Browning

In the early years of the nineteenth century, dissenters from the established Church of England still suffered some remnants of political and social disability—legal penalties for attending their chapels were not abolished until 1812; they were subject to political disenfranchisement until 1832 and—fatefully for Robert Browning as the son of a Dissenter and not himself a communicant of the Anglican church—the ancient universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, until 1854 were open only to members of the Established Church of England. These were serious matters that inclined Nonconformists, most of whom belonged—in East Anglia, the South Midlands, the West country and South Wales—to the respectable working classes, to support the Liberal Party led later in the century by William Gladstone.

Nevertheless, there was a difference in practice between the proscriptive Puritanism bawled from the pulpit and the less rigid, more charitable observance of its dogma in the busy social life and generous-minded charitable organization of the Congregationalists who were as strong in the Lord as they were in the practical virtues of education, evangelism, care of the sick, fundraising bazaars, music, and self-improvement. Robert Browning was born in a period between the early, bleak, and joyless fervour of the seventeenth-century Puritans and the moral hypocrisy of the late Victorians, whose conformity to social conventions characterized virtually every deviation from the norms of Evangelical fundamentalism as either morally reprehensible or criminal, and probably both. In 1812, Mrs Grundy (who had been invented in 1800 by the playwright Thomas Morton as a character in Speed the Plough) was still a laughing-stock and had not then become the all-powerful, repressive deity of respectable late Victorian middle-class society. The domestic tone of the Browning household was nicely moderated between the mother’s religious principles and the father’s cultural enlightenment. In any case, there is no liberty like an enquiring mind that recognizes no limits, and the young Browning’s mind was made aware of no obstacles, beyond the blockheads of school who temporarily impeded his progress, to the accumulation of knowledge.

The violent, at least turbulent, and colourful life of Browning’s mind was tempered—though, more likely, all the more stimulated—by vigorous physical activity: he learned to ride and was taught dancing, boxing, and fencing,18 and he walked about the surrounding countryside. It was two miles, a ‘green half-hour’s walk over the fields’19 and stiles, past hedges and picturesque cottages, from Camberwell to Dulwich where, in 1814, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, attached to Dulwich College, had been opened. In that year, the two-year-old Robert was making his first picture of ‘a certain cottage and rocks in lead pencil and black currant juice—paint being rank poison, as they said when I sucked my brushes’.20

London, as Griffin and Minchin take pains to describe, was by no means well furnished with public art galleries. Neither the National Gallery nor Trafalgar Square then existed. Dulwich Picture Gallery, designed by Sir John Soane, had been specially commissioned for the exhibition of some 350 European paintings—Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, and English. Children under the age of fourteen were, according to regulations, denied entry, but somehow young Robert Browning was allowed to enter with his father, who, said Dante Gabriel Rossetti later in Paris, ‘had a real genius for drawing—but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors’. This was not quite fair: Mr Browning also had a distinct relish for Hogarth grotesques. But it was true that, according to his son, Mr Browning would ‘turn from the Sistine altarpiece’ in favour of the Dutch artists Brouwer, Ostade, and the Teniers (father and son), who were amply represented at Dulwich.

The Dutch School did not detain the interest of young Robert, whose love of Dulwich was suffused, as he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett on 3 March 1846, with ‘those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music lesson group, all the Poussins with the “Armida” and “Jupiter’s nursing”—and—no end to “ands”—I have sate before one, some one of those pictures I had predetermined to see, a good hour and then gone away ….’ Enthusiasm for favourites did not mean an uncritical eye for failures. Familiarity bred contempt for works ‘execrable as sign-paintings even’. For a ‘whole collection, including “a divine painting by Murillo,” and Titian’s Daughter (hitherto supposed to be in the Louvre)’ he would ‘have cheerfully given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing’.

