Browning

Porphyria’s lover waits quietly for the rain to stop and the wind to die down, the girl’s ‘smiling rosy little head’ propped up on his shoulder.

And thus we sit together now,

And all night long we have not stirred,

And yet God has not said a word! (ll. 58–60)

Just so the Duke goes down to—possibly—dinner with his guest, calling attention casually on the stairs to another interesting work of art:

Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (ll. 53–6)

The Duke gave commands and his wife died; Porphyria’s lover wound her hair around her neck and strangled her: in neither case was there remorse or retribution; no police to break down the ducal door, no God to strike down Porphyria’s murderous lover with a thunderbolt. Like Johannes Agricola, similarly complacent, the murderers may have felt:

I have God’s warrant, could I blend

All hideous sins, as in a cup,

To drink the mingled venoms up;

Secure my nature will convert

The draught to blossoming gladness fast: (ll. 33–7)

The point about these characters—ruthless, cold, passionate, hot—is their natures, fully and subtly realized. Their actions depend upon in the act, and are informed in the aftermath, by their characters, and not vice versa. Murder is banal enough: it is the character who commits it who is the interesting subject, and Robert Browning is so much in complete control of the poem that gives the character to us fully-formed that we are largely unaware, on a first reading, of the artistry—the poetic authenticity, the artistic integrity—with which he does it.

Robert Browning, if his works were not often or generally read, was frequently and widely discussed among his friends. He breakfasted with John Kenyon, took six o’clock tea with the Carlyles, dined with Serjeant Talfourd, supped with Macready and William Johnson Fox. All these were social occasions that broadened his acquaintance and at which he was welcome for his confidence in conversation and aptitude for anecdote. Harriet Martineau, though mystified by Sordello, admitted that in conversation ‘no speaker could be more absolutely clear and purpose-like’ than Browning. ‘He was full of good sense and fine feeling, amidst occasional irritability, full also of fun and harmless satire, with some little affectations which were as droll as anything could be. A real genius was Robert Browning assuredly.’

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Joseph Arnould, writing in 1845 to Alfred Domett, described a dinner party at which Robert was also a guest: ‘Glorious Robert Browning is as ever—but more genial, more brilliant and more anecdotical than when we knew him four years ago.’ And yet, and yet, in this year, 1845, the polished social performance was becoming tedious to Robert, as though he were Macready toiling through a familiar role, night after night, in the same company of players, speaking the same words, throwing in a few ad-libs, in a long run of a popular play. Too often, it felt like an exercise in public relations.

In ‘Respectability’, published in Men and Women on 10 November 1855, Robert wrote:

How much of priceless time were spent

With men that every virtue decks,

And women models of their sex,

Society’s true ornament.

In a letter of 12 March 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett, he wrote, ‘So you have got to like society, and would enjoy it, you think? For me, I always hated it.—have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by foregoing it I should let some unknown good escape me, in the true time of it, and only discover my fault when too late; and now that I have done most of what is to be done, any lodge in a garden of cucumbers for me!’ He does not ‘even care about reading now’, he confesses. ‘But you must read books in order to get words and forms for “the public” if you write, and that you needs must do, if you fear God. I have no pleasure in writing myself—none, in the mere act—though all pleasure in fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other!’ He supposes Miss Barrett likes ‘the operation of writing as I should like that of painting or making music … After all, there is a great delight in the heart of the thing; and use and forethought have made me ready at all times to set to work—but—I don’t know why—my heart sinks whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it.’

