Browning

No doubt this sentence made his meaning entirely clear to his contemporaries. What in effect Browning did in Paracelsus was to divide the poem into five sections or scenes, each a monologue by Aureolus Paracelsus, ‘a student’, with occasional interruptions by three other characters—Festus and Michal, husband and wife, described as ‘his friends’, and Aprile, thought to be inspired by Shelley, described as ‘an Italian poet’. These three took the roles, mostly, of auditors and sometimes prompts, iterating his moods at a critical point in his life. In each section, Paracelsus examines the state of his own inner life. By means of the insights he successively gains, he is enabled to act.

Rather more clearly, in his preface to the poem, Browning defined its intended form: ‘I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such only so long as the purpose for which they were first instituted is kept in view. I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all those restrictions, only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves and all new facilities placed at an author’s disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected. It is certain, however, that a work like mine depends more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success: indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, should connect the scattered lights into one constellation—a Lyre or a Crown.’

The poem is not notably dramatic, nor is it a linear narrative, nor is it lyric. It is light years away in its obscure allusions, recondite references, novel form, and difficult philosophy from the comparatively undemanding verse narratives of, say, Sir Walter Scott (who was nevertheless considered difficult even by some contemporary critics) or, for that matter, the familiar brio and theatricality of Byron’s verses. If it required strenuous mental effort from a perceptive critic, it stretched to incomprehension the limits of the common reader whom Browning, however flatteringly, expected to co-operate with him, engage with him, in the very creation of the poem. Paracelsus was, in the modern term, ‘interactive’—it depended, as Browning said in his preface, ‘more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success’.

For the meantime, however, the common reader confirmed the most dolorous expectations of Moxon. The light-minded reader in 1835 preferred the sentimental verse of Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (who died in 1838 at the age of 36, styled herself in life for the purposes of authorship as ‘L.E.L.’, wrote several novels and copious poetry, attracted to herself a reputation for indecorous romantic attachments that caused her to break off her engagement to John Forster) and Felicia Dorothea Hemans (who was responsible in 1829 for the poem ‘Casabianca’ and its famous first line, ‘The boy stood on the burning deck …’); preferred, too, gift books of mawkish poetry, and other such comforting, easily digestible products, after-dinner bon-bons or bon-mots that demanded no effort or response more than an easy smile, a wistful sigh, a romantic tear or any momentary rush of unreflecting, commonplace feeling. Nothing but the most banal expression of sentimental emotion was likely to succeed in the market for new poetry. Robert accepted that a work such as Paracelsus, even if lucky enough to find a publisher ready to print it, would be not only a short-term casualty of the early nineteenth-century crisis in poetry publishing but even, in the long term, might stand more as a succès d’estime than as a source of short-term financial profit or a lasting resource of popular taste. It would have to be enough in the mid-1830s that a few discriminating readers should read Robert Browning and—so far as they were able—appreciate what he was trying to do and say.

Paracelsus partook of the times not only in the experimental nature of its form, for the first half of the nineteenth century was an age of experiments and advances: it positively incorporated new thinking and new ideas and conflated them with the occult wisdom of the Renaissance, another distinct period of new thinking, new art, new science, and new technology. In The Life of Robert Browning, Clyde de L. Ryals54 points to Browning’s assimilation of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century scientific findings in biology, geology, and other sciences, to the extent that he was later to claim, very reasonably, that Paracelsus had anticipated Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (published in 1859) by some quarter of a century. Objecting to an assertion that he had ever been ‘strongly against Darwin, rejecting the truths of science and regretting its advance’, Robert only had to look back to find ‘all that seemed proved in Darwin’s scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning: see in Paracelsus the progressive development from senseless matter to organized, until man’s appearance.’55

Since all things are in nature, and Paracelsus was a natural philosopher and scientist, inexhaustibly desirous to plumb the secrets of nature (in Renaissance terms, an alchemist), it is hardly surprising that he appealed to Robert Browning as a bridge between science as it had been understood by the ancients and the perception of science by savants in his own age. Science itself was appropriate as a convenient vehicle for comment upon the facts of life that have always been known in one way or another, in one philosophy or another, but have been variously interpreted, when not entirely lost or forgotten or ignored, from generation to generation.

When Paracelsus died in 1541, he disappeared from the ken of all but the most esoteric scholars. Chesterton comments, wonderingly, on Browning’s choice of poetic protagonists—‘the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as that they are of no importance in ours’. In his choice of Paracelsus, Browning’s ‘supreme type of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful misers of dust. But for all that’, says Chesterton, ‘Browning was right.’ There could have been no better choice than Paracelsus, claims Chesterton, for Browning’s study of intellectual egotism and, he says, the choice equally refutes any charge against Browning himself that he was a frigid believer in logic and a cold adherent of the intellect—the proof being that at the age of twenty-three Browning wrote a poem designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy.

