Browning

Fox’s review was delightful. It admitted Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession to be ‘evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch’. Nevertheless, ‘In recognising a poet,’ wrote Fox, ‘we cannot stand upon trifles, nor fret ourselves about such matters. Time enough for that afterwards, when larger works come before us. Archimedes in the bath had many particulars to settle about specific gravities and Hiero’s crown; but he first gave a glorious leap and shouted Eureka!’ Fox’s own leap was of faith that he had discovered a true poet. Of the work of genius before him, he had no doubt: he recommended the whole composition as being ‘of the spirit, spiritual. The scenery is in the chambers of thought; the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another.’ There was ‘truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius.’ Tennyson had passed the Fox test of genius, and now so did Browning. Both had raised the hair on the back of his neck. Mrs Orr begs to differ in respect of Fox’s acceptance of the ‘confessional and introspective quality of the poem as an expression of the highest emotional life—of the essence, therefore, of religion’. But she gives her full approbation to the ‘encouraging kindness’ of the one critic who alone, discerning enough to cry Eureka!, discovered Robert Browning in his first obscurity.

Allan Cunningham in the Athenaeum noticed Pauline with some graceful compliments—‘fine things abound … no difficulty in finding passages to vindicate our praise … To one who sings so naturally, poetry must be as easy as music is to a bird.’ This was gratifying stuff, gilding the Fox lily which scented the air Robert Browning breathed and which he acknowledged as ‘the most timely piece of kindness in the way of literary help that ever befell me’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Fox had, however, given a copy of Pauline to John Stuart Mill who, besides being Fox’s friend and assistant on the Monthly Repository, contributed reviews and articles to the Examiner and to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, where, in August 1830, in an omnibus review of some dozen books, Mill briefly dismissed the poem as ‘a piece of pure bewilderment’.

This might not have been so bad as a glancing cuff at an author’s head by a reviewer too pressed for time to have read the poem properly and too squeezed for space to give it more than a line. But Mill, either then or later, had taken trouble to read Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession very thoroughly, and more than once. At the end of his copy, on the fly-leaf, he made a long note presumably for his own reference. What he wrote was this:

With considerable poetic powers, the writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being. I should think it a sincere confession, though of a most unlovable state, if the ‘Pauline’ were not evidently a mere phantom. All about her is full of inconsistency—he neither loves her nor fancies he loves her, yet insists upon talking love to her. If she existed and loved him, he treats her most ungenerously and unfeelingly. All his aspirings and yearnings and regret point to other things, never to her; then he pays her off toward the end by a piece of flummery, amounting to the modest request that she will love him and live with him and give herself up to him without his loving her moyennant quoi he will think her and call her everything that is handsome, and he promises her that she shall find it mighty pleasant. Then he leaves off by saying he knows he will have changed his mind by to-morrow, and despite ‘these intents which seem so fair,’ but that having been thus visited once no doubt he will be again—and is therefore in ‘perfect joy’, bad luck to him! as the Irish say. A cento of most beautiful passages might be made from this poem, and the psychological history of himself is powerful and truthful—truth-like certainly, all but the last stage. That, he evidently has not yet got into. The self-seeking and self-worshipping state is well described—beyond that, I should think the writer has made, as yet, only the next step, viz. into despising his own state. I even question whether part even of that self-disdain is not assumed. He is evidently dissatisfied, and feels part of the badness of his state; he does not write as if it were purged out of him. If he once could muster a hearty hatred of his selfishness it would go; as it is, he feels only the lack of good, not the positive evil. He feels not remorse, but only disappointment; a mind in that state can only be regenerated by some new passion, and I know not what to wish for him but that he may meet with a real Pauline. Meanwhile he should not attempt to show how a person may be recovered from this morbid state, for he is hardly convalescent, and ‘what should we speak of but that which we know?’