A month earlier, Robert had been writing to Miss Barrett about critics, trying to be fair-minded and even-handed in response to her inquiry about his ‘sensitiveness to criticism’. What he had said then was, ‘I shall live always—that is for me—I am living here this 1845, that is for London.’ For himself—‘for me’—he writes from a thorough conviction of duty, and he does his best: ‘the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope in nowise affect me.’ And yet, ‘I must, if for merely scientific purposes, know all about this 1845, its ways and doings’, and if he should take a dozen pages of verse to market, like twelve cabbages (or pomegranates, he might have said, but didn’t) he had grown himself, he should expect to get as much as any man for his goods. If nobody will buy or praise, ‘more’s the shame … But it does so happen that I have met with much more than I could have expected in this matter of kindly and prompt recognition. I never wanted a real set of good hearty praisers—and no bad reviewers—I am quite content with my share. No—what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place—enough to make an apostle swear.’

In this selfsame letter to Miss Barrett, a few lines previously, Robert had seized eagerly on her wish that they should ‘rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and I, on each side’

(#litres_trial_promo) and given himself up to her—and their developing correspondence—entirely: ‘I had rather hear from you than see anybody else. Never you care, dear noble Carlyle, nor you, my own friend Alfred over the sea, nor a troop of true lovers!—Are not these fates written? there!’ These fates were written—what about Robert’s own? The work—far less, or far more, the life, the entire fate of Robert Browning—seemed in 1845 to be in the balance: the achievement so far, what did it amount to? ‘What I have printed gives no knowledge of me—it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will—and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion … that I think—But I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end—“R. B. a poem”—’. At most, ‘these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you.’

This is the letter of a man whose lightning or lighthouse flashes illuminate his world fitfully and reveal himself, though captain of his own ship, becalmed on a dark flood. Robert’s perplexity and discouragement was of long standing. In short, he was depressed: the weeks passed, Carlyle talked wisely and beautifully, there had been quarrels with Macready and Forster, the rarely positive critical response to his work was pleasing enough but misguided, the plays were defunct, the poems had sold disappointingly. On 9 October 1843 he wrote to Alfred Domett, who had thrown up the law and disappeared to the colonies, to New-Zealand, ‘People read my works a little more, they say, and I have some real works here in hand; but now that I could find it in my heart to labour earnestly, I doubt if I shall ever find it in my head, which sings and whirls and stops me even now—an evening minute by the way.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps to still his whirligig head, or to give it something substantial to dance around, Robert sailed for Naples in the late summer of 1844.

As is the case with his previous journeyings abroad, precious few relics survive to substantiate the itinerary or illuminate the events. There is some dispute as to whether Robert wrote the poems ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’ and ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ on this voyage or on the first voyage to Italy—Robert himself said the one, then the other. And if he could not remember, then attribution by others is just as credible one way or the other. Mrs Orr is virtually the sole source of information for Robert’s second trip to Italy, and she gives no circumstantial detail about how he met ‘a young Neapolitan gentleman’, by name of Scotti, ‘who had spent most of his life in Paris’ and with whom, very likely, Robert talked his proper French and improved his vernacular Italian. Quickly becoming good friends, they travelled together from Naples to Rome, Scotti helpfully haggling over their joint expenses. ‘As I write’, reported Robert in a letter to Sarianna, ‘I hear him disputing our bill in the next room. He does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.’

(#litres_trial_promo) One can see why Robert, who had learned to be careful of money, should warm to a man with a mind similarly concentrated on his own short purse. Says Mrs Orr of Scotti, ‘he certainly bore no appearance of being the least prosperous’. In Rome, Scotti was judged by Countess Carducci—an acquaintance of Robert’s father—‘the handsomest man she had ever seen.’ But Mr Scotti ‘blew out his brains soon after he and his new friend had parted; and I do not think the act was ever fully accounted for’.

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We could wish to pause there, at that sensational moment, to inquire further about the impoverished Signor Scotti and his suicide: he sounds just the man, and his death just the circumstance, to stop Robert in his tracks to add his friend and his end to his repertory company of characters fit for a poem. But all we know of Robert’s time in Rome is that he visited Shelley’s tomb in the New Protestant Cemetery, in commemoration of which he wrote the few lines on ‘Fame’ which form the first part of ‘Earth’s Immortalities’, inspected the grotto of Egeria, the scene imagined by Byron of the supposed interview between King Numa Pompilius of Rome and the advisory nymph, and the recently restored church of Santa Prassede, close by Santa Maria Maggiore, where the tomb of Cardinal Cetive may have partly inspired the poem ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’. These are all occasions of the most tantalizing interest, and about which too little—if any—first-hand evidence exists.

