Browning

Robert Browning’s mother was no bluestocking: she was not herself literary, nor was she inclined to draw or paint in water-colours. Her husband did enough book collecting and sketching already. Though she had a considerable taste for music and is said to have been an accomplished pianist (Beethoven’s sonatas, Avison’s marches, and Gaelic laments are cited as belonging to her repertoire), she was very likely no more than ordinarily competent on a piano, though her technique was evidently infused with fine romantic feeling. Sarah Anna Browning tended her flower garden (Cyrus Mason remarks upon ‘the garden, Aunt Robert’s roses, that wicket gate the Robert Browning family used by favor, opening for them a ready way to wander in the then beautiful meadows to reach the Dulwich woods, the College and gallery’) and otherwise occupied herself, day by day, with domestic matters relating to her largely self-contained, self-sufficient family. Other biographers beg to differ when Mrs Orr tells us that Mrs Browning ‘had nothing of the artist about her’. In contrast to her husband, she produced nothing artistic or creative, but partisans speak warmly of her tender interest in music and romantic poetry. She possessed at least an artistic sensibility.

Mrs Orr remarks, cursorily but not disparagingly: ‘Little need be said about the poet’s mother’, the implication—quite wrong—being that there was little to be said. Her son’s devotion to Sarah Anna was very marked: habitually, when he sat beside her, Robert would like to put his arm around her waist. When she died in early 1849, he beatified her by describing her as ‘a divine woman’. Most biographers and others interested in the poet Browning make a point of the empathetic feeling that developed between mother and son: when Sarah Anna Browning was laid low with headaches, her son dreadfully suffered sympathetic pains. ‘The circumstances of his death recalled that of his mother,’ says Mrs Orr, and adds, however ‘it might sound grotesque’, that ‘only a delicate woman could have been the mother of Robert Browning’.

She was certainly religious, and none doubted that her place in heaven had long been marked and secured by her narrow piety, commonsense good nature, and her stoical suffering of physical ailments. Sarah Anna Browning endured debilitating, painful headaches, severe as migraines (which indeed they may have been). In contrast to her vigorously hale husband, she is portrayed by Mrs Orr as ‘a delicate woman, very anaemic during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia which was perhaps a symptom of this condition’.

Robert, her son, was not so delicate in health or attitude. He established an early reputation not only for mental precocity but vocal and physically boisterous expression of it. In modern times, his vigour and fearlessness, his restlessness and temper, might worry some as verging on hyperactivity. ‘He clamoured for occupation as soon as he could speak,’ says Mrs Orr and, though admitting that ‘his energies were of course destructive till they had found their proper outlet’, she discovers no inherent vice in the child: ‘we do not hear of his having destroyed anything for the mere sake of doing so’. A taste for lively spectacle rather than wilful incendiarism is adduced as the motive for Robert’s ‘putting a handsome Brussels lace veil of his mother’s into the fire’ and excusing himself with the words, ‘a pretty blaze, mamma’ (rendered as ‘a pitty baze’ by Mrs Orr, prefiguring the lisping baby-talk that so rejoiced the ears of the poet and his wife when their own son, Pen, first began to speak).

To quiet the boy, Sarah Anna Browning’s best resource was to sit him on her knees, holding him in a firm grip, and to engage his attention with stories—‘doubtless Bible stories’, says Mrs Orr, as a tribute not only to Mrs Browning’s natural piety, her vocation as a Sunday School teacher, and her subscription to the London Missionary Society but also, no doubt, to the improving effect of religion in general, Nonconformism in particular, and its associated morality. If, as Cyrus Mason suggests, Robert was raised to be a poet, quiet introspection was not a notable characteristic of his infancy—though music (he liked to listen to his mother play the piano and would beg her to keep up the performance) and religion (Sarah Anna Browning could curb her son’s arrogance until quite late in his life by pointing out the very real peril and lively retribution awaiting those who failed in Christian charity) could soothe the savage child and bind them together, mother and son, in a delicate balance of love and apprehension. Maternal indulgence, too, was a reliable ploy: Robert could be induced to swallow unpleasant medicine so long as he was given a toad which Mrs Browning, holding a parasol over her head, obligingly searched for in her strawberry bed—a memory of childhood that never faded in her son’s recollection.