This is raw, unedited—though by no means unreflecting—stuff, the sort of thing a reviewer or critic will write for himself before dressing it up or toning it down for publication. It shows Mill’s mind working largely on spontaneous impressions, though—or therefore—fresh and certainly, in this particular instance, acute in literary and psychological insights into a poet whose name and very existence were unknown to Mill. Just six years older than Robert Browning, he was already making a name for himself in literary, political, and journalistic circles. Just as well, then, that Mill’s notes were never polished up and printed. It was quite enough that Mill’s annotated copy of Pauline was included among the review copies that Fox returned to Robert on 30 October 1833. It is surmised that Mill’s words, when Robert read them, prompted his own holograph note on his own copy of Pauline, referring to the poem as an ‘abortion’ and as a ‘crab’ on the Tree of Life in his paradise. Robert refused to permit republication of Pauline for nigh on thirty-five years, acknowledging merely his authorship of the poem ‘with extreme repugnance and indeed purely of necessity’. Not only the review copies were returned to him by Fox; the publishers also sent Robert a bundle of unbound sheets. Not a single copy of Pauline had been sold.

If Mill had been a little too harsh in his disparagement, Fox had perhaps been a little too generous in his praise. Mrs Orr pointedly says of Mill that, ‘there never was a large and cultivated intelligence one can imagine less in harmony than his with the poetic excesses, or even the poetic qualities, of Pauline’; and she acutely recognizes that Fox ‘made very light of the artistic blemishes of the work … it was more congenial to him to hail that poet’s advent than to register his shortcomings’. Mill recognized what Fox did not: the poet’s morbid self-consciousness and the self-seeking state of his mind, the poem as a sincere confession, and its power and truth as a psychological history of its author. For in truth, Pauline was written, says Mrs Orr, whose view is enthusiastically confirmed in turn by Betty Miller, in a moment of ‘supreme moral or physical crisis’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nobody, then or since, has doubted this for a minute. Mill may have been right to suggest that the poet was barely convalescent, far less recovered, from his morbid state of introspection, of self-examination—for Pauline, real or imagined as Browning’s confessor, occupied his attentions as a woman less than his own interesting condition as a young man, slicing himself into an infinity of thin tissue samples and inspecting the results under a microscope of forensic self-analysis.

Robert claimed Pauline to be ‘dramatic in principle’. It is gorgeous in imagery, but it is dramatic in the sense that a philosophical inquiry by Plato is dramatic: a scene is set; time, place, and characters are perfunctorily established before it proceeds to discussion of a moral crisis or conundrum and its resolution. The poem is of course—in view of Robert’s preoccupation with him—heavily influenced by Shelley (invoked in Pauline as ‘Sun-treader’ and ‘Apollo’). Scholarly consensus has it that the dramatic principle of Pauline is a lyrical narrative inspired by the form of Shelley’s Alastor, and deriving elements from that poet’s Epipsychidion. Robert Browning confesses his guilty history to Pauline, who is made privy to disappointing experiences in life and disappointed experiments with living—the poet’s loss of honour in disloyalty to all he held dear, to Pauline herself (who represents women he has loved, including his mother, representing familiar, comfortable domesticity), to a lapse from his inherited religious faith and the substituted creed of Shelley (who taught him to believe in men perfected as gods and the earth perfected as heaven), the sinking of the good estimation of his family (disappointed by his spurning of conventional education and a conventional career). It is a sorry catalogue, all in all.

The examination of the poet’s soul reveals the accumulation of guilt and regret, initially a cause of despair and self-doubt that gradually evolves into a more positive source of self-confidence and optimism. Robert, in the course of Pauline, heals himself, though his renewal necessarily involves an alteration in personal consciousness. To become what he is, it has been necessary to be what he was. On a note of self-definition, he relinquishes his Shelleyan delusions; he returns to his love of God (with some qualifications and reservations), to his love for Pauline (and her domestic virtues and comforts), to art (Shelley, the ‘Sun-treader’, is installed in the firmament—a star in eternity—his ideals renounced but his supremacy as a poet maintained), and to himself in the space he has cleared for future manoeuvre. Read autobiographically, rather than as art, Pauline probably did an effective therapeutic job for the poet; as art, the poem is generally agreed to be a precociously subjective failure.

