practical comfort: understanding her friend’s grief, empathizing sincerely with her loss, she tactfully offered Elizabeth a puppy from her own golden cocker spaniel’s recent litter. It was a generous offer—such a dog was a very valuable gift—and Elizabeth at first refused. But she was persuaded to accept.
Flush, when he arrived in January 1841, was six months old and irresistibly pretty. Of course, he became thoroughly spoiled and as devoted to his new mistress as she to him. Vitally, Flush became the object of her adoring attentions; Elizabeth became responsible for this scrap of excitable animal life. Flush pulled her out of her self-absorption, relieving some of her guilt about Bro—though not entirely. She pushed the painful memory of Bro to the back of her mind, to inhabit some dark place where nobody was permitted to enter. For the rest of her life, she would not talk of him and others learned not to refer, within her hearing, to Bro or the tragedy at Torquay.
Elizabeth returned to London on 11 September 1841. Her three years’ absence had been the most wretched of her life. The house in Wimpole Street, and her niche within it, seemed a haven of security from which she intended never again to be plucked and thrown into the difficult, dangerous world beyond it. Even to let anyone beyond Elizabeth Wilson (known as Lily), her capable and companionable personal maid who had replaced Crow, her immediate family and Flush into her room seemed unnecessarily hazardous. Not that visitors were encouraged or made welcome to the house at all: Mr Barrett, who had been reasonably outgoing, cheerful, and obliging in the days of his great prosperity, had withdrawn into himself as his resources had been depleted. His confidence had diminished and he turned, as it appeared to those who had known him in better days, gruff in manner with friends, grudging and curmudgeonly with strangers.
Elizabeth attributed his change of manner to shyness, about which she expressed some exasperation; but the truth of the matter was that Edward Barrett now felt inadequate. To compensate, he refused all occasions on which he thought he might not act with advantage—worse, be perceived to his disadvantage. Within his own house and family circle, he generally showed kindness and tenderness and was persuaded by Elizabeth to permit the amiable John Kenyon to visit and to meet Miss Mitford, who was also regularly admitted to Elizabeth’s room. He was delighted with Mary Mitford, but his success with her did not encourage him to push his luck further with others, such as Mrs Anna Jameson, who thrust herself into 50 Wimpole Street in November 1844.
There was no keeping Mrs Jameson out. She had read and admired Elizabeth’s latest publication, Poems, and nothing would do but that she should meet the author. Anna Jameson was not unknown in her own right among respected and respectable London society. Obliged to make her own living, she had established herself as a popular authority on art, travel, and literary criticism (mostly about women in Shakespeare and poetry), producing well-received, profitable books that enabled her to travel widely at a fast clip and in modest comfort to research more books on these improving subjects. Her works were not scholarly, perhaps, but they demonstrated some artistic taste and good sense; they were well researched at first hand, vividly written, and they sold well.
As a self-sufficient woman, Mrs Jameson was a convinced feminist in the Harriet Martineau mould, and naturally wished to exchange sisterly views with the celebrated Miss Barrett. She saw no good reason why this ambition should not be achieved, and so she politely left a note at 50 Wimpole Street announcing herself. But many people had left notes at the Barrett house, to no positive advantage. Mrs Jameson, turned away unsatisfied from the doorstep the first time, made a second attempt. She left another note, and this time she was admitted by Wilson. Elizabeth had read at least one of Mrs Jameson’s dozen books and her curiosity about the woman’s determination seems to have overridden her habitual inclination to close the door against even the most distinguished callers.
Anna Jameson was no beauty—Elizabeth, who paid close attention to physical appearance, noted that her complexion was pale and so were her eyes, she possessed no eyebrows to speak of, her lips were thin and colourless, and her hair was a very pale red. Carlyle briskly described her as ‘a little, hard, brown, red-haired, freckled, fierce-eyed, square-mouthed woman’. But Carlyle was not one to varnish a plain portrait. He spoke as he found—and so, for that matter, did Mrs Jameson. She was Irish, which largely accounts for her colouring and partly for her character. Like Miss Mitford, Anna Jameson was of middling years. But with the coincidence of their ages, any resemblance to Miss Mitford ended.
Whereas Mary Mitford indulged Elizabeth’s taste for writing and receiving long, confidingly effusive letters rapturously devoted, for the most part, to the incomparable beauties of Flush, his adorable character, and detailed accounts of his daily doggie activities, Anna Jameson spoke forth uncompromisingly and brusquely on all manner of matters within her competence, and they were many, including the subject of women’s superiority of mind and the uselessness of what she called ‘carpet work’ to which the female sex was condemned and confined. ‘Carpet work’ was injurious to the female mind, she said, because it led, fatally, to the vapid habit of reverie. Elizabeth faintly protested this blanket condemnation, though she had never worked a carpet, far less knitted or plied a needle and thread, in her life. Mrs Jameson, taking stock of Elizabeth, generously made an exception for her on the ground that she might do carpet work with impunity because she could be writing poetry at the same time. Anna Jameson’s vigorous, sharply intelligent, unreserved discourse, and the underlying kindliness of her nature, endeared her immediately, and so this good woman was admitted to the small, exclusive pantheon of Elizabeth’s closest and most trusted allies. She could hardly have chosen anyone truer in friendship or more stout-hearted in the defence of her reputation and interests than Anna Jameson when such unqualified support was required and mattered most.
As Elizabeth’s spirits improved, as her work became more widely known and widely appreciated, and as she took more interest in the activities and gossip of London’s social, political and literary life—in response to her frequent letters, friends wrote back despatches from all these fronts and her chosen ambassadors reported to her in person—so her health also improved. In her letter to Robert of 5 March 1845, she wrote: ‘I am essentially better, and have been for several winters; and I feel as if it were intended for me to live and not die, and I am reconciled to the feeling … I am not desponding by nature, and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion, I come out with two learnt lessons (as I sometimes say and oftener feel),—the wisdom of cheerfulness—and the duty of social intercourse.’
In her darker moments, Elizabeth felt she had been deprived of social and intellectual opportunities, ground to a husk in the mill of suffering, and she contrasted Robert’s luckier, fatter experience of life to date: ‘I do like to hear testimonies like yours, to happiness … it is obvious you have been spared, up to this time, the great natural afflictions, against which we are nearly all called, sooner or later, to struggle and wrestle … Remember that as you owe your unscathed joy to God, you should pay it back to His world. And I thank you for some of it already.’ She made some judicious criticism of attitudes towards her: ‘People have been kind to me, even without understanding me, and pitiful to me, without approving of me’: and now Robert—‘How kind you are!—how kindly and gently you speak to me! Some things you say are very touching, and some, surprising; and although I am aware that you unconsciously exaggerate what I can be to you, yet it is delightful to be broad awake and think of you as my friend.’
Robert retorted in his letter post-marked 12 March that ‘You think—for I must get to you—that “I unconsciously exaggerate what you are to me.” Now, you don’t know what that is, nor can I very well tell you, because the language with which I talk to myself of these matters is spiritual Attic, and “loves contradictions,” as grammarians say … but I read it myself and know very well what it means, that’s why I told you I was self-conscious—I meant that I never yet mistook my own feelings, one for another—there! … Do you think I shall see you in two months, three months? I may travel, perhaps.’ That last, apparently throwaway but more probably well calculated, line had its effect. Elizabeth replied eight days later, ending her letter by saying, ‘If you mean “to travel”, why, I shall have to miss you. Do you really mean it?’ She knew she was being pressed, that Robert’s patience had been tried and was running short. This long letter of 20 March opened with the assurance that ‘Whenever I delay to write to you, dear Mr Browning, it is not, to be sure, that I take “my own good time,” but submit to my own bad time … I have not been very well, nor have had much heart for saying so.’
The weather—‘this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and the moon!’—had been implacable and ‘I only grow weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal, in a corner—and then all this must end! April is coming. There will be both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps, after all, we may. And as to seeing you besides, I observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? You are learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such a secluded life as mine—notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about social duties and the like—well—if you have such knowledge or if you have it not, I cannot say, but I do say that I will indeed see you when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth “to rights” again so as to make pleasures of the sort possible.’
The letter goes on, very affectingly, very emotionally, and in important respects quite misleadingly, to summarize her life, to draw comparisons between Robert’s full, heady experience of an active, happy life—‘You are Paracelsus’—and the life that Elizabeth has lived ‘only inwardly; or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country—had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped towards the ground like an untrained honeysuckle—and but for one, in my own house—but of this I cannot speak.’ Here Elizabeth drew a veil over the memory of Bro.
It was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it. Books and dreams were what I lived in—and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass. And so time passed and passed—and afterwards, when my illness came and I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done, and no prospect (as it appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and time to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave—that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact. I was as a man dying who had not read Shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand? And do you also know what a disadvantage this is to my art? Why, if I live on and 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? Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main. But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some …
And here she gives up, helpless and speechless after such a powerful passage of self-confession and self-revelation. She felt, perhaps, she had gone too far and cut it off with a bathetic moral banality—‘But all grumbling is a vile thing’—promptly followed by a pious platitude—‘We should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them enough for each of us.’
We can read all this more objectively than subjectively, Elizabeth wrote it with passion, some element of self-pity and, in the light of what we now know about her early life, some self-delusion and self-dramatization. To take only the most glaringly self-serving example, if she had been lonely it had been through her own choice to avoid company. The impression she gave (by omission rather than direct statement) of being all but a solitary orphan child brought up by the fairies, was hardly fair to her two devoted parents or the eleven younger brothers and sisters who doted upon their demanding older sister. She might have felt solitary from time to time, she might have longed to be less alone sometimes, she might have felt intellectually isolated, but rarely could she have felt lonely in a social sense. At some cost to others, Elizabeth had bought time and space for her reveries, for her inner life, beyond which the Barretts buzzed like bees in the domestic environment, conscientious and generous in their efforts to care for her health, keep her amused, run her errands, and cater to her every comfort.
Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that what she wrote on 20 March 1845 was true to her deepest feelings, to her perceptions of her situation, if not strictly accurate as to domestic reality and psychological truth. The letter also seemed to mark a real and profound desire that she should move towards a more active life, that time was no longer on her side—‘I, who am scarcely to be called young now’. In March 1845, on her thirty-ninth birthday, she entered her fortieth year, though the anniversary merited no mention in her letters to Robert. There is a suggestion, in Elizabeth’s appeals to Robert to make the imaginative effort to understand, to believe her self-assessment, after her observation that he distrusted her, that personal revelations had by now become necessary and that Robert, himself free to move, represented some hope (not yet quantifiable) of her own release to her personal benefit and the benefit of her poetry.
On the contrary, Robert, surfeited with being active in the world, understood that inwardness and seclusion were desirable and essential conditions for creative activity, for the poetic art, and that the products of the cultivated imagination were of more value than mere representations of reality. Elizabeth’s ‘lamentable disadvantage’ was in fact her most priceless advantage. Robert valued very highly the ‘visionary utterances’ in Elizabeth’s poetry and exalted her professed ‘disadvantage’ above what Daniel Karlin characterizes as ‘the process of interaction between the mind and “external influences” out of which his own “dramatic” poetry was made.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth had the measure of Robert and his poetry when she wrote on 17 April, ‘I have a profound conviction that where a poet has been shut from most of the outward aspects of life, he is at a lamentable disadvantage. Can you, speaking for yourself, separate the results in you from the external influences at work around you, that you say so boldly that you get nothing from the world? You do not directly, I know—but you do indirectly & by a rebound. Whatever acts upon you, becomes you—& whatever you love or hate, whatever charms you or is scorned by you, acts on you & becomes you.’ No critic was ever more acutely perceptive about the well-springs of Robert’s work than Elizabeth.
Her estimations of his character were, at this early stage, less sure—though, to be fair, she was working with inadequate information. Elizabeth had read Robert’s poems, but she had not yet fully read the man. The two were not, as he had warned her, to be confused. Robert had provided some personal information about himself and his family, of course, and she had gleaned a little more from John Kenyon and Miss Mitford: the former biased in Robert’s favour, the latter mildly prejudiced against him. The curtain had been rung up on the play, but neither of the principals had yet made their first entrances. They were still exchanging dialogue as offstage voices.
The preliminary scenes had been carefully set, principally by Robert. He had posed himself solitary at his desk with spiders and skull; he had pictured himself amidst a glittering crowd of celebrated men and women—a wealth of writers, an amplitude of artists, a surfeit of society beauties—weary of their dinner tables and ballrooms. Elizabeth had already conjured him, largely through his poetry, as a heroic figure, and Robert himself had impressed upon her his resolve in getting his own way in whatever he set his heart and mind upon gaining. What she did not yet fully understand, but had begun to suspect, was that he had cast her, sight unseen, as his leading lady, the romantic heroine. There were several objections to this, and she managed to play for time whenever Robert pressed for a meeting. Robert at first tended to assume that she deferred a face to face encounter on account of her invalidity, which, not having inquired too closely of Kenyon for particulars, he took to be greater and more debilitating than it was. In Robert’s letter, postmarked 13 May, he wrote to say, ‘I ask you not to see me so long as you are unwell or mistrustful of—No, no that is being too grand! Do see me when you can, and let me not be only writing myself.’
In her reply to Robert post-marked 16 May, she protested: ‘But how “mistrustfulness”? And how “that way?” What have I said or done, I, who am not apt to be mistrustful of anybody and should be a miraculous monster if I began with you!’ She excused herself: ‘I have made what is vulgarly called a “piece of work” about little; or seemed to make it. Forgive me. I am shy by nature:—and by position and experience by having had my nerves shaken to excess, and by leading a life of such seclusion, … by these things together and by others besides, I have appeared shy and ungrateful to you. Only not mistrustful.’ She relented: she said that if Robert cared to come to see her, he could come. It would be her gain, she said, and not Robert’s. She did not normally admit visitors because, she wrote, ‘putting the question of health quite aside, it would be unbecoming to lie here on the sofa and make a company-show of an infirmity, and hold a beggar’s hat for sympathy.’ To the extent that she did exploit her condition of health, she was obscurely repulsed by it herself and thus certain that others would also be disgusted.
It is a convention that romantic and operatic heroines, especially if pale, languorous, and dying of consumption, should be beautiful, and so it is sentimentally assumed that Elizabeth was chiefly worried by the effect her looks might have on Robert. It is difficult to conceive a more banal idea than that Elizabeth, hearing Robert’s footsteps on the stair for the first time, should primp herself, pinch her cheeks for a little colour, and have Wilson, her maid, fuss with her hair to present herself to best advantage. She possessed no idea of herself as a tragic heroine, and still further from her mind was any concept of herself as a flirt, a coquette. Personally, she affected no mystery. To whatever extent she had been invested with glamour and mystery, that image of beauty unrevealed had arisen in the minds of others from her curious reclusiveness and invisibility. Conscious of public interest in her, and perhaps aware that her disinclination to put herself obligingly on show only served to fuel that curiosity, she feared, if anything, a constant troop of rubber-necking visitors curious to inspect her as a sort of freak show.
More to the point, Elizabeth worried that Robert would find her colourless in person, tongue-tied, less interesting than her poetry. He would be disappointed in her. ‘There is nothing to see in me;’ she warned him, ‘nor to hear in me—I never learnt to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark.’ The most he could expect should be ‘truth and simplicity for you, in any case; and a friend. And do not answer this—I do not write it as a fly trap for compliments. Your spider would scorn me for it too much.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Having consented to a meeting, Elizabeth promptly took fright and retreated a little, disingenuously procrastinating not on her own account but by offering Robert an excuse for delay, a mediator, or the opportunity to create an obstacle to his visit. In her letter post-marked 16 May she reminded Robert that he had not been well, that he had had a headache and a ringing in his ears, and she entreated him ‘not to think of coming until that is all put to silence satisfactorily. When it is done, … you must choose whether you would like best to come with Mr Kenyon or to come alone—and if you would come alone, you must just tell me on what day, and I will see you on any day unless there should be an unforeseen obstacle, … any day after two, or before six.’
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
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Iain Finlayson
This edition does not include illustrations.A major biography of the most modern and the most underrated of English Literature's Great Victorians.Henry James called Robert Browning (1812–89) 'a tremendous and incomparable modern', and the immediacy and colloquial energy of his poetry has ensured its enduring appeal. This biography sets out to do the same for his life, animating the stereotypes (romantic hero, poetic exile, eminent man of letters) that have left him neglected by modern biographers. He has been seen primarily as one half of that romantic pair, the Brownings; and while the courtship, elopement and marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning remains a perennially seductive subject (and one Finlayson evokes vividly, quoting extensively from their daily letters and contemporary accounts) there is far more to Browning than that.Chronological in structure, this book is divided into three sections which deal with his life's major themes: adolescence and ambition, marriage and money, paternity and poetry. Browning explores the many experiences that inspired his writing, his education and passions, his relationships with family and friends, his continual financial struggles and revulsion at being seen as a fortune-hunter, his most unVictorian approach to marriage (sexual equality, his helping wean Elizabeth off morphine and nursing her through various illnesses), fatherhood and fame (inviting a leading member of the Browning Society to watch him burning a trunk of personal letters): all of which contribute to a fascinating portrait of a highly unconventional Victorian. At once witty and moving, this critical biography will revolutionise perceptions of the poet – and of the man.
BROWNING
A Private Life
IAIN FINLAYSON
DEDICATION (#u558bd85d-cb0d-5e46-8d02-a258a0df692d)
to Judith Macrae,
Good Friend and Good Samaritan
CONTENTS
Cover (#u3c1672c7-d687-528c-857d-6b318b6eeace)
Title Page (#ue9645622-fb7e-518f-b6c2-bb5808102e5b)
Prologue (#ua7dde85f-9b6f-542c-ba3a-97ed80a8b80d)
Part 1: Robert and the Brownings 1812–1846 (#uf955e16d-146c-55da-83fb-9139cde46fe7)
Part 2: Robert and Elizabeth 1846–1861 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 3: Robert and Pen 1861–1889 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliographical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Abbreviations and Short Citations of Principal Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_0f3c1dfb-c6af-58ff-b250-209fcca5cb44)
HENRY JAMES, a man of sound and profound literary and personal judgements, provided the most epigrammatic epitaph for Robert Browning. On the occasion of the poet’s burial in Westminster Abbey, on 31 December 1889, he remarked: ‘A good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey, but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd.’
The immortal voice having been condemned to final silence by disinterested Nature, and the mortal dust committed to elaborate interment by a respectful nation, James reflected that only Browning himself could have done literary justice to the ceremony:
‘The consignment of his ashes to the great temple of fame of the English race was exactly one of those occasions in which his own analytic spirit would have rejoiced, and his irrepressible faculty for looking at human events in all sorts of slanting coloured lights have found a signal opportunity … in a word, the author would have been sure to take the special, circumstantial view (the inveterate mark of all his speculation) even of so foregone a conclusion as that England should pay her greatest honour to one of her greatest poets.’
Browning’s greatness and his oddity, his great value, in James’ view, was that ‘in all the deep spiritual and human essentials, he is unmistakably in the great tradition—is, with all his Italianisms and cosmopolitanisms, all his victimisation by societies organised to talk about him, a magnificent example of the best and least dilettantish English spirit’. That English spirit does not, generally, delight in literary or psychological subtleties; nevertheless, stoutly and steadfastly, ‘Browning made them his perpetual pasture, and yet remained typically of his race … His voice sounds loudest, and also clearest, for the things that, as a race, we like best—the fascination of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of the great human passion.’
James particularly distinguished Browning as ‘a tremendous and incomparable modern’ who ‘introduces to his predecessors a kind of contemporary individualism’ long forgotten but now, in their latest honoured companion, forcefully renewed. These predecessors, disturbed in the long, dreaming serenity of Poets’ Corner and their ‘tradition of the poetic character as something high, detached and simple’ by the irruption of Browning, are obliged to measure their marmoreal greatness against Browning’s irreverent inversions and subversions that blew the spark of life into those poetic traditions. But death diminishes the force and power of any great man until—James observed—‘by the quick operation of time, the mere fact of his lying there among the classified and protected makes even Robert Browning lose a portion of the bristling surface of his actuality’. The stillness of silence and marble smooths out the poet and his work. The Samson who would crack the pillars of poetry is subsumed into the fabric of Poets’ Corner, of the Abbey, and of an Englishness that eventually, by force of the simplicity of its legends and the ineffable character of its traditions, stifles the vitality of the poet’s words and corrupts the subtle colours of their maker.
‘Victorian values’ has become a loaded phrase in recent times, sometimes revered, sometimes reviled. At best, the epithet for an age has provoked a revived interest not only in eminent Victorians but also, perhaps more so, in their ethical beliefs and social structures—though in our current perceptions those values are often misunderstood and misinterpreted when set against present-day values, which in turn are too often misapprehended by interested parties seeking to adapt them to their particular advantage and to the confusion of their opponents. Henry James gives the cue when he states that Robert Browning was a modern. Browning survives in the ‘great tradition’ as a ‘modern’ and, in his earlier life, he suffered for it. Matthew Arnold characterized Browning’s poetry as ‘confused multitudinousness’, and at first sight it is often bewildering. To cite the rolling acres of verse, the constantly (though not deliberately) obscure references, the occasional archaisms, is but to highlight a few surface difficulties.
To anyone unfamiliar with or still unseized by Robert Browning, his reputation as a serious, intellectual, difficult, and prolific writer is an impediment to reading even the most accessible of his poems. To the extent that he was serious—as he could be—he was serious because of his insistence on right and justice and the honest authenticity of his own work. To the extent that he was intellectual, he confounded even the most thoughtful critics of his day, and only now, with the perspective of time that enables more objective critical understanding of Victorian themes and thought, can his poetry be more deeply appreciated. To the extent that he was difficult, he was difficult because of his paradoxical simplicity. To the extent that he was prolific—well, he had a great deal to say on a great number of ideas and ideals, themes and topics.
The length of much of Browning’s poetry is daunting. The attention span of modern readers is supposedly more limited than that of the Victorians, though even the attention of the most persistent, discriminating intellects of the literary Victorians was liable to flag: George Eliot, noting advice to confine her own poetic epic, The Spanish Gipsy, to 9,000 lines, remarked in a letter of 1867 to John Blackwood, ‘Imagine—Browning has a poem by him [The Ring and the Book] which has reached 20,000 lines. Who will read it all in these busy days?’ The diversity, too, is intimidating: ‘You have taken a great range,’ remarked Elizabeth Barrett admiringly, ‘from those high faint notes of the mystics which are beyond personality—to dramatic impersonations, gruff with nature.’
To understand Henry James’s assertion that Browning was ‘a tremendous and incomparable modern’, it is necessary to understand the Victorian world as modern, as a dynamic, experimental, excitingly innovative age of achievements in exploration (internal and external) and advances in invention, but also as a time of doubts raised by experiments and enquiries. Browning himself is a prime innovator, an engineer of form, an explorer of history and the human heart, revolutionary in his art and of lasting importance in his achievements. One critic has suggested that Browning’s masterpiece, The Ring and the Book, may be viewed as a ‘heroic attempt to fuse Milton with Dickens, the modern novel with the epic poem’. Certainly, the comparison with Dickens is sustainable: Browning’s poetry is conspicuously democratic, rapid, colloquial, and modern in its preoccupation with individuals and the social, religious, and political systems in which they find themselves obliged to struggle, to progress throughout the history of humanity’s efforts to develop.
Words like ‘develop’ and ‘progress’ raise the matter of Browning’s optimism, which is usually taken at face value to mean his apparently consoling exclamations on the level of ‘God’s in his heaven—All’s right with the world’, ‘Oh, to be in England/Now that April’s there’, ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?’, and so on. These are positive enough, and over-familiar to those who seek moral, theological, or nationalistic uplift from Browning. They have become the stuff of samplers and poker-work, tag lines expressive of a pious sentimentality (‘It was roses, roses all the way …’) he rarely intended, a jingoistic English nationalism (‘Oh, to be in England …’) he hardly felt, and a shining Candidean optimism (‘God’s in his heaven …’) that was the least of his philosophy. Browning’s poetry too often survives miserably as useful material to be raided and packaged for books of inspirational verse-in-snippets and comfortable quotations. This is a permanent fame, perhaps, but not Parnassian glory.
Browning’s optimism was a more robust and muscular characteristic, deriving not at all from sweet-natured sentimentality or rose-tinted romanticism. Rather, it was rooted in a profound, passionate realism—naturalism, some claim—and tremendous psychological analysis that looked unsparingly, with a clear eye, at the roots and shoots of good and evil. Unlike most Victorians, Robert Browning was more matter-of-factly medieval or ruthlessly Renaissance in his assessments and acceptance of matters from which fainter, or at least more emollient, spirits retreated and who drew a more or less banal moral satisfactory to the pious, who tended to prefer the possibility of redemption through suffering. For some readers, suffering was quite sufficient in itself—a just reward and retribution for the sin or moral failure, for example, of being poor.
Browning’s innate Puritanism, as Chesterton remarks, stood him in good stead, providing a firm foothold ‘on the dangerous edge of things’ while he investigated ‘The honest thief, the tender murderer.’ The early attempts of the Browning Society and others to construct a ‘philosophy’ for Browning, a redeeming and inspirational theological and ethical system to stand as firmly as that imposed by Leslie Stephen on Wordsworth, is bound to be suspect in specifics and should be distrusted in general.
That Browning was a lusty optimist is rarely doubted in the popular mind, but the evidence adduced to support the theory is too often selective and superficial. His optimism was in fact an appetite and enthusiasm for life in all its aspects, inclusive rather than exclusive, from the highest joy to the darkest trials. His optimism was an expression of endurance, of acceptance, of the vitality of living and loving, of finding value in the extraordinary individuality and oddity of men and women. Robert Browning is, in the judgement of G. K. Chesterton, ‘a poet of misconceptions, of failures, of abortive lives and loves, of the just-missed and the nearly fulfilled: a poet, in other words, of desire’. Ezra Pound insists on Browning’s poetic passion. Men and Women, the collection of poems that redeemed Browning from obscurity in middle-age, is a demotic, democratic piece of work that reflects his distance from his early reliance on the remote Romantic imagery of Shelley and adopts a firmer insistence on the mundane life of city streets and market-places.
This interest in the apparently tawdry, temporal life of fallible men and women somewhat disconcerted his more elevated, intellectual contemporaries. Of The Ring and the Book, George Eliot (who should have known better, and might have had more sympathy for the poem in her youth) commented: ‘It is not really anything more than a criminal trial, and without anything of the pathetic or awful psychological interest which is sometimes (though very rarely) to be found in such stories of crime. I deeply regret that he has spent his powers on a subject which seems to me unworthy of them.’ She was not the only contemporary critic to make such a point, or adopt such an aesthetic view: Thomas Carlyle declared the poem to be ‘all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and only wants forgetting’.
In short, Browning shocked his contemporaries. The shock consequent on his choice of subject matter was perhaps compounded by the novelty of his poetic approach to its treatment. Pippa Passes, startlingly unlike in form to anything contemporaneous in English poetry, is regarded by Chesterton, aside from ‘one or two by Walt Whitman’, as ‘the greatest poem ever written to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity’. Like Whitman, Browning was responsive to the spirit of his age. For all his learning and his familiarity with the past, and for all his choice of antique subject matter and foreign locations, Browning is no funeral grammarian of a past culture, of spent history. His portrait of the Florentine artist Fra Lippo Lippi is as living, as vibrant, and as relevant as might be a current account of the life of the modern painters Francis Bacon or Damien Hirst. The speeches in The Ring and the Book might, with some adjustments, make a modern television or radio series examining a murder case from the points of view of all the protagonists. The form of serial views of one event was not new when Browning revived it from Greek classic models, but he infused it with modernity and it has since become a staple model for dramatists.
Browning did not bestride the peaks of poetry like a Colossus with a lofty and noble eye for the prospect at his feet. He rambled like a natural historian, peering and poking in holes and corners, describing minutely and drawing his particular conclusions; he visited the courtroom with a reporter’s notebook, and the morgue with the equipment of a forensic scientist. He was an entomologist of humanity in all its bizarre conditions of being. His great subjects were philosophy, religion, history, politics, poetry, art, and music—a few more than even Ezra Pound later marked out as the fit and proper preoccupations of serious poetry. They were all encompassed in Browning’s studies of modern society and the men and women of a universal humankind.
Browning’s poetry is often of a period, but in no sense is it period poetry, nor is Browning a period poet. In this he differs from the more consciously archaic writers and works of the Pre-Raphaelites who admired him, strove to imitate him, and embedded themselves in a literary aspic. Whereas his successors became conscious, perhaps dandified and decadent, Browning himself was largely and serenely unconscious, vigorous, and often matter-of-fact. He had principles and opinions, at first devoutly and latterly didactically held. But Browning was learned and assimilative rather than rigorously intellectual. His poetry suffers often from obscurities that puzzle intellectuals because Browning was, above all, a widely and profoundly literate, well-read man.
Once he had absorbed a fact or a thesis, he subsumed it in his mind where it found useful and congenial company. Joined with a mass of other facts and theses, it became so inextricably enmeshed with its fellows that, when it was eventually pulled out to illustrate, embellish, or point up a phrase in Browning’s work, it was comprehensible only—though not always afterwards, when he had done with it—to the mind of the poet. Being already so personally familiar with it, he thought nothing of its unfamiliarity to his readers. Chesterton regards this as the greatest compliment he could have paid the average reader. There are many who may feel too highly complimented. In this sense, his poetry is devoid of intellectual arrogance or one-upmanship. Perfectly innocently and without conscious affectation, Browning’s work arises from and is coloured with what Henry James identified as an ‘all-touching, all-trying spirit … permeated with accumulations and playing with knowledge’.
For all his modernity, now increasingly acknowledged and admired by literary critics, Browning has recently been somewhat neglected by literary biographers. ‘What’s become of Waring?’ is a well-known line from one of his best-known poems. What, one may reasonably ask, has become of Browning? There is no lack of interest in him in one sense—in the sense of Robert Browning as one half of that romantic pair, the Brownings. The marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning remains a perennially seductive subject, and not only for biographers. One difficulty for the modern biographer is that Robert Browning’s reputation has never quite lived down being cast as a great romantic hero, the juvenile lead, as it were, in Rudolph Besier’s 1934 stage play The Barretts of Wimpole Street and subsequently in the Hollywood movie, where Robert Browning was played dashingly and dramatically by Fredric March. This has become his principal claim to popular fame. For various reasons, Robert has become the dimmer partner, Elizabeth the brilliant star. The romantic hero of fiction or drama is, in any case, generally only a foil for the romantic heroine.
There are big modern biographies of most of Browning’s contemporaries, and more are published every year, but Browning himself is comparatively unknown to present-day readers. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is, to be realistic, the more immediately colourful and engaging character—the drama of her early years as a supposed invalid, the romance of her marriage to Robert Browning and their escape to Italy, the currently fashionable interest in her as an early feminist and as a radical in terms of her views on politics and social justice. Her husband, by contrast, is perceived as a more reactionary and conventional, a more prudish and private character. If judged solely by the quantity and quality of their letters to friends and acquaintances, his personality is less immediately engaging, and, for all his superficial sociability, more introverted and private.
In contrast to the relative scarcity of biographies of Robert Browning, there is an astonishing quantity of critical monographs and papers hardly penetrable to any but the Browning academic specialist. What has recently been lacking, is a chronological narrative of Browning’s life as an upstage drama to complement the downstage chorus of critics of his work. This present book is a conventional, chronological biography of Browning. Despite the enormous and constant critical attention paid to Browning, and the number of books about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the marriage of the Brownings, there have been few modern biographies that give themselves over mostly to the life and character of the man himself.
The standard late twentieth-century biography of Robert Browning that confidently, authoritatively, and entertainingly treats his life as thoroughly as his poetry is The Book, the Ring, and the Poet by William Irvine and Park Honan, published in 1974. Robert Browning: A life within life, Donald Thomas’s biography, published in 1982, is the conscientious work of a scholar who combines a life of the poet with critical analysis of his work. Clyde de L. Ryal’s 1993 biography, The Life of Robert Browning, is an attractive, authoritative literary critical work that provides an overview of Browning’s life and work as a bildungsroman without the distraction of—for the purposes of his book—unnecessary domestic detail.
In this present biography, I have of course been heedful of as much recent biographical work on Browning as seemed to me relevant to my purposes—specific references are gratefully (and comprehensively, I hope) acknowledged—but I have not neglected earlier biographies in my search for such materials as Nathaniel Hawthorne might have characterized as the ‘wonderfully and pleasurably circumstantial’.
A principal resource for any Browning biographer must be the official Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891) by Mrs Alexandra Sutherland Orr, a close friend of the poet. Mrs Orr wrote her biography at the request of Browning’s son and sister. Besides the obvious constraints of these two interested parties at her shoulder, she was writing, too, soon after Browning’s death, as a close friend as much as a conscientious critic. She is thus, and naturally, tactful. Though she is not deliberately misleading, nevertheless she will occasionally suppress materials when she considers it discreet to do so, and will sometimes turn an unfortunate episode to better, more positive account than we might now consider appropriate. A close, long-standing friend of Browning’s, William Wetmore Story, supplied Mrs Orr with details of their long friendship. On reading the published biography in 1891, he commented that it seemed rather colourless, but admitted that Browning’s letters ‘are not vigorous or characteristic or light—and as for incidents and descriptions of persons and life it is very meagre’. Subsequent biographers have supplied the deficit.
My second principal biographical authority is Gilbert Keith Chesterton, whose short book about Browning, published in 1903, is valuable less for strict biographical fact, which now and again he gets wrong, than for consistently inspired and constantly inspiriting psychological judgements about the poet and his work, which he gets right. Like Mrs Orr, Chesterton’s value is that he was closer in time and thought to the Victorian age, more attuned to the Browning period and the psychology of the protagonists than we are now, closer to the historical literary ground than we can be. Chesterton’s Robert Browning has never been bettered. It remains unarguably perceptive and uniquely provocative. Besides its near-contemporaneity to its subject, Chesterton’s book is valuable because it evokes Browning’s character with the very ironies and psychological inversions that Browning himself often employed in his poetry. Time and again Chesterton proposes the converse to prove the obverse, exactly as Browning could easily—with poetic prestidigitation—prove black to be white or red.
Two lively, thoughtful women—Betty Miller and Maisie Ward—have contributed more recent biographies that sometimes convincingly and sometimes controversially propose psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of Robert Browning, his poetry, and his life. Their insights are regularly disputed, and perhaps for that very reason they regularly startle their readers out of complacency. They ask questions, raise points, that—right or wrong—are still worth serious consideration by Browning’s critics and biographers.
I should also say that I have generally relied on earlier Browning criticism, which retains much of its vigour and sparky originality. This is by no means to belittle latter-day critics, many of whom write ingeniously and excitingly, but merely to indicate that for the purposes of this biography I have for the most part personally preferred period sources and contemporary authorities. An exception has to be made for The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Daniel Karlin’s close and authoritative study of the love-letters that preceded the marriage. This book is indispensable to any modern biographer of Browning, not just for Karlin’s detailed analysis of the voluminous correspondence but also for the tenderness and imagination he brings to its interpretation.
There is—or has been—a discussion about how far the biography of an objective poet is necessary, in contrast to the permissible biography of a subjective poet. Browning gave his own views on this in his essay on Shelley. Since Browning himself is generally reckoned to combine subjective and objective elements in his work, then it probably follows that a biography detailing the day-to-day activities of the poet may be as relevant as a critical commentary on his poetry. G. K. Chesterton remarked that one could write a hundred volumes of glorious gossip about Browning. The Collected Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when the full series is finally published, will be exactly that. But for all the froth and bubble of Browning’s social life, not a great deal happened to him—there is a distinct dearth of dramatic incident. One is inclined to sigh with relief, like Joseph Brodsky who says of Eugenio Montale, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975 for the poetry he had written over a period of sixty quiet years, ‘thank God that his life has been so uneventful’.
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And yet, as Chesterton concedes of Browning biography, ‘it is a great deal more difficult to speak finally about his life than his work. His work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much greater mystery which belongs to the simple.’ By and large, my biographical preference has been for a straightforward (I won’t say simple) chronological narrative rather than a series of thematic chapters. And so, this biography is divided into three major sections. These large sections deal successively with three subjects associated with three themes: adolescence and ambition, marriage and money, paternity and poetry.
I like, too, the unfashionable Victorian biographical convention of ‘Life and Letters’. Much of this book is based on the correspondence of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, from which I have quoted lengthily and freely. Where either of them have written personally, or their words have been otherwise recorded by others, I have often preferred to quote them directly rather than make my own paraphrase. Their own voices are important—the tone, the vocabulary, the tempo of the sentences, the entire texture of their poetry, letters, and recorded conversation: all contribute to our understanding of character. The Brownings’ letters are not referenced to the various collections in which they have appeared over the years, since chronological publication of their complete collected correspondence is currently in progress. All dated letters will finally be found there in their proper place.
My reliance on previous biographical materials is deliberate. Far from studiously avoiding them, I have sedulously pillaged them. Biographies are a legitimate secondary source just as much as the first-hand memoirs of those who once saw Shelley, Browning, or any other poet plain and formed an impression that they set down in words or pictures for posterity. It might be argued that a scrupulous biographer who is familiar with all the details of his or her subject’s life may indeed be better informed as to the subject’s character than those friends and enemies who knew him in his outward aspect but were less intimately acquainted with his private life. An enemy of Browning’s, Lady Ashburton, is a case in point. She formed a view of a Miss Gabriel that proved to be wrong. Lady Ashburton, to her credit, thereupon fell to wondering that two views of Miss Gabriel’s character could be so contrary. As a starting-point for biography, her surprised surmise could hardly be bettered. Her latterly-held opinion of Robert Browning could have benefited from some similar consideration of his contrarieties.
‘A Poet’, wrote John Keats, ‘is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually informing and filling some other Body.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This remark, though referring to poets in general, seems to justify the view of Henry James and others that Robert Browning the public personality and Robert Browning the private poet were two distinct personalities. When the biographer stops to point to an image or a word that is apparently autobiographical (or at least seems open to a subjective interpretation), it is because biography imposes a structure and perceives a coherence that the subject himself cannot fully be aware of. The literary biographer neither need be completely contre Sainte-Beuve, nor feel officiously obliged to seek biographical meaning in a text. And yet, of course, Robert Browning is one man, not a series of discrete doppelgängers inhabiting parallel universes. To quote Joseph Brodsky again, ‘every work of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author … a lyrical hero is invariably an author’s self-projection … The author … is a critic of his century; but he is a part of this century also. So his criticism of it nearly always is self-criticism as well, and this is what imparts to his voice … its lyrical poise. If you think that there are other recipes for successful poetic operation, you are in for oblivion.’
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I have avoided, so far as possible, attributing feelings to Browning or anyone else that they are not known to have felt. I have tried to suppose no emotions that are not supported by the statement of anyone who experienced them personally or observed them in others and interpreted their effects. I have stuck so far as possible to the facts insofar as they are known and can be supported, if not ideally by first-hand sources, at least credibly by reliable hearsay; and—where facts fail and supposition supersedes—by creditable biographical consensus and, in the last resort, my own fallible judgement.
Nevertheless, and despite all best intentions, biography is a form of fiction, and successive biographies create, rather like the monologuists in The Ring and the Book, a palimpsest of their subject. Like a Platonic symposium, all the guests at the feast will have their own ideas to propound. A biography, like a novel, tells a story. It contains a principal subject, subsidiary characters, a plot (in the form, normally, of a more or less chronological narrative), and subplots, and it unfolds over a certain period of time in various locations. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, however much these elements may be creatively juggled. That the biographer is not his subject is the point at which the narrative takes on the aspect of fiction. The subject lived his or her life for, say, threescore years and ten, and—allowing for various forms of psychological self-defence—he or she may be regarded as the first authority for that life. Autobiography, however, is generally even more fiction than biography, even less trustworthy than biography. If we put not our faith in princes or poets, even less should we trust an apologist pro vita sua. As Jeanette Winterson puts it, ‘autobiography is art and lies’.
Poetry, of course, may be said to be art and truth. The poet, even if he lies in every other aspect of his life, cannot consistently lie in his work. Robert Browning’s poetry tells the truth not only about Robert Browning, but about the men and women he loved and the common humanity he shared with them and sought to understand. Says Chesterton, with an irresistible conviction and authority:
Every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. Every one on this earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the human race, to be the friends of God … With Browning’s knaves we have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and may at any moment begin to speak poetry.
Lacking the vanity and hypocrisy of the age, Browning was blind to no one, and to the best and the worst of them in their inarticulacy he gave the voice of his own understanding, compassion, and love as few had done so sincerely since Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Burns.
PART 1 ROBERT AND THE BROWNINGS 1812–1846 (#ulink_2de07354-9147-5c62-bd54-c3fe7dd2284e)
ONLY ONE THING is known for certain about the appearance of Sarah Anna Browning, wife of Robert Browning and mother of Robert and Sarianna Browning: she had a notably square head. Which is to say, its uncommon squareness was noted by Alfred Domett, a young man sufficiently serious as to become briefly, in his maturity, Prime Minister of New Zealand and sometime epic poet. Mr Domett, getting on in years, conscientiously committed this observation to his journal on 30 April 1878: ‘I remembered their mother about 40 years before (say 1838), who had, I used to think, the squarest head and forehead I almost ever saw in a human being, putting me in mind, absurdly enough no doubt of a tea-chest or tea-caddy.’
