Robert Browning

An introduction to Macready which took place at Mr Fox's house towards the close of November 1835 was fruitful in consequences. A month later Browning was Macready's guest at Elstree, the actor's resting-place in the country. His fellow-traveller, then unknown to him, in the coach from London was John Forster; in Macready's drawing-room the poet and his critic first formed a personal acquaintance. Browning had for long been much interested in the stage, but only as a spectator. His imagination now turned towards dramatic authorship with a view to theatrical performance. A play on a subject from later Roman history, Narses, was thought of and was cast aside. The success of Talfourd's Ion, after the first performance of which (May 26, 1836) Browning supped in the author's rooms with Macready, Wordsworth, and Landor, probably raised high hopes of a like or a greater success for some future drama of his own. "Write a play, Browning," said Macready, as they left the house, "and keep me from going to America." "Shall it be historical or English?" Browning questioned, as the incident is related by Mrs Orr, "What do you say to a drama on Strafford?" The life of Stafford by his friend Forster, just published, which during an illness of the author had been revised in manuscript by Browning, probably determined the choice of a subject.

By August the poet had pledged himself to achieve this first dramatic adventure. The play was produced at Covent Garden on May 1st, 1837, by Macready, who himself took the part of Strafford. Helen Faucit, then a novice on the stage, gave an adequate rendering of the difficult part of Lady Carlisle. For the rest, the complexion of the piece, as Browning describes it, after one of the latest rehearsals, was "perfect gallows." Great historical personages were presented by actors who strutted or slouched, who whimpered or drawled. The financial distress at Covent Garden forbade any splendour or even dignity of scenery or of costumes.19 The text was considerably altered—and not always judiciously—from that of the printed play, which had appeared before its production on the stage. Yet on the first night Strafford was not damned, and on the second it was warmly applauded.20 After the fifth performance the wretched Pym refused to save his mother England even once more, and the play was withdrawn. Browning declared to his friends that never again, as long as he might live, would he write a play. Whining not being to his taste, he averted his eyes and set himself resolutely to work upon Sordello.

"I sail this morning for Venice," Browning wrote to a friend on Good Friday, 1838. He voyaged as sole passenger on a merchantman, and soon was on friendliest terms with the rough kindly captain. For the first fortnight the sea was stormy and Browning suffered much; as they passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, Captain Davidson aided him to reach the deck, and a pulsing of home-pride—not home-sickness—gave their origin to the patriotic lines beginning, "Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west died away." Under the bulwark of the Norham Castle, off the African coast, when the fancy of a gallop on his Uncle Reuben's horse suddenly presented itself in pleasant contrast with the tedium of the hours on shipboard, he wrote in pencil, on the flyleaf of Bartoli's Simboli, that most spirited of poems which tell of the glory of motion—How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix. The only adventure of the voyage was the discovery of an Algerine pirate ship floating keel uppermost; it righted suddenly under the stress of ropes from the Norham Castle, and the ghastly and intolerable dead—Algerines and Spaniards—could not scare the British sailors eager for loot; at last the battered hulk was cast loose, and its blackness was seen reeling slowly off "into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world." Having visited Venice, Vicenza and Padua—cities and mountain solitudes, which gave their warmth and colour to his unfinished poem—Browning returned home by way of Tyrol, the Rhine, Liege and Antwerp. It was his first visit to Italy and was a time of enchantment. Fifty years later he recalled the memories of these early days when his delight had something insubstantial, magical in it, and the vision was half perceived with the eye and half projected from within:—

How many a year my Asolo,Since—one step just from sea to land—I found you, loved yet feared you so—For natural objects seemed to standPalpably fire-clothed!21

Of evenings soon after his return to London Mrs Bridell-Fox writes: "He was full of enthusiasm for Venice, 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 palace, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced." The anticipations of genius had already produced a finer etching than any of these, in those lines of marvellous swiftness and intensity in Paracelsus, which describe Constantinople at the hour of sunset.

The publication of Sordello (1840) did not improve Browning's position with the public. The poem was a challenge to the understanding of an aspirant reader, and the challenge met with no response. An excuse for not reading a poem of five or six thousand lines is grateful to so infirm and shortlived a being as man. And, indeed, a prophet, if prudent, may do well to postpone the privilege of being unintelligible until he has secured a considerable number of disciples of both sexes. The reception of Sordello might have disheartened a poet of less vigorous will than Browning; he merely marched breast forward, and let Sordello lie inert, until a new generation of readers had arisen. The dramas, King Victor and King Charles and The Return of the Druses (at first named "Mansoor the Hierophant") now occupied his thoughts. Short lyrical pieces were growing under his hand, and began to form a considerable group. And one fortunate day as he strolled alone in the Dulwich wood—his chosen resort of meditation—"the image flashed upon him of one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it."22 In other words Pippa had suddenly passed her poet in the wood.

