Browning

Better, perhaps, to think of happier times, of Robert inspired by this floundering journey on the swell of the sea to recall the first journey into Russia, and hear again in the slap of water against the sides of the Norham Castle the rhythmic beat of his own and Benkhausen’s galloping horses as they ran through northern Europe, their hooves thudding through the silences of white snow and green firs. He wrote, too, ‘Home Thoughts, from the Sea’, a short poem ‘written at the same time, and in the same manner’

(#litres_trial_promo)—in pencil on the cover of a book—a colourful riot of geography (‘Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away’), history (‘Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay’), and triumphant English victory (‘Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?—say’) in eight rhythmic, rhyming, ringing lines.

Not much remains of first-hand information about Robert’s first excursion to Italy and his journey home through Germany and the Low Countries. On his return, he was back in touch with William Johnson Fox, that great man who, as Robert wrote to Fanny Howarth in April 1839, ‘is my Chiron in a small way’, referring to him as the possessor of a ‘magnificent and poetical nature’. Robert regarded Fox as ‘my literary father’ and took care to maintain the connection with him and his family. William Sharp

(#litres_trial_promo) reports a reminiscence of Fox’s daughter ‘Tottie’ (later Mrs Bridell-Fox), who wrote: ‘I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palaces, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced.’

Robert had spent two weeks in Venice out of his four in Italy, and images of his impressions would surface later in poems such as Pippa Passes, ‘In a Gondola’, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, and—significantly for the time being—in the work in hand, Sordello, the poem that is confirmed as having been in the making since at least 1835, and probably for a while before, very likely soon after Pauline. Robert wrote to Fox on 16 April 1835, in a letter referring to Paracelsus, that ‘I have another affair on hand, rather of a more popular nature, I conceive, but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two.’ This ‘other affair’, Sordello, had already been subject to several revisions since its inception in or about 1833, and would again be revised to incorporate first-hand impressions of the Italian sites and sights still remaining, however much altered, some six hundred years after the thirteenth-century troubador (trovatore or, more literarily, trouvère) Sordello had walked and talked among them.

On the day of his departure for Italy, Robert had written to John Robertson, a friend who was connected with the Westminster Review, to say, ‘I sail this morning for Venice—intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes.’

(#litres_trial_promo)Sordello, the poem, is also referred to in a letter to Fanny Haworth that Mrs Orr cannot date precisely but is likely to have been written in the summer of 1838 or 1839: ‘I am going to begin finishing Sordello—and to begin thinking a Tragedy (an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticism on Strafford) and I want to have another tragedy in prospect, I write best so provided: I had chosen a splendid subject for it, when I learned that a magazine for next, this, month, will have a scene founded on my story; vulgarizing or doing no good to it: and I accordingly throw it up. I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love, to contrast with the one I mean to have ready in a short time.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The plays he had in mind were to be King Victor and King Charles, and The Return of the Druses. With his hopes for the popular appeal of Sordello, and the prospective play devoted to a theme of ‘the most wild and passionate love’, it can be taken that Robert was aiming now at the wild hearts as well as the impassioned minds of the market for poetry and plays.

Which begs a question about the condition of his own heart: love, remarks Mrs Orr very astutely at this point, had played a noticeably small part in Robert’s life. His adolescent feelings of affection for Eliza Flower were never very serious, nor likely to be taken very seriously, considering her long-standing devotion to William Fox. No woman—so far as we know from the scant evidence remaining of Robert’s early years—detained his romantic attention or redirected it from the affection he maintained for his mother. Nobody else, for the time being, could count on being kissed goodnight every night by Robert Browning. Mrs Orr suggests that, in the absence of any personal experience of ‘wild and passionate love’, Robert turned to Fanny Haworth to supply the deficit, though what he supposed she might know of it is beyond conjecture. There was a lively sympathy, but no romantic feeling, between Robert and Fanny, and it would certainly have been indelicate, if not improper, for him to inquire too closely into the passions of an older, unmarried woman living cloistered at home with her mother. In a letter of April 1839, he tells Fanny direct, ‘Do you know I was, and am, an Improvisatore of the head—not of the hort [sic] …—not you!’