Robert’s return to religion was not corseted by the narrow confines of Congregationalism. He sought out colourful, dramatic, evangelizing preachers whose theatricality appealed to his taste not merely for their rhetorical flourishes of eloquence, but for imaginative reasoning splendidly dressed with a generous garnish of allusions, references, myth, metaphor, and metaphysics. One of the most celebrated was William Johnson Fox himself, who spoke with a liberal tongue and conscience. Following on Fox’s review of Pauline, Robert paid an evening call at Stamford Grove West, near Dalston in Hackney, where he renewed acquaintance not only with Fox but with Eliza and Sarah Flower, both nearing thirty years of age, who were living with him as his wards after the death of their father in 1829.

They hardly recognized Robert after four years: now almost twenty-one years old, he was a sight to behold—becomingly whiskered, elegantly gloved and caped, drily witty. The sisters had read Pauline and were interested to see the author. Sarah, in a letter of June 1833, remarked to a cousin that the ‘poet boy’ had turned up, ‘very interesting from his great power of conversation and thorough originality, to say nothing of his personal appearance, which would be exceptionally poetic if nature had not served him an unkind trick in giving him an ugly nose’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Quite what was wrong with Robert’s nose is not specified, though perhaps it was merely less ‘unmatured’ than the poet who, Sarah considered, ‘will do much better things’. Her estimation of Pauline was evidently more critical than that of her guardian, Mr Fox, though William Sharp suggests that the enthusiasm of the Flower sisters influenced Fox’s own partiality for the poem. Sarah herself wrote poetry, so probably knew what she was talking about, and she had doubtless discussed Pauline with her sister Eliza, who was acknowledged to be an excellent critic.

Eliza Flower makes only brief appearances in Mrs Orr’s Life and Letters of Robert Browning, but she acknowledges that, ‘If, in spite of his [Browning’s] denials, any woman inspired Pauline, it can have been no other than she.’ Vivienne Browning offers the alternative suggestion, in an essay, ‘The Real Identity of Pauline’, published in the Browning Society notes in 1983, that Robert might have had in mind his Aunt Jemima, only a year older than himself, described by Mrs Orr as ‘very amiable and, to use her nephew’s words, “as beautiful as the day”’. But whoever may have been the model for Pauline is hardly relevant: she was, as Mill understood, ‘a mere phantom’. Pauline was a womanly compound: if not Woman herself, she was at least a combination of friend, lover, Sophia, sister, mother, and even—since it is possible to identify some subtle adolescent homophile lines in the poem—the inspiration may sometimes, just as likely, have been Shelley as well as any woman. The point being, rather, that Robert probably felt some tender adolescent attraction to Eliza, who was nine years his elder—the first of the older women after his mother to engage his attentions and affections throughout his life. The poetic figure of Pauline, a mature figure of a woman with abundant dark hair and a rather sultry eroticism, very likely represented—personified—the sexual image, ideals, and desires that Robert was beginning to form for himself.

Eliza, who was in love with William Johnson Fox, was pleased to see Robert again, though her initial admiration was exceeded by his own self-admiration. She began to think, ‘he has twisted the old-young shoot off by the neck’ and that, ‘if he had not got into the habit of talking of head and heart as two separate existences, one would say that he was born without a heart’. At any rate, any prospect of romance between them was fairly improbable, though they continued to be friends. Ever afterwards, Robert maintained for Eliza a sentimental friendship that was rooted in loyalty to his admiration for her music, respect for her mind, and tender affection for her goodness. She died of consumption in 1846, the year of Robert’s marriage to Elizabeth Barrett.

For all Robert’s later repugnance for Pauline, for all his thwarted attempts to recover the copy of the book that Mill had written in, for all his reluctance to authorize any further publication even of extracts from it in his lifetime, for all his resistance to inclusion of an amended version of the poem in a collected edition of his work in 1868, and for all revisionist tinkerings with the poem to render it fit for an edition of 1888, his dissociation from it could never be complete. The secret of his authorship soon leaked out and, in fact, initially did him some good. It brought him at least some limited literary recognition (albeit of a mixed nature) and established something of a style that twenty years later was recognized by the young painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had read Browning’s Paracelsus and, coming across Pauline in the British Museum library, was astute enough to understand that it was by the hand of the same author—though he was careful enough to copy it out and ask for Browning’s confirmation of authorship, which Robert duly supplied.