A cheap mode of issuing his works now in manuscript was suggested to Browning by the publisher Moxon. They might appear in successive pamphlets, each of a single sheet printed in double-column, and the series might be discontinued at any time if the public ceased to care for it. The general title Bells and Pomegranates was chosen; "beneath upon the hem of the robe 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." Browning, as he explained to his readers in the last number, meant to indicate by the title, "Something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought"—such having been, in fact, one of the most familiar of the Rabbinical interpretations designed to expound the symbolism of this priestly decoration prescribed in "Exodus." From 1841 to 1846 the numbers of Bells and Pomegranates successively appeared; with the eighth the series closed. The first number—Pippa Passes—was sold for sixpence; when King Victor and King Charles was published in the following year (1842), the price was raised to one shilling. The third and the seventh numbers were made up of short pieces—Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845). The Return of the Druses and A Blot in the 'Scutcheon—Numbers 4 and 5—followed each other in the same year 1843. Colombe's Birthday—the only number which is known to survive in manuscript—came next in order (1844). The last to appear was that which included Luna, Browning's favourite among his dramas, and A Soul's Tragedy.23 His sister, except in the instance of Colombe, was Browning's amanuensis. On each title-page he is named Robert Browning "Author of Paracelsus"—the "wholly unintelligible" Sordello being passed over. Talfourd, "Barry Cornwall," and John Kenyon (the cousin of Elizabeth Barrett) were honoured with dedications. In these pamphlets of Moxon, Browning's wonderful apples of gold were certainly not presented to the public in pictures or baskets of silver; yet the possessor of the eight parts in their yellow paper wrappers may now be congratulated. Only one of the numbers—A Blot in the 'Scutcheon—attained the distinction of a second edition, and this probably because the drama as published was helped to a comparative popularity by its representation on the stage.

This tragedy of young love and death was written hastily—in four or five days—for Macready. Browning while at work on his play, as we learn from a letter of Dante Rossetti to Allingham, was kept indoors by a slight indisposition; his father on going to see him "was each day received boisterously and cheerfully with the words: 'I have done another act, father.'"24 Forster read the tragedy aloud from the manuscript for Dickens, who wrote of it with unmeasured enthusiasm in a letter, known to Browning only when printed after the lapse of some thirty years: "Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow.... I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception like it." Things had gone ill with Macready at Drury Lane, and when the time for A Blot in the 'Scutcheon drew near it is evident that he feared further losses and would gladly have been released from his promise to produce the play; but Browning failed to divine the true state of affairs. The tragedy was read to the company by a grotesque, wooden-legged and red-nosed prompter, and it was greeted with laughter. To make amends, Macready himself undertook to read it aloud, but he declared himself unable, in the disturbed state of his mind, to appear before the public: his part—that of Lord Tresham—must be taken by Phelps. From certain rehearsals Phelps was unavoidably absent through illness. Macready who read his lines on these occasions, now was caught by the play, and saw possibilities in the part of Tresham which fired his imagination. He chose, almost at the last moment, to displace his younger and less distinguished colleague. Browning, on the other hand, insisted that Phelps, having been assigned the part, should retain it. To baffle Macready in his design of presenting the play to the public in a mutilated form, Browning, aided by his publisher, had the whole printed in four-and-twenty hours.25 A rupture of the long-standing friendship with Macready followed, nor did author and actor meet again until after the great sorrow of Browning's life. "Mr Macready too"—writes Mrs Orr—"had recently lost his wife, and Mr Browning could only start forward, grasp the hand of his old friend, and in a voice choked with emotion say, 'O Macready!'"

The tragedy was produced at Drury Lane on February nth, 1843, with Phelps, who acted admirably as Tresham, and Helen Faucit as Mildred. Although it had been ill rehearsed and not a shilling had been spent on scenery or dresses, it was received with applause. To a call for the author, Browning, seated in his box, declined to make any response. Thus, not without some soreness of heart, closed his direct connection with the theatre. He heard with pleasure when in Italy that A Blot in the 'Scutcheon was given by Phelps at Sadler's Wells Theatre in November 1848, and with unquestionable success. A rendering of Colombe's Birthday was projected by Charles Kean in 1844, but the long delays, which were inevitable, could not be endured by Browning, who desired to print his play forthwith among the Bells and Pomegranates. It was not until nine years later that this play, a veritable "All for love, or the world well lost," was presented at the Haymarket, Helen Faucit appearing as the Duchess. Soon after Colombe's Birthday had been published, Browning sailed once more, in the autumn of 1844, for Italy.26 As he journeyed northwards and homewards, from Naples (where they were performing an opera named Sordello) and Rome he sought and obtained at Leghorn an interview with Trelawny, the generous-hearted friend of Shelley, by whose grave he had lately stood.27