A recollection of his mother’s garden very likely informs the idyllic first section—‘The Flower’s Name’—of the poem ‘Garden-Fancies’, a revised version of which was included in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, published in 1845:

Here’s the garden she walked across,

Arm in my arm, such a short while since:

Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss

Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!

She must have reached this shrub ere she turned,

As back with that murmur the wicket swung;

For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned,

To feed and forget it the leaves among.9

As she walks with little Robert through her garden, talking to him, Sarah Anna Browning’s gown brushes against a bush or hedge of box. She stops, hushes her words, and points out ‘a moth on the milk-white phlox’. Here roses, there rock plants, elsewhere a particular flower with a ‘soft meandering Spanish name’ that inspires an ambition in the boy to learn Spanish ‘Only for that slow sweet name’s sake’. Above all, the roses ‘ranged in valiant row’ where Sarah Anna always pauses—

… for she lingers

There like sunshine over the ground

And ever I see her soft white fingers

Searching after the bud she found.10

There are any number of anecdotes that attest to a happy childhood and none that imply any serious cause for parental or official reprobation—saving only the exasperation of the Revd George Clayton who, in the course of a church service, had cause to admonish ‘for restlessness and inattention Master Robert Browning’. The boy had been reduced by impatience to gnawing on a pew.

The question of Robert the Third’s education was settled when his head became filled with so much random information that it increased what Mrs Orr describes as his ‘turbulent activity’ and it was thought desirable that he should be off-loaded for an hour or two every day into the care of a ‘lady of reduced fortunes’ who kept a dame school or local kindergarten. There, Robert’s precociousness so dispirited the mothers of the other children in the school, who reckoned that Robert was getting all the poor lady’s attention to the disadvantage of their own dullard sons, that they complained and demanded his removal. Thereafter, until the age of eight or nine, Robert enjoyed the advantages of a home education. His mother mostly took care of his moral, musical, and religious education, his father fired up his imagination with his own squirrelled store of learning and his inspired, fanciful methods of imparting it.

Robert the Second, thoroughly versed in the Greek poets, is conjured irresistibly in his son’s poetic memory: the poem ‘Development’, first published in Asolando, probably dates from 1888 or 1889, and is often quoted to illustrate Browning’s first encounter with Homer in 1817 or thereabouts.

My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.

When I was five years old, I asked him once

‘What do you read about?’

‘The siege of Troy.’

‘What is a siege and what is Troy?’

Whereat

He piled up chairs and tables for a town,

Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat

—Helen, enticed away from home (he said)

By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close

Under the footstool, being cowardly,

But whom—since she was worth the pains, poor puss—

Towzer and Tray,—our dogs, the Atreidai,—sought

By taking Troy to get possession of

—Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk,

(My pony in the stable)—forth would prance

And put to flight Hector—our page boy’s self.

Adds Browning,

This taught me who was who and what was what:

So far I rightly understood the case

At five years old:

And when, after two or three years, the game of Troy’s siege had become familiar,

My Father came upon our make-believe.

‘How would you like to read yourself the tale

Properly told, of which I gave you first

Merely such notion as a boy could bear?’

whereupon, at about the age of eight, Robert the Third opened Pope’s translation of The Iliad and

So I ran through Pope,

Enjoyed the tale, what history so true?

Attacked my Primer, duly drudged,

Grew fitter thus for what was promised next—

The very thing itself, the actual words,

in Greek by the age of twelve. Thereafter, for a lifetime, there was no end to Homer and Greek and the worm casts of scholarship, the dream-destroying detritus of peckers through dust and texts, winnowers of grain from chaff, who tumbled the towers of Ilium more surely to rock and sand than the hot force of vir et armis, desiccating the blood of heroes and giving the lie at Hell’s Gate to Hector’s love for his wife.

‘Development’ raises questions as to whether Robert the Second was to blame for encouraging his son’s learning through play and—strictly speaking—falsehood rather than, in Gradgrind fashion, sticking strictly to the facts:

That is—he might have put into my hand

The ‘Ethics’? In translation, if you please,

Exact, no pretty lying that improves

To suit the modern taste: no more—no less—

The ‘Ethics’.