The entire poem is daringly experimental in form and philosophy: in both respects, it attempts to strip away the phenomenal world to reveal the noumenal world; to strip man of his physical integuments and reveal his psychical nakedness; to bare nature and reveal the natural. In the process, Robert Browning somewhat stripped himself psychologically bare: Paracelsus, for all his resolution after the personal revelations in Pauline, could not help but import some of his own state of mind and being into his work. Authors almost invariably write out of their own state of mind and being—there’s no help for it except rigorous self-awareness which is difficult consciously to attain, improbable to try to impose, and almost impossible thereafter to maintain.

The last thing Paracelsus was intended to be was confessional, but as Betty Miller acutely points out, two of the characters in the poem—Michal (M for Mother) and Festus (F for Father)—can be interpreted as Mr and Mrs Browning. They speak ‘out of the social and domestic environment of Robert Browning himself’. They ‘reveal, and with a singular candour on the part of their creator, the attitude of Browning’s own father and mother towards their brilliant, if ill-comprehended son’. In the discussions between the sober Festus, the gentle Michal, and the impatient, aspiring student Paracelsus, she says, ‘we catch an echo of the family conflict that preceded … the renunciation of a practical for a poetic career’.

Anyone familiar even with the barest biographical details of Robert’s life at this time, and beginning to read Paracelsus, will immediately grant the truth of Betty Miller’s astute psychological insight. It is perfectly plain, the entire difficult crisis; there it is, unmistakably recognizable in the pages, more harrowingly true to the turbulent family emotions and Browning’s own deepest feelings than any second-hand biographical fact and fancy can conjure. But then, too, as Ryals suggests, Paracelsus moves ‘back and forth between enthusiastic creation of a construct or fiction and sceptical de-creation of it when as “truth” or mimesis it is subjected to scrutiny’.56 With a poet as self-conscious at this time as Robert Browning, it should not easily be assumed that he would be unaware of using, even in disguise, his own life, its events and emotions; that he was not capable of a conjuror’s sleight-of-hand with a pack of cards, or an alchemist’s trick of turning lead into gold; that he would not make and unmake even these materials—now you see them, now you don’t; now lead, now gold—with as much ruthless facility as any others.

There is no real dispute, either, about Betty Miller’s judgement that, ‘In form, Paracelsus lies between the confessional of Pauline and the theatrical on which Browning wasted so many years. It is the closest of his early works to the dramatic monologues of his best period.’ Paracelsus did not make money for Browning, but it profited his reputation mightily. Future works would be styled and recommended as being ‘By the author of Paracelsus’. At the age of twenty-three, Robert Browning was a candidate for fame within London literary and theatrical circles. Paracelsus did not entitle him to a named and reserved seat in the Academy, far less the Siege Perilous at the literary round table; but he went confidently out and about, elegant and accomplished, affable and amusing, loquacious and learned, marked by those who mattered in the contemporary court of the London literati.

On 6 May 1835, the great actor-manager William Charles Macready was catching up with the most improving new books, reading ‘the pleasing poem of Van Artevelde’ that had so distressed Edward Moxon by its failure to recoup its costs. Reaching his London chambers, he found ‘Talfourd’s play of Ion in the preface to which is a most kind mention of myself’. Later in the day he called on the famously provocative young dramatic and literary critic John Forster, who was agitatedly considering a duel in Devonshire before thinking better of it.57 Macready was forty-two years old, and had succeeded to the place vacated on the English stage by the death of the actor Edmund Kean, whose grotesque, pathetic last performance of Richard III at Richmond had so much impressed and inspired Robert.

Macready was less barnstorming than Kean, who had acted vividly in the best Romantic manner, and he was certainly more seriously, in terms of intellect and artistry, attentive to the texts he produced and performed. He was ambitious, not only personally but for the English stage as a whole. Kean’s behaviour and attitudes, Macready considered, had brought the business of acting (‘my pariah profession’) into disrepute—though the low reputation of the English stage had never been higher than the sensational moral history of its best-known reprobates and its lowest hangers-on. It was Macready’s duty, as a rectitudinous Victorian—and, as he privately admitted, a reprehensibly envious rival of the disgraceful Kean—to raise the cultural level of the theatre to the virtue attained by the finest of the fine arts, to the most salubrious literary heights; in short, to purge the theatre of its most vicious elements and inspire it to the highest moral and artistic standards.

This ideal represented Macready’s conventional middle-class Victorianism crossed with his passionate egalitarianism, which, much as it reprobated the vile standards of the stage, also snobbishly scorned the high disdain and low virtue of society. Unfortunately for Macready, the English stage and its audiences resisted his energetic idealism.