We fall back upon Mrs Orr, too, for information about the journey home to Hatcham, via Livorno where he found Edward John Trelawny who had been an intimate of the poets Shelley and Byron. Trelawny might have been in a better condition to discuss the poets had he not been stoically—‘indifferently’, says Mrs Orr—enduring a painful operation to have a troublesome bullet dug from his leg by a surgeon. Trelawny’s cool fortitude struck Robert very much. That the veteran was able to talk at all, far less reminisce about poets and poetry, was very remarkable.

Robert returned from Italy in December 1844. During his absence, he had missed the much-acclaimed publication of Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s Poems in the summer of that same year; but once back in Hatcham he read the volumes, which, if they had not in themselves been of the greatest interest, would certainly have caught—or been brought to—his attention on account of two delicately allusive lines that ran:

Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate’, which, if cut deep down

the middle,

Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

What, in 1844, did Robert know of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett? No more than anyone else, which wasn’t much in the way of first-hand information, far less reliable gossip—though uninformed speculation (it was said that Miss Barrett was completely crippled, unable to move) was never short as a negotiable commodity. The poet, essayist, and former seafaring man Richard Hengist Horne, who had experienced enough maritime and military adventure to qualify him as a Baron Munchausen (except that most of his tales, like those of ‘Abyssinia’ Bruce, were largely true) put it about that she was in very delicate health and had lived for years hermetically sealed in her room, her only contact with the outside world being through the medium of letters very erudite and literary in tone. He was more authoritative than most, since she had recently collaborated with him on a two-volume book, A New Spirit of the Age, in which ‘Orion’ Horne, ably assisted by the contributions of others (including Robert Browning as well as Elizabeth Barrett) had aspired to make a general estimate of contemporary literature without, alas!, possessing much literary ability or even critical faculty himself.

In retrospect, from the distance of our own times, Horne’s judgement in 1844, when the book appeared, was naturally coloured by the florid taste of his age, lengthily praising the likes of Talfourd, who is now not much more than a literary footnote to the period. But critical perspectives inevitably alter: to Horne’s credit, he did rate highly those big guns who have survived as literary heroes: Carlyle, Macaulay, Tennyson, and Dickens—though he’d have found it difficult not to notice them respectfully at appropriate length; and he devoted generous space to the ‘little known works of Mr Robert Browning’, whose Paracelsus he praised over five pages and whose Sordello, at the length of a dozen pages, he sorrowfully judged would remain obscure but to have been treated unjustly by critics since the poem, in Horne’s estimation, ‘abounded with beauties’. And so, her hand dabbled in Horne’s book, Elizabeth Barrett, the famously reclusive poetess, would have known not only of Mr Robert Browning’s work but, less intimately, something of the poet himself.

In his book, Horne reflected upon his collaborator’s invisibility among her contemporaries, supposing that future generations might doubt her very existence. But some, he knew, had actually seen her. Miss Mitford, for one, told him that Miss Barrett ‘lies folded in Indian shawls upon her sofa with her long black tresses streaming over her bent-down head, all attention’ while having her new poems read to her by an unnamed gentleman who, we suppose, must have been John Kenyon. Through the medium of Kenyon, then, we may also suppose that Robert learned more even than Horne gleaned from the gossiping Miss Mitford about the interesting lady poet who preferred to call herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett rather than to use her full family name of Barrett Moulton Barrett. From Kenyon, Robert received a manuscript poem, ‘Dead Pan’, written by Elizabeth, and Kenyon was happy to communicate Robert’s enthusiasm to its author.

