Читать книгу Browning - Iain Finlayson - Страница 7

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’.³⁶ 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’.³⁷ 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.³⁸

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’,³⁹ 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’⁴⁰—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,⁴¹ 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.⁴²

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’.⁴³ 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)’.⁴⁴

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]’.⁴⁵ 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’.⁴⁶ 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.⁴⁷

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.⁴⁸ 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’.⁴⁹ 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.’⁵⁰

In a preliminary letter of 2 April⁵¹ 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 1835⁵² 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.’⁵³ 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. Ryals⁵⁴ 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.’⁵⁵

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’.⁵⁶ 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.⁵⁷ 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.’⁵⁸

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’.⁵⁹ 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.’⁶⁰ 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!”’⁶¹ 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 …⁶²

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 1847,⁶³ 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?”’⁶⁴ 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.⁶⁵ 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.’⁶⁶

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.’⁶⁷

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.’⁶⁸ 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’.⁶⁹

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’.⁷⁰ 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.’⁷¹

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’.⁷² 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’,⁷³ 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.⁷⁴

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:⁷⁵ ‘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.’⁷⁶

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.⁷⁷ 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’⁷⁸—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 Sharp⁷⁹ 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.’⁸⁰ 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.’⁸¹ 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.⁸²

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. Sharp⁸³ 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,⁸⁴ 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.’⁸⁵ 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.’⁸⁶ 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.’⁸⁷ 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 Minchin⁸⁸ 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,⁸⁹ 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.⁹⁰ 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.’⁹¹

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.’⁹²

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’.⁹³ 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.⁹⁴

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.’⁹⁵ 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.’⁹⁶ 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.’⁹⁷ 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.’⁹⁸ 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!’⁹⁹

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 Orr¹⁰⁰ 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.¹⁰¹

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.¹⁰²

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.’¹⁰³

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.’¹⁰⁴

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’.¹⁰⁵ 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.’¹⁰⁶ 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’.¹⁰⁷

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’.¹⁰⁸

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’.¹⁰⁹ 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 1881,¹¹⁰ 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’.¹¹¹

Robert and Thomas Carlyle had certainly met by 27 March 1839, when they are recorded as dining together at Macready’s table.¹¹² 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’.¹¹³

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.’¹¹⁴

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.’¹¹⁵ 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)