In no mistrustful mind of dry-as-dust nonagenarian scholarship, unburdened by the Ethics, bubbling with guiltless, childlike nine-year-old innocence of any distinction between accredited reality and mythological falsehood, between truth-to-fact and truth-to-fiction, Robert was sent to school.

Browning’s biographers can become thoroughly intoxicated in the well-stocked cellar of fine vintage learning that their subject laid down from his earliest years and drew upon in draughts for the rest of his working life as a poet. He read everything and ‘could forget nothing’—except, as he claimed later, ‘names and the date of the Battle of Waterloo’. The boy’s virtual self-education at home rather than his formal schooling informed a lifetime’s poetry and play-writing. School was the least of it—a pretty perfunctory performance lasting only some five or six years. Robert boarded, from Mondays to Fridays, with the Misses Ready, who with their brother, the Revd Thomas Ready, kept an elementary school for boys at number 77 Queen’s Road, Peckham.11 It was reputedly the best school in the neighbourhood, highly regarded both in respect of pedagogy and piety. Mr Ready instructed the older boys while the younger boys, up to the age of ten, were physically and spiritually improved by the two Ready sisters, who sang the hymns of Isaac Watts as they oiled and brushed out the hair and brushed up the moral fibre of their charges. Robert attended the Ready school until he was fourteen.

His distress at leaving his mother was more than he thought he could bear. And what was it for, this dolorous separation? He later remarked to Alfred Domett,12 whose two elder brothers had been at the Ready school, that ‘they taught him nothing there, and that he was “bullied by the big boys”’. John Domett recalled to his brother Alfred for his memoir, ‘young Browning, in a pinafore of brown holland such as small boys used to wear in those days, for he was always neat in his dress—and how they used to pit him against much older boys in a “chaffing” match to amuse themselves with the “little bright-eyed fellow’s” readiness and acuteness at retort and repartee’. Robert distinguished himself not only by a smart mouth but also by occasional sharp practice: when the master’s attention was diverted, he would close the Revd Ready’s lexicon, obliging him to open it again to look for the word he’d been referring to. He also learned how to suck up to Mr Ready, composing verses that earned him some privileges and would have warmed the heart of the great Dr Arnold of Rugby. ‘Great bosh they were,’ Robert said, quoting two concluding lines:

We boys are privates in our Regiment’s ranks—

’Tis to our Captain that we all owe thanks!

and followed this piece of blatant toadying by reciting from memory to Alfred Domett, while they were walking by a greenhouse discernible behind the walls of the school playground, a disrespectful epigram he had also made:

Within these walls and near that house of glass,

Did I, three (?) years of hapless childhood pass—

D—d undiluted misery it was!

He got his revenge, though, by taking off the Misses Ready in full Watts voice, ‘illustrating with voice and gesture’ the ferocious emphasis with which the brush would sweep down in the accentuated syllables of the following lines:

‘Lord, ’tis a pleasant thing to stand

In gardens planted by Thy hand

…

Fools never raise their thoughts so high

Like brutes they live, like BRUTES they die.’

Mrs Orr, uncorseting a little in citing this anecdote, obligingly admits that Robert ‘even compelled his mother to laugh at it, though it was sorely against her nature to lend herself to any burlesquing of piously intended things’. She quickly snaps back, though, Mrs Orr, remarking that Robert’s satirical swipe—even if it demonstrated some falling away from ‘the intense piety of his earlier childhood’—evidenced merely a momentary triumph of his sense of humour over religious instincts that did not need strengthening. His humour took a sharper, drier tone when, in 1833, some years after leaving the school, he heard of a serious-minded sermon delivered by the Revd Thomas Ready and commented:

A heavy sermon—sure the error’s great

For not a word Tom utters has its weight.13

The quality of the education at the Ready school was probably perfectly adequate for its times and most of its pupils. If it threatened to stultify the brilliance of Robert Browning, and if his contempt for it has condemned it in the estimation of posterity, the fault can hardly be heaped on the heads of the diligent Readys. Robert himself, quickly taking his own measure of the school in contrast to the pleasure of his father’s exciting, fantastic excursions into the education of his son, seems not to have bothered to make close friends with any of his slower-witted contemporaries, though he did dragoon some of his classmates into acting difficult plays, mostly way above their heads, some of which he wrote specially for them. He conspicuously failed to win a school prize (though, according to Mrs Orr, ‘these rewards were showered in such profusion that the only difficulty was to avoid them’) and took a somewhat de haut en bas attitude towards the school in general.