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Many people have square heads. There is little enough to be interpreted from this characteristic, though to some minds a square head may naturally imply sturdy common sense and a regular attitude to life. A good square head is commonly viewed as virtually a guarantee of correct behaviour and a restrained attitude towards vanity and frivolity. Lombroso’s forensic art of physiognomy being now just as discredited as palmistry or phrenology, we may turn with more confidence to Thomas Carlyle’s shrewd and succinct assessment of Mrs Browning as being ‘the type of a Scottish gentlewoman’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The phrase is evocative enough for those who, like Carlyle, have enjoyed some personal experience and acquired some understanding at first hand of the culture that has bred and refined the Scottish gentlewoman over the generations. She is a woman to be reckoned with. Since we know nothing but bromides and pleasing praises of Sarah Anna’s temperament beyond what may be conjectured, particularly from Carlyle’s brief but telling phrase, we may take it that she was quieter and more phlegmatic than Jane Welsh, Carlyle’s own Scottish gentlewoman wife whose verbal flyting could generally be relied upon to rattle the teeth and teacups of visitors to Carlyle’s London house in Cheyne Walk.
Mrs Browning’s father was German. Her grandfather is said to have been a Hamburg merchant whose son William is generally agreed to have become, in a small way, a ship owner in Dundee and to have married a Scotswoman. She was born Sarah Anna Wiedemann in Scotland, in the early 1770s, and while still a girl came south with her sister Christiana to lodge with an uncle in Camberwell. Her history before marriage is not known to have been remarkable; after marriage it was not notably dramatic. There is only the amplest evidence that she was worthily devoted to her hearth, garden, husband, and children.
Mrs Browning’s head so fascinated Alfred Domett that he continued to refer to it in a domestic anecdote agreeably designed to emphasize the affection that existed between mother and son: ‘On one occasion, in the act of tossing a little roll of music from the table to the piano, he thought it had touched her head in passing her, and I remember how he ran to her to apologise and caress her, though I think she had not felt it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Sarah Anna Browning’s head was at least tenderly regarded and respected by Robert, her son, who—since he has left no description of it to posterity in prose or poetry—either refrained from disobliging comment or regarded its shape as in no respect unusual.
Mrs Browning was a Dissenter; her creed was Nonconformist, a somewhat austere faith that partook of no sacraments and reprobated ritual. She—and, nine years into their marriage, her husband—adhered to the Congregational Church, the chapel in York Street, Walworth, which the Browning family attended regularly to hear the preaching of the incumbent, the Revd George Clayton, characterized in the British Weekly of 20 December 1889 as one who ‘combined the character of a saint, a dancing master, and an orthodox eighteenth-century theologian in about equal proportions’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Before professing Congregationalism, she had been brought up—said Sarianna, her daughter, to Mrs Alexandra Sutherland Orr—in the Church of Scotland. One of the books that is recorded as a gift from Mrs Browning to her son is an anthology of sermons, inscribed by him on the flyleaf as a treasured possession and fond remembrance of his mother. As a token of maternal concern for her son’s spiritual welfare it was perfectly appropriate, and might perhaps have been intended as a modest counterweight to the large and eclectic library of books—six thousand volumes, more or less—that her husband had collected, continued to collect, and through which her precocious son was presently and diligently reading his way.
Sarah Anna Browning doubtless had cause to attempt to concentrate young Robert’s mind more narrowly. He had begun with a rather sensational anthology, Nathaniel Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World, published in 1678, and sooner rather than later would inevitably discover dictionaries and encyclopedias, those seemingly innocent repositories of dry definitions and sober facts but which are, in truth, a maze of conceits and confusions, of broad thoroughfares and frustrating cul-de-sacs from which the imaginative mind, once entered, will find no exit and never in a lifetime penetrate to the centre.
But Mrs Browning’s head, square with religion and good intentions, was very liable to be turned by kindly feeling towards her son and poetry. Robert, in 1826, had already come across Miscellaneous Poems, a copy of Shelley’s best works, published by William Benbow of High Holborn, unblushingly pirated from Mrs Shelley’s edition of her husband’s Posthumous Poems. This volume was presented to him by a cousin, James Silverthorne, and he was eager for a more reliable, authoritative edition. Having made inquiries of the Literary Gazette as to where they might be obtained, Robert requested the poems of Shelley as a birthday present.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Browning may be pictured putting on her gloves, setting her bonnet squarely on her head and proceeding to Vere Street. There, at the premises of C. & J. Ollier, booksellers, she purchased the complete works of the poet, including the Pisa edition of Adonais in a purple paper cover and Epipsychidion. None of them had exhausted their first editions save The Cenci, which had achieved a second edition.
On advice, as being in somewhat the same poetic spirit as the works of the late Percy Bysshe Shelley who had died tragically in a boating accident in Italy but three years before, Sarah Anna Browning added to her order three volumes of the poetry of the late John Keats, who had died, also tragically young, in Rome in 1821. Her arms encumbered with the books of these two neglected poets, her head quite innocent of the effect they would have, she returned home to present them to her son. There being not much call for the poetry of Shelley and Keats at this time, it had taken some effort to obtain their works. Bibliophiles, wrote Edmund Gosse in 1881 in the December issue of the Century Magazine, turn almost dazed at the thought of these prizes picked up by the unconscious lady.
The Browning family belonged, remarked G. K. Chesterton, ‘to the solid and educated middle-class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert Browning senior, husband to Sarah Anna Wiedemann, was certainly educated, undeniably middle-class, and interested in literature not so much for its own sake—though he was more literate and widely read, it may safely be said, than many of his colleagues at the Bank of England—but more from the point of view of bibliophily and learning. There was always another book to be sought and set on a shelf. The house in Camberwell was full of them.
Literature and learning are not precisely the same thing, and Mr Browning senior, according to the testimony of Mr Domett, was accustomed to speak of his son ‘“as beyond him”’—alluding to his Paracelsuses and Sordellos; though I fancy he altered his tone on this subject very much at a later period’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Poetry safely clapped between purple paper covers is one thing, poets are quite another—and an experimental, modern poet within the confines of one’s own family is bound to be unsettling to a traditionalist, try as he may to comprehend, proud as he may be of completed and published effort. Mr Browning senior may initially have been more pleased with the fact of his son’s work being printed and bound and placed in its proper place on his bookshelves than with the perplexing contents of the books themselves.
That said, introductory notes by Reuben Browning to a small volume of sketches by Robert Browning senior refer kindly to his stepbrother’s bibliophily and store of learning—however much at random and magpie-like it may have been acquired: ‘The love of reading attracted him by sympathy to books: old books were his delight, and by his continual search after them he not only knew all the old books-stalls in London, but their contents, and if any scarce work were spoken of, he could tell forthwith where a copy of it might be had. Nay, he would even describe in what part of the shop it was placed, and the price likely to be asked for it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) So, ‘with the scent of a hound and the snap of a bull-dog’ for an old or rare book, Mr Browning acquired learning and a library.
‘Thus his own library became his treasure,’ remarked Reuben Browning. ‘His books, however, were confessedly not remarkable for costly binding, but for their rarity or for interesting remarks he had to make on most of them; and his memory was so good that not infrequently, when a conversation at his table had reference to any particular subject, has he quietly left the room and in the dark, from a thousand volumes in his library, brought two or three illustrations of the point under discussion.’ The point under discussion, however esoteric, would rarely defeat Mr Browning senior’s search for an apposite reference: ‘His wonderful store of information,’ wrote Reuben Browning, ‘might really be compared to an inexhaustible mine. It comprised not merely a thorough scholastic outline of the world, but the critical points of ancient and modern history, the lore of the Middle Ages, all political combinations of parties, their descriptions and consequences; and especially the lives of the poets and painters, concerning whom he ever had to communicate some interesting anecdote not generally known.’
A portrait of Mr Browning senior, preserved throughout their lives by his children, was ‘blue-eyed and “fresh-coloured”’ and, attested Mr Browning’s daughter Sarianna to Alfred Domett, the man himself ‘had not an unsound tooth in his head’ when he died at the age of 84. In his youth he had been a vigorous sportsman, afflicted only by sore throats and a minor liver complaint. Altogether, his general health and recuperative powers were strongly marked. Alfred Domett took these facts of paternal health and heredity seriously, on the ground that ‘they have their significance with reference to the physical constitution of their son, the poet; which goes so far as to make up what is called “genius”’.
So far as Domett was aware, no cloud shadowed the home life of the Brownings: ‘Altogether, father, mother, only son and only daughter formed a most suited, harmonious and intellectual family, as appeared to me.’ Mr Browning senior, to Domett, was not often a physically significant presence: his friend’s father, ‘of whom I did not see much, seemed in my recollection, what I should be inclined to call a dry adust [sic] undersized man; rather reserved; fond particularly of old engravings, of which I believe he had a choice collection.’ Mr Browning took pleasure not only in collecting pictures but also in making them. He was liable to sketch the heads of his colleagues and visitors to the Bank of England, a habit so much encouraged by his employers that hundreds of these whiskered heads survive to this day.
Mr Browning also wrote poetry of a traditional kind. His son in later life praised his father’s verses to Edmund Gosse, declaring ‘that his father had more true poetic genius than he has’. Gosse, taking this with scarcely too gross a pinch of salt and allowing for filial piety, kindly but rigorously comments that, ‘Of course the world at large will answer, “By their fruits shall ye know them,” and of palpable fruit in the way of published verse the elder Mr Browning has nothing to show.’ The elder Browning’s poetic taste was more or less exclusively for double or triple rhyme, and especially for the heroic couplet, which he employed with ‘force and fluency’. Gosse goes on to quote the more celebrated son describing the moral and stylistic vein of the father’s vigorous verses ‘as that of a Pope born out of due time’. Mr Browning had been a great classicist and a lover of eighteenth-century literature, the poetry of that period having achieved, in his estimation, its finest flowering in the work of Alexander Pope. Though his son’s early poetry, Pauline and Paracelsus, confounded him, Mr Browning senior forgave the otherwise impenetrable Sordello because—says William Sharp in his Life of Browning—‘it was written in rhymed couplets’.
Pope, according to the critic Mark Pattison, ‘was very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant; that is, of everything but the one thing which he laboured with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonyms, and pretty turns of language.’ Mr Browning senior’s satirical portraits of friends and colleagues are said to be very Pope-ish in expression, quick sketches reminiscent in their style of Pope’s rhetorical (often oratorical) couplets. It is further said that he was incapable of portraying anyone other than as a grotesque. The sketch of his wife is certainly none too flattering.
This domestic, middle-class idyll, quiet-flowing and given muted colour by art, poetry, music, bibliophily and decent religious observances, was touching to Alfred Domett, who recollected his serene memories of the Browning family in the tranquillity that fell upon him after leaving public office in New Zealand and returning to London to look up an old friend now celebrated as an important poet and public figure.
Mr Browning, like his wife, became a Dissenter and a Nonconformist in middle life, though it had taken Sarah Anna Browning time and energy to persuade him from the Episcopal communion. In his youth, he had held principles and expressed opinions, uncompromisingly liberal, that had all but brought him to ruin—certainly had distanced him from the prospect of maintaining at least, perhaps increasing, the family fortune that derived from estates and commercial interests in the West Indies. His father, the first Robert Browning, had been born the eldest son in 1749 to Jane Morris of Cranborne, Dorset, wife to Thomas Browning who in 1760 had become landlord of Woodyates Inn, close to the Dorset-Wiltshire border, which he had held on a 99-year lease from the Earl of Shaftesbury. Thomas and Jane Browning produced five more children, three sons (one of whom died young) and two daughters.
Robert the First, as he may here be styled, was to become grandfather of the poet. He was recommended by Lord Shaftesbury for employment in the Bank of England, where he served for the whole of his working life, fifty years, from August 1769, when he would have been about the age of twenty, becoming Principal of the Bank Stock Office, a post of some considerable prestige which implied wide contact with influential financiers. This first Robert Browning was no man, merely, of balance sheets and bottom-polished trousers: at about the age of forty, he vigorously assisted, as a lieutenant in the Honourable Artillery Company, in the defence of the Bank of England during the Gordon Riots of 1780.
In 1778, he married Margaret Morris Tittle, a lady who had been born in the West Indies, reputedly a Creole (and said, by some, to have been darker than was then thought decent), by whom he sired three children—Robert, the eldest, being born on 6 July 1782 at Battersea. A second son, William, was born and died in 1784. A daughter, Margaret—who remained unmarried and lived quietly until her death in 1857 (or 1858, according to a descendant, Vivienne Browning)—was born in 1783. Nothing more is heard of Margaret, beyond a reference by Cyrus Mason, a Browning cousin, who in later life composed a memoir in which he wrote that ‘Aunt Margaret was detected mysteriously crooning prophecies over her Nephew, behind a door at the house at Camberwell.’
The picture of an eccentric prophetess lurking at keyholes and singing the fortunes of the future poet is not conjured by any other biographer of Robert Browning. Cyrus Mason is not widely regarded as a reliable chronicler of Browning family history. He begins with his own self-aggrandizing agenda and sticks to it. His reputation is rather as a somewhat embittered relation who took the view that the poet Robert Browning and his admirers had paid inadequate attention and given insufficient credit to the more remote branches of the family. The contribution of the extended family to the poet’s early education, he considered, had been cruelly overlooked and positively belittled by wilful neglect.
However, since the reference to Margaret Browning does exist, and since Margaret has otherwise vanished from biographical ken, a possible—rather than probable—explanation for this single recorded peculiarity of the poet’s aunt is that she may have been simple-minded and thus kept in what her family may have regarded (not uncommonly at the time) as a decent, discreet seclusion. The extent to which they succeeded in containing any public embarrassment may—and it is no more than supposition—account for Margaret’s virtually complete obscurity in a family history that has been otherwise largely revealed.
Margaret Morris Tittle Browning died in Camberwell in 1789, when Robert (who can be referred to as Robert the Second), her only remaining son, was seven years old. When Robert was twelve, his father remarried in April 1794. This second wife, Jane Smith, by whom he fathered nine more children, three sons, and six daughters, was but twenty-three at the time of her marriage in Chelsea to the 45-year-old Robert Browning the First. The difference of twenty-two years between husband and wife is said, specifically by Mrs Sutherland Orr, Robert Browning’s official biographer, sister of the exotic Orientalist and painter Frederic Leighton, and a friend of the poet, to have resulted in the complete ascendancy of Jane Smith Browning over her husband. Besotted by, and doting upon, his young darling, he made no objection to Jane’s relegation of a portrait (attributed to Wright of Derby) of his first wife to a garret on the basis that a man did not need two wives. One—the living—in this case proved perfectly sufficient.
The hard man of business and urban battle, the doughty Englishman of Dorset stock, the soundly respectable man who annually read the Bible and Tom Jones (both, probably, with equal religious attention), the stout and severe man who lived more or less hale—despite the affliction of gout—to the age of eighty-four, was easily subverted by a woman whose gnawing jealousy of his first family extended from the dead to the quick. Browning family tradition, says Vivienne Browning, a family historian, also attributes a jealousy to Robert the First, naturally anxious to retain the love and loyalty of his young wife against any possible threat, actual or merely perceived in his imagination. Their nine children, a substantial though not unusual number, may have been conceived and borne as much in response to jealousy, doubt, and fear as in expression of any softer feelings.
Jane Browning’s alleged ill-will towards Robert the Second, Robert the First’s son by his previous marriage to Margaret Tittle, was not appeased by the young man’s independence, financial or intellectual. He had inherited a small income from an uncle, his mother’s brother, and proposed to apply it to a university education for himself. Jane, supposedly on the ground that there were insufficient funds to send her own sons to university, opposed her stepson’s ambition. Then, too, there was some irritation that Robert the Second wished to be an artist and showed some talent for the calling. Robert the First—says Mrs Orr—turned away disgustedly when Robert the Second showed his first completed picture to his father. The household was plainly a domestic arena of seething discontents, jealous insecurities, envious stratagems, entrenched positions on every front, and sniper fire from every corner of every room.
Margaret Tittle had left property in the West Indies, and it was Robert the First’s intention that their son should proceed, at the age of nineteen, to St Kitts to manage the family estates, which were worked by slave labour. He may have been glad enough to go, to remove himself as far as possible from his father and stepmother. In the event, he lasted only a year in the West Indies before returning to London, emotionally bruised by his experience of the degrading conditions under which slaves laboured on the sugar plantations. Robert the Second’s reasonable expectation was that he might inherit perhaps not all, but at least a substantial proportion of his mother’s property, had he not ‘conceived such a hatred of the slave system’.
Mrs Sutherland Orr states: ‘One of the experiences which disgusted him with St Kitts was the frustration by its authorities of an attempt he was making to teach a negro boy to read, and the understanding that all such educative action was prohibited.’ For a man who, from his earliest years, was wholly devoted to books, art, anything that nourished and encouraged inquiry and intellect, the spiritual repression of mind and soul as much—perhaps more than—physical repression of bodily freedom, must have seemed an act of institutionalized criminality and personal inhumanity by the properly constituted authorities. He could not morally consider himself party to, or representative of, such a system.
Certainly as a result of the apparent lily-livered liberalism of his son and his shocking, incomprehensible disregard for the propriety of profit, conjecturally also on account of a profound unease about maintaining the affection and loyalty of his young wife—there were only ten years between stepmother Jane and her stepson—Robert the First fell into a passionate and powerful rage that he sustained for many years. Robert Browning, the grandson and son of the protagonists of this quarrel, did not learn the details of the family rupture until 25 August 1846, when his mother finally confided the circumstances of nigh on half a century before.
‘If we are poor,’ wrote Robert Browning the Third the next day to Elizabeth Barrett, ‘it is to my father’s infinite glory, who, as my mother told me last night, as we sate alone, “conceived such a hatred to the slave-system in the West Indies,” (where his mother was born, who died in his infancy,) that he relinquished every prospect,—supported himself, while there, in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father’s profound astonishment and rage—one proof of which was, that when he heard that his son was a suitor to her, my mother—he benevolently waited on her Uncle to assure him that his niece “would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged”!—those were his very words. My father on his return, had the intention of devoting himself to art, for which he had many qualifications and abundant love—but the quarrel with his father,—who married again and continued to hate him till a few years before his death,—induced him to go at once and consume his life after a fashion he always detested. You may fancy, I am not ashamed of him.’
As soon as Robert the Second achieved his majority, he was dunned by his father for restitution in full of all the expenses that Robert the First had laid out on him, and he was stripped of any inheritance from his mother, Margaret, whose fortune, at the time of her marriage, had not been settled upon her and thus had fallen under the control of her husband. These reactions so intimidated Robert the Second that he agreed to enter the Bank of England, his father’s territory, as a clerk and to sublimate his love of books and sketching in ledgers and ink. In November 1803, four months after his twenty-first birthday, he began his long, complaisant, not necessarily unhappy servitude of fifty years as a bank clerk in Threadneedle Street.
A little over seven years later, at Camberwell on 19 February 1811, in the teeth of his father’s opposition, Robert the Second married Sarah Anna Wiedemann, whose uncle evidently disregarded Robert the First’s predictions. She was then thirty-nine, ten years older than her husband and only one year younger than his stepmother Jane. They settled at 6 Southampton Street, Camberwell, where, on 7 May 1812, Sarah Anna Browning was delivered of a son, the third in the direct Browning line to be named Robert. Twenty months later, on 7 January 1814, their second child, called Sarah Anna after her mother, but known as Sarianna by her family and friends, was born.
William Sharp, in his Life of Browning, published in 1897, refers briskly and offhandedly to a third child, Clara. Nothing is known of Clara: it is possible she may have been stillborn or died immediately after birth. Mrs Orr never mentions the birth of a third child, and not even Cyrus Mason, the family member one would expect to seize eagerly upon the suppression of any reference to a Browning, suggests that more than two children were born to the Brownings. However, William Clyde DeVane, discussing Browning’s ‘Lines to the Memory of his Parents’ in A Browning Handbook, states that ‘The “child that never knew” Mrs Browning was a stillborn child who was to have been named Clara.’ The poem containing this discreet reference was not printed until it appeared in F.G. Kenyon’s New Poems by Robert Browning, published in 1914, and in the February issue, that same year, of the Cornhill Magazine. Vivienne Browning, in My Browning Family Album, published in 1992, declares that her grandmother (Elizabeth, a daughter of Reuben Browning, son of Jane, Robert the First’s second wife) ‘included a third baby—a girl—in the family tree’, but Vivienne Browning ‘cannot now find any evidence to support this’.
It is known that Sarah Anna Browning miscarried at least once. In a letter to his son Pen, the poet Robert Browning wrote on 25 January 1888 to condole with him and his wife Fannie on her miscarriage: ‘Don’t be disappointed at this first failure of your natural hopes—it may soon be repaired. Your dearest Mother experienced the same misfortune, at much about the same time after marriage: and it happened also to my own mother, before I was born.’ Unless Sarah Anna’s miscarriage occurred in a very late stage of pregnancy, it seems improbable that a miscarried child should have been given a name and regarded, in whatever terms, as a first-born—but natural parental sentiment may have prompted the Brownings to give their first daughter, who never drew breath, miscarried or stillborn, at least the dignity and memorial of a name.
The small, close-knit family moved house in 1824, though merely from 6 Southampton Street to another house (the number is not known) in the same street, where they remained until December 1840. Bereaved of his mother at the age of seven, repressed from the age of twelve by his father and stepmother, denied further education and frustrated in his principles and ambitions in his late teens, all but disinherited for failure to make a success of business and to close a moral eye to the inhumanity of slavery, set on a high stool and loaded with ledgers in his early twenties, it is hardly surprising that Robert the Second sought a little peace and quiet for avocations that had moderated into hobbies. He settled for a happy—perhaps undemanding—marriage to a peacable, slightly older wife, and a tranquil bolt-hole in what was then, in the early nineteenth century, the semi-rural backwater of Camberwell.
His poverty, counted in monetary terms, was relative. His work in the Bank of England, never as elevated or responsible as Robert the First’s, was nevertheless adequately paid, the hours were short and overtime, particularly the lucrative night watch, was paid at a higher rate. There was little or no managerial or official concern about the amount of paper, the number of pens, or the quantity of sealing wax used by Bank officials, and these materials were naturally regarded as lucrative perquisites that substantially bumped up the regular salary. Though Mrs Orr admits this trade, she adds—somewhat severely—in a footnote: ‘I have been told that, far from becoming careless in the use of these things from his practically unbounded command of them, he developed for them an almost superstitious reverence. He could never endure to see a scrap of writing-paper wasted.’
He could count on a regular salary of a little more than £300 a year, supplemented by generous rates of remuneration for extra duties and appropriate perks of office. He may have been deprived of any interest in his mother’s estate, but his small income from his mother’s brother, even after deductions from it by his father, continued to be a reliable annual resource. Over the years, Robert the Second acquired valuable specialist knowledge of pictures and books, and certainly, though he was no calculating businessman and willingly gave away many items from his collection, he occasionally—perhaps regularly—traded acquisitions and profited from serendipitous discoveries.
In the end, though it was a long time coming, Robert the First softened towards his eldest son. That he was not wholly implacable is testified by his will, made in 1819, two years before his retirement from the Bank: he left Robert the Second and Margaret ten pounds each for a ring. This may seem a paltry inheritance, but he took into account the fact that Robert and Margaret had inherited from ‘their Uncle Tittle and Aunt Mill a much greater proportion than can be left to my other dear children’. He trusted ‘they will not think I am deficient in love and regard to them’. As a token of reconciliation, the legacy to buy rings was a substantial olive branch.
It may be assumed that the patriarch Browning’s temper had begun to abate before he made his will, and that the Brownings had resumed some form of comfortable, if cautious, communication until the old man’s death. There is certainly some indication that Robert the First saw something of his grandchildren—the old man is said by Mrs Orr to have ‘particularly dreaded’ his lively grandson’s ‘vicinity to his afflicted foot’, little boys and gout being clearly best kept far apart. After the death of Robert the First in 1833, stepmother Jane, then in her early sixties, moved south of the river from her house in Islington to Albert Terrace, just beyond the toll bar at New Cross. In the biography of Robert Browning published in 1910 by W. Hall Griffin and H.C. Minchin, it is said that the portrait of the first Mrs Browning, Margaret Tittle, had been retrieved from the Islington garret and was hung in her son’s dining room.
The most familiar photograph of Robert the Second, taken—it looks like—in late middle age (though it is difficult to tell, since he is said to have retained a youthful appearance until late in life) shows the profile of a rather worried-looking man. A deep line creases from the nostril to just below the side of the mouth, which itself appears thin and turns down at the corner. The hair is white, neatly combed back over the forehead and bushy around the base of the ears. It is the picture of a doubtful man who looks slightly downward rather than straight ahead, as though he has no expectation of seeing, like The Lost Leader, ‘Never glad confident morning again!’. He still bled, perhaps, from the wounds inflicted upon him as a child and young man: but if he did, he suffered in silence.
As some men for the rest of their lives do not care to talk about their experiences in war, so Robert the Second could never bring himself to talk about his bitter experiences in the West Indies: ‘My father is tenderhearted to a fault,’ wrote his son to Elizabeth Barrett on 27 August 1846. The poet’s mother had confided some particulars to him three days before, but from his father he had got never a word: ‘I have never known much more of those circumstances in his youth than I told you, in consequence of his invincible repugnance to allude to the matter—and I have a fancy to account for some peculiarities in him, which connects them with some abominable early experience. Thus,—if you question him about it, he shuts his eyes involuntarily and shows exactly the same marks of loathing that may be noticed if a piece of cruelty is mentioned … and the word “blood,” even makes him change colour.’
These ‘peculiarities’ observed in his father by the youngest Browning did not go unremarked by others who, with less fancy than his son to seek an origin for them, were content to observe and to wonder at this marvellous man. Cyrus Mason, as an amateur historian of the Browning family, speaks specifically of Robert the Second’s ‘imaginative and eccentric brain’. It seems likely that he is not only confessing his own bewilderment, which becomes ever more apparent as his memoir proceeds, but a general incomprehension within the wider Browning family. Inevitably, mild eccentricities of character become magnified by family and friends otherwise at a loss to account for the somewhat detached life of a man who is for all practical, day-to-day intents and purposes a conscientious banker and responsible family man, but whose domestic and inner life, so far as it is penetrable by others, exhibits a marked degree of abstraction and commitment to matters that harder, squarer heads would not regard as immediately profitable in the conduct of everyday life—‘Robert’s incessant study of subjects perfectly useless in Banking business’, to quote Cyrus Mason. Such minor aberrations are naturally inflated in the remembrance and the retelling, particularly when it becomes evident that such a man has become, indirectly, an object of interest and attention through efforts made by admirers or detractors to trace the early influences upon his remarkable son.
Mrs Orr tells us that Robert the Second, when he in turn became a grandfather, taught his grandson elementary anatomy, impressing upon young Pen Browning ‘the names and position of the principal bones of the human body’. Cyrus Mason adds considerably to this blameless, indeed worthy, anecdote by claiming that ‘Uncle Robert became so absorbed in his anatomical studies that he conveyed objects for dissection into the Bank of England; on one occasion a dead rat was kept for so long a time in his office desk, awaiting dissection, that his fellow clerks were compelled to apply to their chief to have it removed! The study of anatomy became so seductive that on the day Uncle Robert was married, he disappeared mysteriously after the ceremony and was discovered … busily engaged dissecting a duck, oblivious of the fact that a wife and wedding guests were reduced to a state of perplexity by his unexplained absence.’
This story has the air of invention by a fabulist—Mr Browning, being a little peckish, might merely have been carving a duck—and earlier echoes of preoccupied, enthusiastic amateur morbid anatomists recur to the mind (in the annals of Scottish eccentricity, there are several instances of notable absence of mind of more or less this nature at wedding feasts); there is even a faint, ludicrous hint of Francis Bacon fatally catching a cold while stuffing a chicken with snow by the roadside in an early endeavour to discover the principles of refrigeration. The patronizing tone is one of barely-tolerant amusement, of reminiscence dressed up with a dry chuckle, of family anecdote become fanciful.
‘Uncle Robert’, in short, was held—more or less exasperatedly—to be something of a whimsical character. His seeming inclination to desert the ceremonies and commonplace observances of ‘real life’, of family life, for abstruse, even esoteric researches—all those books!—may be exaggerated, but the metamorphosis of memory into myth is generally achieved through the medium of an actuality. The pearl of fiction accretes around a grain of actuality, and in this case the attitudes and behaviour of Robert Browning, father of the poet, achieve a relevance in respect of his attitude towards the education, intellectual liberty, and the vocation of his son.
Robert the Second, frustrated in his own creative ambitions, did not discourage his son from conducting his life along lines that he himself had been denied. Cyrus Mason declares that, from the beginning, the ‘arranged destiny’ of Robert and Sarah Anna’s son was to be a poet. His life and career, says Mason, were planned from the cot. The infant Robert’s ‘swaddling clothes were wrapped around his little body with a poetic consideration’, his father rocked his cradle rhythmically, his Aunt Margaret ‘prophecied [sic] in her dark mysterious manner his brilliant future’, and women lulled him to sleep with whispered words of poetry. Whether unconsciously or by design, Mason here introduces the fairy-story image of the good or bad fairy godmothers conferring gifts more or less useful.
Allowing for the Brothers Grimm or Perrault quality of these images conjured by Mason, and his patent intention in writing his memoir to arrogate a substantial proportion of the credit for the infant Robert’s development to a wider family circle of Brownings, there is a nub of truth in his assertion. There is some dispute as to how far it may be credited, of course. Mrs Orr merely states that the infant Robert showed a precocious aptitude for poetry: ‘It has often been told how he extemporised verse aloud while walking round and round the dining room table supporting himself by his hands, when he was still so small that his head was scarcely above it.’ Some children naturally sing, some dance, some draw little pictures and some declaim nonsense verse or nursery rhymes: Robert Browning invented his own childish verses. Doting family relations would naturally exclaim over his prospects as a great poet and genially encourage the conceit.
That he was raised from birth as—or specifically to become—a poet is improbable: more unlikely still is the assertion that he was raised ‘poetically’ by parents whose inclinations in the normal run of things were kindly and indulgent in terms of stimulating their son’s natural and lively intelligence, but not inherently fanciful: they were respectably pious, middle-class, somewhat matter-of-fact citizens of no more and no less distinction than others of their time, place, and type. They were distinctive enough to those who loved them or had cause to consider them, but they were not—in the usual meaning of the word—distinguished.
They were what G.K. Chesterton calls ‘simply a typical Camberwell family’ after he sensibly dismisses as largely irrelevant to immediate Browning biography all red herrings such as the alleged pied-noir origins of Margaret Tittle (which may have been true), a supposed Jewish strain in the Browning family (now discounted, but which would have been a matter of extreme interest to the poet), and the suggestion, from the fact that Browning and his father used a ring-seal with a coat of arms, of an aristocratic origin dating from the Middle Ages for the family name, if not for the family itself.
Nevertheless, in thrall to the romance of pedigree and the benefits that may be derived from a selective use of genealogy, Cyrus Mason’s memoir is motivated not only by a gnawing ambition to associate himself and his kinsfolk more closely with the poet Browning and to aggrandize himself by the connection, but also, vitally, to give the lie to the ‘monstrous fabrication’ by F.J. Furnivall, a devoted admirer and scholar of the poet Browning, that the Brownings descended from the servant class, very likely from a footman, later butler, to the Bankes family at Corfe Castle before becoming innkeepers. Cyrus Mason claims to trace the Browning lineage back unto the remotest generations—at least into the fourteenth century—to disprove any stigma of low birth. He even manages to infer, from some eighteenth-century holograph family documents, the high cost of binding some family books, the good quality of the ink used, and, from the evidence of ‘fine bold writing’, a prosperous, educated, literary ancestry. These elaborate researches were of the greatest possible interest to Cyrus Mason: they consumed his time, consoled his soul, confirmed his pride, and confounded cavilling critics.
Cyrus Mason was satisfied with his work, and it is to his modest credit that he has amply satisfied everyone else, most of whom are now content to acknowledge this monument to genealogical archaeology and pass more quickly than is entirely respectful to more immediate matters. We consult Mason’s book much as visitors to an exhibition browse speedily through the well-researched but earnest expository notes at the entrance and hurry inside to get to the interesting main exhibit. ‘For the great central and solid fact,’ declared G. K. Chesterton, ‘which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class.’ Allowing, naturally, for his mother’s Scottish-German parentage and his grandmother’s Creole connection, Robert Browning was certainly brought up as a middle-class Englishman.
Chesterton’s argument, scything decisively through the tangled undergrowth of genealogy and the rank weeds of heterogeneous heredity, becomes a spirited, romantic peroration, grandly swelling as he praises Robert Browning’s genius to the heights, then dropping bathetically back as he regularly nails it to the ground by constantly reminding us that Browning was ‘an Englishman of the middle class’; until, finally, he sweeps to his breathtaking and irresistible conclusion that Browning ‘piled up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity.’
Robert Browning’s mother was no bluestocking: she was not herself literary, nor was she inclined to draw or paint in water-colours. Her husband did enough book collecting and sketching already. Though she had a considerable taste for music and is said to have been an accomplished pianist (Beethoven’s sonatas, Avison’s marches, and Gaelic laments are cited as belonging to her repertoire), she was very likely no more than ordinarily competent on a piano, though her technique was evidently infused with fine romantic feeling. Sarah Anna Browning tended her flower garden (Cyrus Mason remarks upon ‘the garden, Aunt Robert’s roses, that wicket gate the Robert Browning family used by favor, opening for them a ready way to wander in the then beautiful meadows to reach the Dulwich woods, the College and gallery’) and otherwise occupied herself, day by day, with domestic matters relating to her largely self-contained, self-sufficient family. Other biographers beg to differ when Mrs Orr tells us that Mrs Browning ‘had nothing of the artist about her’. In contrast to her husband, she produced nothing artistic or creative, but partisans speak warmly of her tender interest in music and romantic poetry. She possessed at least an artistic sensibility.
Mrs Orr remarks, cursorily but not disparagingly: ‘Little need be said about the poet’s mother’, the implication—quite wrong—being that there was little to be said. Her son’s devotion to Sarah Anna was very marked: habitually, when he sat beside her, Robert would like to put his arm around her waist. When she died in early 1849, he beatified her by describing her as ‘a divine woman’. Most biographers and others interested in the poet Browning make a point of the empathetic feeling that developed between mother and son: when Sarah Anna Browning was laid low with headaches, her son dreadfully suffered sympathetic pains. ‘The circumstances of his death recalled that of his mother,’ says Mrs Orr, and adds, however ‘it might sound grotesque’, that ‘only a delicate woman could have been the mother of Robert Browning’.
She was certainly religious, and none doubted that her place in heaven had long been marked and secured by her narrow piety, commonsense good nature, and her stoical suffering of physical ailments. Sarah Anna Browning endured debilitating, painful headaches, severe as migraines (which indeed they may have been). In contrast to her vigorously hale husband, she is portrayed by Mrs Orr as ‘a delicate woman, very anaemic during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia which was perhaps a symptom of this condition’.
Robert, her son, was not so delicate in health or attitude. He established an early reputation not only for mental precocity but vocal and physically boisterous expression of it. In modern times, his vigour and fearlessness, his restlessness and temper, might worry some as verging on hyperactivity. ‘He clamoured for occupation as soon as he could speak,’ says Mrs Orr and, though admitting that ‘his energies were of course destructive till they had found their proper outlet’, she discovers no inherent vice in the child: ‘we do not hear of his having destroyed anything for the mere sake of doing so’. A taste for lively spectacle rather than wilful incendiarism is adduced as the motive for Robert’s ‘putting a handsome Brussels lace veil of his mother’s into the fire’ and excusing himself with the words, ‘a pretty blaze, mamma’ (rendered as ‘a pitty baze’ by Mrs Orr, prefiguring the lisping baby-talk that so rejoiced the ears of the poet and his wife when their own son, Pen, first began to speak).
To quiet the boy, Sarah Anna Browning’s best resource was to sit him on her knees, holding him in a firm grip, and to engage his attention with stories—‘doubtless Bible stories’, says Mrs Orr, as a tribute not only to Mrs Browning’s natural piety, her vocation as a Sunday School teacher, and her subscription to the London Missionary Society but also, no doubt, to the improving effect of religion in general, Nonconformism in particular, and its associated morality. If, as Cyrus Mason suggests, Robert was raised to be a poet, quiet introspection was not a notable characteristic of his infancy—though music (he liked to listen to his mother play the piano and would beg her to keep up the performance) and religion (Sarah Anna Browning could curb her son’s arrogance until quite late in his life by pointing out the very real peril and lively retribution awaiting those who failed in Christian charity) could soothe the savage child and bind them together, mother and son, in a delicate balance of love and apprehension. Maternal indulgence, too, was a reliable ploy: Robert could be induced to swallow unpleasant medicine so long as he was given a toad which Mrs Browning, holding a parasol over her head, obligingly searched for in her strawberry bed—a memory of childhood that never faded in her son’s recollection.
A recollection of his mother’s garden very likely informs the idyllic first section—‘The Flower’s Name’—of the poem ‘Garden-Fancies’, a revised version of which was included in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, published in 1845:
Here’s the garden she walked across,
Arm in my arm, such a short while since:
Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss
Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!
She must have reached this shrub ere she turned,
As back with that murmur the wicket swung;
For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned,
To feed and forget it the leaves among.
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As she walks with little Robert through her garden, talking to him, Sarah Anna Browning’s gown brushes against a bush or hedge of box. She stops, hushes her words, and points out ‘a moth on the milk-white phlox’. Here roses, there rock plants, elsewhere a particular flower with a ‘soft meandering Spanish name’ that inspires an ambition in the boy to learn Spanish ‘Only for that slow sweet name’s sake’. Above all, the roses ‘ranged in valiant row’ where Sarah Anna always pauses—
… for she lingers
There like sunshine over the ground
And ever I see her soft white fingers
Searching after the bud she found.
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There are any number of anecdotes that attest to a happy childhood and none that imply any serious cause for parental or official reprobation—saving only the exasperation of the Revd George Clayton who, in the course of a church service, had cause to admonish ‘for restlessness and inattention Master Robert Browning’. The boy had been reduced by impatience to gnawing on a pew.
The question of Robert the Third’s education was settled when his head became filled with so much random information that it increased what Mrs Orr describes as his ‘turbulent activity’ and it was thought desirable that he should be off-loaded for an hour or two every day into the care of a ‘lady of reduced fortunes’ who kept a dame school or local kindergarten. There, Robert’s precociousness so dispirited the mothers of the other children in the school, who reckoned that Robert was getting all the poor lady’s attention to the disadvantage of their own dullard sons, that they complained and demanded his removal. Thereafter, until the age of eight or nine, Robert enjoyed the advantages of a home education. His mother mostly took care of his moral, musical, and religious education, his father fired up his imagination with his own squirrelled store of learning and his inspired, fanciful methods of imparting it.
Robert the Second, thoroughly versed in the Greek poets, is conjured irresistibly in his son’s poetic memory: the poem ‘Development’, first published in Asolando, probably dates from 1888 or 1889, and is often quoted to illustrate Browning’s first encounter with Homer in 1817 or thereabouts.
My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
‘What do you read about?’
‘The siege of Troy.’
‘What is a siege and what is Troy?’
Whereat
He piled up chairs and tables for a town,
Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat
—Helen, enticed away from home (he said)
By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close
Under the footstool, being cowardly,
But whom—since she was worth the pains, poor puss—
Towzer and Tray,—our dogs, the Atreidai,—sought
By taking Troy to get possession of
—Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk,
(My pony in the stable)—forth would prance
And put to flight Hector—our page boy’s self.
Adds Browning,
This taught me who was who and what was what:
So far I rightly understood the case
At five years old:
And when, after two or three years, the game of Troy’s siege had become familiar,
My Father came upon our make-believe.
‘How would you like to read yourself the tale
Properly told, of which I gave you first
Merely such notion as a boy could bear?’
whereupon, at about the age of eight, Robert the Third opened Pope’s translation of The Iliad and
So I ran through Pope,
Enjoyed the tale, what history so true?
Attacked my Primer, duly drudged,
Grew fitter thus for what was promised next—
The very thing itself, the actual words,
in Greek by the age of twelve. Thereafter, for a lifetime, there was no end to Homer and Greek and the worm casts of scholarship, the dream-destroying detritus of peckers through dust and texts, winnowers of grain from chaff, who tumbled the towers of Ilium more surely to rock and sand than the hot force of vir et armis, desiccating the blood of heroes and giving the lie at Hell’s Gate to Hector’s love for his wife.
‘Development’ raises questions as to whether Robert the Second was to blame for encouraging his son’s learning through play and—strictly speaking—falsehood rather than, in Gradgrind fashion, sticking strictly to the facts:
That is—he might have put into my hand
The ‘Ethics’? In translation, if you please,
Exact, no pretty lying that improves
To suit the modern taste: no more—no less—
The ‘Ethics’.
