Browning

In far Esthonian solitudes

The parent firs of future woods

Gracefully, airily spire at first

Up to the sky, by the soft sand nurst …

and so on until he reached St Petersburg where he looked at pictures in the Hermitage, no doubt as thoroughly and with as critical an eye as at the Dulwich Gallery.

In a letter to Elizabeth Barrett, on 11 August 1845, Robert described a play he had written, in about 1843, entitled ‘Only a Player Girl’: ‘it was Russian, and about a fair on the Neva, and booths and droshkies and fish pies and so forth, with the Palaces in the background’. The play is not known to have survived either the destroying hand of time or that of the author. He says, furthermore, that at St Petersburg he met a Sir James Wylie who ‘chose to mistake me for an Italian—“M. l’Italien” he said another time, looking up from his cards.’ Others regularly made the same assumption, whether sincerely or satirically, taking their cue from Robert’s sallow-complexioned, dandified appearance. Another acquaintance in St Petersburg, say Griffin and Minchin,41 was a King’s Messenger called Waring whose name Robert borrowed eight years later in Dramatic Lyrics to cover for the identity of Alfred Domett as the eponymous subject of the poem ‘Waring’ and imagined as,

Waring in Moscow, to those rough

Cold northern climes borne, perhaps.

Before leaving Russia, after an absence from England of some three months, Robert watched the solid ice crack on the frozen Neva and heard the boom of guns that accompanied the governor’s journey on the now navigable river to present a ceremonial goblet of Neva water to the tsar. ‘St Petersburg, no longer three isolated portions,’ say Griffin and Minchin, ‘was once more united, as the floating wooden bridges swung into place across the mighty stream, and the city was en fête’. Robert, presumably delighting in Russian fairs, which may have occupied his interest rather more than Mrs Orr would have approved, kept an attentive and recording ear open to the music of Russia, folk songs in particular. Fifty years later in Venice, by the account of a friend, Katherine Bronson, he was able to recollect perfectly and accurately sing some of these songs to the elderly Prince Gagarin, a retired Russian diplomat, who exclaimed delightedly and wonderingly at Browning’s musical memory that, he declared, surpassed his own.42

In Russia, and shortly after his return to London, Robert had not overlooked his poetic vocation: besides storing up materials for future work, he wrote a number of poems—notably the grimly dramatic monologue ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, with its quietly sensational last line; a sonnet, ‘A Forest Thought’, which most early Browning biographers and critics have passed by tight-lipped and with a sorrowful shake of the head; a song (beginning, ‘A King lived long ago …’) that he incorporated a few years later into Pippa Passes; a lyric (beginning, ‘Still ailing, wind? Wilt be appeased or no?’) that was later introduced into the sixth section of ‘James Lee’ (in Dramatis Personæ); and the poem ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ (later published in Dramatic Lyrics), which might be thought of, in its theme of Calvinistic predestination, as Browning’s equivalent of ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ by Robert Burns. All these were submitted to Fox’s Monthly Repository and accepted for publication. They appeared there, anonymously over the initial ‘Z’, from 1834 to 1836.

Whether to support his life as a poet or seriously to begin a diplomatic career, or simply to reinforce the independence that the visit to St Petersburg had probably aroused, Robert felt confident enough after his three months as aide or secretary, or whatever role he played in attendance to the Russian consul-general, to apply ‘for appointment on a mission which was to be despatched to Persia’.43 He was disappointed to be passed over, the more so since the response to his application had, on a misreading, appeared to offer him the position which in fact—he learned only in the course of an interview with ‘the chief’—was offered to another man, whom Robert damned in a letter to Sarah Flower, suggesting that ‘the Right Hon. Henry Ellis etc., etc., may go to a hotter climate for a perfect fool—(that at Baghdad in October, 127 Fahrenheit in the shade)’.44

