Browning

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!