On 27 November, Macready presented himself for dinner at the house of William Johnson Fox in Bayswater. ‘I like Mr Fox very much,’ wrote Macready in his diary entry for that day; ‘he is an original and profound thinker, and most eloquent and ingenious in supporting the penetrating views he takes.’ From which encomium we may take it that Macready and Fox harmoniously agreed, or amiably agreed to disagree, on most political, religious, and artistic matters. The evening got better still. ‘Mr Robert Browning, the author of Paracelsus, came in after dinner; I was very much pleased to meet him. His face is full of intelligence. My time passed most agreeably. Mr Fox’s defence of the suggestion that Lady Macbeth should be a woman of delicate and fragile frame pleased me very much, though he opposed me, and of course triumphantly. I took Mr Browning on, and requested to be allowed to improve my acquaintance with him. He expressed himself warmly, as gratified by the proposal; wished to send me his book; we exchanged cards and parted.’ The acquaintance warmed to the degree that on 31 December, the last day of 1835, Browning and five other guests were regaled with a dinner at Macready’s house where ‘Mr Browning was very popular with the whole party; his simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention and won opinions from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.’58

Macready thought it noteworthy to write in his diary on 1 February 1836 that John Forster ‘was talking much of Browning, who is his present all-in-all’. On 16 February, after one or two casual meetings, the acquaintance between Macready and Robert began to catch in earnest, to develop from personal friendship to professional association: ‘Forster and Browning called, and talked over the plot of a tragedy which Browning had begun to think of: the subject, Narses—a victorious general in the time of the Roman Emperor Justinian. He said that I had bit him by my performance of Othello, and I told him I hoped I should make the blood come. It would indeed be some recompense for the miseries, the humiliations, the heart-sickening disgusts which I have endured in my profession if, by its exercise, I had awakened a spirit of poetry whose influence would elevate, ennoble, and adorn our degraded drama. May it be!’

Robert was not only balm for Macready’s suffering professional soul; he found him personally soothing. Forster and the rest could be rumbustious and depressing: ‘My nerves and spirits were quite quelled by them all’; but Browning’s ‘gentle manners always make his presence acceptable’.59 Paracelsus, on the evidence of Macready’s diary entry for 8 December 1835—the day he finished reading the poem and set himself to considering it with the same professional eye of a player that he had brought to Talfourd’s Ion—would not do as drama—(which Robert had never intended that it should). The ‘main design of the poem’, according to Macready, ‘is not made out with sufficient clearness, and obscurity is a fault in many passages’. That said, however, he admitted the poem’s ‘most subtle and penetrating search into the feelings and impulses of our nature, some exquisite points of character, the profoundest and the grandest thoughts and most musically uttered. The writer is one whom I think destined for very great things.’

John Forster had been invited as a guest to Macready’s New Year’s Eve dinner at Elm Place, his house in the rural village of Elstree, and so it was by no remote chance that both Forster and Robert happened to be waiting with other Macready invitees earlier in the day at the ‘Blue Posts’ in Holborn, a boarding stage, for the same rumbling and bumping Billing’s coach that Macready himself used almost daily in his journeys to his London chambers from his country home and back again. Mrs Orr says that the introduction between Forster and Robert took place at Macready’s house, whereupon Forster inquired, ‘Did you see a little notice of you I wrote in the Examiner?’ From this point on, Forster and Robert seem to have been pretty constantly together. It was at Elm Place, too, that Robert first met Miss Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, a neighbour of Macready’s, a young woman some ten or eleven years older than Robert, interested in art and literature.

Narses was abandoned as a probable dramatic subject, and no more was heard of Forster’s and Browning’s interest in writing for the theatre, and for Macready in particular, until a few months later in 1826, when Macready acted in a production of Talfourd’s Ion at Covent Garden. The first night, dedicated as a benefit night for Macready (who, after thirteen years, had just abandoned Drury Lane and its abominable manager Alfred Bunn), was on 26 May. Macready, having taken the principal role before a starry audience of literary and legal luminaries, social celebrities, politicians, and peers, was ‘called for very enthusiastically by the audience and cheered on my appearance most heartily. I said: “It would be affectation to conceal the particular pleasure in receiving their congratulatory compliment on this occasion. It was indeed most gratifying to me; and only checked by the painful consideration that this might be perhaps the last new play I ever might have the honour of producing before them. (Loud cries of ‘No No!’) However that might be, the grateful recollection of their kindness would never leave me.”’