Still, to be realistic, the failure was maybe all to the good. Diplomacy was certainly a creditable profession for a gentleman, though that gentleman needed not only financial assets to back it up, at least in the beginning, and, to advance it, the social contacts that most successful young diplomats had either acquired on their own account at Oxford or Cambridge or naturally possessed through upper-middle-class and aristocratic family relationships. To cut a career as a diplomat was as difficult and expensive as to make progress as a barrister (Alfred Domett and Joseph Arnould were already finding this out in their first years as young lawyers) or gain promotion as a military officer in a regiment of any social consequence. The cost to the Browning family purse of maintaining Robert as an embassy attaché would have weighed even more heavily than keeping him at home as a poet. Maisie Ward supposes that the Silverthornes would have found a place for Robert in the family brewery, but ‘this would have meant no less drudgery, no better future prospects than the bank, and if [Cyrus] Mason’s view of the worldliness of the family is correct, they would certainly have aimed at something more socially acceptable’.

A certain sense of heightened social awareness is imputed to the Brownings by Maisie Ward and by Cyrus Mason: it may fall short of social snobbery, but attitudes and aspirations do tend to suggest at least an impetus towards gentility—what we now regard more positively as ‘upward mobility’. Mrs Orr’s definite and regular distaste for any possibility of Robert’s being tarred by association with ‘lowlife’; the horror with which Cyrus Mason (and other Brownings even into the mid twentieth century) regarded any suggestion that even distant ancestors might have been of the servant class; the gentleman’s education that Robert enjoyed—these are pointers that perhaps speak more of prevailing social values in mid nineteenth-century England than of the particular case of the Brownings, though of course the Brownings were of the middle rank of the powerful middle classes that mostly subscribed without question to the desirability of self-improvement in their lives.

There were no awkward assertions of social superiority, however, to make any visitor to the Browning household feel ill at ease (Mrs Browning was no Mrs Wilfer, with her head tied up in a handkerchief and her aspirations affirmed in a superior sniff); it was a sociable house and many of Robert’s friends have recorded warm memories of happy evenings there among good company. Cyrus Mason gnashed his teeth in the darkness of outer family, dismally nursing into old age his own exclusion from this cheerful company—more than likely, says Maisie Ward, he simply bored the Brownings to death—and took his revenge cold as his abiding bitterness when he wrote of the ‘misty pride’ that hung like a dampness in the ‘genteelly dreary’ Browning household and shrouded its inhabitants, whose single, self-absorbed concern was to develop a poet of genius to the obliteration of natural affection within the near family and shameful neglect of its extended members. The fact that Reuben Browning and the Silverthornes, close family, were welcome guests, and are known to have been generous to Robert, would tend to put paid to Cyrus Mason’s more extreme accusations.

It is true, nevertheless, that Robert took the trouble to cultivate good acquaintance. A letter written in 1830 by Robert to a close friend, Christopher Dowson, refers to ‘the unfortunate state of our friend P[ritchard]’.45 Pritchard is not a significant figure in Browning’s correspondence—the letters that have survived the conflagration of Browning’s personal papers contain only minor references to him—and nobody but Griffin and Minchin is interested in poor old Pritchard as a character in Browning’s life, either at this time or later. They describe him as ‘a brisk, dapper, little, grey-haired sea-captain, with a squint and a delightful fund of tales of adventure’. He lived at Battersea, and it was his whim to keep his address a close secret. However, he was the focus of a set, known as ‘The Colloquials’, of young men into whose orbit Robert was attracted and with whom he struck up lasting friendships. Pritchard’s ‘elasticity of mind bade defiance to advancing years and enabled him to associate unconstrainedly with those who were very considerably his juniors’, say Griffin and Minchin, and they further state that he had a chivalrous regard for women, to the extent of leaving his money to two maiden ladies on the ground that ‘women should be provided for since they cannot earn their living’.46 One of these maiden ladies was Sarianna Browning, who later inherited £1000 by Pritchard’s will.