In no mistrustful mind of dry-as-dust nonagenarian scholarship, unburdened by the Ethics, bubbling with guiltless, childlike nine-year-old innocence of any distinction between accredited reality and mythological falsehood, between truth-to-fact and truth-to-fiction, Robert was sent to school.
Browning’s biographers can become thoroughly intoxicated in the well-stocked cellar of fine vintage learning that their subject laid down from his earliest years and drew upon in draughts for the rest of his working life as a poet. He read everything and ‘could forget nothing’—except, as he claimed later, ‘names and the date of the Battle of Waterloo’. The boy’s virtual self-education at home rather than his formal schooling informed a lifetime’s poetry and play-writing. School was the least of it—a pretty perfunctory performance lasting only some five or six years. Robert boarded, from Mondays to Fridays, with the Misses Ready, who with their brother, the Revd Thomas Ready, kept an elementary school for boys at number 77 Queen’s Road, Peckham.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was reputedly the best school in the neighbourhood, highly regarded both in respect of pedagogy and piety. Mr Ready instructed the older boys while the younger boys, up to the age of ten, were physically and spiritually improved by the two Ready sisters, who sang the hymns of Isaac Watts as they oiled and brushed out the hair and brushed up the moral fibre of their charges. Robert attended the Ready school until he was fourteen.
His distress at leaving his mother was more than he thought he could bear. And what was it for, this dolorous separation? He later remarked to Alfred Domett,
(#litres_trial_promo) whose two elder brothers had been at the Ready school, that ‘they taught him nothing there, and that he was “bullied by the big boys”’. John Domett recalled to his brother Alfred for his memoir, ‘young Browning, in a pinafore of brown holland such as small boys used to wear in those days, for he was always neat in his dress—and how they used to pit him against much older boys in a “chaffing” match to amuse themselves with the “little bright-eyed fellow’s” readiness and acuteness at retort and repartee’. Robert distinguished himself not only by a smart mouth but also by occasional sharp practice: when the master’s attention was diverted, he would close the Revd Ready’s lexicon, obliging him to open it again to look for the word he’d been referring to. He also learned how to suck up to Mr Ready, composing verses that earned him some privileges and would have warmed the heart of the great Dr Arnold of Rugby. ‘Great bosh they were,’ Robert said, quoting two concluding lines:
We boys are privates in our Regiment’s ranks—
’Tis to our Captain that we all owe thanks!
and followed this piece of blatant toadying by reciting from memory to Alfred Domett, while they were walking by a greenhouse discernible behind the walls of the school playground, a disrespectful epigram he had also made:
Within these walls and near that house of glass,
Did I, three (?) years of hapless childhood pass—
D—d undiluted misery it was!
He got his revenge, though, by taking off the Misses Ready in full Watts voice, ‘illustrating with voice and gesture’ the ferocious emphasis with which the brush would sweep down in the accentuated syllables of the following lines:
‘Lord, ’tis a pleasant thing to stand
In gardens planted by Thy hand
…
Fools never raise their thoughts so high
Like brutes they live, like BRUTES they die.’
Mrs Orr, uncorseting a little in citing this anecdote, obligingly admits that Robert ‘even compelled his mother to laugh at it, though it was sorely against her nature to lend herself to any burlesquing of piously intended things’. She quickly snaps back, though, Mrs Orr, remarking that Robert’s satirical swipe—even if it demonstrated some falling away from ‘the intense piety of his earlier childhood’—evidenced merely a momentary triumph of his sense of humour over religious instincts that did not need strengthening. His humour took a sharper, drier tone when, in 1833, some years after leaving the school, he heard of a serious-minded sermon delivered by the Revd Thomas Ready and commented:
A heavy sermon—sure the error’s great
For not a word Tom utters has its weight.
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The quality of the education at the Ready school was probably perfectly adequate for its times and most of its pupils. If it threatened to stultify the brilliance of Robert Browning, and if his contempt for it has condemned it in the estimation of posterity, the fault can hardly be heaped on the heads of the diligent Readys. Robert himself, quickly taking his own measure of the school in contrast to the pleasure of his father’s exciting, fantastic excursions into the education of his son, seems not to have bothered to make close friends with any of his slower-witted contemporaries, though he did dragoon some of his classmates into acting difficult plays, mostly way above their heads, some of which he wrote specially for them. He conspicuously failed to win a school prize (though, according to Mrs Orr, ‘these rewards were showered in such profusion that the only difficulty was to avoid them’) and took a somewhat de haut en bas attitude towards the school in general.
His satirical impulse was not entirely lacking in some grandiose, theatrical sense of his own superiority, to judge by Sarianna Browning’s later description to Mrs Orr of an occasion when her brother solemnly ‘ascended a platform in the presence of assembled parents and friends, and, in best jacket, white gloves, and carefully curled hair, with a circular bow to the company and the then prescribed waving of alternate arms, delivered a high-flown rhymed address of his own composition’. Such a performance was very likely not unknown at home.
It is hardly surprising that Robert was bullied at school, nor that he sometimes played up, nor that he learned virtually nothing that he later considered useful. If one of the purposes of such a school was to ‘knock the nonsense’ out of a boy, iron him out and apply his mind to the Ethics—as it were—there was a lot of knocking out to be done, since the boy Robert was immediately filled up again and creased with the learnedly fantastic ‘nonsense’ he got at home. ‘If we test the matter,’ wrote Chesterton, ‘by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, over-educated.’
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Robert’s scorn for the Ready school (despite acknowledging, on the later word of Sarianna in 1903, that ‘the boys were most liberally and kindly treated’), though perhaps fair enough in terms of his own needs, which the world and its books—far less an elementary school in Peckham and its primers—were not enough to satisfy, was conceived from what Chesterton acutely perceives as his elementary ignorance in one vital respect: Robert was ignorant of the degree to which the knowledge he already possessed—‘knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provençal Troubadors, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages’—was exceptional. He had no idea that he himself was exceptional, that the world in general neither knew nor cared about what he knew and, according to its own lights, got along without it very well. He never was wearied by knowledge and never was troubled by the effort taken to acquire it: learning was pleasure and increase, it never was a dispiriting chore or a burden to his brain. ‘His father’s house,’ commented Sarianna Browning to Mrs Orr, ‘was literally crammed with books; and it was in this way that Robert became very early familiar with subjects generally unknown to boys.’ ‘His sagacious destiny,’ remarked Chesterton, ‘while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.’
The books Robert read ‘omnivorously, though certainly not without guidance’ before and during his schooldays are known mostly on the authority of Mrs Orr, who gives a part-catalogue of them. In addition to Quarles’ Emblems in a seventeenth-century edition which Robert himself annotated, there may be counted ‘the first edition of Robinson Crusoe; the first edition of Milton’s works, bought for him by his father; a treatise on astrology published twenty years after the introduction of printing; the original pamphlet Killing no Murder (1559) [sic], which Carlyle borrowed for his Life of Cromwell; an equally early copy of Bernard de Mandeville’s Bees; very ancient Bibles … Among more modern publications, Walpole’s Letters were familiar to him in boyhood, as well as the Letters of Junius and all the works of Voltaire.’ Later, when Robert had sufficient mastery of ancient languages, Latin poets and Greek dramatists (including Smart’s translation of Horace, donated by his step-uncle Reuben) crowded his mind together with Elizabethan poets and playwrights, scraps from the cloudily romantic Ossian (by James Macpherson, another poet who had difficulty separating fact from fiction),
(#litres_trial_promo) Wordsworth and Coleridge (representatives of the English Romantics) and—to crown the glittering heap—the inimitable (though that stopped no one, including Robert Browning, from trying) poetry of Byron.
These works are not the end of it—hardly even the beginning. Wanley’s aforementioned Wonders of the Little World: or, A General History of Man in Six Books forever gripped Robert Browning’s imagination, its title-page advertising the contents as showing ‘by many thousands of examples … what MAN hath been from the First Ages of the World to these Times in respect of his Body, Senses, Passions, Affections, His Virtues and Perfections, his Vices and Defects.’ Nathaniel Wanley, Vicar of Trinity Parish in the City of Coventry published his Wonders in 1678, in an age when reports of wonder-working strained credulity less than they might now. The book furnished Robert’s poetry with morbid material for the rest of his life. He came across Wanley’s Little World of Wonders pretty much as Robert Louis Stevenson came across Pollock’s toy theatre and characters, ‘penny plain and tuppence coloured’.
The Emblems of Francis Quarles, first published in 1635, was relatively wholesome by comparison, though as a work of intense piety and severely high moral tone, it naturally directed the attention of readers (‘dunghill worldlings’) to the dreadful consequences of any lapse from the exemplary conduct of early and medieval Christian saints. The text was decorated with little woodcuts of devils with pitchforks, the Devil himself driving the chariot of the world and attending idle pursuits such as a game of bowls. Mythology and folklore were mixed with biblical allusions, the whole rich in an extensive, imaginative vocabulary. We have more qualms today about exposing young minds to the grim, the ghastly, the grotesque and the gothic, even the fairy tales of Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and the brothers Grimm in the unexpurgated version, though children will generally seek out and sup on horrors for themselves. Robert Browning’s early exposure to morbid literature and its fine, matter-of-fact and matter-of-fiction examples of casual and institutionalized cruelties, injustices, and fantastical phenomena was balanced by early immersion in more authoritative works, among them—notably—the fifty volumes of the Biographie Universelle, published in 1822, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, The Art of Painting in All its Branches by Gérard de Lairesse, and Principles of Harmony by John Relfe.
Mrs Browning contributed a worthy work of 1677 by Elisha Coles, A Practical Discourse of Effectual Calling and of Perseverance (the only book in the house, according to Betty Miller, to bear her signature)
(#litres_trial_promo) and Cruden’s Concordance to the Holy Scriptures. Mrs Miller comments that these two works of religious dedication testify not only to Mrs Browning’s ingrained piety but point up ‘something of the divided atmosphere in which Robert Browning was brought up. On the one hand he was given the freedom of a liberal and erudite library; on the other, he found himself, like Hazlitt, who counted it a misfortune, “bred up among dissenters who look with too jaundiced an eye at others, and set too high a value on their own particular pretensions. From being proscribed themselves, they learn to proscribe others; and come in the end to reduce all integrity of principle and soundness of opinion within the pale of their own little communion”.’
This may be generally true, and not only of Dissenters; but it is too harsh when applied to the Brownings in particular. In this sense, as characterized by Hazlitt, it is difficult to believe that Robert the Second adhered quite as limpet-like as his wife to the rock of Nonconformism or that her son Robert’s self-confessed passionate attachment in childhood to religion would not wane in the light of opinions other than those sincerely expressed by Congregationalists and other Nonconformists who were drilled into dutiful observance and stilled into attention by the ‘stiffening and starching’ style of the Revd George Clayton and the hectoring manner of Joseph Irons, minister of the Grove Chapel, Camberwell. Alfred Domett was reminded, in conversation with Dr Irons (‘the clever but apparently bigoted High Churchman’), ‘how we used to go sometimes up Camberwell Grove of a Sunday evening, to try how far off we could hear his father (Mr Irons, an Independent Minister or Ranter) bawling out his sermon, well enough to distinguish the words; and how on one occasion, taking a friend with him, they stood outside at a little distance and clearly heard, “I am sorry to say it, beloved brethren, but it is an undoubted fact that Roman Catholicism and midnight assassin are synonymous terms!”.’
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The religion of the Brownings, the Congregationalism of the nineteenth century, was a moderate Calvinism, shading later to liberal Evangelicalism, that derived from the first Independents of the Elizabethan age. These spring-pure Puritans, persecuted in England, disclaimed any duty to the hierarchy of the Church over their duty to God and conscience. They sailed, some of them, into exile to found pilgrim colonies in New England, and others later came to power in the Cromwellian Commonwealth. The long history of Protestant dissent had been vividly, violently marked by persecution, fanaticism, exile, torture, death, and the blood of their martyrs persisted as a lively tang in the nostrils of zealous Nonconformists.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, dissenters from the established Church of England still suffered some remnants of political and social disability—legal penalties for attending their chapels were not abolished until 1812; they were subject to political disenfranchisement until 1832 and—fatefully for Robert Browning as the son of a Dissenter and not himself a communicant of the Anglican church—the ancient universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, until 1854 were open only to members of the Established Church of England. These were serious matters that inclined Nonconformists, most of whom belonged—in East Anglia, the South Midlands, the West country and South Wales—to the respectable working classes, to support the Liberal Party led later in the century by William Gladstone.
Nevertheless, there was a difference in practice between the proscriptive Puritanism bawled from the pulpit and the less rigid, more charitable observance of its dogma in the busy social life and generous-minded charitable organization of the Congregationalists who were as strong in the Lord as they were in the practical virtues of education, evangelism, care of the sick, fundraising bazaars, music, and self-improvement. Robert Browning was born in a period between the early, bleak, and joyless fervour of the seventeenth-century Puritans and the moral hypocrisy of the late Victorians, whose conformity to social conventions characterized virtually every deviation from the norms of Evangelical fundamentalism as either morally reprehensible or criminal, and probably both. In 1812, Mrs Grundy (who had been invented in 1800 by the playwright Thomas Morton as a character in Speed the Plough) was still a laughing-stock and had not then become the all-powerful, repressive deity of respectable late Victorian middle-class society. The domestic tone of the Browning household was nicely moderated between the mother’s religious principles and the father’s cultural enlightenment. In any case, there is no liberty like an enquiring mind that recognizes no limits, and the young Browning’s mind was made aware of no obstacles, beyond the blockheads of school who temporarily impeded his progress, to the accumulation of knowledge.
The violent, at least turbulent, and colourful life of Browning’s mind was tempered—though, more likely, all the more stimulated—by vigorous physical activity: he learned to ride and was taught dancing, boxing, and fencing,
(#litres_trial_promo) and he walked about the surrounding countryside. It was two miles, a ‘green half-hour’s walk over the fields’
(#litres_trial_promo) and stiles, past hedges and picturesque cottages, from Camberwell to Dulwich where, in 1814, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, attached to Dulwich College, had been opened. In that year, the two-year-old Robert was making his first picture of ‘a certain cottage and rocks in lead pencil and black currant juice—paint being rank poison, as they said when I sucked my brushes’.
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London, as Griffin and Minchin take pains to describe, was by no means well furnished with public art galleries. Neither the National Gallery nor Trafalgar Square then existed. Dulwich Picture Gallery, designed by Sir John Soane, had been specially commissioned for the exhibition of some 350 European paintings—Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, and English. Children under the age of fourteen were, according to regulations, denied entry, but somehow young Robert Browning was allowed to enter with his father, who, said Dante Gabriel Rossetti later in Paris, ‘had a real genius for drawing—but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors’. This was not quite fair: Mr Browning also had a distinct relish for Hogarth grotesques. But it was true that, according to his son, Mr Browning would ‘turn from the Sistine altarpiece’ in favour of the Dutch artists Brouwer, Ostade, and the Teniers (father and son), who were amply represented at Dulwich.
The Dutch School did not detain the interest of young Robert, whose love of Dulwich was suffused, as he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett on 3 March 1846, with ‘those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music lesson group, all the Poussins with the “Armida” and “Jupiter’s nursing”—and—no end to “ands”—I have sate before one, some one of those pictures I had predetermined to see, a good hour and then gone away ….’ Enthusiasm for favourites did not mean an uncritical eye for failures. Familiarity bred contempt for works ‘execrable as sign-paintings even’. For a ‘whole collection, including “a divine painting by Murillo,” and Titian’s Daughter (hitherto supposed to be in the Louvre)’ he would ‘have cheerfully given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing’.
In his letter of 27 February 1846 to Elizabeth Barrett, Robert had asked the pertinent question, ‘Are there worse poets in their way than painters?’ There is a subtle difference in the ‘melancholy business’; a poet at least possesses resources capable of being adapted to other things: ‘the bad poet goes out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do afterwards—but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning even how to produce such monstrosities as these, and to what other good do his acquisitions go? This short minute of our life our one chance, an eternity on either side! and a man does not walk whistling and ruddy by the side of hawthorn hedges in spring, but shuts himself up and comes out after a dozen years with “Titian’s Daughter” and, there, gone is his life, let somebody else try!’
The point of this rushing reflection is only partly to do with art: it also makes a none-too-subtle reference to Robert Browning’s seizing the moment, ‘the short minute of our life, our one chance’, with his beloved Miss Barrett, as he finishes with the line:
I have tried—my trial is made too!
But this is in the future. The boy Robert had only just begun, on first acquaintance with the Dulwich pictures, to try his hand at poetry, good, bad, or indifferent, excepting some early extemporized lines of occasional verse for domestic or school consumption. The critic—tutored by the work of de Lairesse—was being formed, but the artist was still mostly whistling, ruddy by the hawthorn hedges, on the way to Dulwich. It was difficult to know which way to turn, which vocation to pursue: painting and drawing, for which young Robert had a facility, inspired by his father and the works of de Lairesse; music, which he dearly loved, inspired by his mother, Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression, and two distinguished tutors—Relfe, who taught theory, and Abel, who was proficient in technique; poetry, for which he not only had an aptitude but also a taste fuelled in several languages (Greek, Latin, French, some Spanish, some Italian, German later, even a smattering of Hebrew in addition to English) by the great exemplars—Horace, Homer, Pope, Byron—of the art of happy expression.
In the event, at the age of twelve, in the very year, 1824, of Byron’s death at Missolonghi, Robert the Third produced a collection of short poems entitled Incondita. The title, comments Mrs Orr, ‘conveyed a certain idea of deprecation’; Griffin and Minchin suggest an ‘allusion to the fact that “in the beginning” even the earth itself was “without form”’. The title may have been modest, but the principal stylistic influence—Byronic—was not, and at least one of the poems, ‘The Dance of Death’, was, on the authority of Mrs Orr, who was told of it, ‘a direct imitation of Coleridge’s “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter”’ (1798). A letter of 11 March 1843 from Robert the Second to a Mr Thomas Powell, quoted by Mrs Orr, testified that his son had been composing verses since ‘quite a child’ and referred to a great quantity of ‘juvenile performances’, some of which ‘extemporaneous productions’ Robert the Second enclosed.
The sample sheet of verses, taken at the time and for some while after at face value, was subsequently identified to Mrs Orr by Sarianna Browning as ‘her father’s own impromptu epigrams’. The attempt to pass off the father’s effusions as the work of the son is baffling, and Mrs Orr kindly directs us to suppose that ‘The substitution may from the first have been accidental.’ The letter is, however, valuable for its affirmation that Robert the Third was remarkably precocious in poetry and the credible information—borne out by his habitual practice in later life—that he deliberately destroyed all instances of his first efforts ‘that ever came in his way’.
Sarianna being too young at the time—no more than ten years old—never saw the poetry of Incondita, but it impressed Mr and Mrs Browning to the extent that they tried, unsuccessfully, to get the manuscript published. Disappointment in this enterprise may have been one reason that led Robert to destroy the manuscript, but it had already got beyond him into the world: Mrs Browning had shown the poems to an acquaintance, Miss Eliza Flower, who had copied them for the attention of a friend, the Revd William Johnson Fox, ‘the well-known Unitarian minister’. Robert, with an adult eye for reputation, retrieved this copy after the death of Mr Fox and, additionally, a fragment of verse contained in a letter from Miss Sarah Flower. He destroyed both.
Mrs Orr, though regretting the loss of ‘these first fruits of Mr Browning’s genius’, supposes that ‘there can have been little in them to prefigure its later forms. Their faults seem to have lain in the direction of too great splendour of language and too little wealth of thought’, an echo of Mr Fox’s opinion. Fox admitted later to Robert that ‘he had feared these tendencies as his future snare’. Two poems, said to have survived from Incondita’s brief and limited exposure, are ‘The First-Born of Egypt’, in blank verse, and ‘The Dance of Death’, in tetrameters. They are certainly gorgeous, richly allusive, spare no wrenching emotion or sensational effect, and ascend to dramatic climax. A distinct gust from the graveyard scents the relentless progress of grisly calamities that would give suffering Job more than usual pause for thought.
Nevertheless, the Byronic, perhaps less so the Coleridgean, influences were not merely juvenile infatuations. In a letter of 22 August 1846 to Miss Barrett, Robert commented that ‘I always maintained my first feeling for Byron in many respects … the interest in places he had visited, in relics of him. I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure—while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were condensed into the little China bottle yonder, after the Rosicrucian fashion … they seem to “have their reward” and want nobody’s love or faith.’ (The reference to Finchley as a place of ultimate pilgrimage is attributable to the fact that two days previously Miss Barrett had driven out as far as that fascinating faubourg.)
The death of Byron was as climactic in its effect as either of the surviving poems of Incondita, which take the fold of death as their theme. It may have been the stimulus that prompted the twelve-year-old Browning’s manuscript. The fallout was great on other poets, other idealists, who subsided into plain prose and practical politics—it was the death, too, at least in England, of any idea of romantic revolution. Alfred Tennyson, we are told, memorialized the event by carving the words ‘Byron is dead’ on a rock near Somersby. He was fifteen. Thomas Carlyle, approaching thirty, felt as though he had lost a brother. It is not too much to say that the death of Byron had as profound an effect in England and Europe in 1824 as the death of President John F. Kennedy had for America and the world in 1963. It was like an eclipse of the sun that stills even bird song, or the silence after a thunderclap. There were few who were unaffected. ‘The news of his death came upon my heart like a mass of lead,’ wrote Carlyle to his wife Jane.
Equally tremendous was the year 1832: Goethe died, and so did Sir Walter Scott. Robert maintained a high regard for Scott the polymathic author, often quoting from him and occasionally reflecting Scott’s work in his own poetry. The death of Keats in 1821 had been quickly followed by that of Shelley in 1822. Wordsworth was to die in 1850, and Heinrich Heine in 1856. These losses amounted, in the case of poetry, to the death of European Romanticism. ‘Though it is by no means clear what Romanticism stood for,’ the historian Eric Hobsbawm points out in a chapter on ‘The Arts’ in The Age of Revolution, ‘it is quite evident what it was against: the middle.’ Isaiah Berlin, in The Roots of Romanticism, supposes that, had one ‘spoken in England to someone who had been influenced by, say, Coleridge, or above all by Byron’, one would have found that ‘the values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying’. This attitude, says Berlin, was relatively new. ‘What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.’
The middle, then, famously distrustful of extremes, did not apparently stand much chance, squeezed between the reactionary, traditional elements of the old order and the revolutionary, idealistic instincts of the avant-garde. Yet society has an irresistible tendency to compromise, to assimilate and settle into social stability—albeit radically altered, both right and left—when shaken by destructive events and stirred by disturbing philosophies. Nowhere is this more marked than in the mobile middle class, the eternally buoyant bourgeoisie, which confidently came into its own following the French and Industrial Revolutions.
This middle class was perceived by pre-Revolutionary enthusiasts as equipped with reason, sentiment, natural feeling, and purpose in contrast to the sterility, decrepitude, reactionary instincts, and corrupt clericalism of pre-Revolutionary society. The artificiality of the Court was in theory to be replaced by the spontaneity of the people—whereupon, of course, by the inevitable evolutionary law of society, the new society in practice naturally stiffened into a bureaucratic, bourgeois respectability, in its own time and triumphant style stifling fine romantic feeling with its own brand of philistinism. Revolutions, like romantic poets, die young. Byron astutely recognized that an early death would save him from a respectable old age.
G. K. Chesterton points to what is now known as the ‘percolation theory’ or the ‘trickle down effect’ that supposedly occurs when society is in some way shaken out from top to bottom or from bottom to top. Robert Browning, says Chesterton, was ‘born in the afterglow of the great Revolution’—the French Revolution of 1789, that is—the point of this observation being that the Jacobin dream of emancipation had begun ‘in the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of society’. By the time of Robert’s boyhood, ‘a very subtle and profound change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the Brownings … A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the middle classes which had nothing at all in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth … On all sides there was the first beginning of the aesthetic stir in the middle classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired office-boys.’
With this famous portmanteau phrase, Chesterton sweeps together such marvellous boys as John Ruskin ‘solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts’, Charles Dickens toiling in a blacking factory, Thomas Carlyle ‘lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire’, and John Keats, who ‘had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon’. Add to these Robert Browning, the son of a Bank of England clerk in Camberwell. These men, born to fame but not to wealth, were the inheritors of a new world that gave them a liberty that, in Robert Browning’s case, ‘exalted poetry above all earthly things’ and which he served ‘with single-hearted intensity’. Browning stands, observed Chesterton, ‘among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else’.
The matter of poetry as Robert’s sole vocation was mostly decided by the revelation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the atheistical poet. The effect was tremendous. It was like coming across a hitherto unknown brother who had thought everything, experienced everything, accomplished everything that Robert Browning, fourteen years old, living in Camberwell, had as yet only dimly felt and begun to put, somewhat derivatively of admired models, into words. Robert had read the cynical, atheistical Voltaire without obvious moral corruption; he had read of the world’s virtues and vices, irregularities and injustices, in the words of Wanley, Shakespeare, Milton, and in other works of dramatic historical fiction, without becoming contemptuous of virtue; he had read the sensational Byron without becoming mad or bad; he had read the waspish Horace Walpole without becoming overwhelmingly mannered. But the cumulative effect was bound, in some degree, to be unsettling. Shelley—who had, like young Robert, read Voltaire and encyclopedias, and who had consorted with Byron—ratcheted up the adolescent tension one notch too far.
Shelley’s musical verse hit every note. With exquisite Shelleyan technique, all the airs that had been vapouring in Robert’s head were given compositional form—delicate, forceful; and as the concert performance proceeded, Shelley’s genius, his creative spirit, played out the great work of the ideal world in which infamy was erased, God rebelled against Satan, and in which—as Chesterton remarks—‘every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy’. All things in heaven and on earth proclaimed the triumph of liberty. ‘O World, O Life, O Time,’ Robert in later life apostrophized with deliberate irony on the flyleaf of Shelley’s Miscellaneous Poems given to him by his cousin Jim Silverthorne, a book he vigorously annotated in his first enthusiasm and then thought better of in his maturity when he tried, on 2 June 1878, to erase ‘the foolish markings and still more foolish scribblings’ that ‘show the impression made on a boy by this first specimen of Shelley’s poetry’. What he could not vehemently blot out or rub at or scratch away or scribble over, he hacked at with a knife or finally—all these obliterating resources being inadequate—cut out with scissors. It seems an excessive reaction, some fifty years later, but the first enthusiasm had evidently come to seem itself embarrassingly excessive. Not only did Robert not wish to remember it, he was determined to efface it from memory—his own or posterity’s—absolutely, though without actually, as was his usual resort, burning the book to ashes. He could burn his own poetry, perhaps, but not another’s.
‘Between the year 1826, when Browning became acquainted with the work of Shelley, and 1832, when Pauline was written,’ says Betty Miller in Robert Browning: A Portrait, ‘there took place in the life of the poet a crisis so radical that everything that followed upon it, including his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett, was qualified in one way or another by the effects of that initial experience.’ This sums up the biographical consensus that began with Mrs Orr’s pronouncement that Robert held Shelley greatest in the poetic art because ‘in his case, beyond all others, he believed its exercise to have been prompted by the truest spiritual inspiration’.
The souls of Keats and Shelley were identified in Robert’s mind with two nightingales which sang harmoniously together on a night in May—perhaps his birthday, the 7th of May in 1826—one in a laburnum (‘heavy with its weight of gold’, as William Sharp says Browning told a friend) in the Brownings’ garden, the other in a large copper beech on adjoining ground. ‘Their utterance,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was, to such a spirit as his, the last, as in a certain sense the first, word of what poetry can say.’ The image was no doubt prompted in Robert’s mind by Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. At any rate, whether or not these birds were the transmigrated souls of Keats and Shelley, as Robert reverently convinced himself, they ‘had settled in a Camberwell garden’, says Chesterton less reverently, ‘in order to sing to the only young gentleman who really adored and understood them’.
The major impact on the tender sensibilities of young Robert Browning was made by Shelley’s Queen Mab, which later achieved a reputation, when issued in a new edition by the publisher Edward Moxon, for being that most horrid—indeed, criminal—thing, a blasphemous libel. ‘The Shelley whom Browning first loved,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was the Shelley of Queen Mab, the Shelley who would have remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became a professing atheist and, for two years, a practising vegetarian. He returned to his natural diet when he found his eyesight becoming weak. The atheism cured itself; we do not exactly know when or how.’ In a letter to Elizabeth Barrett on 13 September 1845, Robert wrote of having lived for two years on bread and potatoes—a regime that, if strictly adhered to, would have tested the faith and asceticism even of the Desert Fathers.
Queen Mab is a lecture in poetic form to Ianthe, a disembodied spirit, on the sorry state of the temporal universe. Mab is a bluestocking fairy queen who takes intense issue with the various shortcomings of contemporary politics, conventional religion, and cankerous commerce, all of which are judged to be more or less hopelessly misguided when not actually corrupt. Queen Mab’s denunciation convinces less by rational argument than by the irresistible force of her—Shelley’s—convictions. She barely stops for breath (only now and then pauses for footnotes), fired by ideas and ideals that combine termagant intensity with tender sentiment, fiercely heretical in her inability to accept a creating Deity but spiritually softer in her recognition that there could be ‘a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe’ which might or might not, according to religious belief, be identified with the supreme maker, sometimes called God.
In an aside, dealing with the matter in a footnote, Shelley argued abstinence from meat as a means whereby man might at a stroke eliminate the brutal pleasures of the chase and restore an agricultural paradise, improve himself physically and morally, and probably live forever in health and virtue. The spiritual and the corporeal were virtually synonymous. Shelley recommended himself and the pure system of his ideas to youth whose moral enthusiasm for truth and virtue was yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. Queen Mab was pouring out a song which, if not of innocence, at least was addressing innocents. The force of Shelley’s expression rather more than the systematic reason of his argument is still powerfully appealing to idealists, and most of his vehement agitprop (as it might be called today) speaks to succeeding generations even unto our own times—so much so that the utterances of Queen Mab sound not unlike the conventional wisdom of modern environmentalists, new-agers, and bourgeois bohemians. It is difficult for us now to appreciate the thrilling horror with which Shelley’s words were received by his unnerved contemporaries who read not only blasphemy—bad enough—but revolution between, as much as upon, every irreverent line.
Vegetarianism worried Robert’s mother; atheism worried the Revd George Clayton. Robert stuck to his beliefs for a while, but forgave himself his youthful excesses, characterizing them later in his life as ‘Crude convictions of boyhood, conveyed in imperfect and unapt forms of speech,—for such things all boys have been pardoned. They are growing pains, accompanied by temporary distortion of soul also.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He regretted the anxiety caused to his mother, whose strong-minded inclination that her son should not compromise his physical health was resisted by Robert’s insistence that meat-eating was a symptom of spiritual disease and argued, presumably, ‘what should it profit a man if he feed his body but starve his soul’. Besides, the new diet was also a symptom of liberty, a badge of freedom, a symbol of release from dependence.
Atheism served much the same purpose. That his speculative beliefs were sincerely held and admitted of no counter-persuasion from those who expressed concern for his physical and spiritual welfare was perhaps secondary to their practical effect. Robert Browning had got out into the world, and he would deal with it on his own terms. He might still be living within the narrow propriety of his parents’ house, which increasingly rubbed at his heels and elbows, but he was his own man. Sarianna, his sympathetic sister, admitted to Mrs Orr that ‘The fact was, poor boy, he had outgrown his social surroundings. They were absolutely good, but they were narrow; it could not be otherwise; he chafed under them.’
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Robert had left the Ready school at the age of fourteen, and for two years thereafter he was educated privately at home, in the mornings by a tutor competent in the general syllabus; in the afternoons by a number of instructors in music, technical science, languages (French particularly), singing, dancing, exercise (riding, boxing, fencing), and probably art.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the evenings, if his father did not entertainingly contribute to the educational process, Robert worked at his own pleasure, voraciously reading, assiduously writing, sometimes composing music. None of his musical compositions have survived the incinerating fire he so loved to feed. Robert ‘wrote music for songs which he himself sang’, states Mrs Orr, citing three: Donne’s ‘Go, and catch a falling star’, Hood’s ‘I will not have the mad Clytie’, and ‘The mountain sheep are sweeter’ by Peacock. These settings were characterized to Mrs Orr, by those who knew of them, as ‘very spirited’.
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Robert also acquired a social life, associating with three Silverthorne cousins—James, John and George, the sons of Christiana Wiedemann, Sarah Anna Browning’s sister, who had married Silverthorne, a prosperous local brewer. All three were musically gifted and sometimes described as ‘wild youths’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Silverthornes lived in Portland Place, Peckham. James came to be Robert’s particular friend, and his name is written in the register of Marylebone Church as one of the two witnesses at the wedding in 1846 of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. James, who succeeded to the family brewery, died in 1852. To mark his passing, Robert wrote the poem ‘May and Death’ which lovingly commemorates the friendship between himself and James (called Charles in the poem).
In addition to association with cousins, Robert acquired improving acquaintance with, notably, Alfred Domett and Joseph Arnould (later to become Sir Joseph Arnould of the High Court bench of Bombay, but meanwhile something of a youthful radical and an admirer of Carlyle). Both were clever, ambitious young men of his own age, sons of established Camberwell families. He had, too, independent adventures. Stories are told—and credited by some—of his ramblings, following the tracks of gypsy caravans far across country. William Sharp, in his biography of Browning (1897), seems to think that Robert kept company with ‘any tramps, gypsies or other wayfarers’, though Mrs Orr in her more authoritative (less lyrical and very much less airily romantic) biography, published in 1891, quashes any suggestion that he caught them up or was detained in parleyings with them: ‘I do not know how the idea can have arisen that he willingly sought his experience in the society of “gipsies and tramps”.’
Both Sharp and Mrs Orr knew Robert Browning personally, and it must be admitted that the latter can lay claim to longer, more intimate and more extensive acquaintance with the poet. There is no doubting it from the tone of her book that Mrs Orr strives for a scrupulous fidelity to the facts—some of which, if deplorable, are omitted—but some caution is required when dealing with her inclination to polish the poet to his brightest lustre and to put the best and brightest face on failure. She can sometimes, in her emphases and suppressions, be inspired to what we now recognize as spin. However, Sharp invites comparison with Browning’s poem ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ and a song which Robert heard on a Guy Fawkes night, 5 November, with the refrain, ‘Following the Queen of the Gipsies oh!’ that rang in his head until it found appropriate poetic expression years later. Chesterton sufficiently credits or relishes Sharp’s literary association as to repeat it in his own biography. It seems likely that, whatever romantic fascination Robert may have had with the itinerant life of gypsies, they represented his then feelings of freedom as a desirable thing rather than as an actuality in his life or as an alternative to it. He had neither any incentive to run away with the ‘raggle-taggle gypsies-o!’, nor any inclination to inquire too closely into the reality of lives less privileged, in conventional terms, than his own.
There is talk, too, of Robert’s taste for country fairs. This is elaborated by Griffin and Minchin, who charmingly describe how, ‘For three days each summer the Walworth Road from Camberwell Gate to the village green—a goodly mile—was aglow after sunset with candles beneath coloured shades on the roadside stalls: on the Green itself, besides the inevitable boats and swings and merry-go-rounds, there was the canvas-covered avenue with its gingerbread booths, there was music and dancing, and best of all, there was the ever-popular Richardson’s Theatre—appreciated, it is said, by the poet in his younger days. Peckham also had its fair, which was held just opposite Mr Ready’s school; and Greenwich, noisiest and most boisterous of fairs, was close at hand.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Again, with an implied note of reproof, Mrs Orr dampens any speculative fervour about Robert’s bohemian instincts by insisting that ‘a few hours spent at a fair would at all times have exhausted his capacity for enduring it. In the most undisciplined acts of his early youth, were always present curious delicacies and reserves.’
She is keen to return Robert to his books and his work, away from any suggestion of irreverent or—spare the mark—inappropriate interests and activities: ‘There was always latent in him the real goodness of heart which would not allow him to trifle consciously with other lives.’ Fifine might go to the fair, but Robert should stay home and satisfy himself with the habit of work as his safeguard and keep tight control of an imagination that, rather than mastering him, would serve him. This seems a little censorious, not to say apprehensive that Robert might have had yearnings that, if not severely restrained, would have led him into even more ‘undisciplined acts’. We must close our eyes in holy dread at the very thought and be thankful that nothing unworthy soiled the blameless page he worked upon, far less sufficiently overcame his ‘curious delicacies and reserves’ to distract him from it.
Better to think of Robert no longer incited by his early adherence to Byron—that libertine and sceptic who roamed at large as much in the world as in his meditations—but at sundown, on the brow of the Camberwell hill (now known as Camberwell Grove), among the spreading elms, suffused with the spiritual light of Shelley and looking down, deliriously, on the darkling mass of London sprawled at his feet, lit by the new gas lamps. For the time being, Robert remained safely distant from the snares and entanglements of the beautiful but seductive city: so many lives to refrain from toying with, so much noisy, messy—maybe vicious—life to assault curious delicacies and reserves should he dare to descend to put them to the test. Byronism, as Chesterton remarks, ‘was not so much a pessimism about civilized things as an optimism about savage things’. But now Robert was Byronic only in the dandyism of his dress. It was Shelley who suited his soul. And so, turning, Robert would go home to bed, sleeping in a bedroom that adjoined his mother’s, the door always open between them, and to give her a kiss—every night, even in the worst of their disputes—before retiring. He never willingly spent a night away from home.
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Robert’s fascination with and attachment to the natural as contrasted with the artificial world was innate. It took inspiration from his mother’s intense sympathy with flora and fauna, if we are to credit W. J. Stillman, in his Autobiography of a Journalist (quoted by Griffin and Minchin), who states that Mrs Browning had that ‘extraordinary power over animals of which we hear sometimes, but of which I have never known a case so perfect as hers. She would lure the butterflies in the garden to her, and domestic animals obeyed her as if they reasoned.’ The Browning household at times approximated to a menagerie: Griffin and Minchin speak respectfully of Browning’s learning early to ride his pony, playing with dogs, keeping pets and birds including a monkey, a magpie, and—improbably—an eagle. The collection of toads, frogs, efts, and other ‘portable creatures’ that is said to have filled his pockets gives some additional substance to the story already quoted that Mrs Browning induced Robert to take medicine by finding a toad for him in the garden. He could whistle up a lizard in Italy, chuck a toad under its chin in Hatcham, and later kept a pet owl in London as well as geese that would follow him around and submit to being embraced by the middle-aged poet.
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William Sharp describes Browning’s occasional long walks into the country: ‘One particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge, or deep in meadow-grasses, or under a tree … and there give himself up so absolutely to the life of the moment that even the shy birds would alight close by, and sometimes venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings for a brief space on his recumbent body.’ Sharp, in this pastoral mode, quotes Browning himself as having said that ‘his faculty of observation at that time would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iroquois’.
(#litres_trial_promo) His faculty of absorption and repose, in this imagery, would have done credit to a St Francis. His love for his mother’s flowers—particularly the roses and lilies that later he would gather to send to Elizabeth Barrett—was perhaps one contributory factor in his brief vegetarianism.
In a letter of 24 July 1838 to Miss Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, he makes a significant confession: ‘I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves—some leaves—that I every now and then,—in an impatience at being able to possess myself of them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent—bite them to bits.’ This devouring quality of Browning’s desire for sensation, to the extent of attempting to consume it literally in the form of vegetable matter, is remarkable. It is as though Browning’s passion to possess the world could only be achieved by eating it, by incorporating it within himself. In Pauline, he recognized some of this when he identified
a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all.
and he declared that,
I have lived all life
When it is most alive.
How apposite, then, to come upon the charmingly-named Flower sisters, Eliza and Sarah. It was to Eliza that Mrs Browning had confided the text of Incondita and it was Eliza, so taken with it, who had copied it for Mr William Johnson Fox, a friend of her father, Benjamin Flower, ‘known’, says Mrs Orr, ‘as editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer’. Robert, encouraged by her enthusiasm for his poems, began writing to Eliza Flower at the age of twelve or thirteen.
(#litres_trial_promo) She was nine years his senior. These letters, which she kept for her lifetime, were eventually and effortfully retrieved and destroyed—all but a few scraps—by Robert. It seems likely, even without the confirmation of the correspondence, that Eliza was his first, immature love, though the boyish, romantic attachment died out ‘for want of root’. Sentimental love, if that was what it amounted to, subsided into a lasting respect and affection for ‘a very remarkable person’ who, with her sister, was responsible for a number of popular hymns such as ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’, written by Sarah Flower Adams and set to music by Eliza. These were composed for Mr Fox’s chapel where Eliza ‘assumed the entire management of the choral part of the service’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Eliza, though Robert denied it, seems to have been the major identifiable inspiration for his second excursion into verse: the long confessional poem entitled Pauline.
Mrs Orr conventionally regrets that the headstrong Robert Browning was not sent to a public school where his energies might have been efficiently directed; but Griffin and Minchin take the more sensible view that a pre-Arnoldian public school education, if only and unrepresentatively to judge by the boy’s experience of the Ready school, would have been been ‘hardly encouraging … Nor were public schools in good odour.’ The reforms inspired by Dr Arnold of Rugby were a thing of the future.