In his letter of 27 February 1846 to Elizabeth Barrett, Robert had asked the pertinent question, ‘Are there worse poets in their way than painters?’ There is a subtle difference in the ‘melancholy business’; a poet at least possesses resources capable of being adapted to other things: ‘the bad poet goes out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do afterwards—but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning even how to produce such monstrosities as these, and to what other good do his acquisitions go? This short minute of our life our one chance, an eternity on either side! and a man does not walk whistling and ruddy by the side of hawthorn hedges in spring, but shuts himself up and comes out after a dozen years with “Titian’s Daughter” and, there, gone is his life, let somebody else try!’

The point of this rushing reflection is only partly to do with art: it also makes a none-too-subtle reference to Robert Browning’s seizing the moment, ‘the short minute of our life, our one chance’, with his beloved Miss Barrett, as he finishes with the line:

I have tried—my trial is made too!

But this is in the future. The boy Robert had only just begun, on first acquaintance with the Dulwich pictures, to try his hand at poetry, good, bad, or indifferent, excepting some early extemporized lines of occasional verse for domestic or school consumption. The critic—tutored by the work of de Lairesse—was being formed, but the artist was still mostly whistling, ruddy by the hawthorn hedges, on the way to Dulwich. It was difficult to know which way to turn, which vocation to pursue: painting and drawing, for which young Robert had a facility, inspired by his father and the works of de Lairesse; music, which he dearly loved, inspired by his mother, Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression, and two distinguished tutors—Relfe, who taught theory, and Abel, who was proficient in technique; poetry, for which he not only had an aptitude but also a taste fuelled in several languages (Greek, Latin, French, some Spanish, some Italian, German later, even a smattering of Hebrew in addition to English) by the great exemplars—Horace, Homer, Pope, Byron—of the art of happy expression.

In the event, at the age of twelve, in the very year, 1824, of Byron’s death at Missolonghi, Robert the Third produced a collection of short poems entitled Incondita. The title, comments Mrs Orr, ‘conveyed a certain idea of deprecation’; Griffin and Minchin suggest an ‘allusion to the fact that “in the beginning” even the earth itself was “without form”’. The title may have been modest, but the principal stylistic influence—Byronic—was not, and at least one of the poems, ‘The Dance of Death’, was, on the authority of Mrs Orr, who was told of it, ‘a direct imitation of Coleridge’s “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter”’ (1798). A letter of 11 March 1843 from Robert the Second to a Mr Thomas Powell, quoted by Mrs Orr, testified that his son had been composing verses since ‘quite a child’ and referred to a great quantity of ‘juvenile performances’, some of which ‘extemporaneous productions’ Robert the Second enclosed.

The sample sheet of verses, taken at the time and for some while after at face value, was subsequently identified to Mrs Orr by Sarianna Browning as ‘her father’s own impromptu epigrams’. The attempt to pass off the father’s effusions as the work of the son is baffling, and Mrs Orr kindly directs us to suppose that ‘The substitution may from the first have been accidental.’ The letter is, however, valuable for its affirmation that Robert the Third was remarkably precocious in poetry and the credible information—borne out by his habitual practice in later life—that he deliberately destroyed all instances of his first efforts ‘that ever came in his way’.

Sarianna being too young at the time—no more than ten years old—never saw the poetry of Incondita, but it impressed Mr and Mrs Browning to the extent that they tried, unsuccessfully, to get the manuscript published. Disappointment in this enterprise may have been one reason that led Robert to destroy the manuscript, but it had already got beyond him into the world: Mrs Browning had shown the poems to an acquaintance, Miss Eliza Flower, who had copied them for the attention of a friend, the Revd William Johnson Fox, ‘the well-known Unitarian minister’. Robert, with an adult eye for reputation, retrieved this copy after the death of Mr Fox and, additionally, a fragment of verse contained in a letter from Miss Sarah Flower. He destroyed both.