Through Pritchard, Robert met and associated with Christopher and Joseph Dowson, William Curling Young and his younger brother Frederick Young, Alfred Domett, and Joseph Arnould. The Dowsons knew Pritchard through shipping, their family business; Christopher Dowson later married Mary, Alfred Domett’s sister; Joseph Dowson associated himself with the Youngs through business interests; in short, the group developed close family and business ties that bound them together longer than their youthful debates—their ‘boisterous Colloquies’, as Arnould later characterized them—about politics, poetry, theatre, philosophy, science, and the business of the group magazine, Olla Podrida, which they produced to publish their own essays, poems, and whatever other of their effusions pleased them. Robert himself contributed ‘A Dissertation on Debt and Debtors’, an essay which characteristically quoted from Quarles and uncharacteristically—for a man whose horror of debt was later well known and to become deeply ingrained—defended debt as a necessary condition of human life.47

A less regular member of the group was Field Talfourd, an artist and brother of Thomas Noon Talfourd, and it has been suggested that Benjamin Jowett, the future celebrated Master of Balliol College, Oxford, may have attended some Colloquial meetings—though his name is introduced more on the basis that he was then a native of Camberwell than on any sure evidence of his participation in the group’s activities. The Colloquials seem to have been a kindly, good-natured set of young, middle-class men whose aspirations and ambitions variously took them into the middle ranks of the law, politics, and business, at home and in the service of the Empire. Several of them, notably Arnould and Domett, wrote poetry for the rest of their lives: Arnould, while at Wadham College, Oxford, won the Newdigate Prize for poetry; Domett turned out stuff such as Ranolf and Amohia: a South-Sea Day Dream, inspired by his Antipodean travels and career, not wholly disrespected by public regard in his own day but entirely unknown to present fame. Of them all, Robert was forever closest to Alfred Domett.

Diplomacy had not yet done with Robert Browning, though Robert may have all but done with diplomacy. In 1834, a young Frenchman presented himself to the Brownings. This was Count Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, then in his mid-twenties. He was socially affable, urbane, cosmopolitan, and intellectually impressive, literate in European art and poetry, and interested in finance. He had been recommended to William Shergold Browning, of Rothschild’s in Paris, by the Marquis of Fortia, his uncle, who shared with William Browning an interest in literature. William in turn recommended young Ripert-Monclar to his brother Reuben in London, who introduced him into the Browning household. Ripert-Monclar claimed to be spending his summers in England, ostensibly for pleasure.48 In fact, the young aristocrat was a Royalist, an active supporter of the dethroned Bourbons now living in England as a result of the French revolution of July 1830 that made Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, King of France until he in turn was toppled in 1848. Ripert-Monclar, as he confessed to the Brownings, was acting as a private agent of communication between the royal exiles and their legitimist friends in France. He was not himself an exile, though it can be assumed that he was no favourite of Louis-Philippe. There is a suggestion that he may have been briefly held in jail in 1830. It was diplomacy of a thrilling sort—clandestine, subversive, and romantic.

Amédée and Robert struck up an immediate, intimate friendship: they talked no doubt of royalty and republicanism, though they probably discussed art and poetry more than politics; they would have talked of France, particularly of Paris, and Robert’s French—already reliable enough to have enabled him to write part of Pauline in good French—would have become even more polished. The young Frenchman introduced Robert to the works of Balzac and the new French realist writers, he sketched his new friend’s portrait, and at some point or other he suggested the life of Paracelsus, the Renaissance alchemist and physician, as the subject of Robert’s next major poem. He then thought better of the idea, ‘because it gave no room for the introduction of love about which every young man of their age thought he had something quite new to say’.49 But too late, too late to withdraw the suggestion: besides, Robert had already dealt with love in Pauline, and there had been precious little profit in that. Better, perhaps, to steer clear for the time being, take another tack.

Though two or three months of preliminary research (‘in the holes and corners of history’, as Chesterton likes to put it) had been necessary, Paracelsus was already a familiar-enough character to Robert: there was the entry in the Biographie Universelle on his father’s shelves; there was the Frederick Bitiskius three-volume folio edition of Paracelsus’ works; there were relevant medical works to hand, including a little octavo of 1620, the Vitœ Germanorum Medicorum of Melchior Adam, with which he was already acquainted from his recent interest in medicine. By mid-March 1835, interrupting a work in progress called Sordello, which he had begun a couple of years earlier in March 1833, Robert had written a full manuscript entitled Paracelsus, a poem of 4,152 lines which was ‘Inscribed to Amédée de Ripert-Monclar by his affectionate friend R.B.’. This dedication was dated ‘London: 15 March 1835’. Paracelsus, divided into five scenes and featuring four characters, had taken Robert just over five months to complete. It was published at his father’s expense by Effingham Wilson, of the Royal Exchange, on 15 August 1835. Saunders and Otley had declined the privilege of publishing the poem, and it had taken some trouble and influence to induce even Effingham Wilson, a small publisher, to undertake the job. Wilson published Paracelsus, says Mrs Orr, more ‘on the ground of radical sympathies in Mr Fox and the author than on that of its intrinsic worth.’50