Meantime, Robert’s father in 1825 had subscribed £100 to the foundation of the new London University, an investment that brought no dividends but procured one particular advantage: since Mr Browning was one of the original ‘proprietors’, he was entitled to a free education for a nominee. Robert, his son, could be admitted to London University as a student. In contrast to Oxford, Cambridge, and the other ancient universities, which required subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles as a necessary prerequisite to admission, London University was nonsectarian, the education was less costly than at other academic institutions, and it was possible to combine the university education with private home study.
Robert was earnestly recommended by his father, describing himself as ‘a parent anxious for the welfare of an only Son’ who deemed admission to the University ‘essential to his future happiness’. Furthermore, Mr Browning testified to Robert’s impeccable moral character (‘I never knew him from his earliest infancy, guilty of the slightest deviation from Truth’) and to his ‘unwearied application for the last 6 years, to the Greek, Latin & French languages’. Mrs Orr draws a discreet veil over the upshot, confining herself to the information that ‘In his eighteenth year he attended, for a term or two, a Greek class at the London University’—he registered for the opening session, 1829–30—and that ‘It was at about the time of his short attendance at University College that the choice of poetry as his future profession was formally made.’ The phrase ‘short attendance’ implies some length of time more than a week, which was the period Robert survived lodging away from home and his mother with a Mr Hughes in Bedford Square, and perhaps a little longer than the few months he endured the pedestrian German, Greek, and Latin classes for which he registered before quitting the college entirely. He was seventeen years old, an age at which, as Mrs Orr frankly acknowledges, he was naturally ‘not only more restless, but less amiable than at any other’.
‘The always impatient temper assumed a quality of aggressiveness,’ she reports. ‘He behaved as a youth will who knows himself to be clever, and believes that he is not appreciated, because the crude or paradoxical forms which his cleverness assumes do not recommend it to his elders’ minds.’ This is judiciously put. A little less indulgent is the bald admission that Robert ‘set the judgements of those about him at defiance, and gratuitously proclaimed himself everything that he was, and some things that he was not.’ School and college simply wearied him: the pedantic routine was stifling. It was not that he lacked aptitude for study, more that he lacked inclination to confine it to the well-worn track. Which is not to say Robert was unpopular: William Sharp quotes a letter from The Times of 14 December 1889, in which a friend loyally testified that ‘I attended with him the Greek class of Professor Long, and I well remember the esteem and regard in which he was held by his fellow-students.’
Poetry was the thing—a foregone conclusion, at least according to Robert. Some attempts seem to have been made to promote the professions of barrister (chosen by his friends Domett and Arnould), clergyman (though Robert had given up regular church attendance), banker (employment in the Bank of England and Rothschild’s bank being the family business), even desperately—it is said—painter or actor. For a short while, when he was sixteen years old, Robert attended medical lectures given by the celebrated physician Dr Blundell at Guy’s Hospital. These are said to have aroused in him ‘considerable interest in the sciences connected with medicine’,
(#litres_trial_promo) but perhaps more from a fascination with the morbid, since ‘no knowledge of either disease or its treatment ever seems to have penetrated into his life’. At any rate, there seems to have been no positive belief that Robert might be suited to the medical profession. The tentative suggestions of anxious parents—the adamantine refusal of a strong-willed son—sulks and silences: it is a familiar-enough scenario, distressing to Mrs Browning, worrying to Mr Browning, a matter of some well-concealed anxiety, no doubt, to Robert Browning himself, who made a conspicuous effort to prepare himself for the profession of poet by reading Johnson’s Dictionary from cover to cover.
Robert had become accustomed to the standards of early nineteenth-century suburban middle-class comfort, but he had been educated as a mid-to-late eighteenth-century gentleman, not only in the breadth of his acquired learning but equally in the departments of upper-class sporting activities such as riding, boxing, and fencing, the social graces of singing, dancing, music, and art, and the civilized values of a man of fine feeling in dress and deportment. The acquisition of these benefits was one thing—they required no financial outlay on his own part; to maintain them would be quite another. Refined tastes are generally expensive to indulge as a permanent style of life.
In his late teens and early twenties, Robert cut a noticeable figure: his appearance was dapper and dandified, verging in some respects on the Byronic, particularly in the manner of his hair, which he wore romantically long, falling over his shoulders and carefully curled. He was of middle height, neither tall nor short, slim, dark-haired, sallow-complexioned, brightly grey-eyed, charming in his urbane, self-confident manner. Robert presented himself to society as ‘full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what’s more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success.’ He was a model of punctilious politeness, good-looking, light-footed and—remarked Mrs ‘Tottie’ Bridell-Fox, daughter of William Johnson Fox, of his appearance in 1835 to 1836—‘just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid-gloves and such things: quite “the glass of fashion and the mould of form”.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He grew, when able to do so, crisp whiskers from cheekbone to chin.
In the absence of an assured annual unearned income, Robert made up his mind to a calculated economy in his private needs: writing to Elizabeth Barrett on 13 September 1845, he would later comment, ‘My whole scheme of life (with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down) was long ago calculated … So for my own future way in the world I have always refused to care’—though that was then, without any responsibility other than to his own material maintenance. The Brownings were not poor, but neither were they rich—they were generous not only in keeping Robert at home but equally in the confidence they displayed in allowing him to devote himself to writing poetry. They might, of course, have been merely marking time, hoping that something would turn up, catch Robert’s attention, fire his imagination and provide him with a good living. But on the best interpretation, his parents were large-minded and great-hearted in their confidence that this was the right thing to do for their son in particular and for the larger matter of literature in general. There was not much prospect of any financial return on their expenditure: it could hardly have been regarded as an investment except in the most optimistic view, poetry then, as now, being a paying proposition only in the most exceptional cases—Lord Byron being one in his own times; Sir Walter Scott, who also benefited from his activity as a novelist, being another.
But no doubt Mr Browning would have looked back on his own career and felt again the sigh of responsibility, of inevitability, with which he had given up his own artistic ambitions for routine employment as a banker. Robert ‘appealed to his father’, says Edmund Gosse, ‘whether it would not be better for him to see life in the best sense, and cultivate the powers of his mind, than to shackle himself in the very outset of his career by a laborious training foreign to that aim’. And, says Gosse, ‘so great was the confidence of the father in the genius of the son’ that Mr Browning acquiesced—though perhaps by no means as promptly as Robert Browning later convinced himself and Gosse to have been the case. But acquiesce he did. Whatever Mr Browning might have felt he owed his son, perhaps he felt he owed himself another chance, albeit at second-hand. It was an indulgence, no doubt, but Mr Browning was not a man to invite difficulties or disputes. It was also a matter of simple fact: Robert remained rooted at home.
William Sharp makes the point that the young Robert Browning is sometimes credited with ‘the singular courage to decline to be rich’, but that Browning himself ‘was the last man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision as “singular courage”’. He had, says Sharp, ‘nothing of this bourgeois spirit’. Money, for money’s sake, was not a consideration—as his letter of 13 September 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett later testified. He would prefer ‘a blouse and a blue shirt (such as I now write in) to all manner of dress and gentlemanly appointment’. He could, ‘if necessary, groom a horse not so badly, or at all events would rather do it all day long than succeed Mr Fitzroy Kelly in the Solicitor-Generalship’, though by 1845 that youthful insouciance was changing in the light of love and its prospective attendant domestic expenses and obligations. Nevertheless, for the time being, in 1830, he ‘need not very much concern himself beyond considering the lilies how they grow’. Or how the roses might blow in his mother’s garden.
In Robert Browning: A Portrait, Betty Miller reviews the Brownings’ financial situation, pointing remorselessly to the comparatively humble origins of Robert’s mother as the daughter of a ‘mariner in Dundee’ rather than aggrandizing her as the daughter of a more substantial ship owner, and playing down the status and salary of the Bank of England clerkship enjoyed by Robert’s father. She also instances some contemporary critics who perceived Robert’s lack of apparent professional middle-class occupation as disgraceful. The prevailing attitude of respect for what is now identified as the ‘Protestant work ethic’ was as incorrigible then as now: poverty was generally considered to be morally reprehensible and fecklessness was regarded as a moral failing. The ‘deserving poor’ (a fairly select minority of the hapless and the disadvantaged) received pretty rough charity, grudging at best and rarely without an attached weight of sanctimony.
An accredited gentleman with an adequate fortune might blamelessly lead a life of leisure and pleasure, but the Brownings pretended to no giddy gentility. They were of the middle class, and the men of the middle class contributed their work to the perceived profit (moral and pecuniary) of society and to their own interests (much the same). Faults in character evidenced by apparent idleness were probably vicious and not easily glossed over by any high-tone, high-flown talk of devotion to poetry or art as a substitute for masculine resolve or absolution from a moral and material responsibility to earn a decent living. There is in this a suggestion that a poet must be, if not effeminate, at least effete—in contrast to the virtuous character of the common man committed to his daily labour who takes his ‘true honourable place in society, etc. etc.’, as Robert himself remarked. He was not wholly indifferent to conventional social values and expectations.
His position as a family dependent, nevertheless, did not unduly worry Robert: he acknowledged his father’s generosity and airily supposed that, with a little effort, he might make ‘a few hundred pounds which would soon cover my simple expenses’; and furthermore he felt, too, ‘whenever I make up my mind to that, I can be rich enough and to spare—because,’ he wrote later to Elizabeth Barrett, ‘along with what you have thought genius in me, is certainly talent, what the world recognises as such; and I have tried it in various ways, just to be sure that I was a little magnanimous in never intending to use it.’ Robert could do it if he had to, but for the time being he didn’t see, or perhaps acknowledge, the necessity—he continued never to know ‘what it was to have to do a certain thing to-day and not to-morrow’, though that did not imply any inclination to do nothing. As Edmund Gosse reported from a conversation with Robert in his later life, ‘freedom led to a super-abundance of production since on looking back he could see that he had often, in his unfettered leisure, been afraid to do nothing’. For the time being, however, Robert settled back into the familiar routines of family life and his proper application to poetry. He gave up vegetarianism as damaging to his health and atheism as damaging to his soul. The prodigal had returned, though in this case he could barely be said ever to have been away.
In January 1833, Robert completed a poetic work entitled Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession. It had been written as the first item in a projected grander master plan conceived at Richmond on the afternoon shading to evening of 22 October 1832 when he had seen Edmund Kean, once a great actor, by then in decline and disrepair but still powerfully impressive even when debilitated by drink and tuberculosis, play Shakespeare’s Richard III. The poem, consisting of 1,031 lines, took Robert three months to write. He was twenty years old. Chesterton’s dry comment is that ‘It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old.’ Robert himself, in a note inserted in 1838 at the beginning of his own copy, remarks that, ‘The following Poem was written in pursuance of a foolish plan which occupied me mightily for a time, and which had for its object the enabling me to assume and realize I know not how many different characters;—meanwhile the world was never to guess that “Brown, Smith, Jones & Robinson” (as the spelling books have it) the respective authors of this poem, the other novel, such an opera, such a speech, etc., etc., were no other than one and the same individual. The present abortion was the first work of the Poet of the batch, who would have been more legitimately myself than most of the others; but I surrounded himself with all manner of (to my then notion) poetical accessories, and had planned quite a delightful life for him. Only this crab remains of the shapely Tree of Life in this fool’s paradise of mine,—R.B.’
If Christiana, Aunt Silverthorne, had not kindly and unpromptedly paid £30 for its publication (£26 and 5 shillings for setting, printing and binding, £3 and 15 shillings for advertising), Pauline might have experienced the fate of Incondita—burned by its author to ashes. As it was, Sarianna had secretly copied, in pencil, particularly choice passages during Robert’s composition of the poem.
(#litres_trial_promo) She knew already the irresistible attraction for her brother of a fire in an open grate. She, indeed, was the only other person in the household who knew that Robert had begun writing the work at all. But then, five months later, there it was, published by Saunders and Otley, born and bound and in the hands of booksellers in March 1833. The author remained anonymous. Readers might suppose it to be the work of Brown, Smith, Jones, even Robinson, if they pleased: Robert Browning perhaps wisely elected for privacy over fame, though possibly only, batedly, preferring to anticipate the moment of astonishing revelation.
The book fell, not by chance, into the hands of reviewers. The Revd William Johnson Fox had read Incondita, and had reacted with a response that, if it stopped somewhat short of fulsome praise, had not been discouraging. Fox had acquired, in the interim, the Monthly Repository which, under his ownership and editorship, had achieved a reputation as an influential Unitarian publication. Its original emphasis had been theological, but Fox was eager not only to politicize its content but equally to give it a reputation for literary and dramatic criticism. Space could be found to notice improving literature: ten pages had recently been devoted in January 1830 to a review of the Poems of Tennyson by the 24-year-old John Stuart Mill (editor of Jeremy Bentham’s Treatise upon Evidence and founder of the Utilitarian Society, activities that had unsettled him to the point of madness until the poetry of Wordsworth restored to him the will to live). On receipt of a positive reply to the letter reintroducing himself—though he seems only to have been aware, to judge by his letter, that Fox contributed reviews to the Westminster Review—Robert had twelve copies of Pauline sent to Mr Fox, together with a copy of Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen which, afterwards wishing to retrieve, he later used as an excuse to call personally on Fox.
Fox’s review was delightful. It admitted Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession to be ‘evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch’. Nevertheless, ‘In recognising a poet,’ wrote Fox, ‘we cannot stand upon trifles, nor fret ourselves about such matters. Time enough for that afterwards, when larger works come before us. Archimedes in the bath had many particulars to settle about specific gravities and Hiero’s crown; but he first gave a glorious leap and shouted Eureka!’ Fox’s own leap was of faith that he had discovered a true poet. Of the work of genius before him, he had no doubt: he recommended the whole composition as being ‘of the spirit, spiritual. The scenery is in the chambers of thought; the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another.’ There was ‘truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius.’ Tennyson had passed the Fox test of genius, and now so did Browning. Both had raised the hair on the back of his neck. Mrs Orr begs to differ in respect of Fox’s acceptance of the ‘confessional and introspective quality of the poem as an expression of the highest emotional life—of the essence, therefore, of religion’. But she gives her full approbation to the ‘encouraging kindness’ of the one critic who alone, discerning enough to cry Eureka!, discovered Robert Browning in his first obscurity.
Allan Cunningham in the Athenaeum noticed Pauline with some graceful compliments—‘fine things abound … no difficulty in finding passages to vindicate our praise … To one who sings so naturally, poetry must be as easy as music is to a bird.’ This was gratifying stuff, gilding the Fox lily which scented the air Robert Browning breathed and which he acknowledged as ‘the most timely piece of kindness in the way of literary help that ever befell me’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Fox had, however, given a copy of Pauline to John Stuart Mill who, besides being Fox’s friend and assistant on the Monthly Repository, contributed reviews and articles to the Examiner and to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, where, in August 1830, in an omnibus review of some dozen books, Mill briefly dismissed the poem as ‘a piece of pure bewilderment’.
This might not have been so bad as a glancing cuff at an author’s head by a reviewer too pressed for time to have read the poem properly and too squeezed for space to give it more than a line. But Mill, either then or later, had taken trouble to read Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession very thoroughly, and more than once. At the end of his copy, on the fly-leaf, he made a long note presumably for his own reference. What he wrote was this:
With considerable poetic powers, the writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being. I should think it a sincere confession, though of a most unlovable state, if the ‘Pauline’ were not evidently a mere phantom. All about her is full of inconsistency—he neither loves her nor fancies he loves her, yet insists upon talking love to her. If she existed and loved him, he treats her most ungenerously and unfeelingly. All his aspirings and yearnings and regret point to other things, never to her; then he pays her off toward the end by a piece of flummery, amounting to the modest request that she will love him and live with him and give herself up to him without his loving her moyennant quoi he will think her and call her everything that is handsome, and he promises her that she shall find it mighty pleasant. Then he leaves off by saying he knows he will have changed his mind by to-morrow, and despite ‘these intents which seem so fair,’ but that having been thus visited once no doubt he will be again—and is therefore in ‘perfect joy’, bad luck to him! as the Irish say. A cento of most beautiful passages might be made from this poem, and the psychological history of himself is powerful and truthful—truth-like certainly, all but the last stage. That, he evidently has not yet got into. The self-seeking and self-worshipping state is well described—beyond that, I should think the writer has made, as yet, only the next step, viz. into despising his own state. I even question whether part even of that self-disdain is not assumed. He is evidently dissatisfied, and feels part of the badness of his state; he does not write as if it were purged out of him. If he once could muster a hearty hatred of his selfishness it would go; as it is, he feels only the lack of good, not the positive evil. He feels not remorse, but only disappointment; a mind in that state can only be regenerated by some new passion, and I know not what to wish for him but that he may meet with a real Pauline. Meanwhile he should not attempt to show how a person may be recovered from this morbid state, for he is hardly convalescent, and ‘what should we speak of but that which we know?’
This is raw, unedited—though by no means unreflecting—stuff, the sort of thing a reviewer or critic will write for himself before dressing it up or toning it down for publication. It shows Mill’s mind working largely on spontaneous impressions, though—or therefore—fresh and certainly, in this particular instance, acute in literary and psychological insights into a poet whose name and very existence were unknown to Mill. Just six years older than Robert Browning, he was already making a name for himself in literary, political, and journalistic circles. Just as well, then, that Mill’s notes were never polished up and printed. It was quite enough that Mill’s annotated copy of Pauline was included among the review copies that Fox returned to Robert on 30 October 1833. It is surmised that Mill’s words, when Robert read them, prompted his own holograph note on his own copy of Pauline, referring to the poem as an ‘abortion’ and as a ‘crab’ on the Tree of Life in his paradise. Robert refused to permit republication of Pauline for nigh on thirty-five years, acknowledging merely his authorship of the poem ‘with extreme repugnance and indeed purely of necessity’. Not only the review copies were returned to him by Fox; the publishers also sent Robert a bundle of unbound sheets. Not a single copy of Pauline had been sold.
If Mill had been a little too harsh in his disparagement, Fox had perhaps been a little too generous in his praise. Mrs Orr pointedly says of Mill that, ‘there never was a large and cultivated intelligence one can imagine less in harmony than his with the poetic excesses, or even the poetic qualities, of Pauline’; and she acutely recognizes that Fox ‘made very light of the artistic blemishes of the work … it was more congenial to him to hail that poet’s advent than to register his shortcomings’. Mill recognized what Fox did not: the poet’s morbid self-consciousness and the self-seeking state of his mind, the poem as a sincere confession, and its power and truth as a psychological history of its author. For in truth, Pauline was written, says Mrs Orr, whose view is enthusiastically confirmed in turn by Betty Miller, in a moment of ‘supreme moral or physical crisis’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nobody, then or since, has doubted this for a minute. Mill may have been right to suggest that the poet was barely convalescent, far less recovered, from his morbid state of introspection, of self-examination—for Pauline, real or imagined as Browning’s confessor, occupied his attentions as a woman less than his own interesting condition as a young man, slicing himself into an infinity of thin tissue samples and inspecting the results under a microscope of forensic self-analysis.
Robert claimed Pauline to be ‘dramatic in principle’. It is gorgeous in imagery, but it is dramatic in the sense that a philosophical inquiry by Plato is dramatic: a scene is set; time, place, and characters are perfunctorily established before it proceeds to discussion of a moral crisis or conundrum and its resolution. The poem is of course—in view of Robert’s preoccupation with him—heavily influenced by Shelley (invoked in Pauline as ‘Sun-treader’ and ‘Apollo’). Scholarly consensus has it that the dramatic principle of Pauline is a lyrical narrative inspired by the form of Shelley’s Alastor, and deriving elements from that poet’s Epipsychidion. Robert Browning confesses his guilty history to Pauline, who is made privy to disappointing experiences in life and disappointed experiments with living—the poet’s loss of honour in disloyalty to all he held dear, to Pauline herself (who represents women he has loved, including his mother, representing familiar, comfortable domesticity), to a lapse from his inherited religious faith and the substituted creed of Shelley (who taught him to believe in men perfected as gods and the earth perfected as heaven), the sinking of the good estimation of his family (disappointed by his spurning of conventional education and a conventional career). It is a sorry catalogue, all in all.
The examination of the poet’s soul reveals the accumulation of guilt and regret, initially a cause of despair and self-doubt that gradually evolves into a more positive source of self-confidence and optimism. Robert, in the course of Pauline, heals himself, though his renewal necessarily involves an alteration in personal consciousness. To become what he is, it has been necessary to be what he was. On a note of self-definition, he relinquishes his Shelleyan delusions; he returns to his love of God (with some qualifications and reservations), to his love for Pauline (and her domestic virtues and comforts), to art (Shelley, the ‘Sun-treader’, is installed in the firmament—a star in eternity—his ideals renounced but his supremacy as a poet maintained), and to himself in the space he has cleared for future manoeuvre. Read autobiographically, rather than as art, Pauline probably did an effective therapeutic job for the poet; as art, the poem is generally agreed to be a precociously subjective failure.
Robert’s return to religion was not corseted by the narrow confines of Congregationalism. He sought out colourful, dramatic, evangelizing preachers whose theatricality appealed to his taste not merely for their rhetorical flourishes of eloquence, but for imaginative reasoning splendidly dressed with a generous garnish of allusions, references, myth, metaphor, and metaphysics. One of the most celebrated was William Johnson Fox himself, who spoke with a liberal tongue and conscience. Following on Fox’s review of Pauline, Robert paid an evening call at Stamford Grove West, near Dalston in Hackney, where he renewed acquaintance not only with Fox but with Eliza and Sarah Flower, both nearing thirty years of age, who were living with him as his wards after the death of their father in 1829.
They hardly recognized Robert after four years: now almost twenty-one years old, he was a sight to behold—becomingly whiskered, elegantly gloved and caped, drily witty. The sisters had read Pauline and were interested to see the author. Sarah, in a letter of June 1833, remarked to a cousin that the ‘poet boy’ had turned up, ‘very interesting from his great power of conversation and thorough originality, to say nothing of his personal appearance, which would be exceptionally poetic if nature had not served him an unkind trick in giving him an ugly nose’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Quite what was wrong with Robert’s nose is not specified, though perhaps it was merely less ‘unmatured’ than the poet who, Sarah considered, ‘will do much better things’. Her estimation of Pauline was evidently more critical than that of her guardian, Mr Fox, though William Sharp suggests that the enthusiasm of the Flower sisters influenced Fox’s own partiality for the poem. Sarah herself wrote poetry, so probably knew what she was talking about, and she had doubtless discussed Pauline with her sister Eliza, who was acknowledged to be an excellent critic.
Eliza Flower makes only brief appearances in Mrs Orr’s Life and Letters of Robert Browning, but she acknowledges that, ‘If, in spite of his [Browning’s] denials, any woman inspired Pauline, it can have been no other than she.’ Vivienne Browning offers the alternative suggestion, in an essay, ‘The Real Identity of Pauline’, published in the Browning Society notes in 1983, that Robert might have had in mind his Aunt Jemima, only a year older than himself, described by Mrs Orr as ‘very amiable and, to use her nephew’s words, “as beautiful as the day”’. But whoever may have been the model for Pauline is hardly relevant: she was, as Mill understood, ‘a mere phantom’. Pauline was a womanly compound: if not Woman herself, she was at least a combination of friend, lover, Sophia, sister, mother, and even—since it is possible to identify some subtle adolescent homophile lines in the poem—the inspiration may sometimes, just as likely, have been Shelley as well as any woman. The point being, rather, that Robert probably felt some tender adolescent attraction to Eliza, who was nine years his elder—the first of the older women after his mother to engage his attentions and affections throughout his life. The poetic figure of Pauline, a mature figure of a woman with abundant dark hair and a rather sultry eroticism, very likely represented—personified—the sexual image, ideals, and desires that Robert was beginning to form for himself.
Eliza, who was in love with William Johnson Fox, was pleased to see Robert again, though her initial admiration was exceeded by his own self-admiration. She began to think, ‘he has twisted the old-young shoot off by the neck’ and that, ‘if he had not got into the habit of talking of head and heart as two separate existences, one would say that he was born without a heart’. At any rate, any prospect of romance between them was fairly improbable, though they continued to be friends. Ever afterwards, Robert maintained for Eliza a sentimental friendship that was rooted in loyalty to his admiration for her music, respect for her mind, and tender affection for her goodness. She died of consumption in 1846, the year of Robert’s marriage to Elizabeth Barrett.
For all Robert’s later repugnance for Pauline, for all his thwarted attempts to recover the copy of the book that Mill had written in, for all his reluctance to authorize any further publication even of extracts from it in his lifetime, for all his resistance to inclusion of an amended version of the poem in a collected edition of his work in 1868, and for all revisionist tinkerings with the poem to render it fit for an edition of 1888, his dissociation from it could never be complete. The secret of his authorship soon leaked out and, in fact, initially did him some good. It brought him at least some limited literary recognition (albeit of a mixed nature) and established something of a style that twenty years later was recognized by the young painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had read Browning’s Paracelsus and, coming across Pauline in the British Museum library, was astute enough to understand that it was by the hand of the same author—though he was careful enough to copy it out and ask for Browning’s confirmation of authorship, which Robert duly supplied.
(#litres_trial_promo)
Biographers of Browning now fall down a hole of unknowing for two years, pulling themselves back into the light of biographical day with some difficulty, finding occasional toeholds in scattered references throughout Browning’s later work that give clues to his activities from publication of Pauline in 1833 to publication of his next production, Paracelsus, in 1835. William Sharp suggests that during this period Robert began to go out and about in ‘congenial society’, specifically citing new acquaintance with ‘many well-known workers in the several arts’,
(#litres_trial_promo) including Charles Dickens and Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd, a notable lawyer—the title ‘Serjeant’ derived from his position in the Inns of Court as a barrister—who was to publish Ion in 1836 and several more blank verse tragedies that do not much detain the attention of posterity but gave pleasure in their own time. Talfourd was then famous, nevertheless, for his wide acquaintance with literary men, later on account of his elevation to the judiciary and his work as a Member of Parliament in securing real protection for authors’ copyright, and always for his loquacity and conviviality.
If Robert did indeed meet Talfourd at this time, he would have been a good man for a young author to know—though Sharp says that Browning’s first reputation among such company was as an artist and musician rather than as a poet, and residence south of the river in remote, rural Camberwell made night engagements impracticable. During the day, says Sharp, Robert consulted works on philosophy and medical history in the British Museum Library and very often visited the National Gallery (unlikely, since that institution did not open until 1838). Certainly Robert was fortifying his friendships with men like Alfred Domett, Jim Silverthorne, his cheerful young uncle Reuben Browning (who was an elegant scholar of Latin and an accomplished horseman), and he may at this time have joined a circle of young men who clustered around a Captain Pritchard of Battersea, who had met Robert when he was sixteen and had introduced him to the medical lectures given at Guy’s Hospital by a cousin, Dr Blundell.
In the winter of 1833–4, at the age of twenty-one going on twenty-two, Robert found himself on an expedition to Russia, specifically to St Petersburg, nominally as secretary to the Chevalier de Benkhausen, the Russian consul-general in London. How on earth he wangled this trip, how on earth indeed he made the acquaintance in the first place of the Russian consul-general—who ‘had taken a great liking to him’
(#litres_trial_promo)—is not clear, though Mrs Orr says that ‘the one active career which would have recommended itself to him in his earlier youth was diplomacy … He would indeed not have been averse to any post of activity and responsibility not unsuited to the training of a gentleman.’
These remarks suggest that Robert was by then perhaps chafing and fretting at home even more than before and may have been thinking better of his decision to commit himself exclusively to poetry and financial dependence on his family. Mrs Orr does not spell out the reasons for this aspiration to diplomacy as a career, and there are no surviving letters from this period to add substance to speculation. William Shergold Browning worked as a Rothschild banker in Paris at this time, while his brother Reuben Browning, Robert’s favourite uncle, worked for Nathan Rothschild in the Rothschild London banking house. It is tempting to assume a connection between international banking and diplomacy that could have brought Robert to the attention of the consul-general. At any rate, there must have been some personal recommendation and introduction, more likely to have derived from a family connection than any other.
Of the Russian expedition, of its official purpose and its immediate personal importance for Robert, we know next to nothing: Robert wrote regularly and lengthily to Sarianna, but he burned the letters in later life. He set off with Benkhausen, say Griffin and Minchin, contradicting by a few months Mrs Orr’s version of an earlier, winter journey, on Saturday 1 March 1834. Early spring seems more likely; they would still be travelling through snow, but would reach Russia just as a thaw was setting in. They travelled, it is estimated, 1500 miles on horseback and by post carriage. In 1830, Stephenson’s Rocket, a marvel of modern technology, had made the first journey on the Liverpool to Manchester railway, and The General Steam Navigation Company operated a basic, bucketing, piston-thumping packet service from London to Ostend and Rotterdam; but there the transport system ran, literally, out of steam. ‘We know,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘how strangely he was impressed by some of the circumstances of the journey: above all by the endless monotony of snow-covered pine forest through which he and his companion rushed for days and nights at the speed of six post-horses, without seeming to move from one spot.’
‘How I remember the flowers—even grapes—of places I have seen!’ wrote Robert to a friend, Fanny Haworth, on 24 July 1838, ‘—some one flower or weed, I should say, that gets some strangehow connected with them. Snowdrops and Tilsit in Prussia go together’; and throughout Browning’s work there are associations of this sort that testify to the power of his memory for detail: ‘Wall and wall of pine’ and, from the poem ‘A Forest Thought’:
In far Esthonian solitudes
The parent firs of future woods
Gracefully, airily spire at first
Up to the sky, by the soft sand nurst …
and so on until he reached St Petersburg where he looked at pictures in the Hermitage, no doubt as thoroughly and with as critical an eye as at the Dulwich Gallery.
In a letter to Elizabeth Barrett, on 11 August 1845, Robert described a play he had written, in about 1843, entitled ‘Only a Player Girl’: ‘it was Russian, and about a fair on the Neva, and booths and droshkies and fish pies and so forth, with the Palaces in the background’. The play is not known to have survived either the destroying hand of time or that of the author. He says, furthermore, that at St Petersburg he met a Sir James Wylie who ‘chose to mistake me for an Italian—“M. l’Italien” he said another time, looking up from his cards.’ Others regularly made the same assumption, whether sincerely or satirically, taking their cue from Robert’s sallow-complexioned, dandified appearance. Another acquaintance in St Petersburg, say Griffin and Minchin,
(#litres_trial_promo) was a King’s Messenger called Waring whose name Robert borrowed eight years later in Dramatic Lyrics to cover for the identity of Alfred Domett as the eponymous subject of the poem ‘Waring’ and imagined as,
Waring in Moscow, to those rough
Cold northern climes borne, perhaps.
Before leaving Russia, after an absence from England of some three months, Robert watched the solid ice crack on the frozen Neva and heard the boom of guns that accompanied the governor’s journey on the now navigable river to present a ceremonial goblet of Neva water to the tsar. ‘St Petersburg, no longer three isolated portions,’ say Griffin and Minchin, ‘was once more united, as the floating wooden bridges swung into place across the mighty stream, and the city was en fête’. Robert, presumably delighting in Russian fairs, which may have occupied his interest rather more than Mrs Orr would have approved, kept an attentive and recording ear open to the music of Russia, folk songs in particular. Fifty years later in Venice, by the account of a friend, Katherine Bronson, he was able to recollect perfectly and accurately sing some of these songs to the elderly Prince Gagarin, a retired Russian diplomat, who exclaimed delightedly and wonderingly at Browning’s musical memory that, he declared, surpassed his own.
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In Russia, and shortly after his return to London, Robert had not overlooked his poetic vocation: besides storing up materials for future work, he wrote a number of poems—notably the grimly dramatic monologue ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, with its quietly sensational last line; a sonnet, ‘A Forest Thought’, which most early Browning biographers and critics have passed by tight-lipped and with a sorrowful shake of the head; a song (beginning, ‘A King lived long ago …’) that he incorporated a few years later into Pippa Passes; a lyric (beginning, ‘Still ailing, wind? Wilt be appeased or no?’) that was later introduced into the sixth section of ‘James Lee’ (in Dramatis Personæ); and the poem ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ (later published in Dramatic Lyrics), which might be thought of, in its theme of Calvinistic predestination, as Browning’s equivalent of ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ by Robert Burns. All these were submitted to Fox’s Monthly Repository and accepted for publication. They appeared there, anonymously over the initial ‘Z’, from 1834 to 1836.
Whether to support his life as a poet or seriously to begin a diplomatic career, or simply to reinforce the independence that the visit to St Petersburg had probably aroused, Robert felt confident enough after his three months as aide or secretary, or whatever role he played in attendance to the Russian consul-general, to apply ‘for appointment on a mission which was to be despatched to Persia’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was disappointed to be passed over, the more so since the response to his application had, on a misreading, appeared to offer him the position which in fact—he learned only in the course of an interview with ‘the chief’—was offered to another man, whom Robert damned in a letter to Sarah Flower, suggesting that ‘the Right Hon. Henry Ellis etc., etc., may go to a hotter climate for a perfect fool—(that at Baghdad in October, 127 Fahrenheit in the shade)’.
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Still, to be realistic, the failure was maybe all to the good. Diplomacy was certainly a creditable profession for a gentleman, though that gentleman needed not only financial assets to back it up, at least in the beginning, and, to advance it, the social contacts that most successful young diplomats had either acquired on their own account at Oxford or Cambridge or naturally possessed through upper-middle-class and aristocratic family relationships. To cut a career as a diplomat was as difficult and expensive as to make progress as a barrister (Alfred Domett and Joseph Arnould were already finding this out in their first years as young lawyers) or gain promotion as a military officer in a regiment of any social consequence. The cost to the Browning family purse of maintaining Robert as an embassy attaché would have weighed even more heavily than keeping him at home as a poet. Maisie Ward supposes that the Silverthornes would have found a place for Robert in the family brewery, but ‘this would have meant no less drudgery, no better future prospects than the bank, and if [Cyrus] Mason’s view of the worldliness of the family is correct, they would certainly have aimed at something more socially acceptable’.
A certain sense of heightened social awareness is imputed to the Brownings by Maisie Ward and by Cyrus Mason: it may fall short of social snobbery, but attitudes and aspirations do tend to suggest at least an impetus towards gentility—what we now regard more positively as ‘upward mobility’. Mrs Orr’s definite and regular distaste for any possibility of Robert’s being tarred by association with ‘lowlife’; the horror with which Cyrus Mason (and other Brownings even into the mid twentieth century) regarded any suggestion that even distant ancestors might have been of the servant class; the gentleman’s education that Robert enjoyed—these are pointers that perhaps speak more of prevailing social values in mid nineteenth-century England than of the particular case of the Brownings, though of course the Brownings were of the middle rank of the powerful middle classes that mostly subscribed without question to the desirability of self-improvement in their lives.
There were no awkward assertions of social superiority, however, to make any visitor to the Browning household feel ill at ease (Mrs Browning was no Mrs Wilfer, with her head tied up in a handkerchief and her aspirations affirmed in a superior sniff); it was a sociable house and many of Robert’s friends have recorded warm memories of happy evenings there among good company. Cyrus Mason gnashed his teeth in the darkness of outer family, dismally nursing into old age his own exclusion from this cheerful company—more than likely, says Maisie Ward, he simply bored the Brownings to death—and took his revenge cold as his abiding bitterness when he wrote of the ‘misty pride’ that hung like a dampness in the ‘genteelly dreary’ Browning household and shrouded its inhabitants, whose single, self-absorbed concern was to develop a poet of genius to the obliteration of natural affection within the near family and shameful neglect of its extended members. The fact that Reuben Browning and the Silverthornes, close family, were welcome guests, and are known to have been generous to Robert, would tend to put paid to Cyrus Mason’s more extreme accusations.
It is true, nevertheless, that Robert took the trouble to cultivate good acquaintance. A letter written in 1830 by Robert to a close friend, Christopher Dowson, refers to ‘the unfortunate state of our friend P[ritchard]’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Pritchard is not a significant figure in Browning’s correspondence—the letters that have survived the conflagration of Browning’s personal papers contain only minor references to him—and nobody but Griffin and Minchin is interested in poor old Pritchard as a character in Browning’s life, either at this time or later. They describe him as ‘a brisk, dapper, little, grey-haired sea-captain, with a squint and a delightful fund of tales of adventure’. He lived at Battersea, and it was his whim to keep his address a close secret. However, he was the focus of a set, known as ‘The Colloquials’, of young men into whose orbit Robert was attracted and with whom he struck up lasting friendships. Pritchard’s ‘elasticity of mind bade defiance to advancing years and enabled him to associate unconstrainedly with those who were very considerably his juniors’, say Griffin and Minchin, and they further state that he had a chivalrous regard for women, to the extent of leaving his money to two maiden ladies on the ground that ‘women should be provided for since they cannot earn their living’.
(#litres_trial_promo) One of these maiden ladies was Sarianna Browning, who later inherited £1000 by Pritchard’s will.
Through Pritchard, Robert met and associated with Christopher and Joseph Dowson, William Curling Young and his younger brother Frederick Young, Alfred Domett, and Joseph Arnould. The Dowsons knew Pritchard through shipping, their family business; Christopher Dowson later married Mary, Alfred Domett’s sister; Joseph Dowson associated himself with the Youngs through business interests; in short, the group developed close family and business ties that bound them together longer than their youthful debates—their ‘boisterous Colloquies’, as Arnould later characterized them—about politics, poetry, theatre, philosophy, science, and the business of the group magazine, Olla Podrida, which they produced to publish their own essays, poems, and whatever other of their effusions pleased them. Robert himself contributed ‘A Dissertation on Debt and Debtors’, an essay which characteristically quoted from Quarles and uncharacteristically—for a man whose horror of debt was later well known and to become deeply ingrained—defended debt as a necessary condition of human life.
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A less regular member of the group was Field Talfourd, an artist and brother of Thomas Noon Talfourd, and it has been suggested that Benjamin Jowett, the future celebrated Master of Balliol College, Oxford, may have attended some Colloquial meetings—though his name is introduced more on the basis that he was then a native of Camberwell than on any sure evidence of his participation in the group’s activities. The Colloquials seem to have been a kindly, good-natured set of young, middle-class men whose aspirations and ambitions variously took them into the middle ranks of the law, politics, and business, at home and in the service of the Empire. Several of them, notably Arnould and Domett, wrote poetry for the rest of their lives: Arnould, while at Wadham College, Oxford, won the Newdigate Prize for poetry; Domett turned out stuff such as Ranolf and Amohia: a South-Sea Day Dream, inspired by his Antipodean travels and career, not wholly disrespected by public regard in his own day but entirely unknown to present fame. Of them all, Robert was forever closest to Alfred Domett.
Diplomacy had not yet done with Robert Browning, though Robert may have all but done with diplomacy. In 1834, a young Frenchman presented himself to the Brownings. This was Count Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, then in his mid-twenties. He was socially affable, urbane, cosmopolitan, and intellectually impressive, literate in European art and poetry, and interested in finance. He had been recommended to William Shergold Browning, of Rothschild’s in Paris, by the Marquis of Fortia, his uncle, who shared with William Browning an interest in literature. William in turn recommended young Ripert-Monclar to his brother Reuben in London, who introduced him into the Browning household. Ripert-Monclar claimed to be spending his summers in England, ostensibly for pleasure.
(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, the young aristocrat was a Royalist, an active supporter of the dethroned Bourbons now living in England as a result of the French revolution of July 1830 that made Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, King of France until he in turn was toppled in 1848. Ripert-Monclar, as he confessed to the Brownings, was acting as a private agent of communication between the royal exiles and their legitimist friends in France. He was not himself an exile, though it can be assumed that he was no favourite of Louis-Philippe. There is a suggestion that he may have been briefly held in jail in 1830. It was diplomacy of a thrilling sort—clandestine, subversive, and romantic.
Amédée and Robert struck up an immediate, intimate friendship: they talked no doubt of royalty and republicanism, though they probably discussed art and poetry more than politics; they would have talked of France, particularly of Paris, and Robert’s French—already reliable enough to have enabled him to write part of Pauline in good French—would have become even more polished. The young Frenchman introduced Robert to the works of Balzac and the new French realist writers, he sketched his new friend’s portrait, and at some point or other he suggested the life of Paracelsus, the Renaissance alchemist and physician, as the subject of Robert’s next major poem. He then thought better of the idea, ‘because it gave no room for the introduction of love about which every young man of their age thought he had something quite new to say’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But too late, too late to withdraw the suggestion: besides, Robert had already dealt with love in Pauline, and there had been precious little profit in that. Better, perhaps, to steer clear for the time being, take another tack.