Mrs Orr, though regretting the loss of ‘these first fruits of Mr Browning’s genius’, supposes that ‘there can have been little in them to prefigure its later forms. Their faults seem to have lain in the direction of too great splendour of language and too little wealth of thought’, an echo of Mr Fox’s opinion. Fox admitted later to Robert that ‘he had feared these tendencies as his future snare’. Two poems, said to have survived from Incondita’s brief and limited exposure, are ‘The First-Born of Egypt’, in blank verse, and ‘The Dance of Death’, in tetrameters. They are certainly gorgeous, richly allusive, spare no wrenching emotion or sensational effect, and ascend to dramatic climax. A distinct gust from the graveyard scents the relentless progress of grisly calamities that would give suffering Job more than usual pause for thought.

Nevertheless, the Byronic, perhaps less so the Coleridgean, influences were not merely juvenile infatuations. In a letter of 22 August 1846 to Miss Barrett, Robert commented that ‘I always maintained my first feeling for Byron in many respects … the interest in places he had visited, in relics of him. I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure—while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were condensed into the little China bottle yonder, after the Rosicrucian fashion … they seem to “have their reward” and want nobody’s love or faith.’ (The reference to Finchley as a place of ultimate pilgrimage is attributable to the fact that two days previously Miss Barrett had driven out as far as that fascinating faubourg.)

The death of Byron was as climactic in its effect as either of the surviving poems of Incondita, which take the fold of death as their theme. It may have been the stimulus that prompted the twelve-year-old Browning’s manuscript. The fallout was great on other poets, other idealists, who subsided into plain prose and practical politics—it was the death, too, at least in England, of any idea of romantic revolution. Alfred Tennyson, we are told, memorialized the event by carving the words ‘Byron is dead’ on a rock near Somersby. He was fifteen. Thomas Carlyle, approaching thirty, felt as though he had lost a brother. It is not too much to say that the death of Byron had as profound an effect in England and Europe in 1824 as the death of President John F. Kennedy had for America and the world in 1963. It was like an eclipse of the sun that stills even bird song, or the silence after a thunderclap. There were few who were unaffected. ‘The news of his death came upon my heart like a mass of lead,’ wrote Carlyle to his wife Jane.

Equally tremendous was the year 1832: Goethe died, and so did Sir Walter Scott. Robert maintained a high regard for Scott the polymathic author, often quoting from him and occasionally reflecting Scott’s work in his own poetry. The death of Keats in 1821 had been quickly followed by that of Shelley in 1822. Wordsworth was to die in 1850, and Heinrich Heine in 1856. These losses amounted, in the case of poetry, to the death of European Romanticism. ‘Though it is by no means clear what Romanticism stood for,’ the historian Eric Hobsbawm points out in a chapter on ‘The Arts’ in The Age of Revolution, ‘it is quite evident what it was against: the middle.’ Isaiah Berlin, in The Roots of Romanticism, supposes that, had one ‘spoken in England to someone who had been influenced by, say, Coleridge, or above all by Byron’, one would have found that ‘the values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying’. This attitude, says Berlin, was relatively new. ‘What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.’

The middle, then, famously distrustful of extremes, did not apparently stand much chance, squeezed between the reactionary, traditional elements of the old order and the revolutionary, idealistic instincts of the avant-garde. Yet society has an irresistible tendency to compromise, to assimilate and settle into social stability—albeit radically altered, both right and left—when shaken by destructive events and stirred by disturbing philosophies. Nowhere is this more marked than in the mobile middle class, the eternally buoyant bourgeoisie, which confidently came into its own following the French and Industrial Revolutions.

This middle class was perceived by pre-Revolutionary enthusiasts as equipped with reason, sentiment, natural feeling, and purpose in contrast to the sterility, decrepitude, reactionary instincts, and corrupt clericalism of pre-Revolutionary society. The artificiality of the Court was in theory to be replaced by the spontaneity of the people—whereupon, of course, by the inevitable evolutionary law of society, the new society in practice naturally stiffened into a bureaucratic, bourgeois respectability, in its own time and triumphant style stifling fine romantic feeling with its own brand of philistinism. Revolutions, like romantic poets, die young. Byron astutely recognized that an early death would save him from a respectable old age.