His satirical impulse was not entirely lacking in some grandiose, theatrical sense of his own superiority, to judge by Sarianna Browning’s later description to Mrs Orr of an occasion when her brother solemnly ‘ascended a platform in the presence of assembled parents and friends, and, in best jacket, white gloves, and carefully curled hair, with a circular bow to the company and the then prescribed waving of alternate arms, delivered a high-flown rhymed address of his own composition’. Such a performance was very likely not unknown at home.

It is hardly surprising that Robert was bullied at school, nor that he sometimes played up, nor that he learned virtually nothing that he later considered useful. If one of the purposes of such a school was to ‘knock the nonsense’ out of a boy, iron him out and apply his mind to the Ethics—as it were—there was a lot of knocking out to be done, since the boy Robert was immediately filled up again and creased with the learnedly fantastic ‘nonsense’ he got at home. ‘If we test the matter,’ wrote Chesterton, ‘by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, over-educated.’14

Robert’s scorn for the Ready school (despite acknowledging, on the later word of Sarianna in 1903, that ‘the boys were most liberally and kindly treated’), though perhaps fair enough in terms of his own needs, which the world and its books—far less an elementary school in Peckham and its primers—were not enough to satisfy, was conceived from what Chesterton acutely perceives as his elementary ignorance in one vital respect: Robert was ignorant of the degree to which the knowledge he already possessed—‘knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provençal Troubadors, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages’—was exceptional. He had no idea that he himself was exceptional, that the world in general neither knew nor cared about what he knew and, according to its own lights, got along without it very well. He never was wearied by knowledge and never was troubled by the effort taken to acquire it: learning was pleasure and increase, it never was a dispiriting chore or a burden to his brain. ‘His father’s house,’ commented Sarianna Browning to Mrs Orr, ‘was literally crammed with books; and it was in this way that Robert became very early familiar with subjects generally unknown to boys.’ ‘His sagacious destiny,’ remarked Chesterton, ‘while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.’

The books Robert read ‘omnivorously, though certainly not without guidance’ before and during his schooldays are known mostly on the authority of Mrs Orr, who gives a part-catalogue of them. In addition to Quarles’ Emblems in a seventeenth-century edition which Robert himself annotated, there may be counted ‘the first edition of Robinson Crusoe; the first edition of Milton’s works, bought for him by his father; a treatise on astrology published twenty years after the introduction of printing; the original pamphlet Killing no Murder (1559) [sic], which Carlyle borrowed for his Life of Cromwell; an equally early copy of Bernard de Mandeville’s Bees; very ancient Bibles … Among more modern publications, Walpole’s Letters were familiar to him in boyhood, as well as the Letters of Junius and all the works of Voltaire.’ Later, when Robert had sufficient mastery of ancient languages, Latin poets and Greek dramatists (including Smart’s translation of Horace, donated by his step-uncle Reuben) crowded his mind together with Elizabethan poets and playwrights, scraps from the cloudily romantic Ossian (by James Macpherson, another poet who had difficulty separating fact from fiction),15 Wordsworth and Coleridge (representatives of the English Romantics) and—to crown the glittering heap—the inimitable (though that stopped no one, including Robert Browning, from trying) poetry of Byron.