In March 1840, Edward Moxon, at the expense of Robert’s father, published Sordello—‘that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry’, as even the partisan William Sharp is obliged to describe the poem. Alfred Tennyson read the first line:

Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told,

and finally he read the last line:

Who would, has read Sordello’s story told,

whereupon he famously said that the first line and the last line were the only two lines of the poem that he understood and they were lies since nothing in between made any sense to him. Douglas Jerrold, at the time a well-known playwright and later an original staff member and contributor to Punch, is said to have started reading Sordello while recuperating from illness. No sooner had he picked up the book than he put it down, saying, ‘My God! I’m an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind’s gone. I can’t understand two consecutive lines of an English poem.’ He called his family to his bedside and gave them the poem to read. When they sadly shook their heads and could make no more of it than he could himself, he heaved a sigh of relief and, confirmed in his sanity, went to sleep. Thomas Carlyle wrote to say that he had read Sordello with great interest but that Jane, his wife, wished to know whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book.

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It is as well to get these three memorably funny stories dusted off at the start. They live forever in Browning’s life and legend, not just because they are sharply humorous or because they comfort our own confusion on reading the poem with the satisfaction of knowing that it confounded even the greatest intellects of its time, but also because they express a genuine, general bewilderment that explanations by critics of the poem’s form and expositions by researchers of the poem’s references have not wholly redeemed. Sordello has been incorporated into the fabric of English literature, but—still and all—its reputation persists, unfairly say some modern revisionary critics, as a notoriously difficult work, a monument to obscurity and a testament to tedium.

Robert Browning himself, says Sharp, came to be resigned to the shortcomings of Sordello as an accessible work of art: years later, ‘on his introduction to the Chinese Ambassador, as a “brother-poet”, he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression he particularly affected. The great man deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as “enigmatic.” Browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship.’ Sharp adds, rather nicely, that Browning’s holograph dedication of a copy of Sordello to a later friend, the French critic Joseph Milsand, read: ‘My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then or since.’

That was—and remains—simply true. George Santayana, in an essay, ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’, declares that if we are to do justice to Browning’s poetry, we must keep two things in mind: ‘One is the genuineness of the achievement, the sterling quality of the vision and inspiration; these are their own justification when we approach them from below and regard them as manifesting a more direct or impassioned glimpse of experience than is given to mildly blatant, convention-ridden minds. The other thing to remember is the short distance to which this comprehension is carried, its failure to approach any kind of finality, or to achieve a recognition even of the traditional ideals of poetry and religion.’ This latter qualification is now more disputed than the preceding encomium.

However, the estimation of Browning’s contemporaries was naturally foreshortened by the immediate, looming presence of Sordello, which had not then achieved the longer perspective of later critical perception nor the farther horizon of literary history. It was right under their noses. Sharp

(#litres_trial_promo) characterizes the poem as ‘a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan’. He compares its monotony to ‘one of the enormous American inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight’—which is a pretty way of dressing up the word ‘stagnant’. He regrets the ‘fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness’ and this, ‘coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, has been Browning’s ruin here’. Nevertheless, on the charge of Sordello’s obscurity, Sharp admits that ‘its motive thought is not obscure. It is a moonlit plain compared to the “silva oscura” of the “Divina Commedia”’—a tract of open country compared to Dante’s ‘dark wood’.

It is irresistible, though irreverent, to think of comparing Sordello to the smuggler’s ship that Robert came across on his voyage to Italy: the poem first setting sail on publication, heavily armed with emotion and erudition, fully ballasted with all the approved poetic paraphernalia, confident of successfully accosting and overwhelming readers and critics that cross its path, foundering on the unexpected obstacle of public bewilderment and upturned by a sudden storm of critical abuse, all hands dead, wounded, lost in attitudes of frightful prayer, finally righting itself and—with an ineffably battered dignity—turning to look mutely, uncomprehendingly at those critic-surgeons who butchered it and cast it adrift, reeling off into the sunset like a ‘mutilated creature’. It is a painful metaphor for the unsuspected end of a brave adventure.

As Chesterton remarks,

(#litres_trial_promo)Sordello is almost unique in literary history, in the sense that praise or blame hardly figured in its reception: both were overwhelmed by an almighty, universal incomprehension that stopped informed criticism in its tracks. ‘There had been authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with Sordello enters into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding.’ So far in his career, Robert’s reputation as a poet and playwright had seemed to be advancing much in step with those of his contemporaries. Pauline had fallen stillborn and anonymously from the press, but since nobody had noticed, nobody had heard the dull thud, its failure made no difficulties, and it had had the useful result of attracting the interested attention and positive regard of William Johnson Fox. Paracelsus had obtained a reasonable critical reception, though the poem itself had not sold out its first edition; and Strafford had been received with general enthusiasm, though how it would have fared in a longer theatrical run could never be known. So far, so good, all things considered: one undoubted failure, two moderate successes, nothing to be ashamed of (though Pauline remained decently veiled and in a permanent purdah). But Sordello suddenly blighted this promise in the bud.