Though two or three months of preliminary research (‘in the holes and corners of history’, as Chesterton likes to put it) had been necessary, Paracelsus was already a familiar-enough character to Robert: there was the entry in the Biographie Universelle on his father’s shelves; there was the Frederick Bitiskius three-volume folio edition of Paracelsus’ works; there were relevant medical works to hand, including a little octavo of 1620, the Vitœ Germanorum Medicorum of Melchior Adam, with which he was already acquainted from his recent interest in medicine. By mid-March 1835, interrupting a work in progress called Sordello, which he had begun a couple of years earlier in March 1833, Robert had written a full manuscript entitled Paracelsus, a poem of 4,152 lines which was ‘Inscribed to Amédée de Ripert-Monclar by his affectionate friend R.B.’. This dedication was dated ‘London: 15 March 1835’. Paracelsus, divided into five scenes and featuring four characters, had taken Robert just over five months to complete. It was published at his father’s expense by Effingham Wilson, of the Royal Exchange, on 15 August 1835. Saunders and Otley had declined the privilege of publishing the poem, and it had taken some trouble and influence to induce even Effingham Wilson, a small publisher, to undertake the job. Wilson published Paracelsus, says Mrs Orr, more ‘on the ground of radical sympathies in Mr Fox and the author than on that of its intrinsic worth.’
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In a preliminary letter of 2 April
(#litres_trial_promo) to William Johnson Fox, Robert requested an introduction to Fox’s neighbour, Edward Moxon, printer and publisher of Dover Street, Piccadilly, ‘on account of his good name and fame among author-folk, besides he has himself written—as the Americans say—“more poetry ’an you can shake a stick at”’. Moxon was a high-flying old bird to be expected to notice a fledgling fresh out of the nest and bumping near to the ground like Robert Browning. Thirty-four years of age in 1835, when he gave up writing his own poetry, Moxon was less distinguished as a poet than as a publisher and bookseller. Leigh Hunt wittily described him as ‘a bookseller among poets, and a poet among booksellers’. The remark has stuck to Moxon, who in 1830 had established his business which quickly acquired a reputation for publishing poetry of high quality by a remarkable list of poets including Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb (who introduced many of them to Moxon), Southey, Clare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, who became Moxon’s close friend. Leigh Hunt remarked that ‘Moxon has no connection but with the select of the earth’, which was intended satirically but may have been true enough in literary terms, implying a discrimination that has proved itself in posterity and went far beyond the terms of mere business in Moxon’s defence of his poets against the famous attacks by Lockhart and the rest of the Scots critics of Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly reviews.
On 16 April 1835
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert again wrote to Fox to report on a visit to Moxon, whose ‘visage loured exceedingly’ and ‘the Moxonian accent grew dolorous’ on perusal of a recommendatory letter by Charles Cowden Clarke (who had been a close friend of Keats, and was now a friend of Fox) which Robert presented to him. This was not encouraging; even less encouraging was Moxon’s view of the poetry written by some of Robert’s tremendous contemporaries, far less a work by someone virtually unknown. Moxon gloomily revealed that Philip von Artevelde, a long dramatic poem by Sir Henry Taylor that had excited the Athenaeum, normally decorous, to rave enthusiastically in fifteen columns just the year before, had ‘not paid expenses by about thirty odd pounds’. Furthermore, ‘Tennyson’s poetry’, said Moxon, ‘is “popular at Cambridge” and yet of 800 copies which were printed of his last, some 300 only have gone off: Mr M[oxon] hardly knows whether he shall ever venture again, etc. etc., and in short begs to decline even inspecting, etc. etc.’ Poetry could no longer be relied upon as a paying proposition.
Robert offered to read his poem to Fox some morning, ‘though I am rather scared of a fresh eye going over its 4000 lines … yet on the whole I am not much afraid of the issue … I shall really need your notice on this account’; and finished off his letter with some heavy humorous flourishes that included a discreet swipe at John Stuart Mill advising him not to be an ‘idle spectator’ of Robert’s first appearance on a public stage (‘having previously only dabbled in private theatricals’). Paracelsus was to be Robert’s première, his big first night with the critics, who were invited to attend and advised to pay attention, ‘benignant or supercilious’ as Mill in particular should choose, but ‘he may depend that tho’ my “Now is the winter of our discontent” be rather awkward, yet there shall be occasional outbreaks of good stuff—that I shall warm as I get on, and finally wish “Richmond at the bottom of the seas,” etc. in the best style imaginable.’
Paracelsus received mixed reviews from those critics who did not pass it over in silence entirely. The reviewer for the Athenaeum gave the poem a brief, lukewarm notice in 73 words on 22 August 1835, reluctantly recognizing ‘talent in this dramatic poem’ but warning against facile imitation of Shelley’s ‘mysticism and vagueness’ in a work the reviewer found ‘dreamy and obscure’. There was worse from some other reviewers whose notices Robert, if he did not take them to heart as guides to future good poetic conduct, at least bore as scabs on his mind and as scars in his soul. He still scratched at them a decade later. On 17 September 1845, in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett, he recalled ‘more than one of the reviews and newspapers that laughed my “Paracelsus” to scorn ten years ago’ and contrasted, in a further letter to her of 9 December 1845, ‘that my own “Paracelsus”, printed a few months before, had been as dead a failure as “Ion” [by Thomas Noon Talfourd] a brilliant success … I know that until Forster’s notice in the Examiner appeared, every journal that thought it worth while to allude to the poem at all, treated it with entire contempt.’ Fox contributed a tardy review in the Monthly Repository in November: Robert had read Paracelsus aloud to him and they had discussed the poem, so he had had the benefit of the poet’s own industry, ideas and intentions to draw upon in his favourable notice, which declared the work to be ‘the result of thought, skill and toil’ and not—as the Athenaeum had judged it—a dreamy and obscure effusion. Paracelsus was not only a poem, declared Fox, but a poem with ideas.
His bold, informed defence of the poem had its effect: John Forster, in an article in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal early in 1836, promoted Robert to Parnassus: ‘Without the slightest hesitation we name Mr Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth.’ A vacancy had recently occurred, since Samuel Taylor Coleridge had died in 1834. But Forster had needed little or no prompting from a sympathetic review by Fox. As chief dramatic and literary reviewer of the Examiner, he had already dealt generously with Paracelsus in that publication: ‘Since the publication of Philip von Artevelde,’ he wrote, ‘we have met with no such evidences of poetic genius, and of general intellectual power, as are contained in this volume.’ Forster closed his review of Paracelsus with these words: ‘It is some time since we read a work of more unequivocal power than this. We conclude that its author is a young man, as we do not recollect his having published before.’ He was evidently, perhaps mercifully, unacquainted with Pauline, now immured in the British Museum Library. ‘If so, we may safely predict for him a brilliant career, if he continues true to the present promise of his genius. He possesses all the elements of a fine poet.’ Forster, unlike Fox, had not enjoyed the benefit of Robert Browning’s acquaintance, and his review is all the more valuable for that reason. He assumed Browning to be a young man, though it was difficult to tell from the poem itself: to repeat Chesterton’s line, Robert could have been anything between twenty and a thousand years old if the evidence of Paracelsus were the only criterion by which to judge his age.
Forster, says Mrs Orr, ‘knew that a writer in the Athenaeum had called it rubbish, and he had taken it up as a probable subject for a piece of slashing criticism’. A young critic (Forster was twenty-three years old in 1835, only five months younger than Browning) will sometimes adopt this tactic—an acknowledged means of getting on in literary society by bringing one’s own talent more prominently to the attention of fellow-critics, editors, and publishers than the work being reviewed. However, intending to bury Browning, Forster paused to praise, though ‘what he did write’, says Mrs Orr, ‘can scarcely be defined as praise. It was the simple, ungrudging admission of the unequivocal power, as well as brilliant promise, which he recognized in the work.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This in turn is perhaps a little grudging of Forster’s real recognition that here was a poet, perhaps not yet fully formed but promising great things. Robert himself, weighing the laurel crown awarded by Forster in the balance against the ashes heaped on his head by others, did not feel as pleased as he might otherwise have done if Forster’s had been but one voice amongst a full chorus singing in praiseful tune. Though he privately enjoyed the wholehearted applause of family and friends for his ‘private theatricals’, his public reception, now that he had put himself stage front, was more problematical.
Paracelsus was important to Robert. If Pauline had been a preview, in theatrical terms, the aspiring player would have performed to an empty house before being hooked off the stage by dissatisfied critics. But now—as he himself had written to Fox—this latest poem was his ‘first appearance on any stage’. It had been better, maybe, to start again and afresh. However, Robert specifically disclaimed in the preface any intention to promote Paracelsus as a drama or a dramatic poem. It was, he insisted, a poem and of a genre very different from that undertaken by any other poet. He warned critics off judging it ‘by principles on which it was never moulded’ and subjecting it ‘to a standard to which it was never meant to conform’.
What he meant by this was his intention ‘to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of mind or the passions by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects along and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded.’
No doubt this sentence made his meaning entirely clear to his contemporaries. What in effect Browning did in Paracelsus was to divide the poem into five sections or scenes, each a monologue by Aureolus Paracelsus, ‘a student’, with occasional interruptions by three other characters—Festus and Michal, husband and wife, described as ‘his friends’, and Aprile, thought to be inspired by Shelley, described as ‘an Italian poet’. These three took the roles, mostly, of auditors and sometimes prompts, iterating his moods at a critical point in his life. In each section, Paracelsus examines the state of his own inner life. By means of the insights he successively gains, he is enabled to act.
Rather more clearly, in his preface to the poem, Browning defined its intended form: ‘I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such only so long as the purpose for which they were first instituted is kept in view. I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all those restrictions, only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves and all new facilities placed at an author’s disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected. It is certain, however, that a work like mine depends more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success: indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, should connect the scattered lights into one constellation—a Lyre or a Crown.’
The poem is not notably dramatic, nor is it a linear narrative, nor is it lyric. It is light years away in its obscure allusions, recondite references, novel form, and difficult philosophy from the comparatively undemanding verse narratives of, say, Sir Walter Scott (who was nevertheless considered difficult even by some contemporary critics) or, for that matter, the familiar brio and theatricality of Byron’s verses. If it required strenuous mental effort from a perceptive critic, it stretched to incomprehension the limits of the common reader whom Browning, however flatteringly, expected to co-operate with him, engage with him, in the very creation of the poem. Paracelsus was, in the modern term, ‘interactive’—it depended, as Browning said in his preface, ‘more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success’.
For the meantime, however, the common reader confirmed the most dolorous expectations of Moxon. The light-minded reader in 1835 preferred the sentimental verse of Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (who died in 1838 at the age of 36, styled herself in life for the purposes of authorship as ‘L.E.L.’, wrote several novels and copious poetry, attracted to herself a reputation for indecorous romantic attachments that caused her to break off her engagement to John Forster) and Felicia Dorothea Hemans (who was responsible in 1829 for the poem ‘Casabianca’ and its famous first line, ‘The boy stood on the burning deck …’); preferred, too, gift books of mawkish poetry, and other such comforting, easily digestible products, after-dinner bon-bons or bon-mots that demanded no effort or response more than an easy smile, a wistful sigh, a romantic tear or any momentary rush of unreflecting, commonplace feeling. Nothing but the most banal expression of sentimental emotion was likely to succeed in the market for new poetry. Robert accepted that a work such as Paracelsus, even if lucky enough to find a publisher ready to print it, would be not only a short-term casualty of the early nineteenth-century crisis in poetry publishing but even, in the long term, might stand more as a succès d’estime than as a source of short-term financial profit or a lasting resource of popular taste. It would have to be enough in the mid-1830s that a few discriminating readers should read Robert Browning and—so far as they were able—appreciate what he was trying to do and say.
Paracelsus partook of the times not only in the experimental nature of its form, for the first half of the nineteenth century was an age of experiments and advances: it positively incorporated new thinking and new ideas and conflated them with the occult wisdom of the Renaissance, another distinct period of new thinking, new art, new science, and new technology. In The Life of Robert Browning, Clyde de L. Ryals
(#litres_trial_promo) points to Browning’s assimilation of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century scientific findings in biology, geology, and other sciences, to the extent that he was later to claim, very reasonably, that Paracelsus had anticipated Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (published in 1859) by some quarter of a century. Objecting to an assertion that he had ever been ‘strongly against Darwin, rejecting the truths of science and regretting its advance’, Robert only had to look back to find ‘all that seemed proved in Darwin’s scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning: see in Paracelsus the progressive development from senseless matter to organized, until man’s appearance.’
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Since all things are in nature, and Paracelsus was a natural philosopher and scientist, inexhaustibly desirous to plumb the secrets of nature (in Renaissance terms, an alchemist), it is hardly surprising that he appealed to Robert Browning as a bridge between science as it had been understood by the ancients and the perception of science by savants in his own age. Science itself was appropriate as a convenient vehicle for comment upon the facts of life that have always been known in one way or another, in one philosophy or another, but have been variously interpreted, when not entirely lost or forgotten or ignored, from generation to generation.
When Paracelsus died in 1541, he disappeared from the ken of all but the most esoteric scholars. Chesterton comments, wonderingly, on Browning’s choice of poetic protagonists—‘the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as that they are of no importance in ours’. In his choice of Paracelsus, Browning’s ‘supreme type of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful misers of dust. But for all that’, says Chesterton, ‘Browning was right.’ There could have been no better choice than Paracelsus, claims Chesterton, for Browning’s study of intellectual egotism and, he says, the choice equally refutes any charge against Browning himself that he was a frigid believer in logic and a cold adherent of the intellect—the proof being that at the age of twenty-three Browning wrote a poem designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy.
The entire poem is daringly experimental in form and philosophy: in both respects, it attempts to strip away the phenomenal world to reveal the noumenal world; to strip man of his physical integuments and reveal his psychical nakedness; to bare nature and reveal the natural. In the process, Robert Browning somewhat stripped himself psychologically bare: Paracelsus, for all his resolution after the personal revelations in Pauline, could not help but import some of his own state of mind and being into his work. Authors almost invariably write out of their own state of mind and being—there’s no help for it except rigorous self-awareness which is difficult consciously to attain, improbable to try to impose, and almost impossible thereafter to maintain.
The last thing Paracelsus was intended to be was confessional, but as Betty Miller acutely points out, two of the characters in the poem—Michal (M for Mother) and Festus (F for Father)—can be interpreted as Mr and Mrs Browning. They speak ‘out of the social and domestic environment of Robert Browning himself’. They ‘reveal, and with a singular candour on the part of their creator, the attitude of Browning’s own father and mother towards their brilliant, if ill-comprehended son’. In the discussions between the sober Festus, the gentle Michal, and the impatient, aspiring student Paracelsus, she says, ‘we catch an echo of the family conflict that preceded … the renunciation of a practical for a poetic career’.
Anyone familiar even with the barest biographical details of Robert’s life at this time, and beginning to read Paracelsus, will immediately grant the truth of Betty Miller’s astute psychological insight. It is perfectly plain, the entire difficult crisis; there it is, unmistakably recognizable in the pages, more harrowingly true to the turbulent family emotions and Browning’s own deepest feelings than any second-hand biographical fact and fancy can conjure. But then, too, as Ryals suggests, Paracelsus moves ‘back and forth between enthusiastic creation of a construct or fiction and sceptical de-creation of it when as “truth” or mimesis it is subjected to scrutiny’.
(#litres_trial_promo) With a poet as self-conscious at this time as Robert Browning, it should not easily be assumed that he would be unaware of using, even in disguise, his own life, its events and emotions; that he was not capable of a conjuror’s sleight-of-hand with a pack of cards, or an alchemist’s trick of turning lead into gold; that he would not make and unmake even these materials—now you see them, now you don’t; now lead, now gold—with as much ruthless facility as any others.
There is no real dispute, either, about Betty Miller’s judgement that, ‘In form, Paracelsus lies between the confessional of Pauline and the theatrical on which Browning wasted so many years. It is the closest of his early works to the dramatic monologues of his best period.’ Paracelsus did not make money for Browning, but it profited his reputation mightily. Future works would be styled and recommended as being ‘By the author of Paracelsus’. At the age of twenty-three, Robert Browning was a candidate for fame within London literary and theatrical circles. Paracelsus did not entitle him to a named and reserved seat in the Academy, far less the Siege Perilous at the literary round table; but he went confidently out and about, elegant and accomplished, affable and amusing, loquacious and learned, marked by those who mattered in the contemporary court of the London literati.
On 6 May 1835, the great actor-manager William Charles Macready was catching up with the most improving new books, reading ‘the pleasing poem of Van Artevelde’ that had so distressed Edward Moxon by its failure to recoup its costs. Reaching his London chambers, he found ‘Talfourd’s play of Ion in the preface to which is a most kind mention of myself’. Later in the day he called on the famously provocative young dramatic and literary critic John Forster, who was agitatedly considering a duel in Devonshire before thinking better of it.
(#litres_trial_promo) Macready was forty-two years old, and had succeeded to the place vacated on the English stage by the death of the actor Edmund Kean, whose grotesque, pathetic last performance of Richard III at Richmond had so much impressed and inspired Robert.
Macready was less barnstorming than Kean, who had acted vividly in the best Romantic manner, and he was certainly more seriously, in terms of intellect and artistry, attentive to the texts he produced and performed. He was ambitious, not only personally but for the English stage as a whole. Kean’s behaviour and attitudes, Macready considered, had brought the business of acting (‘my pariah profession’) into disrepute—though the low reputation of the English stage had never been higher than the sensational moral history of its best-known reprobates and its lowest hangers-on. It was Macready’s duty, as a rectitudinous Victorian—and, as he privately admitted, a reprehensibly envious rival of the disgraceful Kean—to raise the cultural level of the theatre to the virtue attained by the finest of the fine arts, to the most salubrious literary heights; in short, to purge the theatre of its most vicious elements and inspire it to the highest moral and artistic standards.
This ideal represented Macready’s conventional middle-class Victorianism crossed with his passionate egalitarianism, which, much as it reprobated the vile standards of the stage, also snobbishly scorned the high disdain and low virtue of society. Unfortunately for Macready, the English stage and its audiences resisted his energetic idealism.
On 27 November, Macready presented himself for dinner at the house of William Johnson Fox in Bayswater. ‘I like Mr Fox very much,’ wrote Macready in his diary entry for that day; ‘he is an original and profound thinker, and most eloquent and ingenious in supporting the penetrating views he takes.’ From which encomium we may take it that Macready and Fox harmoniously agreed, or amiably agreed to disagree, on most political, religious, and artistic matters. The evening got better still. ‘Mr Robert Browning, the author of Paracelsus, came in after dinner; I was very much pleased to meet him. His face is full of intelligence. My time passed most agreeably. Mr Fox’s defence of the suggestion that Lady Macbeth should be a woman of delicate and fragile frame pleased me very much, though he opposed me, and of course triumphantly. I took Mr Browning on, and requested to be allowed to improve my acquaintance with him. He expressed himself warmly, as gratified by the proposal; wished to send me his book; we exchanged cards and parted.’ The acquaintance warmed to the degree that on 31 December, the last day of 1835, Browning and five other guests were regaled with a dinner at Macready’s house where ‘Mr Browning was very popular with the whole party; his simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention and won opinions from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.’
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Macready thought it noteworthy to write in his diary on 1 February 1836 that John Forster ‘was talking much of Browning, who is his present all-in-all’. On 16 February, after one or two casual meetings, the acquaintance between Macready and Robert began to catch in earnest, to develop from personal friendship to professional association: ‘Forster and Browning called, and talked over the plot of a tragedy which Browning had begun to think of: the subject, Narses—a victorious general in the time of the Roman Emperor Justinian. He said that I had bit him by my performance of Othello, and I told him I hoped I should make the blood come. It would indeed be some recompense for the miseries, the humiliations, the heart-sickening disgusts which I have endured in my profession if, by its exercise, I had awakened a spirit of poetry whose influence would elevate, ennoble, and adorn our degraded drama. May it be!’
Robert was not only balm for Macready’s suffering professional soul; he found him personally soothing. Forster and the rest could be rumbustious and depressing: ‘My nerves and spirits were quite quelled by them all’; but Browning’s ‘gentle manners always make his presence acceptable’.
(#litres_trial_promo)Paracelsus, on the evidence of Macready’s diary entry for 8 December 1835—the day he finished reading the poem and set himself to considering it with the same professional eye of a player that he had brought to Talfourd’s Ion—would not do as drama—(which Robert had never intended that it should). The ‘main design of the poem’, according to Macready, ‘is not made out with sufficient clearness, and obscurity is a fault in many passages’. That said, however, he admitted the poem’s ‘most subtle and penetrating search into the feelings and impulses of our nature, some exquisite points of character, the profoundest and the grandest thoughts and most musically uttered. The writer is one whom I think destined for very great things.’
John Forster had been invited as a guest to Macready’s New Year’s Eve dinner at Elm Place, his house in the rural village of Elstree, and so it was by no remote chance that both Forster and Robert happened to be waiting with other Macready invitees earlier in the day at the ‘Blue Posts’ in Holborn, a boarding stage, for the same rumbling and bumping Billing’s coach that Macready himself used almost daily in his journeys to his London chambers from his country home and back again. Mrs Orr says that the introduction between Forster and Robert took place at Macready’s house, whereupon Forster inquired, ‘Did you see a little notice of you I wrote in the Examiner?’ From this point on, Forster and Robert seem to have been pretty constantly together. It was at Elm Place, too, that Robert first met Miss Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, a neighbour of Macready’s, a young woman some ten or eleven years older than Robert, interested in art and literature.
Narses was abandoned as a probable dramatic subject, and no more was heard of Forster’s and Browning’s interest in writing for the theatre, and for Macready in particular, until a few months later in 1826, when Macready acted in a production of Talfourd’s Ion at Covent Garden. The first night, dedicated as a benefit night for Macready (who, after thirteen years, had just abandoned Drury Lane and its abominable manager Alfred Bunn), was on 26 May. Macready, having taken the principal role before a starry audience of literary and legal luminaries, social celebrities, politicians, and peers, was ‘called for very enthusiastically by the audience and cheered on my appearance most heartily. I said: “It would be affectation to conceal the particular pleasure in receiving their congratulatory compliment on this occasion. It was indeed most gratifying to me; and only checked by the painful consideration that this might be perhaps the last new play I ever might have the honour of producing before them. (Loud cries of ‘No No!’) However that might be, the grateful recollection of their kindness would never leave me.”’
Macready repaired after the performance to Talfourd’s house in nearby Russell Square, where he ‘met Wordsworth, who pinned me; Walter Savage Landor, to whom I was introduced, and whom I very much liked; Stanfield, Browning, Price, Miss Mitford—I cannot remember them all.’
(#litres_trial_promo) There were some sixty people in all, crowding around one another in congratulatory mode. Macready was placed at the supper table between Landor and Wordsworth, with Browning opposite—which speaks well for Robert’s own status in the company. Macready perhaps forgot or omitted to give some detail in his diary for this tremendous day, but Mrs Orr supplies the information that when Talfourd proposed a toast to the poets of England, Robert was included in their number, named by his host as the author of Paracelsus, and he stayed put in his chair while glasses were raised to him; according to Griffin and Minchin, Wordsworth ‘leaned across the table and remarked, “I am proud to drink your health, Mr Browning!”’
(#litres_trial_promo) This story is rubbished by Betty Miller, who points out that Robert had never much liked Wordsworth’s poetry or his politics and would not have been particularly flattered by the grand old placeman’s compliment—even if Wordsworth had been there to make it: he had gone home before the toasts were offered. The story has survived even the firm evidence that contradicts it.
Years later, on 24 February 1875, Robert wrote to the Revd Alexander B. Grosart to explain, with some embarrassment, why he had attacked Wordsworth in ‘The Lost Leader’, a poem published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845: ‘I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerable personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account: had I intended more, above all, such a boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about “handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon.” These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet; whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular about-face of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore.’
Wordsworth had abandoned liberalism, Robert’s preferred political position, and by so doing he had proved himself, in Robert’s estimation, that most disgraceful and detestable thing—a traitor. Throughout Robert’s poetical canon there are hissing references to the turpitudinous characters of turncoats. Unpleasant revenges, as unsparing as in Dante’s Inferno, are invented for them.
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote …
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There will be further occasions on which we will recognize that Robert Browning could be a good hater for the sake of conscience; this is one of the first and most significant. Wordsworth, heaped with honours, eulogized by friends and literary partisans such as Harriet Martineau, had become Poet Laureate in 1843. He had become, too, an object of absolute disgust for Robert, whose poem pulled no punches. This was not satire, this was not an elegant swipe: ‘The Lost Leader’ was a seriously-intended piece of lethal invective that found its mark not only through Robert’s authentic outrage but through his authentic poetic voice. His counterblast has stood as long as Wordsworth’s poetic reputation, and its venomous sting still poisons the old man in posterity.
There are other contradictions and misapprehensions concerning Talfourd’s famous party, none of them too surprising. It was a party celebrating a significant occasion; it was a party boiling and roiling with writers, actors, quantities of poets, lawyers, and journalists; and if it wasn’t an occasion for binding up old wounds and gouging open new ones, settling old scores and setting new grudges, for giving gossip and getting things wrong, then it can’t have been much of a party. But in fact it was all those things and more—it was a wonderful party. The more it is recalled, the more legends it accretes. The Ion supper is a sort of early Victorian charabanc, standing room only, for every notable of the period bundled and bumped together and bowled along, fired by their own fissiparous energies. Robert was noticed by one of the guests, Miss Mitford, who never forgot how he looked that night. Ten years or more later, in a letter of 1847,
(#litres_trial_promo) she wrote, ‘I saw Mr Browning once and remember thinking how exactly he resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes—and as to his poetry I have just your opinion of it—It is one heap of obscurity, confusion and weakness … I met him once as I told you when he had long ringlets and no neckcloth—and when he seemed to me about the height and size of a boy of twelve years old—Femmelette—is a word made for him. A strange sort of person to carry such a woman as Elizabeth Barrett off her feet.’
‘Femmelette’, applied to a man or a woman, means a feeble creature, lacking force and energy, a languishing, listless person, in distinct contrast to Miss Mary Russell Mitford herself, who tended to be pert. In 1836, she was a successful, middle-aged dramatist associated with Macready (who had taken roles in her plays); essayist; sometime poet (set on that path by the encouragement of Coleridge), and famous as the author of the sketches and stories that were published in 1832 as Our Village. Her nature was generally sunny, though she was as capable as anyone—and possibly more than some—of asperity and decided views. Perhaps Robert merely struck Miss Mitford as a little insipid, as at least modestly reserved: it was not his manner then to be full-voiced or conspicuously hearty. He would stand up for himself when necessary, but his mode was essentially placatory, as would be evident later to Macready when he noted Robert’s moderating, calming reaction to the impetuosity and hot-headedness of Forster.
The talk tended towards the literary and theatrical, and Macready ‘overtook Mr Browning as they were leaving the house and said, “Write a play, Browning, and keep me from going to America.” The reply was, “Shall it be historical and English: what do you say to a drama on Strafford?”’
(#litres_trial_promo) The Earl of Strafford had been in Robert’s mind, and even more to the fore in Forster’s mind since he happened to be writing the lives of Strafford and other statesmen of the period of Charles I, the Civil War, and the Commonwealth. Forster had temporarily stalled on his biographies, due partly to some personal difficulties with the fascinating Laetitia Landon, and Robert had been assisting him with some of the literary work on Strafford. Forster’s Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth was published in parts between 1836 and 1839 and his Life of Strafford had been published just a few weeks before the Ion party. Strafford was very much dans le vent.
Robert, seized by the idea of a great play for a great contemporary actor, delivered a full text some ten months later in March 1837. It might have been sooner—he was a fast writer once he had settled on his subject and theme—had he not been simultaneously working on the poem Sordello, which he had begun shortly after writing Pauline and which had already been displaced, to an extent, by the intervention of Paracelsus.
(#litres_trial_promo) Macready was willing to credit that Strafford, the play, would be his own salvation from some personal professional difficulties and rescue the English stage from the wretched condition into which it had sunk. Any play by Browning, for that matter, might do the trick, for he had surely seen John Forster’s imaginative, puffing article in March, in the New Monthly Magazine, entitled ‘Evidences of a new genius for Dramatic Poetry’, which declared, among other emphatic assertions, that ‘Mr Browning has the powers of a great dramatic poet’ and that his genius ‘waits only the proper opportunity to redeem the drama and elevate the literary repute of England’.
Macready, with his actor’s head sunk into his hands, might have felt his spirits rise a little. On 3 August 1836 Forster told Macready that ‘Browning had fixed on Strafford for the subject of a tragedy’. On 1 November, when Forster reported to Macready on the progress of Browning’s play, he praised it highly, but Macready feared that the young critic and would-be biographer of Strafford might be ‘misled as to its dramatic power; characters to him having the interest of action’. However, ‘Nous verrons! Heaven speed it! Amen!’ Despite pious sentiments, Macready began to feel faintly uneasy.
On 23 November, Macready confided to his diary that he ‘Began very attentively to read over the tragedy of Strafford, in which I find more grounds for exception than I had anticipated. I had been too carried away by the truth of character to observe the meanness of plot, and occasional obscurity.’ On 21 March 1837, when Macready and Robert read through Strafford together, he felt his heart fail. He is frank in his diary entry for that day: ‘I must confess my disappointment at the management of the story. I doubt its interest.’ Familiarity did not improve it. ‘I am by no means sanguine, I lament to say, on its success.’
On 30 March, Macready read the play to Osbaldistone, manager of Covent Garden, ‘who caught at it with avidity, agreed to produce it without delay on his part, and to give the author £12 per night for twenty-five nights, and £10 per night for ten nights beyond … Browning and Forster came in;’ records Macready in his diary for 30 March, ‘I had the pleasure of narrating what had passed between Mr Osbaldiston [sic] and myself, and of making Browning very happy.’ Macready suggested some further revisions that Robert ‘was quite enraptured with.’ Forster said he was trying to induce Longman to publish the text of the play. Robert asked if he could dedicate the play to Macready, who said ‘how much I should value such an honour, which I had not anticipated or looked for’. All of them, thoroughly pleased and in the highest good humour with one another and their prospects, looked forward to the production of Strafford, that most interesting new play by that great new dramatic poet Mr Robert Browning, and a stage success on the scale of, or surpassing, Talfourd’s Ion.
Dramatists, even authors of books, will repress a grim smile when they hear of a celebratory mood in which congratulations are exchanged in circumstances such as these. Elation is excusable, euphoria is understandable—it is the very air that is breathed in a moment of head-spinning optimism and rare agreement: it’s like bouncing on a spring mattress before the bed frame gives way and the whole company is tumbled down, some coming off with worse bruises than others. Macready held fast to his first and subsequent doubts about the stage worthiness of the play that Osbaldistone’s enthusiasm had made all the more urgent to resolve. He went over the play laboriously with Robert himself, and even drafted in Forster to meddle with the text and structure in an attempt to relieve Strafford of what he perceived as its ‘heaviness’ and stiffen what he felt to be its ‘feebleness’. He had read it to his wife Catherine and his children, who were ‘oppressed by a want of action and lightness; I fear it will not do.’
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Quarrels were not unfamiliar to Macready. On 12 April there was positively a dust-up between Macready, Forster, and Browning: ‘There were mutual complaints—much temper—sullenness, I should say on the part of Forster, who was very much out of humour with Browning, who said and did all that man could to expiate any offence he might have given.’ Forster, at Macready’s behest, had been worrying for a while at the text of Strafford and—by Macready’s account—seemed to agree with the great actor’s cuts and alterations. ‘He thought my view of the work quite a clear one, and in the most earnest spirit of devotion, set off to find and communicate with Browning on the subject—a fearful rencontre.’ In fact, Macready seems to have been anxious to ‘furnish Browning with a decent excuse to withdraw the play’, to the extent of trying to find out if the actors who had been engaged were ‘restive about their parts’. But no luck there: Macready was ‘disappointed at their general acquiescence’. In his diary for 13 April, Macready acknowledged that, when Forster returned with Robert in tow, ‘Forster … showed an absence of sense and generosity in his behaviour which I grieved to see. There was a scene.’
Quite what the dispute was about is not entirely clear. Whatever offence had been taken by Forster, and whatever its cause, he blew up and—not for the first time—lost his considerable temper. This feature of Forster’s personality was well known, and it was a worry to Robert, who confided in Macready ‘how much injury he did himself by this temper’. The dispute ended when Robert ‘assented to all the proposed alterations, and expressed his wish, that coûte que coûte, the hazard should be made and the play proceeded with’. This seemed satisfactory.
Until the next day. Macready wrote a detailed report in his diary on 14 April of how he found Robert at Forster’s where the poet-dramatist ‘produced some scraps of paper with hints and unconnected lines—the full amount of his labour upon the alterations agreed on. It was too bad to trifle in this way, but it was useless to complain; he had wasted his time in striving to improve the fourth act scene, which was ejected from the play as impracticable for any good result. We went all over the play again (!) very carefully, and he resolved to bring the amendments suggested by eleven o’clock this evening. Met Browning at the gate of my chambers; he came upstairs and, after some subjects of general interest, proceeded to that of his tragedy. He had done nothing to it; had been oppressed and incapable of carrying his intentions into action. He wished to withdraw it.’ Macready sent Robert for Forster and they both came back. They turned over all the pros and cons, for acting the play, for not acting the play. Finally they all decided to go ahead with Strafford, though Robert asked for more time to complete his alterations. ‘It was fixed to be done. Heaven speed us all!’ wrote Macready at the end of a difficult day.
It was one thing to deal with writers and critics, but that was not the end of it for Macready or the fate of Strafford: hardly even the beginning. For as soon as it was decided to perform the play, the complications and intrigues of staging it took over. On 20 April, all Macready’s doubts about the play recurred. He read Strafford again. He groaned. He sweated. He strongly feared its failure: ‘it is not good.’ He had had five days for his fears to be fed by the fact that Osbaldistone was on the verge of bankruptcy and had imposed ‘parsimonious regulations’. That is to say, the production budget had been slashed to the bone. The actors were playing up. Miss Helen Faucit, a fine young actress, only twenty years old and already a popular favourite with audiences, complained to Macready that ‘her part in Browning’s play was very bad, and that she did not know if she should do it. She wanted me to ask her to do it. But I would not, for I wish she would refuse it, that even at his late point in time the play might be withdrawn—it will do no one good.’
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Even as he learned his own part, Macready’s spirits fell further: he felt a certain obligation to Robert Browning that compromised his better judgement that he should withdraw for his own benefit; but he could not help hoping for an accident that should prevent performance, relieve his own decision to proceed, avoid the play and—worse—his own performance in the leading role being grievously hissed by a disappointed house, bringing down his own reputation as much as that of Browning to damnation. Browning might recover some ground and rescue himself with Sordello, but in his worst moments the worried actor considered that the inevitable failure of Strafford would mean it would be all up for the great Macready. ‘It will strike me hard, I fear. God grant that it may not be a heavy blow.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The sole chance for the play, he thought, would be in the acting: his own, at least. He had his doubts about the performances of some of his co-players.
And sure enough, the notices of the première of Strafford in the newspapers of 2 May, the morning after the first night, were nothing like as bad as Macready had anticipated: he was gratified to find them ‘lenient and even kind to Browning. On myself—the “brutal and ruffianly” journal observed that I “acquitted myself exceedingly well”.’ When Macready called that day on Forster and found Robert with him, he told him candidly that ‘the play was a grand escape, and that he ought to regard it only as such, a mere step to that fame which his talents must procure him.’ It had been, in Macready’s estimation, a narrow squeak. Some small ill-feeling still rankled between the three of them: Forster had written up the play in the Examiner, judging it more poetic than dramatic, which was to Macready’s mind a ‘very kind and judicious criticism’, though the judiciousness thereof was evidently not to Robert’s liking. Robert suggested that if Forster wanted any future tragedies, he should write them himself. Forster expressed himself hurt by Robert’s ‘expressions of discontent at his criticism’ which Macready thought had, if anything, verged on indulgence ‘for such a play as Strafford’ and he was cross at Robert’s ingratitude ‘after all that has been done for Browning’.
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The first night, on 1 May, had been a triumph: a full house; the end of each act attended with the plaudits of an enthusiastic audience; calls of ‘Author! Author’ from a partisan claque to which Robert did not respond—it is not clear whether he was even in the house—so that the hubbub took some time to die down; the critics generally positive, despite some serious shortcomings in the staging and the general dilapidation of Covent Garden. William Sharp writes sadly that ‘the house was in ill repair: the seats dusty, the “scenery” commonplace and sometimes noticeably inappropriate, the costumes and accessories almost sordid’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The less said about the acting and understanding of the actors, the better: though Robert himself had something to say in remarks he made to Eliza Flower, who communicated them eagerly in a letter to Sarah Fox: ‘he seems a good deal annoyed at the go of things behind the scenes, and declares he will never write a play again, as long as he lives. You have no idea of the ignorance and obstinacy of the whole set, with here and there an exception; think of his having to write out the meaning of the word impeachment, as some of them thought it meant poaching.’
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The exceptions were very likely Miss Faucit as Lady Carlisle and Macready as Strafford. Both had acquitted themselves well; she tender and affectingly pathetic, he majestic in bearing and bearded to resemble a Vandyke courtier of the period. Mr Vandenhoff as Pym had taken a purely perfunctory interest in his part, which he reportedly played with a nauseating, whining drawl; Mr Dale as Charles I was deaf as a post; and ‘The Younger Vane’, says Sharp, ‘ranted so that a hiss, like an embodied scorn, vibrated on vagrant wings throughout the house’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The part of the Queen, Henrietta Maria, was taken by Miss Vincent, fresh from her triumph at Drury Lane where she had played with Burmese bulls to the greatest satisfaction of her audiences. It was thus all the more to the credit of the play itself that it transcended these ignoble obstacles. The second night, when Robert sat ‘muffled up in the pit to feel the pulse of the audience’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the house received the play with warm-enough applause.
And so on through to the fourth night’s ‘fervid applause’ from an ‘admirably filled house’ and playbills announcing two further performances, one of which took place as advertised, the second fatally handicapped by the absence of Vandenhoff, who, having secured a better offer in America, jumped stage and took ship. He failed to turn up to play the important part of Pym, Strafford’s principal antagonist. The performance was cancelled. The play’s run was terminated. The precarious financial condition of the Covent Garden theatre collapsed entirely, and the promising young author, for his pains, got not a penny of his promised reward of £12 for even four, five, far less the projected first twenty-five nights, and he might whistle forever for the £10 for each of the ten nights further envisioned.
It was something, however, never mind if Robert had made little or no money from the play’s performances, that Longman had at least published the text of his play on the occasion of the first night of Strafford, 1 May. The Brownings had not been required to dip into their own purse to pay for the honour, though neither the book nor the play brought any profit to either party. Five months later, Macready took over the management of the Covent Garden theatre from Osbaldistone with a troupe of good actors, and for two years thereafter indulged his mission and pursued his ambition to improve the English stage. Robert himself stuck for a decent while to the vow of renunciation he had made in the hearing of Eliza Flower: it was to be six years before he next ventured near a stage or a theatre except as a regular spectator.
The blank verse tragedy that was Strafford took as its principal character the English statesman Sir Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford (1593–1641), who from 1639 was chief adviser to Charles I. In 1640, Strafford was impeached by the House of Commons. On a Bill of Attainder, and with the assent of the king, he was executed on Tower Hill. The action, such as it is, of Browning’s play—rather, the course of events from which the drama derives—is centred around the character of Strafford himself; his monarch, Charles I; his antagonist, John Pym, formerly Strafford’s closest friend; and his would-be lover, Lady Carlisle. It is a drama of crossed loves and conflicted loyalties, passions and prejudices, public and personal: Strafford loves Pym, who considers himself betrayed by his friend’s defection to the royalist cause; Strafford loves Charles I whose unworthiness and weakness betray his adviser’s loyalty and send him to the block; Strafford is loved by the unhistorical character Lady Carlisle, whose devotion he does not perceive, blinded as he is by his fatal commitment to the king.
Strafford had not been a critical failure—that the production had abruptly stalled due to external circumstances was no fault of Robert Browning’s, but the fiasco of the fifth night and the abrupt, untimely termination of the play’s intended run has tended to colour posterity’s judgement of its success. Of course posterity has also had an extended opportunity to judge the published text of the play and to review it in the light of developments in drama since 1837. It does not stand out conspicuously in the modern, revised history of the English theatre. It has enjoyed occasional amateur college productions, but it has never been professionally revived—nor is it likely to be. But for all that, Strafford in its time was well-enough received by contemporary critics and those playgoers who happened to see it before it fell off the stage into the pit of English literary and theatrical history.
Robert retired hurt—by the stage, by Forster, by the low conduct of venal and inadequate actors, by a general disgust—though his disappointment did not stop him associating with the many new friends he had made, frequenting the backstage green room when he attended the theatre, dining with Macready and Forster and Talfourd and the rest, all of whom welcomed his good company. He retired for extended periods to Camberwell where, in his room, succoured by his immediate family and surrounded by his familiar and fetish objects, pictures, and books, an idea for another historical play occurred to him. But mostly he set himself back to work on his interrupted poem, Sordello, which he intended to finish during a visit to Italy.
Prompted perhaps by his theatrical disappointments (it is good form to remove oneself abroad temporarily after an embarrassing dramatic disaster), and probably also to add colour not only to his own life but to his poetic work in progress, he embarked on his adventure in the afternoon of Good Friday, 13 April 1838. He sailed from London’s St Katharine’s Docks as the only passenger on the Norham Castle, a merchant vessel bound for Trieste on Rothschild business. It may be supposed that passage had been arranged for Robert by Reuben Browning.