In 1820, aged fourteen years, Elizabeth Barrett had privately published an epic, The Battle of Marathon, dedicated to her father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett. She had begun writing this at the age of eleven. Though imitative of the styles of Homer, Pope, and Byron, it was an impressive achievement—and would have been so if only by reason of its pastiche and precocious learning, far less as evidence of genuine poetic ability. This effort was followed the next year by ‘Stanzas, Excited by Some Reflections on the Present State of Greece’, published in the New Monthly Magazine (1821), and ‘Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron’ in 1824. In 1826, at the age of twenty, she published an Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, the printing costs being paid by Mary Trepsack, a Barrett slave from Jamaica, who lived in the Barrett household. Elizabeth’s correspondence with a family friend, Sir Uvedale Price, contributed substantially to Price’s Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages, published in 1827. On her own account, in 1832, she translated Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, published with Miscellaneous Poems in 1833.

All these were given anonymously to the world, until she finally put her name to The Seraphim, and Other Poems in 1838, and followed these verses with occasional poems and translations published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and in the Athenaeum. In 1842, she published three hymns translated from the Greek of Gregory Nazianzen and ‘Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets’. In 1844, there appeared her Poems, which famously included ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ (the story of a beautiful, talented, high-born lady who chooses to marry Bertram, a low-born poet, rather than a suitor of her own rank) and, within that poem, the references to Robert Browning’s own poems. Elizabeth Barrett was, by 1844, esteemed by the best and most influential literary magazines. Her classical and metaphysical learning, her poetic accomplishments, her mysterious reluctance to make any public appearances, all astonished and somewhat intimidated the literary establishment. There were some who muttered ungraciously about poetical obscurity and mysticism, but by and large her work was treated more reverently, more indulgently, than the irredeemable obscurities and impenetrable mystifications of Robert Browning’s poetry.

Some three years before, John Kenyon had attempted to arrange a meeting between Robert and Elizabeth. He had enthusiastically told her about him, him about her; he had discussed his poetry with her, hers with him; and at one point this middle-aged romantic go-between had almost brought his plan to a satisfactory conclusion, only to have it frustrated by Elizabeth putting off the encounter with a perfectly plausible, believable plea of indisposition—though in fact, as she admitted, it was because of her ‘blind dislike to seeing strangers’. Still, there it was—the reference to Robert Browning, in ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, and in the best poetic company, his work linked favourably, equal in rank, with ‘poems/Made by Tuscan flutes … the pastoral parts of Spenser—or the subtle interflowings/Found in Petrarch’s sonnets’.

On 10 January 1845, Robert—having read the copy of Elizabeth’s Poems given to Sarianna by John Kenyon, having punctiliously asked Kenyon if it would be in order for him to write, and having been assured by Kenyon that she would be pleased to hear from him—posted a letter from New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey, to Elizabeth Barrett at 50 Wimpole Street. The first sentence of his first letter to her is this:

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,—whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a graceful and natural end of the thing.

Several sentences further into the letter, Robert declares, ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too.’

And so it began.

But what was begun, and how was it begun? We know the upshot, the happy ending—the lovestruck drama has become the stuff of potent myth; but our sentimentality may misinterpret the beginning and our romantic predisposition may rose-colour our perceptions of the whole courtship correspondence as the simple singing of two flirtatious love birds, the coy cooing of two eroticized turtle doves. In The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Daniel Karlin points out that Robert, from his first letter, from the first sentence of that letter, knew what he was doing. Artless is the very last word that should be adduced to characterize Robert’s letters. Different in kind to Elizabeth’s, they are—insists Karlin—dramatic compositions. They may not be premeditated, but they are not spontaneous. Robert ‘composes his love for Elizabeth in the same terms as he composes the action of his poems’. In all Robert’s letters ‘there is not a single casual allusion, there is not a single pointless digression; an all-embracing objective cannot tolerate unconnected images or associations. Elizabeth Barrett’s best letters remind you of Byron; Browning’s of St Paul.’