Chesterton perceptively and properly disputes and demolishes the persistent myth of Sordello’s unintelligibility: its literary qualities, when perceived and understood, render the poem clearer. As Sharp admits, too, ‘its motive thought is not obscure’ and is perceptible to intelligent critical analysis. The final verdict on Sordello’s appeal to posterity may be given by Ezra Pound, who, perhaps exasperatedly, exclaimed, ‘Hang it—there is but one Sordello!’ And yes, there is no getting round it—we could not now or for the future do without Sordello, any more than Robert Browning could then or later have done without it. Since Pound regarded Browning as ‘my poetic father’, it is not irrelevant here to refer to T. S. Eliot, who admitted that Pound himself, in his time, suffered from being simultaneously judged to be ‘objectionably modern’ and ‘objectionably antiquarian’. The fellow-feeling and the sense of paternity that Pound bore for Browning is, in this sense, perfectly understandable.

The charge of Browning’s wilful obscurity, though it does not begin with Sordello, is sometimes attributed to Browning’s intellectual vanity and, by extension, arrogance. Chesterton speaks true when he says that ‘throughout his long and very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man who was intellectually vain.’ It is plain that, in his early career, he had little or no awareness that nobody knew as much as he did, and that that profound ignorance made him unaware that what was perfectly clear to Robert Browning was of the uttermost obscurity to almost everyone else. But that is a different matter: had he been aware of it, and had he made allowance for it, he would have committed a worse sin of being consciously condescending and patronising, of writing de haut en bas—which is one fault for which he is never successfully prosecuted.

‘He was not unintelligible because he was proud,’ says Chesterton, decisively and characteristically turning the difficulty on its head, ‘but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious.’

(#litres_trial_promo) And because they were obvious, he fell into that concision of expression, allusion, and imagery which Sharp perceives as a fault and which, admittedly, compounded the unintelligibility of the poem for his readers. If Browning is accused of intellectual complexity, it is paradoxical that that complexity derives from his efforts to reduce it to a simplicity that, in the event, was fully comprehensible—and then only intermittently—solely to himself. By not writing down to his readership, Browning’s Sordello, says Chesterton, was ‘the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man’. It is a compliment that has not, then or now, been easily understood or greatly appreciated. The compliment was rebuffed, indeed, by the Athenaeum on 30 May with reference to the poem’s ‘puerilities and affectations’, and by the Atlas on 28 May which found Sordello full of ‘pitching, hysterical, and broken sobs of sentences’.

Even Macready finally gave up on the book: ‘After dinner tried—another attempt—utterly desperate—on Sordello; it is not readable.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Only Fanny Haworth had much good to say for it, a kindness to which Robert responded gratefully in a letter to her of May 1840: ‘You say roses and lilies and lilac-bunches and lemon-flowers about it while everybody else pelts cabbage stump after potato-paring—nay, not everybody—for Carlyle … but I won’t tell you what [Richard Monckton] Milnes told me Carlyle told him the other day: (thus I make you believe it was something singular in the way of praise—connu!).’ In fact, it is pleasing to report that Carlyle did have a good word to say.

Nobody now reads Sordello—or if they do, not idly, not without a good reason, and rarely without a concordance conveniently to hand. This is fair enough: Robert himself, in later life, when asked to explain a reference in one of his poems, was obliged to reply that once God and Browning knew what he meant, but ‘now only God knows’. And in modern times, quite aside from the poem’s literary difficulties, its sheer length—divided into six cantos (or ‘Books’) it amounts to five or six lines short of a total of 6,000 lines—is a deterrent to the casual reader. Chesterton is kindly inclined to exonerate Browning, finally, on the grounds of innocence and inexperience: ‘The Browning then who published Sordello we have to conceive, not as a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from each other.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Substitute, then, for Sharp’s image of ‘the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan’, the idea of Robert Browning as a Laocoön entangled in the coils of serpents so intertwined that they become one indistinguishable, roiling mass. Robert, all unwitting, called up leviathans from the vasty deep of his unconscious mind and conjured them off the pages of his conscious reading, so that they devoured him.

‘A very great part of the difficulty of Sordello,’ instances Chesterton, ‘is in the fact that before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of Browning’s actual narrative, he is supposed to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epochs—the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in medieval Italy.’ Griffin and Minchin

(#litres_trial_promo) say that, ‘In 1844, when Browning landed at Naples, among the first sights that met his view were advertisements of the performance of an opera on Sordello’, and that as late as 1910 (the publication date of their biography) ‘in the windows of Italian bookshops, one may see paper-covered volumes on the legend of Sordello and of the Ezzelini family who figure so prominently in Browning’s poem’. This is like saying an Italian arriving in London and seeing advertisements of the performance of a play on the Earl of Strafford would know instantly the historical treat he might expect from a stage version of the story, or that paper-covered volumes on the legend of Richard the Lionheart and Blondel the troubador would immediately engage his attention with a thrill of long familiarity.

Chesterton and others might later, with hindsight, excuse Sordello on several counts, but youth, except by the special indulgence of Mrs Orr,

(#litres_trial_promo) cannot be one of them. In 1840, Robert was twenty-eight years old and henceforth, says Mrs Orr, ‘his work ceases to be autobiographic in the sense in which, perhaps erroneously, we have felt it to be’. Erroneously, certainly, if we take it to be true-to-fact; not so far off the mark if we take it and interpret it, in the light of the known biographical facts about Browning, as perceptive emotional self-confession. His future work will, says Mrs Orr, be ‘inspired by every variety of conscious motive, but never again by the old (real or imagined) self-centred, self-directing Will … in Pippa Passes, published one year later, the poet and the man show themselves full-grown. Each has entered on the inheritance of the other.’

Chesterton picks up this cue from Mrs Orr and runs with it a little further, saying that Sordello ‘does not present any very significant advance in Browning on that already represented by Pauline and Paracelsus. Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent phrase used about the first by Mr Johnson Fox, “confessional” … Browning is still writing about himself, a subject of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant.’ And Chesterton, like Mrs Orr, recognizes Pippa Passes as a significant step forward not only in the technical development of Browning’s poetry but in the personal development of the poet himself. Both speak in a new voice from another place.

Poetry was the principal string to Robert’s bow; but he could not help pulling on another, trying to shoot a true arrow from it. As he had written to Fanny Haworth, it suited his way of working to keep several things on the go simultaneously. This is interesting to know, but nothing to make too much of: it is not uncommon—few writers conscientiously finish one job (book, play, poem or essay), dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s, before committing themselves to the next. Writers tend to work on several (more than one, anyhow) projects in parallel rather than serially or consecutively, and none of them will ever be at the same stage of development at the same time. It is only pedants and plodders and publishers who insist that one cannot do two things (or three, or four or more) at the same time. Since Strafford, Robert had taken his opportunities to keep up and broaden his acquaintance with the theatre and those associated with it. The untimely death of Strafford had been a blow, but his fascination with the stage had not died with it. Somewhat smoke-scented, its feathers a little ruffled, shaking out the ashes and preening the charred tips from its wings, the phoenix of Robert’s theatrical ambition was ready for another flight.

Macready, in his tenure as manager of Covent Garden (he reigned there from 30 September 1837 to 18 July 1839), was one focus of Robert’s attention; another was the well-disposed William Johnson Fox. Between Macready and Fox, two substantial rocks in the social life of London, Robert was naturally pulled by the eddies and currents that flowed around and between them into contact with a wide literary, legal, political, and social acquaintance.

This included men such as Charles Dickens (exactly Browning’s age and already prolific, with Sketches by ‘Boz’, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby under his belt); Walter Savage Landor (the famously and intractably temperamental poet, dramatist, and polemicist, recently returned from Italy after bitter separation from his wife); Edward Bulwer (the fashionable novelist, playwright, and politician who was to become Bulwer-Lytton in 1843, when he inherited the great house Knebworth from his mother, and thereafter first Baron Lytton); Daniel Maclise (the Irish portrait and history painter); Leigh Hunt (who had personally known Byron, Shelley, and Keats and whom Robert liked for his childlike nature and because he had rescued Shelley’s heart from the funeral pyre on the beach at Viareggio and now treasured it, along with a wisp of Milton’s hair, in his collection of literary relics); John Forster, of course, who was by now a close friend of Dickens and was to become his biographer; Richard Henry (sometimes Hengist) Horne (adventurer, critic, sometime editor of the Monthly Repository, author of plays that were never acted); Richard Monckton Milnes (later the first Baron Houghton, a tremendous social swell of wide literary and political acquaintance who amassed a large library of pornography that included the thrillingly wicked works of the Marquis de Sade); the literary and legal lion Thomas Noon Talfourd; and other playwrights, critics, actors, and men and women of fashion who thronged the times, the theatres, the salons and the dinner tables of London.