In a preliminary letter of 2 April51 to William Johnson Fox, Robert requested an introduction to Fox’s neighbour, Edward Moxon, printer and publisher of Dover Street, Piccadilly, ‘on account of his good name and fame among author-folk, besides he has himself written—as the Americans say—“more poetry ’an you can shake a stick at”’. Moxon was a high-flying old bird to be expected to notice a fledgling fresh out of the nest and bumping near to the ground like Robert Browning. Thirty-four years of age in 1835, when he gave up writing his own poetry, Moxon was less distinguished as a poet than as a publisher and bookseller. Leigh Hunt wittily described him as ‘a bookseller among poets, and a poet among booksellers’. The remark has stuck to Moxon, who in 1830 had established his business which quickly acquired a reputation for publishing poetry of high quality by a remarkable list of poets including Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb (who introduced many of them to Moxon), Southey, Clare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, who became Moxon’s close friend. Leigh Hunt remarked that ‘Moxon has no connection but with the select of the earth’, which was intended satirically but may have been true enough in literary terms, implying a discrimination that has proved itself in posterity and went far beyond the terms of mere business in Moxon’s defence of his poets against the famous attacks by Lockhart and the rest of the Scots critics of Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly reviews.

On 16 April 183552 Robert again wrote to Fox to report on a visit to Moxon, whose ‘visage loured exceedingly’ and ‘the Moxonian accent grew dolorous’ on perusal of a recommendatory letter by Charles Cowden Clarke (who had been a close friend of Keats, and was now a friend of Fox) which Robert presented to him. This was not encouraging; even less encouraging was Moxon’s view of the poetry written by some of Robert’s tremendous contemporaries, far less a work by someone virtually unknown. Moxon gloomily revealed that Philip von Artevelde, a long dramatic poem by Sir Henry Taylor that had excited the Athenaeum, normally decorous, to rave enthusiastically in fifteen columns just the year before, had ‘not paid expenses by about thirty odd pounds’. Furthermore, ‘Tennyson’s poetry’, said Moxon, ‘is “popular at Cambridge” and yet of 800 copies which were printed of his last, some 300 only have gone off: Mr M[oxon] hardly knows whether he shall ever venture again, etc. etc., and in short begs to decline even inspecting, etc. etc.’ Poetry could no longer be relied upon as a paying proposition.

Robert offered to read his poem to Fox some morning, ‘though I am rather scared of a fresh eye going over its 4000 lines … yet on the whole I am not much afraid of the issue … I shall really need your notice on this account’; and finished off his letter with some heavy humorous flourishes that included a discreet swipe at John Stuart Mill advising him not to be an ‘idle spectator’ of Robert’s first appearance on a public stage (‘having previously only dabbled in private theatricals’). Paracelsus was to be Robert’s première, his big first night with the critics, who were invited to attend and advised to pay attention, ‘benignant or supercilious’ as Mill in particular should choose, but ‘he may depend that tho’ my “Now is the winter of our discontent” be rather awkward, yet there shall be occasional outbreaks of good stuff—that I shall warm as I get on, and finally wish “Richmond at the bottom of the seas,” etc. in the best style imaginable.’