Browning's work as a playwright, consisting of eight pieces, or nine if we include the later In a Balcony, is sufficiently ample to enable us to form a trustworthy estimate of his genius as seen in drama. Dramatic, in the sense that he created and studied minds and hearts other than his own, he pre-eminently was; if he desired to set forth or to vindicate his most intimate ideas or impulses, he effected this indirectly, by detaching them from his own personality and giving them a brain and a heart other than his own in which to live and move and have their being. There is a kind of dramatic art which we may term static, and another kind which we may term dynamic. The former deals especially with characters in position, the latter with characters in movement.28 Passion and thought may be exhibited and interpreted by dramatic genius of either type; to represent passion and thought and action—action incarnating and developing thought and passion—the dynamic power is required. And by action we are to understand not merely a visible deed, but also a word, a feeling, an idea which has in it a direct operative force. The dramatic genius of Browning was in the main of the static kind; it studies with extraordinary skill and subtlety character in position; it attains only an imperfect or a laboured success with character in movement. The dramatis personae are ready at almost every moment, except the culminating moments of passion, to fall away from action into reflection and self-analysis. The play of mind upon mind he recognises of course as a matter of profound interest and importance; but he catches the energy which spirit transfers to spirit less in the actual moment of transference than after it has arrived. Thought and emotion with him do not circulate freely through a group of persons, receiving some modification from each. He deals most successfully with each individual as a single and separate entity; each maintains his own attitude, and as he is touched by the common influence he proceeds to scrutinise it. Mind in these plays threads its way dexterously in and out of action; it is not itself sufficiently incorporated in action. The progress of the drama is now retarded; and again, as if the author perceived that the story had fallen behind or remained stationary, it is accelerated by sudden jerks. A dialogue of retrospection is a common device at the opening of popular plays, with a view to expound the position of affairs to the audience; but a dramatic writer of genius usually works forward through his dialogue to the end which he has set before him. With Browning for the purpose of mental analysis a dialogue of retrospection may be of higher value than one which leans and presses towards the future. The invisible is for him more important than the visible; and so in truth it may often be; but the highest dramatist will not choose to separate the two. The invisible is best captured and is most securely held in the visible.

As a writer of drama, Browning, who delights to study the noblest attitudes of the soul, and to wring a proud sense of triumph out of apparent failure, finds his proper field in tragedy rather than in comedy. Colombe's Birthday has a joyous ending, but the joy is very grave and earnest, and the body of the play is made up of serious pleadings and serious hopes and fears. There is no light-hearted mirth, no real gaiety of temper anywhere in the dramas of Browning. Pippa's gladness in her holiday from the task of silk-winding is touched with pathos in the thought that what is so bright is also so brief, and it is encompassed, even within delightful Asolo, by the sins and sorrows of the world. Bluphocks, with his sniggering wit and his jingles of rhyme is a vagabond and a spy, who only covers the shame of his nakedness with these rags of devil-may-care good spirits. The genial cynicism of Ogniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies is at heart the satirist of moral illusions, the unmasker of self-deception, who with long experience of human infirmities, has come to chuckle gently over his own skill in dealing with them; and has he not—we may ask—wound around his own spirit some of the incurable illusions of worldly wisdom? No—this is not gaiety; if Browning smiles with his Ogniben, his smile is a comment upon the weakness and the blindness of the self-deceiver.

Browning's tragedies are tragedies without villains. The world is here the villain, which has baits and bribes and snares wherewith to entangle its victims, to lure down their mounting aspirations, to dull their vision for the things far-off and faint; perhaps also to make them prosperous and portly gentlemen, easy-going, and amiably cynical, tolerant of evil, and prudently distrustful of good. Yet truth is truth, and fact is fact; worldly wisdom is genuine wisdom after its kind; we shall be the better instructed if we listen to its sage experience, if we listen, understand, and in all justice, censure. Ogniben can blandly and skilfully conduct a Chiappino to his valley of humiliation—"let him that standeth take heed lest he fall." But what would the wisdom of Ogniben be worth in its pronouncements on a Luria or a Colombe? Perhaps even in such a case not wholly valueless. The self-pleased, keen-sighted Legate might after all have applauded a moral heroism or a high-hearted gallantry which would ill accord with his own ingenious and versatile spirit. Bishop Blougram—sleek, ecclesiastical opportunist—was not insensible to the superior merits of "rough, grand, old Martin Luther."