G. K. Chesterton points to what is now known as the ‘percolation theory’ or the ‘trickle down effect’ that supposedly occurs when society is in some way shaken out from top to bottom or from bottom to top. Robert Browning, says Chesterton, was ‘born in the afterglow of the great Revolution’—the French Revolution of 1789, that is—the point of this observation being that the Jacobin dream of emancipation had begun ‘in the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of society’. By the time of Robert’s boyhood, ‘a very subtle and profound change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the Brownings … A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the middle classes which had nothing at all in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth … On all sides there was the first beginning of the aesthetic stir in the middle classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired office-boys.’

With this famous portmanteau phrase, Chesterton sweeps together such marvellous boys as John Ruskin ‘solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts’, Charles Dickens toiling in a blacking factory, Thomas Carlyle ‘lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire’, and John Keats, who ‘had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon’. Add to these Robert Browning, the son of a Bank of England clerk in Camberwell. These men, born to fame but not to wealth, were the inheritors of a new world that gave them a liberty that, in Robert Browning’s case, ‘exalted poetry above all earthly things’ and which he served ‘with single-hearted intensity’. Browning stands, observed Chesterton, ‘among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else’.

The matter of poetry as Robert’s sole vocation was mostly decided by the revelation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the atheistical poet. The effect was tremendous. It was like coming across a hitherto unknown brother who had thought everything, experienced everything, accomplished everything that Robert Browning, fourteen years old, living in Camberwell, had as yet only dimly felt and begun to put, somewhat derivatively of admired models, into words. Robert had read the cynical, atheistical Voltaire without obvious moral corruption; he had read of the world’s virtues and vices, irregularities and injustices, in the words of Wanley, Shakespeare, Milton, and in other works of dramatic historical fiction, without becoming contemptuous of virtue; he had read the sensational Byron without becoming mad or bad; he had read the waspish Horace Walpole without becoming overwhelmingly mannered. But the cumulative effect was bound, in some degree, to be unsettling. Shelley—who had, like young Robert, read Voltaire and encyclopedias, and who had consorted with Byron—ratcheted up the adolescent tension one notch too far.

Shelley’s musical verse hit every note. With exquisite Shelleyan technique, all the airs that had been vapouring in Robert’s head were given compositional form—delicate, forceful; and as the concert performance proceeded, Shelley’s genius, his creative spirit, played out the great work of the ideal world in which infamy was erased, God rebelled against Satan, and in which—as Chesterton remarks—‘every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy’. All things in heaven and on earth proclaimed the triumph of liberty. ‘O World, O Life, O Time,’ Robert in later life apostrophized with deliberate irony on the flyleaf of Shelley’s Miscellaneous Poems given to him by his cousin Jim Silverthorne, a book he vigorously annotated in his first enthusiasm and then thought better of in his maturity when he tried, on 2 June 1878, to erase ‘the foolish markings and still more foolish scribblings’ that ‘show the impression made on a boy by this first specimen of Shelley’s poetry’. What he could not vehemently blot out or rub at or scratch away or scribble over, he hacked at with a knife or finally—all these obliterating resources being inadequate—cut out with scissors. It seems an excessive reaction, some fifty years later, but the first enthusiasm had evidently come to seem itself embarrassingly excessive. Not only did Robert not wish to remember it, he was determined to efface it from memory—his own or posterity’s—absolutely, though without actually, as was his usual resort, burning the book to ashes. He could burn his own poetry, perhaps, but not another’s.

‘Between the year 1826, when Browning became acquainted with the work of Shelley, and 1832, when Pauline was written,’ says Betty Miller in Robert Browning: A Portrait, ‘there took place in the life of the poet a crisis so radical that everything that followed upon it, including his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett, was qualified in one way or another by the effects of that initial experience.’ This sums up the biographical consensus that began with Mrs Orr’s pronouncement that Robert held Shelley greatest in the poetic art because ‘in his case, beyond all others, he believed its exercise to have been prompted by the truest spiritual inspiration’.

