Browning

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