In Browning's nature a singularly keen, exploring intelligence was united with a rare moral and spiritual ardour, a passion for high ideals. In creating his chief dramatis persona he distributes among them what he found within himself, and they fall into two principal groups—characters in which the predominating power is intellect, and characters in which the mastery lies with some lofty emotion. The intellect dealing with things that are real and positive, those persons in whom intelligence is supreme may too easily become the children of this world; in their own sphere they are wiser than the children of light; and they are skilled in a moral casuistry by which they justify to themselves the darkening of the light that is in them. The passionate natures have an intelligence of their own; they follow a gleam which is visible to them if not to others; they discover, or rather they are discovered by, some truth which flashes forth in one inspired moment—the master-moment of a lifetime; they possess the sublime certainty of love, loyalty, devotion; if they err through a heroic folly and draw upon themselves ruin in things temporal, may there not be some atom of divine wisdom at the heart of the folly, which is itself indestructible, and which ensures for them a welfare out of time and space? Prophet and casuist—Browning is both; and to each he will endeavour to be just; but his heart must give a casting vote, and this cannot be in favour of the casuist. Every self-transcending passion has in it a divine promise and pledge; even the passion of the senses if it has hidden within it one spark of self-annihilating love may be the salvation of a soul. It is Ottima, lifted above her own superb voluptuousness, who cries—"Not me—to him, O God, be merciful." The region of untrammelled, unclouded passion, of spiritual intuition, and of those great words from heaven, which pierce "even to the dividing asunder of the joints and marrow," is, for Browning's imagination, the East. The nations of the West—and, before all others, the Italian race—are those of a subtly developed intelligence. The worldly art of a Church-man, ingenuities of theology having aided in refining ingenuities of worldliness, is perhaps the finest exemplar of unalloyed western brain-craft. But Italy is also a land of passion; and therefore at once, for its ardours of the heart—seen not in love alone but in carven capital and on frescoed wall—and for its casuistries of intellect, Browning looks to Italy for the material best fitted to his artistry. Between that group of personages whom we may call his characters of passion and that group made up of his characters of intelligence, lie certain figures of peculiar interest, by birth and inheritance children of the East, and by culture partakers, in a greater or a less degree, of the characteristics of the West—a Djabal, with his Oriental heart entangled by Prankish tricks of sophistry; a Luria, whose Moorish passion is enthralled by the fascination of Florentine intellect, and who can make a return upon himself with a half-painful western self-consciousness.

Loyalties, devotions, to a person, to a cause, to an ideal, and the sacrifice of individual advantages, worldly prosperity, temporal successes to these—such, stated in a broad and general way, is the theme of special interest to Browning in his dramas. These loyalties may be well and wisely fixed, or they may contain a portion of error and illusion. But in either case they furnish a test of manly and womanly virtue. With a woman the test is often proposed by love—by love as set over against ease, or high station, or the pride of power. Colombe of Ravestein is offered on the one hand the restoration of her forfeited Duchy, the prospective rank of Empress and partnership with a man, who, if he cannot give love, is yet no ignoble wooer, a man of honour, of intellect, and of high ambition; on the other hand pleads the advocate of Cleves, a nameless provincial, past his days of youth, lean and somewhat worn, and burdened with the griefs and wrongs of his townsfolk. Mere largeness in a life is something, is much; but the quality of a life is more. Valence has set the cause of his fellow-citizens above himself; he has made the heart of the Duchess for the first time thrill in sympathy with the life of her people; he has placed his loyalty to her far above his own hopes of happiness; he has urged his rival's claims with unfaltering fidelity. It is not with any backward glances of regret, any half-doubts, prudent reserves, or condescending qualifications that Colombe gives herself to the advocate of the poor. She, in her youth and beauty, has been happy during her year of idlesse as play-Duchess of Juliers; she is happier now as she abandons the court and, sure in her grave choice, turns with a light and joyous laugh to welcome the birthday gift of freedom and of love that has so unexpectedly come to her. Having once made her election, Colombe can throw away the world as gaily as in some girlish frolic she might toss aside a rose.

The loyalty of men, their supreme devotion and their test may, as with women, spring from the passion of love; but other tests than this are often proposed to them. With King Charles of Sardinia it is duty to his people that summons him, from those modest and tranquil ways of life of which he dreamed, to the cares and toils of the crown. He has strength to accept without faltering the burden that is laid upon him. And if he falters at the last, and would resign to his father, who reclaims it, the crown which God alone should have removed, shall we assert confidently that Browning's dramatic instinct has erred? The pity of it—that his great father, daring in battle, profound in policy, should stand before him an outraged, helpless old man, craving with senile greed a gift from his son—the pity of it revives an old weakness, an old instinct of filial submission, in the heart of Charles. He has tasked himself without sparing; he has gained the affections of his subjects; he has conciliated a hostile Europe; is not this enough? Or was it also in the bond that he should tread a miserable father into the dust? The test again of Luigi, in the third part of Pippa Passes, is that of one who sees all the oppression of his people, who is enamoured of the antique ideal of liberty, and whose choice lies between a youth of luxurious ease and the virtue of one heroic crime, to be followed by the scaffold-steps, with youth cut short. To him that overcometh and endureth unto the end will God give the morning-star: