Browning

Carlyle’s first impression of Robert Browning had not been wholly positive. Forty years later, Robert, in a letter of 18 March 1881,

(#litres_trial_promo) candidly admitted that Carlyle ‘confessed once to me that, on the first occasion of my first visiting him, he was anything but favorably impressed by my “smart green coat”—I being in riding costume: and if then and there had begun and ended our acquaintanceship, very likely I might have figured in some corner of a page as a poor scribbling-man with proclivities for the turf and scamphood. What then? He wrote Sartor [Resartus]—and such letters to me in those old days. No, I am his devotedly.’

Carlyle, seventeen years older than Robert, might deplore his dandyism, but he admitted his young friend to be beautiful, striking in his facial features, and possessing a full head of dark, flowing hair. Besides, the ‘neat dainty little fellow’ professed a marked enthusiasm for the philosophy of the Scottish philosopher whose intellectual distinction in London literary society added a lustre to his otherwise gaunt, somewhat dour appearance. As Carlyle got to know Robert better, he formed a close personal attachment to him and a high opinion of his capabilities. To Gavan Duffy, the young Irish nationalist, Carlyle declared Robert Browning to possess not only a powerful intellect but, ‘among the men engaged in England in literature just now was one of the few from which it was possible to expect something’. Browning, said Carlyle, responding in 1849 to Duffy’s suggestion that the poet might be an imitator of Coleridge’s ‘The Suicide’s Argument’ (first published in 1828), ‘was an original man and by no means a person who would consciously imitate anyone’.

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Robert and Thomas Carlyle had certainly met by 27 March 1839, when they are recorded as dining together at Macready’s table.

(#litres_trial_promo) In a letter of 30 December 1841 to Fanny Haworth, Robert tells her that he ‘dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people “dear,” in a hurry, except in letter-beginings!) yesterday—I don’t know any people like them—there was a son of [Robert] Burns’ there, Major Burns whom Macready knows—he sung “Of all the airts”—“John Anderson”—and another song of his father’s.’ This reference speaks confidently of some considerable intimacy and friendship beyond mere literary respect or intellectual hero-worship. In a letter to Robert of 1 December 1841, Carlyle lamented that, ‘The sight of your card instead of yourself, the other day when I came down stairs, was a real vexation to me! The orders here are rigorous. “Hermetically sealed till 2 o’clock!” But had you chanced to ask for my Wife, she would have guessed that you formed an exception, and would have brought me down.’ Carlyle goes on to invite Robert to pay visits on Friday nights for tea at six or half-past six. A letter of 1842 from Robert to Mrs Carlyle accepts an invitation to breakfast. Carlyle’s letters to Robert in this period are those of a man corresponding with an intellectual equal and a friend interested in the common domestic matters of life as well as the more rarefied matters of the mind and the human condition. Browning had, wrote Carlyle to Moncure Daniel Conway, ‘simple speech and manners and ideas of his own’. He was ‘a fine young man … I liked him better than any young man about here.’ And though Carlyle ‘did not make much out of’ Paracelsus, he conceded that ‘that and his other works proved a strong man’.

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Robert not only rode into town to visit Carlyle at his house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, but Carlyle rode out to Hatcham to visit the Brownings, whose decent domestic respectability he admired as much as the tidy trim of ‘the little room’ in which Robert kept his books. Perhaps Mrs Browning played the piano for him, perhaps Carlyle now and again burst into song. It was not unlikely—despite Elizabeth Barrett being convinced of his having ‘forbidden all “singing” to this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing’. Robert revealed to her, in a letter of 26 February 1845, an occasion a couple of weeks before when Carlyle had abruptly asked him, ‘Did you never try to write a Song? Of all the things in the world, that I should be proudest to do.’ It may be that Carlyle was mindful of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun’s remark in 1703, ‘I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Chr—’s sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ If he could not make a song, Carlyle could at least sing one. Six months before, Robert had heard the sage of Ecclefechan, the prophet of Craigenputtock, the great Cham of Chelsea, ‘croon if not certainly sing, “Charlie is my darling” (“my darling” with an adoring emphasis)’.

Of this enduring but improbable friendship, Chesterton puts the matter succinctly: ‘Browning was, indeed, one of the few men who got on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most other poets of the day, had something amounting to a real attachment to him … Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all companies.’

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Dramatic Lyrics had been published, at Mr Browning senior’s expense, in late November 1842. The pamphlet consisted of sixteen poems, fourteen of them new: ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ had already been published in the Monthly Repository in 1836. Moxon had suggested a collection of small poems for popularity’s sake, and so Robert had collected up poems he had written over the past eight years, during and after his trip to Russia. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (first titled ‘The rain set in early to-night …’) and ‘Johannes Agricola’ (first titled ‘There’s Heaven above …’) are said to have actually been written in the spring of 1834, in St Petersburg. ‘Cavalier Tunes’, a set of three poems—‘Marching Along’, ‘Give a Rouse’, and ‘My Wife Gertrude’ (later titled ‘Boot and Saddle’)—was probably written in the summer of 1842, arising out of Robert’s background reading for Strafford and coinciding with the two-hundredth anniversary of the Civil War. Sordello and Robert’s visit to Italy in 1838 had inspired ‘My Last Duchess’ (here titled ‘Italy’) and ‘In a Gondola’. ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is said to have come from reading in his father’s library. These, together with ‘Waring’, were to figure among Robert’s most famous poems and, with ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola’, are among the best known, best loved, and best studied poems in the English language, from high school to high table.

On first publication, Robert had been anxious to allay any interpretation of Dramatic Lyrics as expressing anything that might be construed as personal to the author. A plain disclaimer asserted: ‘Such poems as the following come properly enough, I suppose, under the head of “Dramatic Pieces”; being, though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.’ This was largely true in principle: the poems are not notably introspective but are mostly based on legend or history; they depend on dramatic action more than philosophical themes; and—with the exception of ‘Cavalier Tunes’—they are distinctly flavoured with Robert’s observations of nations and nationalities other than England and the English. The title of the collection also directs readers away from any psychological analysis: the poems are by an author recently known for dramatic works and the word Lyrics in the title specifically casts them back to the lyrical poetry of the Romantic poets. Of course, this is somewhat disingenuous—they are in a distinctively modern, Browning idiom.

Robert might have saved himself all the trouble of dissociating himself personally from the utterances in Dramatic Lyrics since the pamphlet attracted little or no attention from readers or critics. John Forster reviewed it, more or less admiringly, in the Examiner, writing that ‘Mr Browning is a genuine poet, and only needs to have less misgiving on the subject himself.’ But difficult, of course, to believe in one’s genuine poetic ability when nobody else notices it or pays good money to read it. Perhaps Forster meant, however, that Robert had identified his true manner in Dramatic Lyrics. If so, he was right. The pamphlet proved definitively, for the first time, Robert’s personal, inimitable mastery of the dramatic lyric and the monologue.

‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, a last-minute addition to fill up space in the volume, had been written for young Willie Macready, the actor’s eldest son, when the boy was ill in bed. Willie liked to draw pictures and had asked Robert for something to illustrate. His retentive mind recalled a story about the death of the Pope’s Legate at the Council of Trent from Wanley’s The Wonders of the Little World. Willie’s clever drawings inspired the final version of the improvised poem, now a nursery classic, which was perfectly designed to thrill an imaginative little boy:

Rats!

They fought the dogs and killed the cats,

And bit the babies in the cradles,

And ate the cheeses out of the vats,

And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,

And even spoiled the women’s chats

By drowning their speaking

With shrieking and squeaking

In fifty different sharps and flats. (ll. 10–20)

The poem is a perfectly structured, perfectly paced, perfectly psychologically judged dramatic story, perfectly suited to the human voice—to recitation, which Robert loved. If we are to look for the cadences of his own voice in conversation, we may look no further than ‘The Pied Piper’. Robert very likely enjoyed it as much as Willie. Indeed, it became one of his party pieces when entertaining at children’s parties. The rhythms are important here, just as they are in another poem in Dramatic Lyrics: ‘Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr’, said to have been composed on horseback in 1842. The thudding phrase ‘As I ride, as I ride’ resonates throughout the poem, just as effectively creating the sense of a rhythmic, steady gallop as the cadences of ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, published in 1845 in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics:

Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace

Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;

I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,

Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,

Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,

Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. (ll. 7–12)

If ‘The Pied Piper’ was aesthetically a great dramatic success, no less were other poems in the pamphlet. Robert had been impressed by Tennyson’s poetry, though he preferred reality to Tennyson’s romance. It is this insistence on reality, rather than romance or sentiment, that gives such power not only in the fantasy of legend to the ambiguously happy though unambiguously moral ending of ‘The Pied Piper’, but also to the grim amorality of poems like ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’. Both these latter poems concern the murder of women. It is possible that the murderers in both are mad—fantasists to whom reality is a mirage; but to suppose any such thing is to flinch from Robert Browning’s insistence on character over the detail of narrative, in contrast to Tennyson’s emphasis on story over characterization. Ian Jack makes this important point: ‘Tennyson tells us that the old man who narrates the story is an artist, but we have to be told—whereas in Browning we would know from the smell of the paint.’

(#litres_trial_promo) G. K. Chesterton had earlier made this point in a different way: Robert knew about painting, sculpture, music, and the rest because he had practised painting, sculpture, and music with his own hands.

And in these two poems of muted horror, just as in the poems of action and adventure, the unemphatic pace of the narrative underlines the matter-of-fact nature of the act and its matter-of-fact acceptance:

Porphyria worshipped me; surprise

Made my heart swell, and still it grew

While I debated what to do.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

Perfectly pure and good: I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

In one long yellow string I wound

Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her. No pain felt she;

I am quite sure she felt no pain. (ll. 33–42)

And we, too, are sure: the tenor of the lines might do just as well for telling us that her lover was tying Porphyria’s shoelaces as an act of humble homage. Just so the Duke, in ‘My Last Duchess’, refers to the death of his wife:

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder now: Frà Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.’ (ll. 1–4)