The journey to Trieste, where he was dropped off by the ship’s Captain, Matthew Davidson, took seven weeks. It was as terrible in its episodes of almost Byronic high drama as in constantly wretched periods of dispiritingly low seasickness. It took a full week of gales and snow before they even reached Start Point, Devon. On 26 April, they were off Lisbon; the next day they were sixteen miles north-west of Cape St Vincent. They passed the Straits of Gibraltar on Sunday 29 April, and on 6 May they came upon an upturned boat off the coast of Algiers. On 13 May, they were seven miles from Valetta; the next day they sailed close to Syracuse and were briefly becalmed on 16 May within sight of Mount Etna. It took another fortnight before they reached Trieste. The next evening, 31 May, Robert left by steamer for Venice, where he arrived early on the morning of 1 June.
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A letter to Fanny Haworth in Elstree is normally quoted in full in any account of Browning’s life. It is worth repeating as a rare early example of Robert’s narrative prose. It is dated 24 July 1838, by which time he was back in Camberwell. The introductory passage has been partly quoted already—‘I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves … bite them to bits … snowdrops and Tilsit …’; it is a charming, literally flowery, preface to saying:
You will see Sordello in a trice, if the fagging-fit holds. I did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed thro’ the Straits of Gibraltar)—but I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you, two to the Queen … the whole to go in Book 3—perhaps. I called you ‘Eyebright’—meaning a simple and sad sort of translation of ‘Euphrasia’ into my own language: folks would know who Euphrasia, or Fanny, was,—and I should not know Ianthe or Clemanthe. Not that there is anything in them to care for, good or bad. Shall I say ‘Eyebright’? I was disappointed in one thing, Canova. What companions should I have? The story of the ship must have reached you ‘with a difference’ as Ophelia says,—my sister told it to a Mr Dow who delivered it, I suppose to Forster, who furnished Macready with it, who made it over etc. etc. etc.—As short as I can tell, this way it happened: the Captain woke me one bright Sunday morning to say there was a ship floating keel uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some floating canvas, and towed her towards our vessel. Both met half-way, and the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. Our men made the wreck fast, and went to breakfast in high glee at the notion of having ‘new trousers out of the sails,’ and quite sure that she was a French boat, broken from her moorings at Algiers, close by. Ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk) round her stanchions, and after a quarter of an hour’s pushing at the capstan, the vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were in the forecastle, and had probably been there a month—under a blazing African sun … don’t imagine the wretched state of things. They were, these six, the ‘watch below’—(I give you the results of the day’s observation)—the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard at first. One or two were Algerines, the rest Spaniards. The vessel was a smuggler bound for Gibraltar; there were two stupidly-disproportionate guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and [here Browning inserts three small drawings of the ship, noting (‘All the “bulwarks,” or sides at the top, carried away by the waves’)]—nay, look you, these are the gun rings, and the black square the place where the bodies lay. Well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up the aft deck, hauled up tobacco and cigars, good lord such heaps of them, and then bale after bale of prints and chintz, don’t you call it, till the Captain was half frightened—he would get at the ship’s papers, he said; so these poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the sea, the very sailors calling to each other ‘to cover the faces’: no papers of importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder and ball enough for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton &c that would have taken a day to get out, but the Captain vowed that after five-o’clock she should be cut adrift; accordingly she was cast loose, not a third of her cargo having been touched; and you can hardly conceive the strange sight when the battered hulk turned around, actually, and looked at us, and then reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some scoundrel French surgeon’s lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world: there—only thank me for not taking you at your word and giving you the whole ‘story.’
The image of the loosed boat as a ‘mutilated creature’ turning to look at Robert Browning and his shipmates before reeling off into a luridly effulgent sunset is stunning—worthy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, or any of the tuppence-coloured gothic horrors in Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World. Mrs Orr provides some supplementary detail, which Robert confided to Sarianna but withheld from Fanny as too sensational:
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Of the dead pirates, one had his hand clasped as if praying; another, a severe gash in his head. The captain burnt disinfectants and blew gunpowder, before venturing on board, but even then, he, a powerful man, turned very sick with the smell and the sight. They stayed one whole day by the side, but the sailors, in spite of orders, began to plunder the cigars, etc. The captain said privately to Robert, “I cannot restrain my men, and they will bring the plague into our ship, so I mean quietly in the night to sail away.” Robert took two cutlasses and a dagger; they were of the coarsest workmanship, intended for use. At the end of one of the sheaths was a heavy bullet, so that it could be used as a sling. The day after, to their great relief, a heavy rain fell and cleansed the ship. Captain Davidson reported the sight of the wreck and its condition as soon as he arrived at Trieste.’
Robert’s letter to Fanny continues with a brisk itinerary: ‘“What I did?” I went to Trieste, then Venice—then thro’ Treviso and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles, you will see.’ Presumably Robert means that Fanny will see them if not first in poetical form in Sordello, then certainly in other poems in due course—Pippa would soon and significantly pass, in April 1841, through delicious Asolo. ‘Then to Vicenza, Padua and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Inspruck (the Tyrol) Munich, “Wurzburg in Franconia”! Frankfort and Mayence,—down the Rhine to Cologne, thence to Aix-la-Chapelle, Liège, and Antwerp—then home.’ Robert here carefully blots out four lines, asking Fanny Haworth to ‘Forgive this blurring, and believe it was only a foolish quotation:—shall you come to town, anywhere near town, soon? I shall be off again as soon as my book is out—whenever that will be.’
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It may or may not have been true that Robert had written only four for sure, no more than six, lines of poetry: while the Norham Castle passed through the Pillars of Hercules (Robert being hauled up to the deck by Captain Davidson and supported in his tottering, nauseous state so that he might see the tremendous Rock of Gibraltar), and skirted the north African coast, he wrote either now on this first journey to Italy, or later on a second trip, one of his best known poems, ‘How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, written in pencil on the cover of Bartoli’s De’ Simboli Trasportati al Morale, according to Mrs Orr a favourite book and constant companion of Robert’s.
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert himself declared, in a letter of 20 October 1871 responding to an inquiry about the antecedents of the journey from Ghent to Aix, ‘I have to say there were none but the sitting down under the bulwark of a ship off the coast of Tangiers, and writing it on the fly-leaf of Bartoli’s Simboli; the whole “Ride” being purely imaginary.’ This seems definite, but Robert could be often contradictory and sometimes plain wrong in his recollections about where and when and how a particular poem was written.
‘We can imagine,’ says Mrs Orr with a sympathetic shudder, ‘in what revulsion of feeling towards firm land and healthy motion this dream of a headlong gallop was born in him.’
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three …
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
Better, perhaps, to think of happier times, of Robert inspired by this floundering journey on the swell of the sea to recall the first journey into Russia, and hear again in the slap of water against the sides of the Norham Castle the rhythmic beat of his own and Benkhausen’s galloping horses as they ran through northern Europe, their hooves thudding through the silences of white snow and green firs. He wrote, too, ‘Home Thoughts, from the Sea’, a short poem ‘written at the same time, and in the same manner’
(#litres_trial_promo)—in pencil on the cover of a book—a colourful riot of geography (‘Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away’), history (‘Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay’), and triumphant English victory (‘Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?—say’) in eight rhythmic, rhyming, ringing lines.
Not much remains of first-hand information about Robert’s first excursion to Italy and his journey home through Germany and the Low Countries. On his return, he was back in touch with William Johnson Fox, that great man who, as Robert wrote to Fanny Howarth in April 1839, ‘is my Chiron in a small way’, referring to him as the possessor of a ‘magnificent and poetical nature’. Robert regarded Fox as ‘my literary father’ and took care to maintain the connection with him and his family. William Sharp
(#litres_trial_promo) reports a reminiscence of Fox’s daughter ‘Tottie’ (later Mrs Bridell-Fox), who wrote: ‘I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palaces, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced.’
Robert had spent two weeks in Venice out of his four in Italy, and images of his impressions would surface later in poems such as Pippa Passes, ‘In a Gondola’, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, and—significantly for the time being—in the work in hand, Sordello, the poem that is confirmed as having been in the making since at least 1835, and probably for a while before, very likely soon after Pauline. Robert wrote to Fox on 16 April 1835, in a letter referring to Paracelsus, that ‘I have another affair on hand, rather of a more popular nature, I conceive, but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two.’ This ‘other affair’, Sordello, had already been subject to several revisions since its inception in or about 1833, and would again be revised to incorporate first-hand impressions of the Italian sites and sights still remaining, however much altered, some six hundred years after the thirteenth-century troubador (trovatore or, more literarily, trouvère) Sordello had walked and talked among them.
On the day of his departure for Italy, Robert had written to John Robertson, a friend who was connected with the Westminster Review, to say, ‘I sail this morning for Venice—intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes.’
(#litres_trial_promo)Sordello, the poem, is also referred to in a letter to Fanny Haworth that Mrs Orr cannot date precisely but is likely to have been written in the summer of 1838 or 1839: ‘I am going to begin finishing Sordello—and to begin thinking a Tragedy (an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticism on Strafford) and I want to have another tragedy in prospect, I write best so provided: I had chosen a splendid subject for it, when I learned that a magazine for next, this, month, will have a scene founded on my story; vulgarizing or doing no good to it: and I accordingly throw it up. I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love, to contrast with the one I mean to have ready in a short time.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The plays he had in mind were to be King Victor and King Charles, and The Return of the Druses. With his hopes for the popular appeal of Sordello, and the prospective play devoted to a theme of ‘the most wild and passionate love’, it can be taken that Robert was aiming now at the wild hearts as well as the impassioned minds of the market for poetry and plays.
Which begs a question about the condition of his own heart: love, remarks Mrs Orr very astutely at this point, had played a noticeably small part in Robert’s life. His adolescent feelings of affection for Eliza Flower were never very serious, nor likely to be taken very seriously, considering her long-standing devotion to William Fox. No woman—so far as we know from the scant evidence remaining of Robert’s early years—detained his romantic attention or redirected it from the affection he maintained for his mother. Nobody else, for the time being, could count on being kissed goodnight every night by Robert Browning. Mrs Orr suggests that, in the absence of any personal experience of ‘wild and passionate love’, Robert turned to Fanny Haworth to supply the deficit, though what he supposed she might know of it is beyond conjecture. There was a lively sympathy, but no romantic feeling, between Robert and Fanny, and it would certainly have been indelicate, if not improper, for him to inquire too closely into the passions of an older, unmarried woman living cloistered at home with her mother. In a letter of April 1839, he tells Fanny direct, ‘Do you know I was, and am, an Improvisatore of the head—not of the hort [sic] …—not you!’
In March 1840, Edward Moxon, at the expense of Robert’s father, published Sordello—‘that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry’, as even the partisan William Sharp is obliged to describe the poem. Alfred Tennyson read the first line:
Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told,
and finally he read the last line:
Who would, has read Sordello’s story told,
whereupon he famously said that the first line and the last line were the only two lines of the poem that he understood and they were lies since nothing in between made any sense to him. Douglas Jerrold, at the time a well-known playwright and later an original staff member and contributor to Punch, is said to have started reading Sordello while recuperating from illness. No sooner had he picked up the book than he put it down, saying, ‘My God! I’m an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind’s gone. I can’t understand two consecutive lines of an English poem.’ He called his family to his bedside and gave them the poem to read. When they sadly shook their heads and could make no more of it than he could himself, he heaved a sigh of relief and, confirmed in his sanity, went to sleep. Thomas Carlyle wrote to say that he had read Sordello with great interest but that Jane, his wife, wished to know whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book.
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It is as well to get these three memorably funny stories dusted off at the start. They live forever in Browning’s life and legend, not just because they are sharply humorous or because they comfort our own confusion on reading the poem with the satisfaction of knowing that it confounded even the greatest intellects of its time, but also because they express a genuine, general bewilderment that explanations by critics of the poem’s form and expositions by researchers of the poem’s references have not wholly redeemed. Sordello has been incorporated into the fabric of English literature, but—still and all—its reputation persists, unfairly say some modern revisionary critics, as a notoriously difficult work, a monument to obscurity and a testament to tedium.
Robert Browning himself, says Sharp, came to be resigned to the shortcomings of Sordello as an accessible work of art: years later, ‘on his introduction to the Chinese Ambassador, as a “brother-poet”, he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression he particularly affected. The great man deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as “enigmatic.” Browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship.’ Sharp adds, rather nicely, that Browning’s holograph dedication of a copy of Sordello to a later friend, the French critic Joseph Milsand, read: ‘My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then or since.’
That was—and remains—simply true. George Santayana, in an essay, ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’, declares that if we are to do justice to Browning’s poetry, we must keep two things in mind: ‘One is the genuineness of the achievement, the sterling quality of the vision and inspiration; these are their own justification when we approach them from below and regard them as manifesting a more direct or impassioned glimpse of experience than is given to mildly blatant, convention-ridden minds. The other thing to remember is the short distance to which this comprehension is carried, its failure to approach any kind of finality, or to achieve a recognition even of the traditional ideals of poetry and religion.’ This latter qualification is now more disputed than the preceding encomium.
However, the estimation of Browning’s contemporaries was naturally foreshortened by the immediate, looming presence of Sordello, which had not then achieved the longer perspective of later critical perception nor the farther horizon of literary history. It was right under their noses. Sharp
(#litres_trial_promo) characterizes the poem as ‘a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan’. He compares its monotony to ‘one of the enormous American inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight’—which is a pretty way of dressing up the word ‘stagnant’. He regrets the ‘fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness’ and this, ‘coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, has been Browning’s ruin here’. Nevertheless, on the charge of Sordello’s obscurity, Sharp admits that ‘its motive thought is not obscure. It is a moonlit plain compared to the “silva oscura” of the “Divina Commedia”’—a tract of open country compared to Dante’s ‘dark wood’.
It is irresistible, though irreverent, to think of comparing Sordello to the smuggler’s ship that Robert came across on his voyage to Italy: the poem first setting sail on publication, heavily armed with emotion and erudition, fully ballasted with all the approved poetic paraphernalia, confident of successfully accosting and overwhelming readers and critics that cross its path, foundering on the unexpected obstacle of public bewilderment and upturned by a sudden storm of critical abuse, all hands dead, wounded, lost in attitudes of frightful prayer, finally righting itself and—with an ineffably battered dignity—turning to look mutely, uncomprehendingly at those critic-surgeons who butchered it and cast it adrift, reeling off into the sunset like a ‘mutilated creature’. It is a painful metaphor for the unsuspected end of a brave adventure.
As Chesterton remarks,
(#litres_trial_promo)Sordello is almost unique in literary history, in the sense that praise or blame hardly figured in its reception: both were overwhelmed by an almighty, universal incomprehension that stopped informed criticism in its tracks. ‘There had been authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with Sordello enters into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding.’ So far in his career, Robert’s reputation as a poet and playwright had seemed to be advancing much in step with those of his contemporaries. Pauline had fallen stillborn and anonymously from the press, but since nobody had noticed, nobody had heard the dull thud, its failure made no difficulties, and it had had the useful result of attracting the interested attention and positive regard of William Johnson Fox. Paracelsus had obtained a reasonable critical reception, though the poem itself had not sold out its first edition; and Strafford had been received with general enthusiasm, though how it would have fared in a longer theatrical run could never be known. So far, so good, all things considered: one undoubted failure, two moderate successes, nothing to be ashamed of (though Pauline remained decently veiled and in a permanent purdah). But Sordello suddenly blighted this promise in the bud.
Chesterton perceptively and properly disputes and demolishes the persistent myth of Sordello’s unintelligibility: its literary qualities, when perceived and understood, render the poem clearer. As Sharp admits, too, ‘its motive thought is not obscure’ and is perceptible to intelligent critical analysis. The final verdict on Sordello’s appeal to posterity may be given by Ezra Pound, who, perhaps exasperatedly, exclaimed, ‘Hang it—there is but one Sordello!’ And yes, there is no getting round it—we could not now or for the future do without Sordello, any more than Robert Browning could then or later have done without it. Since Pound regarded Browning as ‘my poetic father’, it is not irrelevant here to refer to T. S. Eliot, who admitted that Pound himself, in his time, suffered from being simultaneously judged to be ‘objectionably modern’ and ‘objectionably antiquarian’. The fellow-feeling and the sense of paternity that Pound bore for Browning is, in this sense, perfectly understandable.
The charge of Browning’s wilful obscurity, though it does not begin with Sordello, is sometimes attributed to Browning’s intellectual vanity and, by extension, arrogance. Chesterton speaks true when he says that ‘throughout his long and very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man who was intellectually vain.’ It is plain that, in his early career, he had little or no awareness that nobody knew as much as he did, and that that profound ignorance made him unaware that what was perfectly clear to Robert Browning was of the uttermost obscurity to almost everyone else. But that is a different matter: had he been aware of it, and had he made allowance for it, he would have committed a worse sin of being consciously condescending and patronising, of writing de haut en bas—which is one fault for which he is never successfully prosecuted.
‘He was not unintelligible because he was proud,’ says Chesterton, decisively and characteristically turning the difficulty on its head, ‘but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And because they were obvious, he fell into that concision of expression, allusion, and imagery which Sharp perceives as a fault and which, admittedly, compounded the unintelligibility of the poem for his readers. If Browning is accused of intellectual complexity, it is paradoxical that that complexity derives from his efforts to reduce it to a simplicity that, in the event, was fully comprehensible—and then only intermittently—solely to himself. By not writing down to his readership, Browning’s Sordello, says Chesterton, was ‘the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man’. It is a compliment that has not, then or now, been easily understood or greatly appreciated. The compliment was rebuffed, indeed, by the Athenaeum on 30 May with reference to the poem’s ‘puerilities and affectations’, and by the Atlas on 28 May which found Sordello full of ‘pitching, hysterical, and broken sobs of sentences’.
Even Macready finally gave up on the book: ‘After dinner tried—another attempt—utterly desperate—on Sordello; it is not readable.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Only Fanny Haworth had much good to say for it, a kindness to which Robert responded gratefully in a letter to her of May 1840: ‘You say roses and lilies and lilac-bunches and lemon-flowers about it while everybody else pelts cabbage stump after potato-paring—nay, not everybody—for Carlyle … but I won’t tell you what [Richard Monckton] Milnes told me Carlyle told him the other day: (thus I make you believe it was something singular in the way of praise—connu!).’ In fact, it is pleasing to report that Carlyle did have a good word to say.
Nobody now reads Sordello—or if they do, not idly, not without a good reason, and rarely without a concordance conveniently to hand. This is fair enough: Robert himself, in later life, when asked to explain a reference in one of his poems, was obliged to reply that once God and Browning knew what he meant, but ‘now only God knows’. And in modern times, quite aside from the poem’s literary difficulties, its sheer length—divided into six cantos (or ‘Books’) it amounts to five or six lines short of a total of 6,000 lines—is a deterrent to the casual reader. Chesterton is kindly inclined to exonerate Browning, finally, on the grounds of innocence and inexperience: ‘The Browning then who published Sordello we have to conceive, not as a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from each other.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Substitute, then, for Sharp’s image of ‘the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan’, the idea of Robert Browning as a Laocoön entangled in the coils of serpents so intertwined that they become one indistinguishable, roiling mass. Robert, all unwitting, called up leviathans from the vasty deep of his unconscious mind and conjured them off the pages of his conscious reading, so that they devoured him.
‘A very great part of the difficulty of Sordello,’ instances Chesterton, ‘is in the fact that before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of Browning’s actual narrative, he is supposed to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epochs—the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in medieval Italy.’ Griffin and Minchin
(#litres_trial_promo) say that, ‘In 1844, when Browning landed at Naples, among the first sights that met his view were advertisements of the performance of an opera on Sordello’, and that as late as 1910 (the publication date of their biography) ‘in the windows of Italian bookshops, one may see paper-covered volumes on the legend of Sordello and of the Ezzelini family who figure so prominently in Browning’s poem’. This is like saying an Italian arriving in London and seeing advertisements of the performance of a play on the Earl of Strafford would know instantly the historical treat he might expect from a stage version of the story, or that paper-covered volumes on the legend of Richard the Lionheart and Blondel the troubador would immediately engage his attention with a thrill of long familiarity.
Chesterton and others might later, with hindsight, excuse Sordello on several counts, but youth, except by the special indulgence of Mrs Orr,
(#litres_trial_promo) cannot be one of them. In 1840, Robert was twenty-eight years old and henceforth, says Mrs Orr, ‘his work ceases to be autobiographic in the sense in which, perhaps erroneously, we have felt it to be’. Erroneously, certainly, if we take it to be true-to-fact; not so far off the mark if we take it and interpret it, in the light of the known biographical facts about Browning, as perceptive emotional self-confession. His future work will, says Mrs Orr, be ‘inspired by every variety of conscious motive, but never again by the old (real or imagined) self-centred, self-directing Will … in Pippa Passes, published one year later, the poet and the man show themselves full-grown. Each has entered on the inheritance of the other.’
Chesterton picks up this cue from Mrs Orr and runs with it a little further, saying that Sordello ‘does not present any very significant advance in Browning on that already represented by Pauline and Paracelsus. Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent phrase used about the first by Mr Johnson Fox, “confessional” … Browning is still writing about himself, a subject of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant.’ And Chesterton, like Mrs Orr, recognizes Pippa Passes as a significant step forward not only in the technical development of Browning’s poetry but in the personal development of the poet himself. Both speak in a new voice from another place.
Poetry was the principal string to Robert’s bow; but he could not help pulling on another, trying to shoot a true arrow from it. As he had written to Fanny Haworth, it suited his way of working to keep several things on the go simultaneously. This is interesting to know, but nothing to make too much of: it is not uncommon—few writers conscientiously finish one job (book, play, poem or essay), dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s, before committing themselves to the next. Writers tend to work on several (more than one, anyhow) projects in parallel rather than serially or consecutively, and none of them will ever be at the same stage of development at the same time. It is only pedants and plodders and publishers who insist that one cannot do two things (or three, or four or more) at the same time. Since Strafford, Robert had taken his opportunities to keep up and broaden his acquaintance with the theatre and those associated with it. The untimely death of Strafford had been a blow, but his fascination with the stage had not died with it. Somewhat smoke-scented, its feathers a little ruffled, shaking out the ashes and preening the charred tips from its wings, the phoenix of Robert’s theatrical ambition was ready for another flight.
Macready, in his tenure as manager of Covent Garden (he reigned there from 30 September 1837 to 18 July 1839), was one focus of Robert’s attention; another was the well-disposed William Johnson Fox. Between Macready and Fox, two substantial rocks in the social life of London, Robert was naturally pulled by the eddies and currents that flowed around and between them into contact with a wide literary, legal, political, and social acquaintance.
This included men such as Charles Dickens (exactly Browning’s age and already prolific, with Sketches by ‘Boz’, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby under his belt); Walter Savage Landor (the famously and intractably temperamental poet, dramatist, and polemicist, recently returned from Italy after bitter separation from his wife); Edward Bulwer (the fashionable novelist, playwright, and politician who was to become Bulwer-Lytton in 1843, when he inherited the great house Knebworth from his mother, and thereafter first Baron Lytton); Daniel Maclise (the Irish portrait and history painter); Leigh Hunt (who had personally known Byron, Shelley, and Keats and whom Robert liked for his childlike nature and because he had rescued Shelley’s heart from the funeral pyre on the beach at Viareggio and now treasured it, along with a wisp of Milton’s hair, in his collection of literary relics); John Forster, of course, who was by now a close friend of Dickens and was to become his biographer; Richard Henry (sometimes Hengist) Horne (adventurer, critic, sometime editor of the Monthly Repository, author of plays that were never acted); Richard Monckton Milnes (later the first Baron Houghton, a tremendous social swell of wide literary and political acquaintance who amassed a large library of pornography that included the thrillingly wicked works of the Marquis de Sade); the literary and legal lion Thomas Noon Talfourd; and other playwrights, critics, actors, and men and women of fashion who thronged the times, the theatres, the salons and the dinner tables of London.
From the time of Strafford, Robert became a regular diner-out: he seems, indeed, rarely to have refused a decent invitation. Such social activity was useful: having attracted the public eye, he was not about to drop out of its sight. Acquaintance with the author was more sought after than with his books: Robert was talkative, intelligent, personable, and—having got over early reserve in company—was by now confident in conversation and socially assured. By chance, fatefully, when dining at Talfourd’s in 1839, Robert made the acquaintance of John Kenyon, described by Mrs Orr as being at that date ‘a pleasant, elderly man’, who turned out to have been a schoolfellow of Robert’s father.
(#litres_trial_promo) This encounter led to the reunion of Mr Browning and Mr Kenyon, who were as delighted with one another in their advancing years as they had been as schoolboys. This first meeting after so long a break prospered into an enduringly warm friendship with the whole Browning family. Mrs Orr quotes from a letter, dated 10 January 1884, from Robert to Professor Knight of St Andrews, some twenty-eight years after Kenyon’s death: ‘He was one of the best of human beings, with a general sympathy for excellence of every kind. He enjoyed the friendship of Wordsworth, of Southey, of Landor, and in later days, was intimate with most of my contemporaries of excellence.’
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At about this time—even the thorough Mrs Orr cannot put an exact date on it—the Brownings moved to a larger, three-storeyed house, Hanover Cottage, to be near Jane Browning, Robert the First’s widow, who had moved nearby from Islington with her daughter Jemima and son Reuben. A letter conjecturally dated December 1840 by Robert to William Macready specifically states, ‘we remove into a new house, the week after next,—a place really not impossible to be got at’, and another to Macready, which on internal evidence must be dated no earlier than 1840, gives ‘Hanover Cottage Southampton [St]’ as Robert’s address. The reference to Southampton [St] must be provisional. To Laman Blanchard, the author of Offerings, Robert wrote in April 1841 to advise him of his new address: ‘if, in a week or two you will conquer the interminable Kent Road, and on passing the turnpike at New Cross, you will take the first lane with a quickset hedge to the right, you will “descry a house resembling a goose-pie”; only a crooked, hasty and rash goose-pie. We have a garden and trees, and little green hills of a sort to go out on.’ Mr Browning’s books, six thousand and more, were lodged in ‘the long low rooms of its upper storey.’
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Robert’s description of the house as ‘resembling a goose-pie’ has vexed many Browning scholars, who have scoured all of literature to discover an appropriate association. One might offer to this inquiry the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and perruquier Allan Ramsay, who became a bookseller in Edinburgh and promoted the city’s first circulating library. He built a round house known as the ‘Goose-Pie’ on the lower slopes of the Edinburgh Castle hill, above what are now the Princes Street gardens. Perhaps—and it’s not unlikely: Carlyle would have known them—Robert had read Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany, a collection of Scottish songs and ballads, the first volume of which was published in 1723, or The Ever Green (1724), which contained Ramsay’s revisions of representative work by the late medieval Makars of Scotland, notably the great poets Dunbar and Henryson. From Ramsay’s editions of Scottish poetry Robert might have gone on to glean a little gossip about Ramsay’s life, and a house known as the ‘Goose-Pie’ is striking enough to have stuck in anyone’s memory to be retrieved later as an amusing and typically recondite reference.
Mr Browning’s stepbrother Reuben, Robert’s young uncle, was allowed to put up York, his horse, which Robert was encouraged to ride, in the stable and coach-house which was attached to the house and accessible from it. The horse was groomed by the gardener, who was also responsible, with Mrs Browning, for the large garden ‘opening on to the Surrey hills’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sarianna spoke later of trees in the front of the new house, and Mrs Orr refers specifically to a white rose tree in the garden under which lived a toad which became so much attached to Robert that it would follow him about and suffer him to tickle its head. Hanover Cottage was larger than the family’s previous house and is referred to in several literary memoirs of the period, always with affection and respect for the warmth of its welcome to Robert’s guests.
After Strafford, Robert’s brain teemed with ideas for further dramatic productions, including an adaptation of a ballad, ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’, just lately published by John Payne Collier (who in 1840 founded the Shakespeare Society and busied himself thereafter with falsifications and forgeries in folios of Shakespeare’s plays that are the subject of academic debate to this day). His interest in the ballad was eclipsed by another rendering of it in dramatic form by Richard Hengist Horne in 1837, but no matter; there were other subjects. He wrote two plays, King Victor and King Charles and Mansoor the Hierophant (later retitled The Return of the Druses), both of which were submitted to Macready for his attention and refused by the great actor.
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On 5 September 1839, Macready ‘Read Browning’s play on Victor, King of Sardinia—it turned out to be a great mistake. I called Browning into my room and most explicitly told him so, and gave him my reasons for coming to such a conclusion.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert was not best pleased: Macready records in his Diary for 20 September a meeting with Forster who ‘told me of Browning’s intemperance about his play which he read to Fox, Forster, etc.’. On 6 August 1840, Macready was in another dilemma: Robert had delivered the text of The Return of the Druses. Macready sighed and despaired: ‘with the deepest concern I yield to the belief that he will never write again—to any purpose. I fear his intellect is not quite clear. I do not know how to write to Browning.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That he evidently found something to say is evidenced by a letter from Robert to Macready dated 23 August. It begins: ‘So once again, dear Macready, I have failed to please you! The Druzes [sic] return in another sense than I had hoped.’ On 12 August, Robert called on Macready and they talked, Macready giving his frank opinion both on Sordello and The Return of the Druses and ‘expressing myself most anxious, as I am, that he should justify the expectations formed of him, but that he could not do so by placing himself in opposition to the world.’ Nevertheless, Macready promised to read the play again.
On 27 August, Robert called at Elm Cottage, Elstree, to retrieve his manuscript. He came upon Macready before the great actor-manager had finished his bath, ‘and really wearied me with his obstinate faith in his poem of Sordello, and of his eventual celebrity, and also with his self-opinionated persuasions upon his Return of the Druses. I fear he is for ever gone. He speaks of Mr Fox (who would have been delighted and proud in the ability to praise him) in a very unkind manner, and imputed motives to him which on the mere surface seem absurd … Browning accompanied me to the theatre, at last consenting to leave the MS. with me for a second perusal.’
In his letter of 20 August to Macready, Robert had vigorously defended his play, in terms that it is not difficult to imagine he defended it to others, to anyone who would listen indeed, and had finished by hoping that The Return of the Druses might ‘but do me half the good “Sordello” has done—be praised by the units, cursed by the tens, and unmeddled with by the hundreds!’ The failure of Sordello and Macready’s plain misunderstanding of the finer points of his plays, which Robert was more than willing to explicate and exculpate, had caused the poet-dramatist to lose some of his customary aplomb, and the old actor to doubt the man’s sanity. Convinced of the inevitability of his future celebrity, Robert was anxious to promote it in poetry and in performance.
There is a note of panic in his attitude at this time, in his attempts to salvage a career that looked likely to be cut short by the incomprehensible incomprehension not only of the public but of his literary and dramatic peers. Little wonder that his behaviour and remarks (even about those he knew to be his supporters) might be somewhat intemperate and contributed to a reputation in the world that was doing him no good.
After yet another reading of Robert’s ‘mystical, strange and heavy play’, Macready could not revise his original opinion: ‘It is not good.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He wrote to say as much to Robert, who, two days later, on 16 August, turned up to collect his rejected manuscript.
There was no lasting difficulty for the time being between the two men, no serious disruption of their sociability: Robert continued to attend Macready’s plays, met him with mutual friends, dined with him. Mrs Orr supposes that Macready’s Diaries, edited for publication, omit some of the detail surrounding the production of Robert’s third attempt at a performable play—A Blot in the ’Scutcheon—which was produced at Drury Lane on 11 February 1843. This was some three years after Robert had written it, to judge by references in an undated letter to Macready that is likely to have been written before the end of December 1840. In this letter Robert says, in effect, third time lucky: ‘“The luck of the third adventure” is proverbial. I have written a spick and span new Tragedy (a sort of compromise between my own notion [i.e. in the Druses] and yours—as I understand it at least) and will send it to you if you care to be bothered so far. There is action in it, drabbing, stabbing, et autres gentillesses,—who knows but the Gods may make me good even yet? Only, make no scruple of saying flatly that you cannot spare the time, if engagements of which I know nothing, but fancy a great deal, should claim every couple of hours in the course of this week.’
This is a conciliatory, even faintly humble letter. It certainly counts on Macready’s patience and good grace, and concedes that some dramatic action might be required to hold the attention of the playgoing public. He is prepared to give Macready what he wants if Macready will take what Robert wants to give. Such diplomacy had become necessary: Macready was losing faith in his young dramatist. Robert’s correspondence includes a couple of letters to Macready, dated 26 April 1842, in which he tries to drum Macready into stating his intentions towards not only The Return of the Druses but also A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.
In Macready’s edited Diaries there is a curious silence about the play he calls Blot until 25 and 26 January 1843, when he refers to reading it. On the Saturday, 28 January 1843, there had been a reading of Blot during which the actors had laughed at the play. Macready told Robert of the actors’ reaction and ‘Advised him as to the alteration of the second act.’
On 31 January, Macready went to the Drury Lane theatre. ‘Found Browning waiting for me in a state of great excitement. He abused the doorkeeper and was in a very great passion. I calmly apologized for having detained him, observing that I had made a great effort to meet him at all. He had not given his name to the doorkeeper, who had told him he might walk into the green-room, but his dignity was mortally wounded. I fear he is a very conceited man. Went over his play with him, then looked over part of it.’ By 7 February, Blot was in rehearsal and Robert had recovered his temper. But there were difficulties looming. Macready, right up to the last minute, was considering significant alterations to the play that were resisted by Robert: on 10 February ‘Browning … in the worst taste, manner and spirit, declined any further alterations … I had no more to say. I could only think Mr Browning a very disagreeable and offensively mannered person. Voilâ tout!’ But Macready thought that about a lot of persons who contradicted or even mildly discomposed him, so this judgement on this playwright at this time can be taken with a pinch of salt. Tempers, in any case, were short all round. The next day, Robert reappeared at the theatre. He ‘seemed desirous to explain or qualify the strange carriage and temper of yesterday, and laid much blame on Forster for irritating him’. Macready ‘directed the rehearsal of Blot in the ’Scutcheon, and made many valuable improvements’, though the acting left something to be desired.
On 11 February the three-act tragedy A Blot in the ’Scutcheon was performed to no great acclaim. The play lasted three nights before it disappeared forever from Macready’s repertoire. The Times shortly declared it to be ‘one of the most faulty dramas we ever beheld’, and on 18 February the Athenaeum unkindly laid into the play: ‘If to pain and perplex were the end and aim of tragedy, Mr Browning’s poetic melodrama called A Blot in the ’Scutcheon would be worthy of admiration, for it is a very puzzling and unpleasant piece of business. The plot is plain enough, but the acts and feelings of the characters are inscrutable and abhorrent, and the language is as strange as their proceedings.’
(#litres_trial_promo) On 18 March, Macready records in his Diary: ‘Went out; met Browning, who was startled into accosting me, but seeming to remember that he did not intend to do so, started off in great haste. What but contempt, which one ought not to feel, can we with galled spirit feel for those wretched insects about one? Oh God! how is it all to end?’ One thing had certainly ended: the association and friendship between Robert and Macready, which was not resumed for some twenty years thereafter. When they did cross one another’s paths, as happened on 4 June 1846 at a garden party, Robert cut Macready: ‘Browning—who did not speak to me—the puppy!’
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Most of the preceding account leading to production of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon has been told from Macready’s point of view, taken from his Diaries (as edited for publication). Robert Browning’s side of the matter is naturally somewhat different in detail and emphasis. Much later in life, he gave his own version to Edmund Gosse, and Mrs Orr
(#litres_trial_promo) publishes in full a letter of 15 December 1884 to Frank Hill, in which Robert thanks Hill, then editor of the Daily News, for suppressing a paragraph referring to A Blot in the ’Scutcheon in an article about the theatre. What Robert had to say to Gosse pretty much corresponds with the frank account he disclosed to Hill. Additionally, a letter from Joseph Arnould to Alfred Domett substantially describes, from his own firsthand observation, the play’s first night; and finally a letter from Charles Dickens recommending the play completes the full knowledge we have of this crisis in Browning’s professional life before his personal life was about to be thrown into upheaval.
Macready, it should be understood by connoisseurs of the backstage drama to A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, was experiencing severe domestic as well as professional difficulties in the early 1840s, some of which were public knowledge, some of which were public gossip, and some of which were nobody’s business but Macready’s. When, in October 1841, he took over the management of the Drury Lane theatre, he needed new plays to add to his existing repertoire and John Forster, on 29 September 1841, had ‘importuned’ him to read A Blot in the ’Scutcheon. Macready, although doubtful of Browning’s ability to write anything ever again, and despite his wavering faith in Forster himself, whose intemperate enthusiasms by now matched not only his intemperance of character but increasingly his intemperate taste for the bottle, read Browning’s Blot and was not impressed. Forster, too, by now had his doubts about the play, which was dispatched to Charles Dickens for a third opinion. Dickens did not reply for a year. When he did, on 25 November 1842, Forster showed the great novelist’s response to Macready. Dickens’ letter read:
Browning’s play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most earnest feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. It is full of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and beautiful in its vigour. I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred’s recurrence to that ‘I was so young—I had no mother.’ I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it. And I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played: and must be played, moreover, by Macready … And if you tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.
This letter, as quoted by Forster in the biography he later wrote of Dickens, was not in fact known to Robert Browning until, some thirty years later, he read it in Forster’s Dickens. This unqualified testimonial to the sublimities of Blot put Macready in a difficult position: Dickens’ opinion could not be ignored. The plot and sentiments of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon had deeply affected Dickens not just as an objective critic, but subjectively for deep-seated reasons of his own that served to heighten his enthusiasm for the play, which took the eighteenth century for its setting and family pride as its theme.
Lord Henry Mertoun, a landowner, asks Lord Tresham for the hand of his sister, Mildred, in marriage. Tresham, delighted, agrees. When Tresham is told by an aged servant that Mildred has been entertaining a secret lover—identity unknown—in her room, he confronts this clandestine cloaked figure and they fight. In the course of the duel, the secret lover—Lord Mertoun himself, whose awe of his idol Tresham has inspired his covert activity—is fatally wounded. Tresham, overwhelmed by remorse, takes poison. Mildred, overcome by her own remorse, dies of grief in her brother’s arms. The stage is littered with three corpses, and a fourth—the play itself—is dead by the time the curtain falls on it. This is to put the matter of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon a little bluntly: it is easy enough to render it ridiculous as melodrama; but the sentiment of pathos and the irony of self-righteousness were not fully realized in its principal characters, who lacked not for Shakespearean speeches but for Shakespearean credibility of character. This, then, is the play that Robert conceived when, two or three years earlier, he had written to Fanny Haworth, ‘I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love.’
Joseph Arnould attended the play’s first night, a lengthy account of which he wrote for the benefit of Alfred Domett in May 1843:
The first night was magnificent (I assume that Browning has sent you the play). Poor Phelps did his utmost, Helen Faucit very fairly, and there could be no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience. The gallery—and of course this was very gratifying, because not to be expected at a play of Browning’s—took all the points as quickly as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the action far more than the boxes, some of whom took it upon themselves to be shocked at being betrayed into so much interest in a young woman who had behaved so improperly as Mildred. Altogether the first night was a triumph. The second night was evidently presided over by the spirit of the manager. I was one of about sixty or seventy in the pit, and we yet seemed crowded compared to the desolate emptiness of the boxes. The gallery was again full, and again, among all who were there, were the same decided impressions of pity and horror produced. The third night I took my wife again to the boxes: it was evident at a glance that it was to be the last. My own delight and hers, too, in the play, was increased at this third representation, and would have gone on increasing to a thirtieth; but the miserable great chilly house, with its apathy and emptiness, produced on us both the painful sensation which made her exclaim that ‘she could cry with vexation’ at seeing so noble a play so basely marred.
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Arnould’s letter also painted in the background, backstage machinations, and mischief-making that, as much as the obvious shortcomings of the play, contributed substantially to its failure. The fault was not all Robert Browning’s, even allowing for the profundity of his anxiety that did him no good in the way it influenced his own behaviour towards Macready. Macready had his own agenda in respect of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon that contributed to its short, disastrous run, and it is possible that he deliberately undermined the play by orchestrating a bad reception for its performances.
Robert Browning’s own scrupulously detailed version to Frank Hill of the Daily News in a letter of 15 December 1884 reads thus:
Macready received and accepted the play, while he was engaged at the Haymarket, and retained it for Drury Lane, of which I was ignorant that he was about to become the manager: he accepted it ‘at the instigation’ of nobody,—and Charles Dickens was not in England when he did so: it was read to him after his return, by Forster—and the glowing letter which contains his opinion of it, although directed by him to be shown to myself, was never heard of nor seen by me till printed in Forster’s book some thirty years after. When the Drury Lane season began, Macready informed me that he should act the play when he had brought out two others—‘The Patrician’s Daughter’ and ‘Plighted Troth:’ having done so, he wrote to me that the former had been unsuccessful in money-drawing, and the latter had ‘smashed his arrangements altogether:’ but he would still produce my play. I had—in my ignorance of certain symptoms better understood by Macready’s professional acquaintances—I had no notion that it was a proper thing, in such a case, to ‘release him from his promise;’ on the contrary, I should have fancied that such a proposal was offensive. Soon after, Macready begged that I would call on him: he said the play had been read to the actors the day before, ‘and laughed at from beginning to end:’ on my speaking my mind about this, he explained that the reading had been done by the Prompter, a grotesque person with a red nose and a wooden leg, ill at ease in the love scenes, and that he would himself make amends by reading the play next morning—which he did, and very adequately—but apprised me that, in consequence of the state of his mind, harassed by business and various trouble, the principal character must be taken by Mr Phelps; and again I failed to understand—, what Forster subsequently assured me was plain as the sun at noonday,—that to allow at Macready’s Theatre any other than Macready to play the principal part in a new piece was suicidal,—and really believed I was meeting his exigencies by accepting the substitution. At the rehearsal, Macready announced that Mr Phelps was ill, and that he himself would read the part: on the third rehearsal, Mr Phelps appeared for the first time, while Macready more than read, rehearsed the part. The next morning Mr Phelps waylaid me at the stage-door to say, with much emotion, that it was never intended that he should be instrumental in the success of a new tragedy, and that Macready would play Tresham on the ground that himself, Phelps, was unable to do so. He added that he could not expect me to waive such an advantage,—but that, if I were prepared to waive it, ‘he would take ether, sit up all night, and have the words in his memory by next day.’ I bade him follow me to the green-room, and hear what I decided upon—which was that as Macready had given him the part, he should keep it: this was on a Thursday; he rehearsed on Friday and Saturday,—the play being acted the same evening,—of the fifth day after the ‘reading’ by Macready. Macready at once wished to reduce the importance of the ‘play,’—as he styled it in the bills,—tried to leave out so much of the text, that I baffled him by getting it printed in four-and-twenty hours, by Moxon’s assistance. He wanted me to call it ‘The Sister’!—and I have before me, while I write, the stage-acting copy, with two lines of his own insertion to avoid the tragical ending—Tresham was to announce his intention of going into a monastery! all this, to keep up the belief that Macready, and Macready alone, could produce a veritable ‘tragedy,’ unproduced before. Not a shilling was spent on scenery or dresses—and a striking scene which had been used for the ‘Patrician’s Daughter,’ did duty a second time. If your critic considers this treatment of the play an instance of ‘the failure of powerful and experienced actors’ to ensure its success,—I can only say that my own opinion was shown by at once breaking off a friendship of many years—a friendship which had a right to be plainly and simply told that the play I had contributed as a proof of it, would through a change of circumstances, no longer be to my friend’s advantage,—all I could possibly care for.
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One can hear Robert, in the course of this letter, warming to his reminiscence, waxing again with the indignation that through long years had not seriously cooled in his breast. If sin there had been in this dolorous sequence of events, it was that Macready had finally, fatally, been false to friendship. The heat of this disgrace flares through the letter, and Robert remarks that ‘my play subsists and is as open to praise or blame as it was forty-one years ago’. He is not about to encourage positively any latter-day production of the play: ‘This particular experience was sufficient: but the Play is out of my power now; though amateurs and actors may do what they please.’ In his account of an interview with Robert Browning on the subject of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, Edmund Gosse gives the Browning version a dramatic, journalistic, jaunty air that somewhat plays up the admittedly farcical aspects of the business that, nevertheless, caused Robert real pain. And Mrs Orr, uncharacteristically, cannot resist a humorous touch: ‘I well remember Mr Browning’s telling me how, when he returned to the green-room, on that critical day, he drove his hat more firmly on to his head and said to Macready, “I beg pardon, sir, but you have given the part to Mr Phelps, and I am satisfied that he should act it;” and how Macready, on hearing this, crushed up the MS., and flung it on to the ground. He also admitted that his own manner had been provocative; but he was indignant at what he deemed the unjust treatment which Mr Phelps had received.’
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The version according to Gosse admits what Robert had confessed in his letter to Hill: that he was not merely deceived in his dealings with Macready, but that his disappointments were founded less on simple misunderstandings than on total ignorance. Macready’s financial embarrassments only became clear to Robert on publication of the old actor’s diaries, and only in the light of these revelations, he wrote to Hill, ‘could I in a measure understand his motives for such conduct—and less than ever understand why he so strangely disguised and disfigured them. If “applause” means success, the play thus maimed and maltreated was successful enough: it “made way” for Macready’s own Benefit, and the Theatre closed a fortnight after.’
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Robert’s final excursion into the legitimate theatre was Colombe’s Birthday, which he finished writing in March 1844 but which was not produced until 1853—by Mr Phelps, as it happened, at the Haymarket Theatre, with Helen Faucit taking the role of the heroine. It played seven nights before vanishing forever from the boards of the London stage. The play had been originally written for Edmund Kean’s son, Charles, who was performing at Covent Garden and who was looking for new parts to play. His wife, Ellen Tree, was designated for the part of Colombe. Kean offered, it is said, £500 to Robert for a play, though Robert himself speaks in a letter to Christopher Dowson of ‘two or three hundred pounds’. But several complications got in the way of production. Kean wanted to postpone the play’s performance until Easter the following year; the engagement at the Haymarket was to be for twelve nights only; Kean was off to Scotland; Kean was a slow studier of new roles (a failing that incited Robert’s scorn as a fast-writing author). Robert was disinclined to ‘let this new work lie stifled for a year and odd, and work double tides to bring out something as likely to be popular this present season’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a disappointment that the play should not go immediately into production, particularly as Robert had been busy turning out other dramas—notably, Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy, which ‘I have by me in a state of forwardness’.
If A Blot in the ’Scutcheon had fragmented Robert’s friendship with Macready beyond ready repair, Colombe’s Birthday was to deal yet another devastating blow, this time to his friendship with John Forster. The play had been published by Edward Moxon as one of a continuing series of Browning’s works, and it was reviewed by Forster on 22 June 1844 in the Examiner. Forster concluded his generally respectful review with the fatal words, ‘There can be no question as to the nerve and vigour of this writing, or of its grasp of thought. Whether the present generation of readers will take note of it or leave it to the uncertain mercies of the future, still rests with Mr Browning himself. As far as he has gone, we abominate his tastes as much as we respect his genius.’ That did it for Robert Browning—until, a year later, Forster apologized, ‘very profuse of graciocities’ as Robert reported to Miss Barrett on 18 September 1845, and so ‘we will go on again with the friendship as the snail repairs its battered shell’. But the friendship was never the same, and much later there were no more than fragments of the shell strewn around to be trodden upon and utterly crushed.
To frustrate Macready’s attempts to edit or alter the text of his plays in production and performance, Robert had had them printed by Edward Moxon, who eventually suggested publishing Browning’s works at the expense of the Browning family as a continuing part work, a series of paper-covered pamphlets: ‘each poem should form a separate brochure of just one sheet—sixteen pages in double columns—the entire cost of which should not exceed twelve or fifteen pounds.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By using the same small, cheap type as was being used to print a low-priced edition of Elizabethan dramatists, Moxon could afford to offer bargain terms which Robert was quick to accept. The umbrella title of Bells and Pomegranates was, as usual, perfectly clear in its symbolism to Robert Browning, but he was obliged to provide some cues and hints to less erudite readers as to its origin. The perplexity of the general astonished Robert, but he finally, graciously explained that the intention was to express ‘something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought; which looks too ambitious thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred’.
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If this was still not clear enough, the reference to bells and pomegranates derived from the Book of Exodus, wherein is described the fashioning of Aaron the priest’s ephod: ‘And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about:/A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about.’ (Exodus 28: 33–4) There is poetry in the rhythm of these words and in their symbols, in the alternating images around the hem of the garment worn by Aaron whose ‘sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the Lord, and when he cometh out, that he die not’ (ibid., verse 35). Robert further explained that ‘Giotto placed a pomegranate fruit in the hand of Dante, and Raffaelle [Raphael] crowned his Theology (in the Camera della Segnatura) with blossoms of the same’—the fruit being symbolic of fine works.
The series of eight pamphlets was published over a period of some five years. It began in 1841 with Pippa Passes, a moderately long dramatic poem which Robert had written while he was finishing Sordello and after his trip to Italy. The second pamphlet, in spring 1842, comprised the text of an unperformed play, King Victor and King Charles. The third was Dramatic Lyrics, in November or December 1842. The Return of the Druses was the fourth pamphlet in January 1843. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, the fifth, was published on the day of its first performance on 11 February 1843. Colombe’s Birthday, published in March 1844, was the sixth pamphlet. The seventh in the series was a collection of short poems, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in November 1845. The final pamphlet, the eighth, on 13 April 1846, was the text of Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy, two unperformed plays.
These successive publications were prefaced in the first, Pippa Passes, with a dedication to Thomas Talfourd. The complete dedication, later omitted except for Talfourd’s name, expressed Robert Browning’s hopes and aspirations and also alluded subtly and ruefully to past experiences: ‘Two or three years ago I wrote a Play, about which the chief matter I much care to recollect at present is, that a Pit-full of goodnatured people applauded it:—ever since, I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. What follows I mean for the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals, and I amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again.’ The Pit-audience was to take its time—some twenty years—to applaud the eager poet-dramatist optimistic of acclaim and certain of celebrity.
A letter from Thomas Carlyle of 21 June 1841, acknowledging Robert’s gift of a copy of Pippa Passes and of Sordello, suggested some difficulties ahead: ‘Unless I very greatly mistake, judging from these two works, you seem to possess a rare spiritual gift, poetical, pictorial, intellectual, by whatever name we may prefer calling it; to unfold which into articulate clearness is naturally the problem of all problems for you. This noble endowment, it seems to me farther, you are not at present on the best way for unfolding;—and if the world had loudly called itself content with these two Poems, my surmise is, the world could have rendered you no fataller disservice than that same! Believe me, I speak with sincerity; and if I had not loved you well, I would not have spoken at all.’
Carlyle, in contemporary critical terms, was perfectly right, and much of what he had read of Robert’s work was obscure to him. On those grounds, critical and public discontent with Browning’s poetry was by no means a bad thing. His view that Robert had not yet come into full inheritance of his ‘noble endowment’ boiled down to a sort of headmaster’s mid-term report—in simple terms, ‘shows promise, could do better’. But of course, in Carlylean terms, it was not that simple. Carlyle continued sincerely but perhaps depressingly: his Scottish, rather Calvinistic, disposition assumed not only the value of struggle in itself but also the enhanced value of achievement as a result of it. What followed was virtually a moral sermon:
A long battle, I could guess, lies before you, full of toil and pain and all sorts of real fighting: a man attains to nothing here below without that. Is it not verily the highest prize you fight for? Fight on; that is to say, follow truly, with steadfast singleness of purpose, with valiant humbleness and openness of heart, what best light you can attain to; following truly so, better and ever better light will rise on you. The light we ourselves gain, by our very errors if not otherwise, is the only precious light. Victory, what I call victory, if well fought for, is sure to you.
Excelsior! was Carlyle’s hortatory word to Robert Browning who, if anyone, bore a banner with a strange, indecipherable device. Mocked and misunderstood, nevertheless the hero’s way led upward through—doubtless—a cold and lonely and desolate territory until the sunlit peak was reached. But even Carlyle recognized the difficulty. He kindly offered the weary wayfarer a short respite, a room for the night, as it were, where he could check his equipment, take his bearings, fully assess his commitment to the arduous journey ahead, consider the true philosophical meaning of the journey rather than be focused upon its artistic, symbolic value:
If your own choice happened to point that way, I for one should hail it as a good omen that your next work were written in prose! Not that I deny you poetic faculty; far, very far from that. But unless poetic faculty mean a higher-power of common understanding, I know not what it means. One must first make a true intellectual representation of a thing, before any poetic interest that is true will supervene. All cartoons are geometrical withal; and cannot be made till we have fully learnt to make mere diagrams well. It is this that I mean by prose;—which hint of mine, most probably inapplicable at present, may perhaps at some future day come usefully to mind.
Carlyle concluded his letter, sugaring the salt, by admitting to Robert that, ‘I esteem yours no common case; and think such a man is not to be treated in the common way. And so persist in God’s name as you best see and can; and understand always that my true prayer for you is, Good Speed in the name of God!’
Whatever Robert may have thought then of this letter would surely have been tempered later by a letter of 17 February 1845 from Elizabeth Barrett. She had sent her poems to Carlyle, who had evidently offered her the same advice as he had given to Robert Browning, and indeed freely to every other poet except Tennyson: ‘And does Mr Carlyle tell you that he has forbidden all “singing” to this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing? And have you told Mr Carlyle that song is work, and also the condition of work? I am a devout sitter at his feet—and it is an effort for me to think him wrong in anything—and once when he told me to write prose and not verse, I fancied that his opinion was I had mistaken my calling,—a fancy which in infinite kindness and gentleness he stooped immediately to correct. I never shall forget the grace of that kindness—but then! For him to have thought ill of me, would not have been strange—I often think ill of myself, as God knows. But for Carlyle to think of putting away, even for a season, the poetry of the world, was wonderful, and has left me ruffled in my thoughts ever since.’ And whatever Carlyle might think about Pippa Passes, the conception of it was, to Miss Barrett’s mind, ‘most exquisite and altogether original—and the contrast in the working out of the plan, singularly expressive of various faculty’.
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Thomas Carlyle was from the beginning, and remained, an important friend to Robert Browning and a significant intellectual influence in his life. On 5 May 1840, Macready attended a lecture by Carlyle. What it was about he could not recollect, ‘although I listened with the utmost attention to it, and was greatly pleased with it’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The title and subject matter of the lecture, which Macready could not well recall, was ‘The Hero as Divinity’. The second, on 8 May, he recollected very well: ‘“The Hero as Prophet: Mahomet”; on which he [Carlyle] descanted with a fervour and eloquence that only a conviction of truth could give. I was charmed, carried away by him. Met Browning there.’ Macready had met Robert at the earlier lecture, too, three days before. Robert also attended the third lecture, ‘The Hero as Poet’. This series of six lectures, the remaining subjects of which were ‘The Hero as Priest’, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, and ‘The Hero as King’, ran from 5 to 22 May. This lecture series, the sensation of the season, was published as that great and curious Carlylean work, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History in 1841.
Carlyle’s first impression of Robert Browning had not been wholly positive. Forty years later, Robert, in a letter of 18 March 1881,
(#litres_trial_promo) candidly admitted that Carlyle ‘confessed once to me that, on the first occasion of my first visiting him, he was anything but favorably impressed by my “smart green coat”—I being in riding costume: and if then and there had begun and ended our acquaintanceship, very likely I might have figured in some corner of a page as a poor scribbling-man with proclivities for the turf and scamphood. What then? He wrote Sartor [Resartus]—and such letters to me in those old days. No, I am his devotedly.’
Carlyle, seventeen years older than Robert, might deplore his dandyism, but he admitted his young friend to be beautiful, striking in his facial features, and possessing a full head of dark, flowing hair. Besides, the ‘neat dainty little fellow’ professed a marked enthusiasm for the philosophy of the Scottish philosopher whose intellectual distinction in London literary society added a lustre to his otherwise gaunt, somewhat dour appearance. As Carlyle got to know Robert better, he formed a close personal attachment to him and a high opinion of his capabilities. To Gavan Duffy, the young Irish nationalist, Carlyle declared Robert Browning to possess not only a powerful intellect but, ‘among the men engaged in England in literature just now was one of the few from which it was possible to expect something’. Browning, said Carlyle, responding in 1849 to Duffy’s suggestion that the poet might be an imitator of Coleridge’s ‘The Suicide’s Argument’ (first published in 1828), ‘was an original man and by no means a person who would consciously imitate anyone’.
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Robert and Thomas Carlyle had certainly met by 27 March 1839, when they are recorded as dining together at Macready’s table.
(#litres_trial_promo) In a letter of 30 December 1841 to Fanny Haworth, Robert tells her that he ‘dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people “dear,” in a hurry, except in letter-beginings!) yesterday—I don’t know any people like them—there was a son of [Robert] Burns’ there, Major Burns whom Macready knows—he sung “Of all the airts”—“John Anderson”—and another song of his father’s.’ This reference speaks confidently of some considerable intimacy and friendship beyond mere literary respect or intellectual hero-worship. In a letter to Robert of 1 December 1841, Carlyle lamented that, ‘The sight of your card instead of yourself, the other day when I came down stairs, was a real vexation to me! The orders here are rigorous. “Hermetically sealed till 2 o’clock!” But had you chanced to ask for my Wife, she would have guessed that you formed an exception, and would have brought me down.’ Carlyle goes on to invite Robert to pay visits on Friday nights for tea at six or half-past six. A letter of 1842 from Robert to Mrs Carlyle accepts an invitation to breakfast. Carlyle’s letters to Robert in this period are those of a man corresponding with an intellectual equal and a friend interested in the common domestic matters of life as well as the more rarefied matters of the mind and the human condition. Browning had, wrote Carlyle to Moncure Daniel Conway, ‘simple speech and manners and ideas of his own’. He was ‘a fine young man … I liked him better than any young man about here.’ And though Carlyle ‘did not make much out of’ Paracelsus, he conceded that ‘that and his other works proved a strong man’.
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Robert not only rode into town to visit Carlyle at his house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, but Carlyle rode out to Hatcham to visit the Brownings, whose decent domestic respectability he admired as much as the tidy trim of ‘the little room’ in which Robert kept his books. Perhaps Mrs Browning played the piano for him, perhaps Carlyle now and again burst into song. It was not unlikely—despite Elizabeth Barrett being convinced of his having ‘forbidden all “singing” to this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing’. Robert revealed to her, in a letter of 26 February 1845, an occasion a couple of weeks before when Carlyle had abruptly asked him, ‘Did you never try to write a Song? Of all the things in the world, that I should be proudest to do.’ It may be that Carlyle was mindful of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun’s remark in 1703, ‘I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Chr—’s sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ If he could not make a song, Carlyle could at least sing one. Six months before, Robert had heard the sage of Ecclefechan, the prophet of Craigenputtock, the great Cham of Chelsea, ‘croon if not certainly sing, “Charlie is my darling” (“my darling” with an adoring emphasis)’.
Of this enduring but improbable friendship, Chesterton puts the matter succinctly: ‘Browning was, indeed, one of the few men who got on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most other poets of the day, had something amounting to a real attachment to him … Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all companies.’
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Dramatic Lyrics had been published, at Mr Browning senior’s expense, in late November 1842. The pamphlet consisted of sixteen poems, fourteen of them new: ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ had already been published in the Monthly Repository in 1836. Moxon had suggested a collection of small poems for popularity’s sake, and so Robert had collected up poems he had written over the past eight years, during and after his trip to Russia. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (first titled ‘The rain set in early to-night …’) and ‘Johannes Agricola’ (first titled ‘There’s Heaven above …’) are said to have actually been written in the spring of 1834, in St Petersburg. ‘Cavalier Tunes’, a set of three poems—‘Marching Along’, ‘Give a Rouse’, and ‘My Wife Gertrude’ (later titled ‘Boot and Saddle’)—was probably written in the summer of 1842, arising out of Robert’s background reading for Strafford and coinciding with the two-hundredth anniversary of the Civil War. Sordello and Robert’s visit to Italy in 1838 had inspired ‘My Last Duchess’ (here titled ‘Italy’) and ‘In a Gondola’. ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is said to have come from reading in his father’s library. These, together with ‘Waring’, were to figure among Robert’s most famous poems and, with ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola’, are among the best known, best loved, and best studied poems in the English language, from high school to high table.
On first publication, Robert had been anxious to allay any interpretation of Dramatic Lyrics as expressing anything that might be construed as personal to the author. A plain disclaimer asserted: ‘Such poems as the following come properly enough, I suppose, under the head of “Dramatic Pieces”; being, though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.’ This was largely true in principle: the poems are not notably introspective but are mostly based on legend or history; they depend on dramatic action more than philosophical themes; and—with the exception of ‘Cavalier Tunes’—they are distinctly flavoured with Robert’s observations of nations and nationalities other than England and the English. The title of the collection also directs readers away from any psychological analysis: the poems are by an author recently known for dramatic works and the word Lyrics in the title specifically casts them back to the lyrical poetry of the Romantic poets. Of course, this is somewhat disingenuous—they are in a distinctively modern, Browning idiom.
Robert might have saved himself all the trouble of dissociating himself personally from the utterances in Dramatic Lyrics since the pamphlet attracted little or no attention from readers or critics. John Forster reviewed it, more or less admiringly, in the Examiner, writing that ‘Mr Browning is a genuine poet, and only needs to have less misgiving on the subject himself.’ But difficult, of course, to believe in one’s genuine poetic ability when nobody else notices it or pays good money to read it. Perhaps Forster meant, however, that Robert had identified his true manner in Dramatic Lyrics. If so, he was right. The pamphlet proved definitively, for the first time, Robert’s personal, inimitable mastery of the dramatic lyric and the monologue.
‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, a last-minute addition to fill up space in the volume, had been written for young Willie Macready, the actor’s eldest son, when the boy was ill in bed. Willie liked to draw pictures and had asked Robert for something to illustrate. His retentive mind recalled a story about the death of the Pope’s Legate at the Council of Trent from Wanley’s The Wonders of the Little World. Willie’s clever drawings inspired the final version of the improvised poem, now a nursery classic, which was perfectly designed to thrill an imaginative little boy:
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats. (ll. 10–20)
The poem is a perfectly structured, perfectly paced, perfectly psychologically judged dramatic story, perfectly suited to the human voice—to recitation, which Robert loved. If we are to look for the cadences of his own voice in conversation, we may look no further than ‘The Pied Piper’. Robert very likely enjoyed it as much as Willie. Indeed, it became one of his party pieces when entertaining at children’s parties. The rhythms are important here, just as they are in another poem in Dramatic Lyrics: ‘Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr’, said to have been composed on horseback in 1842. The thudding phrase ‘As I ride, as I ride’ resonates throughout the poem, just as effectively creating the sense of a rhythmic, steady gallop as the cadences of ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, published in 1845 in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics:
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. (ll. 7–12)
If ‘The Pied Piper’ was aesthetically a great dramatic success, no less were other poems in the pamphlet. Robert had been impressed by Tennyson’s poetry, though he preferred reality to Tennyson’s romance. It is this insistence on reality, rather than romance or sentiment, that gives such power not only in the fantasy of legend to the ambiguously happy though unambiguously moral ending of ‘The Pied Piper’, but also to the grim amorality of poems like ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’. Both these latter poems concern the murder of women. It is possible that the murderers in both are mad—fantasists to whom reality is a mirage; but to suppose any such thing is to flinch from Robert Browning’s insistence on character over the detail of narrative, in contrast to Tennyson’s emphasis on story over characterization. Ian Jack makes this important point: ‘Tennyson tells us that the old man who narrates the story is an artist, but we have to be told—whereas in Browning we would know from the smell of the paint.’
(#litres_trial_promo) G. K. Chesterton had earlier made this point in a different way: Robert knew about painting, sculpture, music, and the rest because he had practised painting, sculpture, and music with his own hands.
And in these two poems of muted horror, just as in the poems of action and adventure, the unemphatic pace of the narrative underlines the matter-of-fact nature of the act and its matter-of-fact acceptance:
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain. (ll. 33–42)
And we, too, are sure: the tenor of the lines might do just as well for telling us that her lover was tying Porphyria’s shoelaces as an act of humble homage. Just so the Duke, in ‘My Last Duchess’, refers to the death of his wife:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.’ (ll. 1–4)
Porphyria’s lover waits quietly for the rain to stop and the wind to die down, the girl’s ‘smiling rosy little head’ propped up on his shoulder.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word! (ll. 58–60)
Just so the Duke goes down to—possibly—dinner with his guest, calling attention casually on the stairs to another interesting work of art:
Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (ll. 53–6)
The Duke gave commands and his wife died; Porphyria’s lover wound her hair around her neck and strangled her: in neither case was there remorse or retribution; no police to break down the ducal door, no God to strike down Porphyria’s murderous lover with a thunderbolt. Like Johannes Agricola, similarly complacent, the murderers may have felt:
I have God’s warrant, could I blend
All hideous sins, as in a cup,
To drink the mingled venoms up;
Secure my nature will convert
The draught to blossoming gladness fast: (ll. 33–7)
The point about these characters—ruthless, cold, passionate, hot—is their natures, fully and subtly realized. Their actions depend upon in the act, and are informed in the aftermath, by their characters, and not vice versa. Murder is banal enough: it is the character who commits it who is the interesting subject, and Robert Browning is so much in complete control of the poem that gives the character to us fully-formed that we are largely unaware, on a first reading, of the artistry—the poetic authenticity, the artistic integrity—with which he does it.
Robert Browning, if his works were not often or generally read, was frequently and widely discussed among his friends. He breakfasted with John Kenyon, took six o’clock tea with the Carlyles, dined with Serjeant Talfourd, supped with Macready and William Johnson Fox. All these were social occasions that broadened his acquaintance and at which he was welcome for his confidence in conversation and aptitude for anecdote. Harriet Martineau, though mystified by Sordello, admitted that in conversation ‘no speaker could be more absolutely clear and purpose-like’ than Browning. ‘He was full of good sense and fine feeling, amidst occasional irritability, full also of fun and harmless satire, with some little affectations which were as droll as anything could be. A real genius was Robert Browning assuredly.’
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Joseph Arnould, writing in 1845 to Alfred Domett, described a dinner party at which Robert was also a guest: ‘Glorious Robert Browning is as ever—but more genial, more brilliant and more anecdotical than when we knew him four years ago.’ And yet, and yet, in this year, 1845, the polished social performance was becoming tedious to Robert, as though he were Macready toiling through a familiar role, night after night, in the same company of players, speaking the same words, throwing in a few ad-libs, in a long run of a popular play. Too often, it felt like an exercise in public relations.
In ‘Respectability’, published in Men and Women on 10 November 1855, Robert wrote:
How much of priceless time were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society’s true ornament.
In a letter of 12 March 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett, he wrote, ‘So you have got to like society, and would enjoy it, you think? For me, I always hated it.—have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by foregoing it I should let some unknown good escape me, in the true time of it, and only discover my fault when too late; and now that I have done most of what is to be done, any lodge in a garden of cucumbers for me!’ He does not ‘even care about reading now’, he confesses. ‘But you must read books in order to get words and forms for “the public” if you write, and that you needs must do, if you fear God. I have no pleasure in writing myself—none, in the mere act—though all pleasure in fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other!’ He supposes Miss Barrett likes ‘the operation of writing as I should like that of painting or making music … After all, there is a great delight in the heart of the thing; and use and forethought have made me ready at all times to set to work—but—I don’t know why—my heart sinks whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it.’
A month earlier, Robert had been writing to Miss Barrett about critics, trying to be fair-minded and even-handed in response to her inquiry about his ‘sensitiveness to criticism’. What he had said then was, ‘I shall live always—that is for me—I am living here this 1845, that is for London.’ For himself—‘for me’—he writes from a thorough conviction of duty, and he does his best: ‘the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope in nowise affect me.’ And yet, ‘I must, if for merely scientific purposes, know all about this 1845, its ways and doings’, and if he should take a dozen pages of verse to market, like twelve cabbages (or pomegranates, he might have said, but didn’t) he had grown himself, he should expect to get as much as any man for his goods. If nobody will buy or praise, ‘more’s the shame … But it does so happen that I have met with much more than I could have expected in this matter of kindly and prompt recognition. I never wanted a real set of good hearty praisers—and no bad reviewers—I am quite content with my share. No—what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place—enough to make an apostle swear.’
In this selfsame letter to Miss Barrett, a few lines previously, Robert had seized eagerly on her wish that they should ‘rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and I, on each side’
(#litres_trial_promo) and given himself up to her—and their developing correspondence—entirely: ‘I had rather hear from you than see anybody else. Never you care, dear noble Carlyle, nor you, my own friend Alfred over the sea, nor a troop of true lovers!—Are not these fates written? there!’ These fates were written—what about Robert’s own? The work—far less, or far more, the life, the entire fate of Robert Browning—seemed in 1845 to be in the balance: the achievement so far, what did it amount to? ‘What I have printed gives no knowledge of me—it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will—and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion … that I think—But I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end—“R. B. a poem”—’. At most, ‘these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you.’
This is the letter of a man whose lightning or lighthouse flashes illuminate his world fitfully and reveal himself, though captain of his own ship, becalmed on a dark flood. Robert’s perplexity and discouragement was of long standing. In short, he was depressed: the weeks passed, Carlyle talked wisely and beautifully, there had been quarrels with Macready and Forster, the rarely positive critical response to his work was pleasing enough but misguided, the plays were defunct, the poems had sold disappointingly. On 9 October 1843 he wrote to Alfred Domett, who had thrown up the law and disappeared to the colonies, to New-Zealand, ‘People read my works a little more, they say, and I have some real works here in hand; but now that I could find it in my heart to labour earnestly, I doubt if I shall ever find it in my head, which sings and whirls and stops me even now—an evening minute by the way.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps to still his whirligig head, or to give it something substantial to dance around, Robert sailed for Naples in the late summer of 1844.
As is the case with his previous journeyings abroad, precious few relics survive to substantiate the itinerary or illuminate the events. There is some dispute as to whether Robert wrote the poems ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’ and ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ on this voyage or on the first voyage to Italy—Robert himself said the one, then the other. And if he could not remember, then attribution by others is just as credible one way or the other. Mrs Orr is virtually the sole source of information for Robert’s second trip to Italy, and she gives no circumstantial detail about how he met ‘a young Neapolitan gentleman’, by name of Scotti, ‘who had spent most of his life in Paris’ and with whom, very likely, Robert talked his proper French and improved his vernacular Italian. Quickly becoming good friends, they travelled together from Naples to Rome, Scotti helpfully haggling over their joint expenses. ‘As I write’, reported Robert in a letter to Sarianna, ‘I hear him disputing our bill in the next room. He does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.’
(#litres_trial_promo) One can see why Robert, who had learned to be careful of money, should warm to a man with a mind similarly concentrated on his own short purse. Says Mrs Orr of Scotti, ‘he certainly bore no appearance of being the least prosperous’. In Rome, Scotti was judged by Countess Carducci—an acquaintance of Robert’s father—‘the handsomest man she had ever seen.’ But Mr Scotti ‘blew out his brains soon after he and his new friend had parted; and I do not think the act was ever fully accounted for’.
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We could wish to pause there, at that sensational moment, to inquire further about the impoverished Signor Scotti and his suicide: he sounds just the man, and his death just the circumstance, to stop Robert in his tracks to add his friend and his end to his repertory company of characters fit for a poem. But all we know of Robert’s time in Rome is that he visited Shelley’s tomb in the New Protestant Cemetery, in commemoration of which he wrote the few lines on ‘Fame’ which form the first part of ‘Earth’s Immortalities’, inspected the grotto of Egeria, the scene imagined by Byron of the supposed interview between King Numa Pompilius of Rome and the advisory nymph, and the recently restored church of Santa Prassede, close by Santa Maria Maggiore, where the tomb of Cardinal Cetive may have partly inspired the poem ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’. These are all occasions of the most tantalizing interest, and about which too little—if any—first-hand evidence exists.
We fall back upon Mrs Orr, too, for information about the journey home to Hatcham, via Livorno where he found Edward John Trelawny who had been an intimate of the poets Shelley and Byron. Trelawny might have been in a better condition to discuss the poets had he not been stoically—‘indifferently’, says Mrs Orr—enduring a painful operation to have a troublesome bullet dug from his leg by a surgeon. Trelawny’s cool fortitude struck Robert very much. That the veteran was able to talk at all, far less reminisce about poets and poetry, was very remarkable.
Robert returned from Italy in December 1844. During his absence, he had missed the much-acclaimed publication of Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s Poems in the summer of that same year; but once back in Hatcham he read the volumes, which, if they had not in themselves been of the greatest interest, would certainly have caught—or been brought to—his attention on account of two delicately allusive lines that ran:
Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate’, which, if cut deep down
the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
What, in 1844, did Robert know of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett? No more than anyone else, which wasn’t much in the way of first-hand information, far less reliable gossip—though uninformed speculation (it was said that Miss Barrett was completely crippled, unable to move) was never short as a negotiable commodity. The poet, essayist, and former seafaring man Richard Hengist Horne, who had experienced enough maritime and military adventure to qualify him as a Baron Munchausen (except that most of his tales, like those of ‘Abyssinia’ Bruce, were largely true) put it about that she was in very delicate health and had lived for years hermetically sealed in her room, her only contact with the outside world being through the medium of letters very erudite and literary in tone. He was more authoritative than most, since she had recently collaborated with him on a two-volume book, A New Spirit of the Age, in which ‘Orion’ Horne, ably assisted by the contributions of others (including Robert Browning as well as Elizabeth Barrett) had aspired to make a general estimate of contemporary literature without, alas!, possessing much literary ability or even critical faculty himself.
In retrospect, from the distance of our own times, Horne’s judgement in 1844, when the book appeared, was naturally coloured by the florid taste of his age, lengthily praising the likes of Talfourd, who is now not much more than a literary footnote to the period. But critical perspectives inevitably alter: to Horne’s credit, he did rate highly those big guns who have survived as literary heroes: Carlyle, Macaulay, Tennyson, and Dickens—though he’d have found it difficult not to notice them respectfully at appropriate length; and he devoted generous space to the ‘little known works of Mr Robert Browning’, whose Paracelsus he praised over five pages and whose Sordello, at the length of a dozen pages, he sorrowfully judged would remain obscure but to have been treated unjustly by critics since the poem, in Horne’s estimation, ‘abounded with beauties’. And so, her hand dabbled in Horne’s book, Elizabeth Barrett, the famously reclusive poetess, would have known not only of Mr Robert Browning’s work but, less intimately, something of the poet himself.
In his book, Horne reflected upon his collaborator’s invisibility among her contemporaries, supposing that future generations might doubt her very existence. But some, he knew, had actually seen her. Miss Mitford, for one, told him that Miss Barrett ‘lies folded in Indian shawls upon her sofa with her long black tresses streaming over her bent-down head, all attention’ while having her new poems read to her by an unnamed gentleman who, we suppose, must have been John Kenyon. Through the medium of Kenyon, then, we may also suppose that Robert learned more even than Horne gleaned from the gossiping Miss Mitford about the interesting lady poet who preferred to call herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett rather than to use her full family name of Barrett Moulton Barrett. From Kenyon, Robert received a manuscript poem, ‘Dead Pan’, written by Elizabeth, and Kenyon was happy to communicate Robert’s enthusiasm to its author.
In 1820, aged fourteen years, Elizabeth Barrett had privately published an epic, The Battle of Marathon, dedicated to her father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett. She had begun writing this at the age of eleven. Though imitative of the styles of Homer, Pope, and Byron, it was an impressive achievement—and would have been so if only by reason of its pastiche and precocious learning, far less as evidence of genuine poetic ability. This effort was followed the next year by ‘Stanzas, Excited by Some Reflections on the Present State of Greece’, published in the New Monthly Magazine (1821), and ‘Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron’ in 1824. In 1826, at the age of twenty, she published an Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, the printing costs being paid by Mary Trepsack, a Barrett slave from Jamaica, who lived in the Barrett household. Elizabeth’s correspondence with a family friend, Sir Uvedale Price, contributed substantially to Price’s Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages, published in 1827. On her own account, in 1832, she translated Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, published with Miscellaneous Poems in 1833.
All these were given anonymously to the world, until she finally put her name to The Seraphim, and Other Poems in 1838, and followed these verses with occasional poems and translations published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and in the Athenaeum. In 1842, she published three hymns translated from the Greek of Gregory Nazianzen and ‘Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets’. In 1844, there appeared her Poems, which famously included ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ (the story of a beautiful, talented, high-born lady who chooses to marry Bertram, a low-born poet, rather than a suitor of her own rank) and, within that poem, the references to Robert Browning’s own poems. Elizabeth Barrett was, by 1844, esteemed by the best and most influential literary magazines. Her classical and metaphysical learning, her poetic accomplishments, her mysterious reluctance to make any public appearances, all astonished and somewhat intimidated the literary establishment. There were some who muttered ungraciously about poetical obscurity and mysticism, but by and large her work was treated more reverently, more indulgently, than the irredeemable obscurities and impenetrable mystifications of Robert Browning’s poetry.
Some three years before, John Kenyon had attempted to arrange a meeting between Robert and Elizabeth. He had enthusiastically told her about him, him about her; he had discussed his poetry with her, hers with him; and at one point this middle-aged romantic go-between had almost brought his plan to a satisfactory conclusion, only to have it frustrated by Elizabeth putting off the encounter with a perfectly plausible, believable plea of indisposition—though in fact, as she admitted, it was because of her ‘blind dislike to seeing strangers’. Still, there it was—the reference to Robert Browning, in ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, and in the best poetic company, his work linked favourably, equal in rank, with ‘poems/Made by Tuscan flutes … the pastoral parts of Spenser—or the subtle interflowings/Found in Petrarch’s sonnets’.
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.’
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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 …”.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
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At first, Robert and Elizabeth contented themselves more or less with thoughtful, tentative criticism of each other’s work. She frankly admitted her faults (as they seemed to her): ‘Headlong I was at first, and headlong I continue … guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary—tearing open letters, and never untying a string,—and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning. And so, at your half word I flew at the whole one, with all its possible consequences, and wrote what you read.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But, she further admitted, ‘In art, however, I understand that it does not do to be headlong, but patient and laborious—and there is a love strong enough, even in me, to overcome nature.’
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’,
(#litres_trial_promo) 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 that enabled him to suit himself as to when, or even if, he should do anything at any time not of his own choosing. He owed this considerable liberty to the largely passive indulgence of his parents and his sister, who, for whatever reasons of their own, colluded with him in the gratification of his personal desires, apparently against the prevailing social values of middle-class self-reliance and self-improvement. It is interesting to consider how these apparently opposed yet very similar character traits—there’s no easily getting around the words ‘selfishness’ and ‘ruthlessness’—contended to get their own way in the great things of their lives at the expense of their conventional personal comforts.
Among her family and friends, Elizabeth was considered ‘delicate’: at least they had become accustomed to her presenting herself as a semi-invalid and had collaborated in treating her as such. In a letter post-marked 6 May, Elizabeth recommended sleep to Robert on the ground that ‘we all know that thinking, dreaming, creating people like yourself, have two lives to bear instead of one, and therefore ought to sleep more than others’; and for herself, ‘I think better of sleep than I ever did, now that she will not easily come near me except in a red hood of poppies.’ What we might now call her habit had been acquired over twenty-five years. In March 1845, Elizabeth was thirty-nine years old. Since the age of fifteen, and perhaps earlier, she had regularly been dosed with opium.
The Barretts, like the Brownings, had derived their fortune from the sugar plantations of the West Indies—though Robert’s father had renounced the trade on moral grounds, while Elizabeth’s father had continued to rely upon it for his income. Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, who came to England in 1792 at the age of seven and married Mary Graham-Clarke on 14 May 1805, was the grandson of Edward Barrett (usually known as Edward of Cinnamon Hill), a hugely rich Jamaican plantation owner who died in 1798. Edward’s father, Charles Moulton, was the son of another Jamaican family that also worked its plantations by slave labour. Charles seems to have been known for his savagery towards his slaves and, even for those times and in that place, acquired a bad reputation. Elizabeth, born to Edward and Mary on 6 March 1806, was formally christened with Edward, her younger brother by fifteen months, in February 1809. By that time, she had become known as Ba, an abbreviation for Baby—but the ‘a’ pronounced as in ‘babby’ rather than as in ‘baby’.
At the time of Elizabeth’s birth, the Barretts were living at Coxhoe Hall, near Durham, close to the Graham-Clarkes, but in 1809 Edward bought a property of some four hundred acres, Hope End, near Ledbury in Herefordshire, and moved his family (which by now included Henrietta, born on 4 March that year) to the house he almost immediately began—with an energy and taste for the exotic that William Beckford would have admired—to embellish, inside and out, in a Turkish style, to the extent of commissioning concrete and cast iron minarets from his architects. Edward’s neighbours might mutter about grandiosity and flamboyance, even of nouveau riche vulgarity, but he didn’t care; and Mary Barrett was captivated by a ‘beautiful and unique’ fantasy she thought worthy of an Arabian Nights story.
This extensive, expensive ornamentation of the house continued for nigh on ten years, in his absence as much as his presence. When Edward was not at Hope End, he was in London and Jamaica, attending to business. Mary’s business consisted in almost constant childbearing and child rearing: after Elizabeth, little Edward (known as ‘Bro’), and Henrietta (‘Addles’), at regular intervals of about eighteen months came Sam (known as ‘Storm’, ‘Stormy’, or ‘Stormie’), Arabella (‘Arabel’), Mary (who died young, aged four), Charles, George (‘Pudding’), Henry, Alfred (‘Daisy’), Septimus (‘Sette’), and—the youngest, born in 1824—Octavius (‘Occie’ or ‘Occy’). It was, by all accounts, not only a large but a mutually loving family, bossed by Elizabeth as the senior sister, and devoted to their sweet-natured, occasionally harassed mother. She in turn devoted herself to her dozen children, who occupied all her time. They were adored by their indulgent father, who took no great offence when his children were affectionately disrespectful. If anything, boldness and curiosity in his brood was encouraged: none of the children felt repressed, and they all looked forward eagerly to the fun they would have with him when he returned home from his business trips. They felt not just materially and emotionally safe, but, like little animals, secure in the predictable domestic routines and the regular disciplines of daily family prayers and other religious observances insisted upon by Mr Barrett. It was a fixed, solid world in which the Barretts, from eldest to youngest, were sure of their proper places—which did not exclude some natural jealousies and jostling for position—in the pecking order of Hope End.
If all this sounds like an idyll, it largely was. Hope End was an isolated rural property, deep in the agricultural west of the country, invisible from any road, silent but for bird song, and hedged from the outer world by dense foliage that to outsiders seemed oppressive. The Barretts lived in a quiet, secure, enclosed little world of their own, pretty much self-reliant and self-sufficient for their amusements. In this situation, Elizabeth discovered books at a very early age and her mother encouraged her to write about what she had read, nagging at her when her handwriting and critical standards didn’t come up to scratch. Supervised by Mary, Elizabeth ate up novels by Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, and begged for more. When a tutor was brought in to prepare Bro for school at Charterhouse, Elizabeth eagerly shared the lessons with her younger brother and learned Greek with him.
In April 1821, Arabel, Henrietta, and Elizabeth fell ill with headaches, pains in their sides, and convulsive twitchings of their muscles. They were treated, on the best medical advice, with a tincture of valerian, whereupon Arabel and Henrietta quickly recovered. Elizabeth did not, and in June she contracted a case of measles. It is at this time that she seems to have decided that she suffered from ‘natural ill health’, and her symptoms increased not only in quality but in quantity. She described her constant headache and her recurrent paroxysms—her ‘agony’—to her local and London doctors; how she swooned, the wild beating of her heart, her feeble pulse, the coldness of her feet, the constant pains in the right side of her chest that travelled round to her back, up to her right shoulder and down the arm. Margaret Forster succinctly describes how, ‘From the onset of menstruation middle-class women were encouraged to regard themselves as delicate creatures who must take great care of themselves. Vigorous exercise was discouraged, rest encouraged. Every ache and pain was taken seriously.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The result, too often, was a debilitated condition—a chronic invalidism at best; at worst, symptoms resulting from hysteria or a narcissistic hypochondria that derived from or provoked the social attitude that women were naturally weak, dependent creatures. Illness was considered to be virtually the norm for upper-and middle-class women: to be ‘pale and interesting’ was quite the thing; robust health was not fashionable.
Elizabeth, whose health in childhood had been good, allowing for seasonal coughs and colds, nothing to worry about in normal circumstances, was prescribed purgatives that gave little or no relief. Advice, of course trustfully taken and dutifully observed, to confine herself ‘in a recumbent posture’ for long hours every day to a sofa or bed probably only reinforced her condition. Her paroxysms continued at the rate of three a day, though none at night, and she began to complain that her spine was ‘swollen’. Though medical examination could detect ‘nothing obviously wrong with the spine’, she was put in a ‘spine crib’—a kind of hammock suspended some four feet off the ground—just in case a disorder of the spine should develop. It was at this point that laudanum—dried and powdered opium dissolved in alcohol—was prescribed for Elizabeth, who took this universal panacea with just as much thought as we might take any mildly palliative over-the-counter nostrum or prescription drug today. A solution of opium or morphine enabled her to sleep in a ‘red hood of poppies’. At first, the dose would have been mild, but in time she would come to depend upon taking up to forty drops a day, a serious quantity, and claim she could not do without it.
After a few months, Elizabeth recovered some of her usual high spirits. Her appetite improved, her symptoms of upper body pain and paroxysms abated, and she felt rested. But she continued to believe that she was truly suffering from a disease of the spine and, despite medical prognoses that she would make a complete recovery from ailments both real and imaginary, she behaved as though she were a chronic invalid with no hope of cure. Her body was as passive as her mind was active. For the next year, strung up in her spinal crib or recumbent on a sofa, she read voraciously, wrote quantities of gloomy verse, ‘sickly’ as she herself eventually characterized it, in the form of odes dedicated to her family, and continued her study of Greek. She read Shakespeare and the best modern poets—Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth—and became morbidly Romantic. She read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and became enraged about the sufferings of womanhood. Mary Wollstonecraft, in fact, affected her as deeply in her view of wedlock and subservience to men as Shelley’s atheism and vegetarianism had affected Robert. Elizabeth rejected romantic love and marriage as a snare she should take care to avoid. Robert had rejected the prospect of marriage less philosophically, rather as an unlikely adventure which, even if he should find a compatible partner, he could not financially afford.
In common, too, with the young Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett had determined in her teens that to be a poet was an honourable profession, that poetry was real work of deep spiritual and high artistic value, that she herself could become a proper poet—‘one of God’s singers’. Her ambitions extended far beyond the charming verses that young dilettantish women composed as prettily as they painted watercolours. Since Elizabeth’s parents, like Robert’s, were respectful of major poetry and serious poets, they made no difficulty about their eldest daughter’s devotion to such a creditable art and encouraged her aspirations. From the age of eleven, after all, she had shown not just promise, but uncommon ability. However they might privately enjoy the lighter-minded versifying of the other children, her parents and siblings soon learned that Elizabeth’s poems were no laughing matter and to tread warily if ever tempted to take them lightly. By the age of twenty-one, Elizabeth was a published poet. She had proved the worth of her work to herself and enjoyed the regard of those who valued it. To buy time to pursue her high vocation and continue her scholarly studies, she insisted on respect for the importance of her work and indulgence for her precarious state of health.
Her physical condition had markedly improved: she no longer rode or walked great distances or played boisterously with the younger children as she had done before her first illness, but she did stroll around the house and the gardens of Hope End and tutored her younger brothers in Latin. For the best part of the day, however, she closeted herself in her room, writing and reading in bed until late in the morning and preferring not to join the rest of the family when visitors were entertained. Now that her physical frailty had become established, accepted by custom and usage, she no longer had to emphasize her mysteriously non-specific weakness by regular consultations with doctors: coughings and a susceptibility to colds were enough to provoke sympathy and promote a collective agreement within her family that Elizabeth should be protected from anything that might worsen her delicate state of health. For intellectual stimulation, she corresponded lengthily with neighbours, older gentlemen such as Sir Uvedale Price (author, in 1794, of An Essay on the Picturesque, which introduced a new aesthetic category), Sir James Commeline (a local vicar and classical scholar), and especially with Hugh Stuart Boyd, a scholar, translator, and poet who lived at nearby Malvern Wells. She fell half in love with Mr Boyd, who was sadly afflicted with blindness, the only man outside her family that she consented to see and to make the effort to visit. But Mr Boyd, a gentleman of some moderate private means, happened to be married already and the father of children.
Mary Barrett, exhausted by the birth of her twelfth child, Octavius, in 1824, distressed by the death of her mother, Grandmother Graham-Clarke, and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, died at the age of forty-seven in October 1828. Elizabeth was twenty-two years old. As the oldest daughter, she might have been expected to take over the running of the Hope End household, but no such duty was imposed upon her. Instead, Aunt Bummy, Arabella Graham-Clark, an unmarried sister of Mary Barrett, came to live with the Barretts. She was forty-three years old, the same age as her brother-in-law, and capably took over the management of the household, so relieving Elizabeth of any domestic obligations. The death of his wife deeply affected Edward Barrett, who turned to religion for spiritual comfort.
On his trips to London he had fallen under the influence of the powerfully charismatic Scottish preacher Edward Irving who, by 1825, had started to go seriously off his theological head—and not quietly. Irving’s big moment of revelation arrived when, sensationally, he predicted the imminent second coming of Christ. From 1828, he began teaching Christ’s oneness with humanity in all its attributes and thus, heretically, to assert to his followers the sinfulness of Christ’s nature. Edward Barrett’s mind became infused with the Irvingite belief that salvation lay in purity, that translation to the next world, preferment in the afterlife, could be achieved only by remaining uncorrupted by this wretched and sinful world. Irving preached zealously to large crowds that flocked to hear his dramatic denunciations of the errors of turpitudinous humanity. His authority, he claimed, derived directly from God, whose mouthpiece he had become. As an instrument of the divine, Irving was regularly inspired to invoke the wrathful retribution of the Almighty upon the godless and the guilty.
Bereft of her mother, Elizabeth adhered emotionally to her father. They had always been close, though never dependent on one another. Edward Barrett’s feelings towards his eldest daughter were sympathetic towards her physical fragility and psychological sensitivity. His general conduct as a good paterfamilias was not exceptional: he could be severe when necessary in his principles of good Christian conduct, and strict, though not abusive, about correcting any backsliding among the young Barretts, though he tended to be more indulgent towards Elizabeth than towards the rest of his children. But now Elizabeth became clinging, resentful of his business trips to London, anxious even when he was out of her sight at home. She wept pitifully when he went away and wept for joy when he returned safely. It is now generally accepted that, in the first years after his wife’s death, Edward Barrett did not become abnormally possessive of Elizabeth: quite the reverse, in fact. If anything, it was Elizabeth who felt, however irrationally, abandoned and insecure to the extent that she became virtually reclusive and sought comfort to an unusual degree in the powerful protective presence and reassuring company of her father.
Mr Barrett, in turn, looked to his family for solace in his grief and loneliness. He was liable to fall into rages, justifiably or not, but he could generally put on a good-humoured face. If he was sometimes a beast, he was at least—like Dr Arnold of Rugby—a just beast. In whatever temper, thunderous or sunny, it was perfectly evident that he greatly missed his wife. As he turned inward upon himself and his children, so he excluded friends and barely tolerated the intrusions by various remote members of the Barrett and Graham-Clarke families. Like Elizabeth, he conceived a horror of visitors and refused to make visits to other houses. His children amply and affectionately returned his love for them, and so for a while their mutual need for security coincided. For the most part, harmony reigned throughout Hope End. Then, in 1830, just two years after the death of his wife, Edward Barrett’s mother died. His shock was unspeakable. He had no words to describe the immensity of his loss. For that matter, the entire Barrett family was shocked to the extent that they were all shackled even more securely together in the isolated house and in their passionate, almost exclusive involvement with one another.
Edward Barrett was experiencing other difficulties, beyond the deeply wounding, irreparable losses in his private life. Some long-standing business and financial worries, caused by sustained mismanagement of his interests in the West Indies and a damaging lawsuit, were brought to a head by a slave rebellion in 1832 on the Jamaican plantations managed by his brother Sam. Additionally, the imminent prospect of the complete abolition of slavery (which eventuated in 1833) implied higher production costs and an inevitable tumult in the price of sugar. The monetary losses would be severe. Hope End, a significant drain on his resources (it was heavily mortgaged and creditors were pressing), would have to be sold. He kept much of the land, but the loss of the house was bad enough. It represented, even worse, a loss of his fundamental security in the world after the deaths of his wife and mother, and a serious loss of face—humiliating evidence of failure. If such precious things could so easily slip from his grasp, what might he lose next? In fact, Edward Barrett was far from ruined: the prospect before him was not that he would be a poor man, but he would no longer be a rich man.
The Barretts left Hope End on 23 August 1832. Mr Barrett had taken a large, comfortable house by the sea at Sidmouth in Devon, and the family settled more or less cheerfully, at least without protest, into their new lives. Elizabeth slept soundly, her appetite increased, and her cough was less troublesome: perhaps the sea air had something to do with the revival of her health, and probably, too, the stimulation of a new, more open and extroverted environment after the backwater of Hope End was beneficial. It was as though a heavy burden of gloom had been lifted from the Barretts. The whole family, buzzing around the beach and enjoying a more active social life, felt better and looked healthier. They received local visitors and returned their calls—all except Elizabeth, who refused to visit or be visited by anyone and mostly stuck to her books.
Bro, Stormie, and George, the older brothers, were by now judged by their father to be adult enough to prepare themselves for employment in the world. Bro, twenty-five years old, travelled to Jamaica to help his Uncle Sam, while Stormie and George, aged sixteen and nineteen respectively, left to attend Glasgow University. Elizabeth experienced her familiar feeling that, as soon as any of the family disappeared from her sight, she might never see them again, lose them altogether; but she put up a brave front, appeared compliant of inevitable changes in family life, and applied herself even more diligently to her proper business of reading and writing until the family situation should, with any luck, return to normal.
The three Barrett brothers returned to Sidmouth in 1835. At the end of the year Mr Barrett announced that, for the sake of his sons, the family would move immediately to London. George, who intended to become a barrister, would enter the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court; Bro (who had acquired first-hand experience of the West Indian estates) and Stormie (who stammered so badly that he could not take his viva voce examination and thus had failed to take his degree) would join the family business; and the younger boys would be properly educated. Elizabeth, who had found little intellectual stimulation in Sidmouth—not that she had made much effort to seek it out—was better pleased than not at the prospect of a literary life in London. For two years the Barretts lived at 74 Gloucester Place before moving permanently, in 1838, to 50 Wimpole Street.
London winters were cold, daylight turned a depressing grey, and dense, chilling fog hung like a malevolent yellow miasma about the streets, clutching at the throat and lungs. Elizabeth’s health deteriorated. In contrast to the open situation of Sidmouth, the reflective light of the sea and the green of the surrounding Devonshire countryside, she felt immured, ‘stuck to the fender’, almost literally bricked in. There was hardly a leaf or a blade of grass to be seen except if she drove out to Hampstead Heath, which hardly qualified as real country. As for acquiring stimulating literary and intellectual acquaintance, her sole resource and only constant visitor was her portly, red-faced, fifty-two-year-old cousin, John Kenyon whose advantage, in addition to a kindly and sociable nature, was that his house in Devonshire Place was a notable focus for literary men and women. He contrived, with some difficulty, to introduce Elizabeth to Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, and—more successfully—Mary Russell Mitford, chatty and opinionated and well-connected with literary persons, who became one of her few close friends and a regular recipient, until her death many years later, of Elizabeth’s most personally confiding and wittily conversational letters.
As the result of a cold contracted in the winter of 1837–8, Elizabeth began to cough again. She continued to feel unwell into the spring. When she consulted the eminent Dr Chambers, he recommended even more rest, to the point that she was rendered virtually immobile, moving only from sofa to bed and back again, hardly stirring from her room, which was closely sealed from the least possibility of a draught. Despite all precautions, she caught another cold, and Chambers gravely diagnosed an affection of the lungs. In August 1838, he advised a change of climate. Elizabeth should winter somewhere warm, and Mr Barrett was persuaded, with some difficulty, that she should go to Torquay with her maid, Elizabeth Crow. During the three years of her convalescence at Torquay, usually attended by one or other of her brothers and sisters, Elizabeth was fairly constantly unhappy. She didn’t like Torquay, she worried about the expense of it all, the climate was not particularly mild, and her health did not noticeably improve. At times, it took decided and distressing turns for the worse. She became increasingly reliant on laudanum to help her sleep. She wanted to be well for her father’s sake, and strenuously put her mind to feeling better, but she was convinced she was dying.
Many explanations have been given for Elizabeth’s chronic ill health: Betty Miller suggests that it derived from sibling rivalry, from jealousy of Bro. As a boy—it seemed to his elder sister—he was given the advantage by being sent to school to be properly, formally educated while she was obliged more or less to instruct herself. It is certainly true that Elizabeth was intellectually much cleverer than Bro. Mrs Miller’s theory implies that Elizabeth was malingering: perceiving herself as largely powerless, she put on suffering and incapacity as a means to obtain control of her life and so avoid the domestic and social duties of a woman of her class (she never liked sewing, for example), perhaps even deliberately to restrict the possibility of being obliged to marry. Illness attracted and focused the attention of her parents, and the household was at least partly run on the basis of her requirements. She imposed what she called a ‘rigid rein’ upon herself in order not to be ‘hurled with Phaeton far from everything human … everything reasonable!’
(#litres_trial_promo) In her own estimation, by imposing the restraint of immobility upon herself, she saved herself from acting upon the ‘violent inclination’ that remained in her ‘inmost heart’. Elizabeth at least partly acknowledged that her ill health might be a desirable condition.
The modern consensus is that Elizabeth was truly ill. There seems little doubt now that she contracted a form of tuberculosis in her mid-teens and, as Daniel Karlin comments, ‘Tuberculosis is an impressionable disease. Elizabeth Barrett’s health fluctuated according to variations in climate and state of mind; she had periods of remission followed by crises, and the crises generally corresponded with times when she was under nervous strain. In these circumstances, there is little point in drawing distinctions between “physical” and “psychological” illness.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This fits very well with Margaret Forster’s view that ‘It is impossible to over-emphasise how tension of any kind—pleasurable excitement just as much as unpleasant—had an immediate physical effect on Elizabeth. She was, as she described herself, “intensely nervous”.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
In February 1840, the Barretts learned that Sam had died in Jamaica at the age of twenty-eight. The loss of a brother struck Elizabeth down instantly. She became delirious, fainting into unconsciousness when she was not in an opium-induced sleep, and could be comforted only by her father, who came down to Torquay to stay with her for several weeks. He rallied her with pious exhortations. He urged Christian submission to God’s will and invoked devotional feeling for His grace. She gave pious thanks for Sam’s life and everything she had loved in him—his amiability, his goodness, his wit, his delight in dandyish dress—but it was difficult not to be overwhelmed by his loss. She made the effort, however, to such an extent that Mr Barrett was gratified by his beloved daughter’s beauty of character as revealed in her staunch belief that love never dies, that Sam was but in another room, in another, better world, not dead to those who loved him. What she did not yet (if she ever did) know was that Sam had died—or so it was reported by missionaries who had worked to save his soul—of evil influences: the tropical climate, in part, but more perniciously of having resorted to native women and other carnal pleasures that had broken his health and imperilled his soul.
At about this time, Arabel and Bro had discovered romance. Bro’s affair seems to have been the more serious of the two, or perhaps it was merely more advanced than Arabel’s. Bro was thirty-three years old, an age at which his father had been married for eleven years and had sired eight children. Bro was refused paternal permission to marry. Mr Barrett set his face against any argument: he would hear no plea in favour of his son’s proposed nuptials. This was not unexpected. First of all, the fact was that Bro had no money of his own and stood in no position to marry without financial support from his father. Secondly, there exists the possibility that Mr Barrett had reasonable objections to the proposed bride, though we know no grounds on which they might have been well founded. Thirdly, it was well known among the Barretts that Mr Barrett had adopted the Irvingite principle, bolstered by his own reading of the Bible, that a father exercised absolute authority over his children. It was his first duty to lead them from the paths of corruption, to save them from sin, to preserve their purity. He might grieve for Sam, but—and we may assume he knew the disgraceful details of the wage Sam had earned from sin—the circumstances leading to his son’s spiritual ruin and consequent death would have surely confirmed his moral beliefs. For Mr Barrett to permit Bro to marry a woman who did not meet the exacting standards of the most rigorous morality would be to risk losing another son to perdition.
To an extent, from love, rather than from fear, the Barrett children were somewhat awed by the implications of their father’s attitude: no suitor other than a saint would be worthy of any of them, and a saint would hardly be the most likely material from which a spouse might be made. They might privately, among themselves, poke affectionate fun at their father’s protective concern for their spiritual salvation; but it was one thing to feel proud that they were special in his eyes, quite another when his interdict, as final as a ruling of the Last Judgement, frustrated their genuine emotions and commonplace desires. In a letter of 12 December 1845 to Robert Browning, Elizabeth summed up a situation that had unexpectedly arisen to affect her personally and to which she had once referred in jest to Arabel:
‘If a prince of Eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, & a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel, in the other’ …
‘Why even then,’ said my sister Arabel, ‘it would not do.’ And she was right, & we all agreed that she was right. It is an obliquity of the will—& one laughs at it till the turn comes for crying.
The rectitudinous Mr Barrett was not in principle opposed to the institution of marriage—he was himself a living testament to its virtues, beauties and benefits; but he was absolutely opposed to any occasion for sin, and, in that respect, an inappropriate attachment could not be countenanced. Where he suspected sin he generally discovered it. When one looks for devils, it is not difficult to find them. His religious principles had not descended upon him suddenly. There had been no voice in a thunderclap or vision in a lightning flash. He had experienced no moment of sudden revelation. They had waxed gradually within him, secreted like amber that, on exposure to the moral dilemmas of life, had hardened and trapped the insects of his intolerance. Irvingism had taken deep root, nourished by Edward Barrett’s naturally devout Protestantism and his cautious, conservative Liberal politics. It was partly this slow evolution of his character into something grim and forbidding that inhibited the Barrett children from recognizing the process of transformation until it was too late to do anything to modify it. And so, by and large, it had become accepted as an element influencing their own lives.
The Barretts might admit that their father had their own good at heart, but that concept of the absolute good was utterly inflexible and did not yield to the more elastic idea of good as conceived by weaker characters. Edward Barrett’s love was as oppressive as his ire. G. K Chesterton puts it precisely: ‘He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism, not that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability … The worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In his deep anxiety about loss, to prevent any further harm to the Barrett family, he perversely suffocated the children by his insistence on the family’s self-sufficiency, by his efforts to exclude any external threat to their well-being, and by his belief that they should be all in all to one another and be kept together.
Elizabeth, though strong-willed as a child, perfectly capable of throwing books and other objects around a room when she fell into a pet at being thwarted in her desires, did not as a mature woman challenge her father’s authority directly in the matter of marriage. Instead, she secretly attempted to make over her own money to Bro so that he could marry as he pleased. She was foiled in this underhand strategy. Mr Barrett had no legal right to stop any of his children marrying, but his personal wishes and his threats to disinherit any of them who defied those wishes were intimidating enough. He would cut any of them off without a shilling and cast them out of his life—regretfully, no doubt, but unhesitatingly.
For one thing, Elizabeth was afraid of her father’s anger and would not confront it directly. She could not in general bear, as she wrote to her brother George after her own marriage, ‘agitating opposition from those I tenderly loved—& to act openly in defiance of Papa’s will, would have been more impossible for me than to use the right which I believe to be mine, of taking a step so strictly personal on my own responsibility.’ For another thing, she retreated into her perceived weakness less as a self-professed invalid and more as a helpless woman. To Robert Browning, who had lost his temper over Mr Barrett’s apparent tyranny, she wrote on 12 June 1846: ‘You said once that women were as strong as men, … unless in the concurrence of physical force. Which is a mistake. I would rather be kicked with a foot, … (I, for one woman! …) than be overcome by a loud voice speaking cruel words … being a woman, & a very weak one (in more senses than the bodily), they would act on me as a dagger would … I could not help dropping, dying before them—I say it that you may understand.’ So much for the invigorating spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism. There was a third factor, however: Elizabeth, like the rest of her brothers and sisters, had been inculcated with a strong sense of family, and the Barretts were not only profoundly loyal to one another, they loved one another deeply. The children’s loyalty and love for their father was no less real and no less committed than among themselves.
Bro, who had come to Torquay to be with Elizabeth, went sailing with three friends at midday on 11 July 1840. The sea was calm and the weather was fine, except for a brief squall that blew up suddenly in the afternoon. By nightfall, the boat had not returned. It never did. The Barretts explored every strategy they could devise to convince themselves that Bro could be alive. Every possible eventuality was examined and analysed until, at last and reluctantly, they gave up hope after three days. Bro’s body was not discovered until three weeks later when it was washed ashore, with the corpses of one of his friends and the boatman, in Babbacombe Bay on 4 August. They were buried in a local churchyard two days later. Elizabeth despaired: she had quarrelled with Bro on the morning of the 11th. Her last words to her beloved brother had not been friendly. She convinced herself, too, that her illness had been the primary—the only—reason for Bro being in Torquay at all. He had stayed with her at her request, and she felt responsible for having kept him with her. It was her fault that he had been there, she reasoned, and so it was her fault that he had died. The blame was hers. Her guilt was fathomless.
For the three weeks between Bro’s disappearance and his funeral, Elizabeth was scarcely conscious. Her mind, when not blank, was tormented—delirious visions of ‘long dark spectral trains’ and ‘staring infantine faces’ filled it; dreams were ‘nothing but broken hideous shadows and ghastly lights to mark them’, driving her, she said later, almost to ‘madness, absolute hopeless madness’. For three months, she did nothing. Her father stayed with her, every bit as despairing and suffering as his daughter in their mutual loss. He returned to London in December. Elizabeth had finally felt strong enough to write a letter to Miss Mitford in October. Mary Mitford offered very practical comfort: understanding her friend’s grief, empathizing sincerely with her loss, she tactfully offered Elizabeth a puppy from her own golden cocker spaniel’s recent litter. It was a generous offer—such a dog was a very valuable gift—and Elizabeth at first refused. But she was persuaded to accept.
Flush, when he arrived in January 1841, was six months old and irresistibly pretty. Of course, he became thoroughly spoiled and as devoted to his new mistress as she to him. Vitally, Flush became the object of her adoring attentions; Elizabeth became responsible for this scrap of excitable animal life. Flush pulled her out of her self-absorption, relieving some of her guilt about Bro—though not entirely. She pushed the painful memory of Bro to the back of her mind, to inhabit some dark place where nobody was permitted to enter. For the rest of her life, she would not talk of him and others learned not to refer, within her hearing, to Bro or the tragedy at Torquay.
Elizabeth returned to London on 11 September 1841. Her three years’ absence had been the most wretched of her life. The house in Wimpole Street, and her niche within it, seemed a haven of security from which she intended never again to be plucked and thrown into the difficult, dangerous world beyond it. Even to let anyone beyond Elizabeth Wilson (known as Lily), her capable and companionable personal maid who had replaced Crow, her immediate family and Flush into her room seemed unnecessarily hazardous. Not that visitors were encouraged or made welcome to the house at all: Mr Barrett, who had been reasonably outgoing, cheerful, and obliging in the days of his great prosperity, had withdrawn into himself as his resources had been depleted. His confidence had diminished and he turned, as it appeared to those who had known him in better days, gruff in manner with friends, grudging and curmudgeonly with strangers.
Elizabeth attributed his change of manner to shyness, about which she expressed some exasperation; but the truth of the matter was that Edward Barrett now felt inadequate. To compensate, he refused all occasions on which he thought he might not act with advantage—worse, be perceived to his disadvantage. Within his own house and family circle, he generally showed kindness and tenderness and was persuaded by Elizabeth to permit the amiable John Kenyon to visit and to meet Miss Mitford, who was also regularly admitted to Elizabeth’s room. He was delighted with Mary Mitford, but his success with her did not encourage him to push his luck further with others, such as Mrs Anna Jameson, who thrust herself into 50 Wimpole Street in November 1844.
There was no keeping Mrs Jameson out. She had read and admired Elizabeth’s latest publication, Poems, and nothing would do but that she should meet the author. Anna Jameson was not unknown in her own right among respected and respectable London society. Obliged to make her own living, she had established herself as a popular authority on art, travel, and literary criticism (mostly about women in Shakespeare and poetry), producing well-received, profitable books that enabled her to travel widely at a fast clip and in modest comfort to research more books on these improving subjects. Her works were not scholarly, perhaps, but they demonstrated some artistic taste and good sense; they were well researched at first hand, vividly written, and they sold well.
As a self-sufficient woman, Mrs Jameson was a convinced feminist in the Harriet Martineau mould, and naturally wished to exchange sisterly views with the celebrated Miss Barrett. She saw no good reason why this ambition should not be achieved, and so she politely left a note at 50 Wimpole Street announcing herself. But many people had left notes at the Barrett house, to no positive advantage. Mrs Jameson, turned away unsatisfied from the doorstep the first time, made a second attempt. She left another note, and this time she was admitted by Wilson. Elizabeth had read at least one of Mrs Jameson’s dozen books and her curiosity about the woman’s determination seems to have overridden her habitual inclination to close the door against even the most distinguished callers.
Anna Jameson was no beauty—Elizabeth, who paid close attention to physical appearance, noted that her complexion was pale and so were her eyes, she possessed no eyebrows to speak of, her lips were thin and colourless, and her hair was a very pale red. Carlyle briskly described her as ‘a little, hard, brown, red-haired, freckled, fierce-eyed, square-mouthed woman’. But Carlyle was not one to varnish a plain portrait. He spoke as he found—and so, for that matter, did Mrs Jameson. She was Irish, which largely accounts for her colouring and partly for her character. Like Miss Mitford, Anna Jameson was of middling years. But with the coincidence of their ages, any resemblance to Miss Mitford ended.
Whereas Mary Mitford indulged Elizabeth’s taste for writing and receiving long, confidingly effusive letters rapturously devoted, for the most part, to the incomparable beauties of Flush, his adorable character, and detailed accounts of his daily doggie activities, Anna Jameson spoke forth uncompromisingly and brusquely on all manner of matters within her competence, and they were many, including the subject of women’s superiority of mind and the uselessness of what she called ‘carpet work’ to which the female sex was condemned and confined. ‘Carpet work’ was injurious to the female mind, she said, because it led, fatally, to the vapid habit of reverie. Elizabeth faintly protested this blanket condemnation, though she had never worked a carpet, far less knitted or plied a needle and thread, in her life. Mrs Jameson, taking stock of Elizabeth, generously made an exception for her on the ground that she might do carpet work with impunity because she could be writing poetry at the same time. Anna Jameson’s vigorous, sharply intelligent, unreserved discourse, and the underlying kindliness of her nature, endeared her immediately, and so this good woman was admitted to the small, exclusive pantheon of Elizabeth’s closest and most trusted allies. She could hardly have chosen anyone truer in friendship or more stout-hearted in the defence of her reputation and interests than Anna Jameson when such unqualified support was required and mattered most.
As Elizabeth’s spirits improved, as her work became more widely known and widely appreciated, and as she took more interest in the activities and gossip of London’s social, political and literary life—in response to her frequent letters, friends wrote back despatches from all these fronts and her chosen ambassadors reported to her in person—so her health also improved. In her letter to Robert of 5 March 1845, she wrote: ‘I am essentially better, and have been for several winters; and I feel as if it were intended for me to live and not die, and I am reconciled to the feeling … I am not desponding by nature, and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion, I come out with two learnt lessons (as I sometimes say and oftener feel),—the wisdom of cheerfulness—and the duty of social intercourse.’
In her darker moments, Elizabeth felt she had been deprived of social and intellectual opportunities, ground to a husk in the mill of suffering, and she contrasted Robert’s luckier, fatter experience of life to date: ‘I do like to hear testimonies like yours, to happiness … it is obvious you have been spared, up to this time, the great natural afflictions, against which we are nearly all called, sooner or later, to struggle and wrestle … Remember that as you owe your unscathed joy to God, you should pay it back to His world. And I thank you for some of it already.’ She made some judicious criticism of attitudes towards her: ‘People have been kind to me, even without understanding me, and pitiful to me, without approving of me’: and now Robert—‘How kind you are!—how kindly and gently you speak to me! Some things you say are very touching, and some, surprising; and although I am aware that you unconsciously exaggerate what I can be to you, yet it is delightful to be broad awake and think of you as my friend.’
Robert retorted in his letter post-marked 12 March that ‘You think—for I must get to you—that “I unconsciously exaggerate what you are to me.” Now, you don’t know what that is, nor can I very well tell you, because the language with which I talk to myself of these matters is spiritual Attic, and “loves contradictions,” as grammarians say … but I read it myself and know very well what it means, that’s why I told you I was self-conscious—I meant that I never yet mistook my own feelings, one for another—there! … Do you think I shall see you in two months, three months? I may travel, perhaps.’ That last, apparently throwaway but more probably well calculated, line had its effect. Elizabeth replied eight days later, ending her letter by saying, ‘If you mean “to travel”, why, I shall have to miss you. Do you really mean it?’ She knew she was being pressed, that Robert’s patience had been tried and was running short. This long letter of 20 March opened with the assurance that ‘Whenever I delay to write to you, dear Mr Browning, it is not, to be sure, that I take “my own good time,” but submit to my own bad time … I have not been very well, nor have had much heart for saying so.’
The weather—‘this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and the moon!’—had been implacable and ‘I only grow weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal, in a corner—and then all this must end! April is coming. There will be both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps, after all, we may. And as to seeing you besides, I observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? You are learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such a secluded life as mine—notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about social duties and the like—well—if you have such knowledge or if you have it not, I cannot say, but I do say that I will indeed see you when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth “to rights” again so as to make pleasures of the sort possible.’
The letter goes on, very affectingly, very emotionally, and in important respects quite misleadingly, to summarize her life, to draw comparisons between Robert’s full, heady experience of an active, happy life—‘You are Paracelsus’—and the life that Elizabeth has lived ‘only inwardly; or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country—had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped towards the ground like an untrained honeysuckle—and but for one, in my own house—but of this I cannot speak.’ Here Elizabeth drew a veil over the memory of Bro.
It was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it. Books and dreams were what I lived in—and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass. And so time passed and passed—and afterwards, when my illness came and I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done, and no prospect (as it appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and time to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave—that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact. I was as a man dying who had not read Shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand? And do you also know what a disadvantage this is to my art? Why, if I live on and 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? Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main. But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some …
And here she gives up, helpless and speechless after such a powerful passage of self-confession and self-revelation. She felt, perhaps, she had gone too far and cut it off with a bathetic moral banality—‘But all grumbling is a vile thing’—promptly followed by a pious platitude—‘We should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them enough for each of us.’
We can read all this more objectively than subjectively, Elizabeth wrote it with passion, some element of self-pity and, in the light of what we now know about her early life, some self-delusion and self-dramatization. To take only the most glaringly self-serving example, if she had been lonely it had been through her own choice to avoid company. The impression she gave (by omission rather than direct statement) of being all but a solitary orphan child brought up by the fairies, was hardly fair to her two devoted parents or the eleven younger brothers and sisters who doted upon their demanding older sister. She might have felt solitary from time to time, she might have longed to be less alone sometimes, she might have felt intellectually isolated, but rarely could she have felt lonely in a social sense. At some cost to others, Elizabeth had bought time and space for her reveries, for her inner life, beyond which the Barretts buzzed like bees in the domestic environment, conscientious and generous in their efforts to care for her health, keep her amused, run her errands, and cater to her every comfort.
Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that what she wrote on 20 March 1845 was true to her deepest feelings, to her perceptions of her situation, if not strictly accurate as to domestic reality and psychological truth. The letter also seemed to mark a real and profound desire that she should move towards a more active life, that time was no longer on her side—‘I, who am scarcely to be called young now’. In March 1845, on her thirty-ninth birthday, she entered her fortieth year, though the anniversary merited no mention in her letters to Robert. There is a suggestion, in Elizabeth’s appeals to Robert to make the imaginative effort to understand, to believe her self-assessment, after her observation that he distrusted her, that personal revelations had by now become necessary and that Robert, himself free to move, represented some hope (not yet quantifiable) of her own release to her personal benefit and the benefit of her poetry.
On the contrary, Robert, surfeited with being active in the world, understood that inwardness and seclusion were desirable and essential conditions for creative activity, for the poetic art, and that the products of the cultivated imagination were of more value than mere representations of reality. Elizabeth’s ‘lamentable disadvantage’ was in fact her most priceless advantage. Robert valued very highly the ‘visionary utterances’ in Elizabeth’s poetry and exalted her professed ‘disadvantage’ above what Daniel Karlin characterizes as ‘the process of interaction between the mind and “external influences” out of which his own “dramatic” poetry was made.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth had the measure of Robert and his poetry when she wrote on 17 April, ‘I have a profound conviction that where a poet has been shut from most of the outward aspects of life, he is at a lamentable disadvantage. Can you, speaking for yourself, separate the results in you from the external influences at work around you, that you say so boldly that you get nothing from the world? You do not directly, I know—but you do indirectly & by a rebound. Whatever acts upon you, becomes you—& whatever you love or hate, whatever charms you or is scorned by you, acts on you & becomes you.’ No critic was ever more acutely perceptive about the well-springs of Robert’s work than Elizabeth.
Her estimations of his character were, at this early stage, less sure—though, to be fair, she was working with inadequate information. Elizabeth had read Robert’s poems, but she had not yet fully read the man. The two were not, as he had warned her, to be confused. Robert had provided some personal information about himself and his family, of course, and she had gleaned a little more from John Kenyon and Miss Mitford: the former biased in Robert’s favour, the latter mildly prejudiced against him. The curtain had been rung up on the play, but neither of the principals had yet made their first entrances. They were still exchanging dialogue as offstage voices.
The preliminary scenes had been carefully set, principally by Robert. He had posed himself solitary at his desk with spiders and skull; he had pictured himself amidst a glittering crowd of celebrated men and women—a wealth of writers, an amplitude of artists, a surfeit of society beauties—weary of their dinner tables and ballrooms. Elizabeth had already conjured him, largely through his poetry, as a heroic figure, and Robert himself had impressed upon her his resolve in getting his own way in whatever he set his heart and mind upon gaining. What she did not yet fully understand, but had begun to suspect, was that he had cast her, sight unseen, as his leading lady, the romantic heroine. There were several objections to this, and she managed to play for time whenever Robert pressed for a meeting. Robert at first tended to assume that she deferred a face to face encounter on account of her invalidity, which, not having inquired too closely of Kenyon for particulars, he took to be greater and more debilitating than it was. In Robert’s letter, postmarked 13 May, he wrote to say, ‘I ask you not to see me so long as you are unwell or mistrustful of—No, no that is being too grand! Do see me when you can, and let me not be only writing myself.’
In her reply to Robert post-marked 16 May, she protested: ‘But how “mistrustfulness”? And how “that way?” What have I said or done, I, who am not apt to be mistrustful of anybody and should be a miraculous monster if I began with you!’ She excused herself: ‘I have made what is vulgarly called a “piece of work” about little; or seemed to make it. Forgive me. I am shy by nature:—and by position and experience by having had my nerves shaken to excess, and by leading a life of such seclusion, … by these things together and by others besides, I have appeared shy and ungrateful to you. Only not mistrustful.’ She relented: she said that if Robert cared to come to see her, he could come. It would be her gain, she said, and not Robert’s. She did not normally admit visitors because, she wrote, ‘putting the question of health quite aside, it would be unbecoming to lie here on the sofa and make a company-show of an infirmity, and hold a beggar’s hat for sympathy.’ To the extent that she did exploit her condition of health, she was obscurely repulsed by it herself and thus certain that others would also be disgusted.
It is a convention that romantic and operatic heroines, especially if pale, languorous, and dying of consumption, should be beautiful, and so it is sentimentally assumed that Elizabeth was chiefly worried by the effect her looks might have on Robert. It is difficult to conceive a more banal idea than that Elizabeth, hearing Robert’s footsteps on the stair for the first time, should primp herself, pinch her cheeks for a little colour, and have Wilson, her maid, fuss with her hair to present herself to best advantage. She possessed no idea of herself as a tragic heroine, and still further from her mind was any concept of herself as a flirt, a coquette. Personally, she affected no mystery. To whatever extent she had been invested with glamour and mystery, that image of beauty unrevealed had arisen in the minds of others from her curious reclusiveness and invisibility. Conscious of public interest in her, and perhaps aware that her disinclination to put herself obligingly on show only served to fuel that curiosity, she feared, if anything, a constant troop of rubber-necking visitors curious to inspect her as a sort of freak show.
More to the point, Elizabeth worried that Robert would find her colourless in person, tongue-tied, less interesting than her poetry. He would be disappointed in her. ‘There is nothing to see in me;’ she warned him, ‘nor to hear in me—I never learnt to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark.’ The most he could expect should be ‘truth and simplicity for you, in any case; and a friend. And do not answer this—I do not write it as a fly trap for compliments. Your spider would scorn me for it too much.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Having consented to a meeting, Elizabeth promptly took fright and retreated a little, disingenuously procrastinating not on her own account but by offering Robert an excuse for delay, a mediator, or the opportunity to create an obstacle to his visit. In her letter post-marked 16 May she reminded Robert that he had not been well, that he had had a headache and a ringing in his ears, and she entreated him ‘not to think of coming until that is all put to silence satisfactorily. When it is done, … you must choose whether you would like best to come with Mr Kenyon or to come alone—and if you would come alone, you must just tell me on what day, and I will see you on any day unless there should be an unforeseen obstacle, … any day after two, or before six.’
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
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Iain Finlayson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: This edition does not include illustrations.A major biography of the most modern and the most underrated of English Literature′s Great Victorians.Henry James called Robert Browning (1812–89) ′a tremendous and incomparable modern′, and the immediacy and colloquial energy of his poetry has ensured its enduring appeal. This biography sets out to do the same for his life, animating the stereotypes (romantic hero, poetic exile, eminent man of letters) that have left him neglected by modern biographers. He has been seen primarily as one half of that romantic pair, the Brownings; and while the courtship, elopement and marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning remains a perennially seductive subject (and one Finlayson evokes vividly, quoting extensively from their daily letters and contemporary accounts) there is far more to Browning than that.Chronological in structure, this book is divided into three sections which deal with his life′s major themes: adolescence and ambition, marriage and money, paternity and poetry. Browning explores the many experiences that inspired his writing, his education and passions, his relationships with family and friends, his continual financial struggles and revulsion at being seen as a fortune-hunter, his most unVictorian approach to marriage (sexual equality, his helping wean Elizabeth off morphine and nursing her through various illnesses), fatherhood and fame (inviting a leading member of the Browning Society to watch him burning a trunk of personal letters): all of which contribute to a fascinating portrait of a highly unconventional Victorian. At once witty and moving, this critical biography will revolutionise perceptions of the poet – and of the man.