Macready repaired after the performance to Talfourd’s house in nearby Russell Square, where he ‘met Wordsworth, who pinned me; Walter Savage Landor, to whom I was introduced, and whom I very much liked; Stanfield, Browning, Price, Miss Mitford—I cannot remember them all.’60 There were some sixty people in all, crowding around one another in congratulatory mode. Macready was placed at the supper table between Landor and Wordsworth, with Browning opposite—which speaks well for Robert’s own status in the company. Macready perhaps forgot or omitted to give some detail in his diary for this tremendous day, but Mrs Orr supplies the information that when Talfourd proposed a toast to the poets of England, Robert was included in their number, named by his host as the author of Paracelsus, and he stayed put in his chair while glasses were raised to him; according to Griffin and Minchin, Wordsworth ‘leaned across the table and remarked, “I am proud to drink your health, Mr Browning!”’61 This story is rubbished by Betty Miller, who points out that Robert had never much liked Wordsworth’s poetry or his politics and would not have been particularly flattered by the grand old placeman’s compliment—even if Wordsworth had been there to make it: he had gone home before the toasts were offered. The story has survived even the firm evidence that contradicts it.

Years later, on 24 February 1875, Robert wrote to the Revd Alexander B. Grosart to explain, with some embarrassment, why he had attacked Wordsworth in ‘The Lost Leader’, a poem published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845: ‘I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerable personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account: had I intended more, above all, such a boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about “handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon.” These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet; whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular about-face of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore.’

Wordsworth had abandoned liberalism, Robert’s preferred political position, and by so doing he had proved himself, in Robert’s estimation, that most disgraceful and detestable thing—a traitor. Throughout Robert’s poetical canon there are hissing references to the turpitudinous characters of turncoats. Unpleasant revenges, as unsparing as in Dante’s Inferno, are invented for them.

Just for a handful of silver he left us,

Just for a riband to stick in his coat—

Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,

Lost all the others she lets us devote …62

There will be further occasions on which we will recognize that Robert Browning could be a good hater for the sake of conscience; this is one of the first and most significant. Wordsworth, heaped with honours, eulogized by friends and literary partisans such as Harriet Martineau, had become Poet Laureate in 1843. He had become, too, an object of absolute disgust for Robert, whose poem pulled no punches. This was not satire, this was not an elegant swipe: ‘The Lost Leader’ was a seriously-intended piece of lethal invective that found its mark not only through Robert’s authentic outrage but through his authentic poetic voice. His counterblast has stood as long as Wordsworth’s poetic reputation, and its venomous sting still poisons the old man in posterity.

There are other contradictions and misapprehensions concerning Talfourd’s famous party, none of them too surprising. It was a party celebrating a significant occasion; it was a party boiling and roiling with writers, actors, quantities of poets, lawyers, and journalists; and if it wasn’t an occasion for binding up old wounds and gouging open new ones, settling old scores and setting new grudges, for giving gossip and getting things wrong, then it can’t have been much of a party. But in fact it was all those things and more—it was a wonderful party. The more it is recalled, the more legends it accretes. The Ion supper is a sort of early Victorian charabanc, standing room only, for every notable of the period bundled and bumped together and bowled along, fired by their own fissiparous energies. Robert was noticed by one of the guests, Miss Mitford, who never forgot how he looked that night. Ten years or more later, in a letter of 1847,63 she wrote, ‘I saw Mr Browning once and remember thinking how exactly he resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes—and as to his poetry I have just your opinion of it—It is one heap of obscurity, confusion and weakness … I met him once as I told you when he had long ringlets and no neckcloth—and when he seemed to me about the height and size of a boy of twelve years old—Femmelette—is a word made for him. A strange sort of person to carry such a woman as Elizabeth Barrett off her feet.’

‘Femmelette’, applied to a man or a woman, means a feeble creature, lacking force and energy, a languishing, listless person, in distinct contrast to Miss Mary Russell Mitford herself, who tended to be pert. In 1836, she was a successful, middle-aged dramatist associated with Macready (who had taken roles in her plays); essayist; sometime poet (set on that path by the encouragement of Coleridge), and famous as the author of the sketches and stories that were published in 1832 as Our Village. Her nature was generally sunny, though she was as capable as anyone—and possibly more than some—of asperity and decided views. Perhaps Robert merely struck Miss Mitford as a little insipid, as at least modestly reserved: it was not his manner then to be full-voiced or conspicuously hearty. He would stand up for himself when necessary, but his mode was essentially placatory, as would be evident later to Macready when he noted Robert’s moderating, calming reaction to the impetuosity and hot-headedness of Forster.

The talk tended towards the literary and theatrical, and Macready ‘overtook Mr Browning as they were leaving the house and said, “Write a play, Browning, and keep me from going to America.” The reply was, “Shall it be historical and English: what do you say to a drama on Strafford?”’64 The Earl of Strafford had been in Robert’s mind, and even more to the fore in Forster’s mind since he happened to be writing the lives of Strafford and other statesmen of the period of Charles I, the Civil War, and the Commonwealth. Forster had temporarily stalled on his biographies, due partly to some personal difficulties with the fascinating Laetitia Landon, and Robert had been assisting him with some of the literary work on Strafford. Forster’s Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth was published in parts between 1836 and 1839 and his Life of Strafford had been published just a few weeks before the Ion party. Strafford was very much dans le vent.