These works are not the end of it—hardly even the beginning. Wanley’s aforementioned Wonders of the Little World: or, A General History of Man in Six Books forever gripped Robert Browning’s imagination, its title-page advertising the contents as showing ‘by many thousands of examples … what MAN hath been from the First Ages of the World to these Times in respect of his Body, Senses, Passions, Affections, His Virtues and Perfections, his Vices and Defects.’ Nathaniel Wanley, Vicar of Trinity Parish in the City of Coventry published his Wonders in 1678, in an age when reports of wonder-working strained credulity less than they might now. The book furnished Robert’s poetry with morbid material for the rest of his life. He came across Wanley’s Little World of Wonders pretty much as Robert Louis Stevenson came across Pollock’s toy theatre and characters, ‘penny plain and tuppence coloured’.

The Emblems of Francis Quarles, first published in 1635, was relatively wholesome by comparison, though as a work of intense piety and severely high moral tone, it naturally directed the attention of readers (‘dunghill worldlings’) to the dreadful consequences of any lapse from the exemplary conduct of early and medieval Christian saints. The text was decorated with little woodcuts of devils with pitchforks, the Devil himself driving the chariot of the world and attending idle pursuits such as a game of bowls. Mythology and folklore were mixed with biblical allusions, the whole rich in an extensive, imaginative vocabulary. We have more qualms today about exposing young minds to the grim, the ghastly, the grotesque and the gothic, even the fairy tales of Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and the brothers Grimm in the unexpurgated version, though children will generally seek out and sup on horrors for themselves. Robert Browning’s early exposure to morbid literature and its fine, matter-of-fact and matter-of-fiction examples of casual and institutionalized cruelties, injustices, and fantastical phenomena was balanced by early immersion in more authoritative works, among them—notably—the fifty volumes of the Biographie Universelle, published in 1822, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, The Art of Painting in All its Branches by Gérard de Lairesse, and Principles of Harmony by John Relfe.

Mrs Browning contributed a worthy work of 1677 by Elisha Coles, A Practical Discourse of Effectual Calling and of Perseverance (the only book in the house, according to Betty Miller, to bear her signature)16 and Cruden’s Concordance to the Holy Scriptures. Mrs Miller comments that these two works of religious dedication testify not only to Mrs Browning’s ingrained piety but point up ‘something of the divided atmosphere in which Robert Browning was brought up. On the one hand he was given the freedom of a liberal and erudite library; on the other, he found himself, like Hazlitt, who counted it a misfortune, “bred up among dissenters who look with too jaundiced an eye at others, and set too high a value on their own particular pretensions. From being proscribed themselves, they learn to proscribe others; and come in the end to reduce all integrity of principle and soundness of opinion within the pale of their own little communion”.’

This may be generally true, and not only of Dissenters; but it is too harsh when applied to the Brownings in particular. In this sense, as characterized by Hazlitt, it is difficult to believe that Robert the Second adhered quite as limpet-like as his wife to the rock of Nonconformism or that her son Robert’s self-confessed passionate attachment in childhood to religion would not wane in the light of opinions other than those sincerely expressed by Congregationalists and other Nonconformists who were drilled into dutiful observance and stilled into attention by the ‘stiffening and starching’ style of the Revd George Clayton and the hectoring manner of Joseph Irons, minister of the Grove Chapel, Camberwell. Alfred Domett was reminded, in conversation with Dr Irons (‘the clever but apparently bigoted High Churchman’), ‘how we used to go sometimes up Camberwell Grove of a Sunday evening, to try how far off we could hear his father (Mr Irons, an Independent Minister or Ranter) bawling out his sermon, well enough to distinguish the words; and how on one occasion, taking a friend with him, they stood outside at a little distance and clearly heard, “I am sorry to say it, beloved brethren, but it is an undoubted fact that Roman Catholicism and midnight assassin are synonymous terms!”.’17

The religion of the Brownings, the Congregationalism of the nineteenth century, was a moderate Calvinism, shading later to liberal Evangelicalism, that derived from the first Independents of the Elizabethan age. These spring-pure Puritans, persecuted in England, disclaimed any duty to the hierarchy of the Church over their duty to God and conscience. They sailed, some of them, into exile to found pilgrim colonies in New England, and others later came to power in the Cromwellian Commonwealth. The long history of Protestant dissent had been vividly, violently marked by persecution, fanaticism, exile, torture, death, and the blood of their martyrs persisted as a lively tang in the nostrils of zealous Nonconformists.