Paracelsus received mixed reviews from those critics who did not pass it over in silence entirely. The reviewer for the Athenaeum gave the poem a brief, lukewarm notice in 73 words on 22 August 1835, reluctantly recognizing ‘talent in this dramatic poem’ but warning against facile imitation of Shelley’s ‘mysticism and vagueness’ in a work the reviewer found ‘dreamy and obscure’. There was worse from some other reviewers whose notices Robert, if he did not take them to heart as guides to future good poetic conduct, at least bore as scabs on his mind and as scars in his soul. He still scratched at them a decade later. On 17 September 1845, in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett, he recalled ‘more than one of the reviews and newspapers that laughed my “Paracelsus” to scorn ten years ago’ and contrasted, in a further letter to her of 9 December 1845, ‘that my own “Paracelsus”, printed a few months before, had been as dead a failure as “Ion” [by Thomas Noon Talfourd] a brilliant success … I know that until Forster’s notice in the Examiner appeared, every journal that thought it worth while to allude to the poem at all, treated it with entire contempt.’ Fox contributed a tardy review in the Monthly Repository in November: Robert had read Paracelsus aloud to him and they had discussed the poem, so he had had the benefit of the poet’s own industry, ideas and intentions to draw upon in his favourable notice, which declared the work to be ‘the result of thought, skill and toil’ and not—as the Athenaeum had judged it—a dreamy and obscure effusion. Paracelsus was not only a poem, declared Fox, but a poem with ideas.

His bold, informed defence of the poem had its effect: John Forster, in an article in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal early in 1836, promoted Robert to Parnassus: ‘Without the slightest hesitation we name Mr Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth.’ A vacancy had recently occurred, since Samuel Taylor Coleridge had died in 1834. But Forster had needed little or no prompting from a sympathetic review by Fox. As chief dramatic and literary reviewer of the Examiner, he had already dealt generously with Paracelsus in that publication: ‘Since the publication of Philip von Artevelde,’ he wrote, ‘we have met with no such evidences of poetic genius, and of general intellectual power, as are contained in this volume.’ Forster closed his review of Paracelsus with these words: ‘It is some time since we read a work of more unequivocal power than this. We conclude that its author is a young man, as we do not recollect his having published before.’ He was evidently, perhaps mercifully, unacquainted with Pauline, now immured in the British Museum Library. ‘If so, we may safely predict for him a brilliant career, if he continues true to the present promise of his genius. He possesses all the elements of a fine poet.’ Forster, unlike Fox, had not enjoyed the benefit of Robert Browning’s acquaintance, and his review is all the more valuable for that reason. He assumed Browning to be a young man, though it was difficult to tell from the poem itself: to repeat Chesterton’s line, Robert could have been anything between twenty and a thousand years old if the evidence of Paracelsus were the only criterion by which to judge his age.

Forster, says Mrs Orr, ‘knew that a writer in the Athenaeum had called it rubbish, and he had taken it up as a probable subject for a piece of slashing criticism’. A young critic (Forster was twenty-three years old in 1835, only five months younger than Browning) will sometimes adopt this tactic—an acknowledged means of getting on in literary society by bringing one’s own talent more prominently to the attention of fellow-critics, editors, and publishers than the work being reviewed. However, intending to bury Browning, Forster paused to praise, though ‘what he did write’, says Mrs Orr, ‘can scarcely be defined as praise. It was the simple, ungrudging admission of the unequivocal power, as well as brilliant promise, which he recognized in the work.’53 This in turn is perhaps a little grudging of Forster’s real recognition that here was a poet, perhaps not yet fully formed but promising great things. Robert himself, weighing the laurel crown awarded by Forster in the balance against the ashes heaped on his head by others, did not feel as pleased as he might otherwise have done if Forster’s had been but one voice amongst a full chorus singing in praiseful tune. Though he privately enjoyed the wholehearted applause of family and friends for his ‘private theatricals’, his public reception, now that he had put himself stage front, was more problematical.

Paracelsus was important to Robert. If Pauline had been a preview, in theatrical terms, the aspiring player would have performed to an empty house before being hooked off the stage by dissatisfied critics. But now—as he himself had written to Fox—this latest poem was his ‘first appearance on any stage’. It had been better, maybe, to start again and afresh. However, Robert specifically disclaimed in the preface any intention to promote Paracelsus as a drama or a dramatic poem. It was, he insisted, a poem and of a genre very different from that undertaken by any other poet. He warned critics off judging it ‘by principles on which it was never moulded’ and subjecting it ‘to a standard to which it was never meant to conform’.

What he meant by this was his intention ‘to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of mind or the passions by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects along and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded.’