The souls of Keats and Shelley were identified in Robert’s mind with two nightingales which sang harmoniously together on a night in May—perhaps his birthday, the 7th of May in 1826—one in a laburnum (‘heavy with its weight of gold’, as William Sharp says Browning told a friend) in the Brownings’ garden, the other in a large copper beech on adjoining ground. ‘Their utterance,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was, to such a spirit as his, the last, as in a certain sense the first, word of what poetry can say.’ The image was no doubt prompted in Robert’s mind by Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. At any rate, whether or not these birds were the transmigrated souls of Keats and Shelley, as Robert reverently convinced himself, they ‘had settled in a Camberwell garden’, says Chesterton less reverently, ‘in order to sing to the only young gentleman who really adored and understood them’.

The major impact on the tender sensibilities of young Robert Browning was made by Shelley’s Queen Mab, which later achieved a reputation, when issued in a new edition by the publisher Edward Moxon, for being that most horrid—indeed, criminal—thing, a blasphemous libel. ‘The Shelley whom Browning first loved,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was the Shelley of Queen Mab, the Shelley who would have remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became a professing atheist and, for two years, a practising vegetarian. He returned to his natural diet when he found his eyesight becoming weak. The atheism cured itself; we do not exactly know when or how.’ In a letter to Elizabeth Barrett on 13 September 1845, Robert wrote of having lived for two years on bread and potatoes—a regime that, if strictly adhered to, would have tested the faith and asceticism even of the Desert Fathers.

Queen Mab is a lecture in poetic form to Ianthe, a disembodied spirit, on the sorry state of the temporal universe. Mab is a bluestocking fairy queen who takes intense issue with the various shortcomings of contemporary politics, conventional religion, and cankerous commerce, all of which are judged to be more or less hopelessly misguided when not actually corrupt. Queen Mab’s denunciation convinces less by rational argument than by the irresistible force of her—Shelley’s—convictions. She barely stops for breath (only now and then pauses for footnotes), fired by ideas and ideals that combine termagant intensity with tender sentiment, fiercely heretical in her inability to accept a creating Deity but spiritually softer in her recognition that there could be ‘a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe’ which might or might not, according to religious belief, be identified with the supreme maker, sometimes called God.

In an aside, dealing with the matter in a footnote, Shelley argued abstinence from meat as a means whereby man might at a stroke eliminate the brutal pleasures of the chase and restore an agricultural paradise, improve himself physically and morally, and probably live forever in health and virtue. The spiritual and the corporeal were virtually synonymous. Shelley recommended himself and the pure system of his ideas to youth whose moral enthusiasm for truth and virtue was yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. Queen Mab was pouring out a song which, if not of innocence, at least was addressing innocents. The force of Shelley’s expression rather more than the systematic reason of his argument is still powerfully appealing to idealists, and most of his vehement agitprop (as it might be called today) speaks to succeeding generations even unto our own times—so much so that the utterances of Queen Mab sound not unlike the conventional wisdom of modern environmentalists, new-agers, and bourgeois bohemians. It is difficult for us now to appreciate the thrilling horror with which Shelley’s words were received by his unnerved contemporaries who read not only blasphemy—bad enough—but revolution between, as much as upon, every irreverent line.

Vegetarianism worried Robert’s mother; atheism worried the Revd George Clayton. Robert stuck to his beliefs for a while, but forgave himself his youthful excesses, characterizing them later in his life as ‘Crude convictions of boyhood, conveyed in imperfect and unapt forms of speech,—for such things all boys have been pardoned. They are growing pains, accompanied by temporary distortion of soul also.’21 He regretted the anxiety caused to his mother, whose strong-minded inclination that her son should not compromise his physical health was resisted by Robert’s insistence that meat-eating was a symptom of spiritual disease and argued, presumably, ‘what should it profit a man if he feed his body but starve his soul’. Besides, the new diet was also a symptom of liberty, a badge of freedom, a symbol of release from dependence.