From the time of Strafford, Robert became a regular diner-out: he seems, indeed, rarely to have refused a decent invitation. Such social activity was useful: having attracted the public eye, he was not about to drop out of its sight. Acquaintance with the author was more sought after than with his books: Robert was talkative, intelligent, personable, and—having got over early reserve in company—was by now confident in conversation and socially assured. By chance, fatefully, when dining at Talfourd’s in 1839, Robert made the acquaintance of John Kenyon, described by Mrs Orr as being at that date ‘a pleasant, elderly man’, who turned out to have been a schoolfellow of Robert’s father.

(#litres_trial_promo) This encounter led to the reunion of Mr Browning and Mr Kenyon, who were as delighted with one another in their advancing years as they had been as schoolboys. This first meeting after so long a break prospered into an enduringly warm friendship with the whole Browning family. Mrs Orr quotes from a letter, dated 10 January 1884, from Robert to Professor Knight of St Andrews, some twenty-eight years after Kenyon’s death: ‘He was one of the best of human beings, with a general sympathy for excellence of every kind. He enjoyed the friendship of Wordsworth, of Southey, of Landor, and in later days, was intimate with most of my contemporaries of excellence.’

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At about this time—even the thorough Mrs Orr cannot put an exact date on it—the Brownings moved to a larger, three-storeyed house, Hanover Cottage, to be near Jane Browning, Robert the First’s widow, who had moved nearby from Islington with her daughter Jemima and son Reuben. A letter conjecturally dated December 1840 by Robert to William Macready specifically states, ‘we remove into a new house, the week after next,—a place really not impossible to be got at’, and another to Macready, which on internal evidence must be dated no earlier than 1840, gives ‘Hanover Cottage Southampton [St]’ as Robert’s address. The reference to Southampton [St] must be provisional. To Laman Blanchard, the author of Offerings, Robert wrote in April 1841 to advise him of his new address: ‘if, in a week or two you will conquer the interminable Kent Road, and on passing the turnpike at New Cross, you will take the first lane with a quickset hedge to the right, you will “descry a house resembling a goose-pie”; only a crooked, hasty and rash goose-pie. We have a garden and trees, and little green hills of a sort to go out on.’ Mr Browning’s books, six thousand and more, were lodged in ‘the long low rooms of its upper storey.’

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Robert’s description of the house as ‘resembling a goose-pie’ has vexed many Browning scholars, who have scoured all of literature to discover an appropriate association. One might offer to this inquiry the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and perruquier Allan Ramsay, who became a bookseller in Edinburgh and promoted the city’s first circulating library. He built a round house known as the ‘Goose-Pie’ on the lower slopes of the Edinburgh Castle hill, above what are now the Princes Street gardens. Perhaps—and it’s not unlikely: Carlyle would have known them—Robert had read Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany, a collection of Scottish songs and ballads, the first volume of which was published in 1723, or The Ever Green (1724), which contained Ramsay’s revisions of representative work by the late medieval Makars of Scotland, notably the great poets Dunbar and Henryson. From Ramsay’s editions of Scottish poetry Robert might have gone on to glean a little gossip about Ramsay’s life, and a house known as the ‘Goose-Pie’ is striking enough to have stuck in anyone’s memory to be retrieved later as an amusing and typically recondite reference.

Mr Browning’s stepbrother Reuben, Robert’s young uncle, was allowed to put up York, his horse, which Robert was encouraged to ride, in the stable and coach-house which was attached to the house and accessible from it. The horse was groomed by the gardener, who was also responsible, with Mrs Browning, for the large garden ‘opening on to the Surrey hills’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Sarianna spoke later of trees in the front of the new house, and Mrs Orr refers specifically to a white rose tree in the garden under which lived a toad which became so much attached to Robert that it would follow him about and suffer him to tickle its head. Hanover Cottage was larger than the family’s previous house and is referred to in several literary memoirs of the period, always with affection and respect for the warmth of its welcome to Robert’s guests.

After Strafford, Robert’s brain teemed with ideas for further dramatic productions, including an adaptation of a ballad, ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’, just lately published by John Payne Collier (who in 1840 founded the Shakespeare Society and busied himself thereafter with falsifications and forgeries in folios of Shakespeare’s plays that are the subject of academic debate to this day). His interest in the ballad was eclipsed by another rendering of it in dramatic form by Richard Hengist Horne in 1837, but no matter; there were other subjects. He wrote two plays, King Victor and King Charles and Mansoor the Hierophant (later retitled The Return of the Druses), both of which were submitted to Macready for his attention and refused by the great actor.

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On 5 September 1839, Macready ‘Read Browning’s play on Victor, King of Sardinia—it turned out to be a great mistake. I called Browning into my room and most explicitly told him so, and gave him my reasons for coming to such a conclusion.’