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Biographers of Browning now fall down a hole of unknowing for two years, pulling themselves back into the light of biographical day with some difficulty, finding occasional toeholds in scattered references throughout Browning’s later work that give clues to his activities from publication of Pauline in 1833 to publication of his next production, Paracelsus, in 1835. William Sharp suggests that during this period Robert began to go out and about in ‘congenial society’, specifically citing new acquaintance with ‘many well-known workers in the several arts’,

(#litres_trial_promo) including Charles Dickens and Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd, a notable lawyer—the title ‘Serjeant’ derived from his position in the Inns of Court as a barrister—who was to publish Ion in 1836 and several more blank verse tragedies that do not much detain the attention of posterity but gave pleasure in their own time. Talfourd was then famous, nevertheless, for his wide acquaintance with literary men, later on account of his elevation to the judiciary and his work as a Member of Parliament in securing real protection for authors’ copyright, and always for his loquacity and conviviality.

If Robert did indeed meet Talfourd at this time, he would have been a good man for a young author to know—though Sharp says that Browning’s first reputation among such company was as an artist and musician rather than as a poet, and residence south of the river in remote, rural Camberwell made night engagements impracticable. During the day, says Sharp, Robert consulted works on philosophy and medical history in the British Museum Library and very often visited the National Gallery (unlikely, since that institution did not open until 1838). Certainly Robert was fortifying his friendships with men like Alfred Domett, Jim Silverthorne, his cheerful young uncle Reuben Browning (who was an elegant scholar of Latin and an accomplished horseman), and he may at this time have joined a circle of young men who clustered around a Captain Pritchard of Battersea, who had met Robert when he was sixteen and had introduced him to the medical lectures given at Guy’s Hospital by a cousin, Dr Blundell.

In the winter of 1833–4, at the age of twenty-one going on twenty-two, Robert found himself on an expedition to Russia, specifically to St Petersburg, nominally as secretary to the Chevalier de Benkhausen, the Russian consul-general in London. How on earth he wangled this trip, how on earth indeed he made the acquaintance in the first place of the Russian consul-general—who ‘had taken a great liking to him’

(#litres_trial_promo)—is not clear, though Mrs Orr says that ‘the one active career which would have recommended itself to him in his earlier youth was diplomacy … He would indeed not have been averse to any post of activity and responsibility not unsuited to the training of a gentleman.’

These remarks suggest that Robert was by then perhaps chafing and fretting at home even more than before and may have been thinking better of his decision to commit himself exclusively to poetry and financial dependence on his family. Mrs Orr does not spell out the reasons for this aspiration to diplomacy as a career, and there are no surviving letters from this period to add substance to speculation. William Shergold Browning worked as a Rothschild banker in Paris at this time, while his brother Reuben Browning, Robert’s favourite uncle, worked for Nathan Rothschild in the Rothschild London banking house. It is tempting to assume a connection between international banking and diplomacy that could have brought Robert to the attention of the consul-general. At any rate, there must have been some personal recommendation and introduction, more likely to have derived from a family connection than any other.

Of the Russian expedition, of its official purpose and its immediate personal importance for Robert, we know next to nothing: Robert wrote regularly and lengthily to Sarianna, but he burned the letters in later life. He set off with Benkhausen, say Griffin and Minchin, contradicting by a few months Mrs Orr’s version of an earlier, winter journey, on Saturday 1 March 1834. Early spring seems more likely; they would still be travelling through snow, but would reach Russia just as a thaw was setting in. They travelled, it is estimated, 1500 miles on horseback and by post carriage. In 1830, Stephenson’s Rocket, a marvel of modern technology, had made the first journey on the Liverpool to Manchester railway, and The General Steam Navigation Company operated a basic, bucketing, piston-thumping packet service from London to Ostend and Rotterdam; but there the transport system ran, literally, out of steam. ‘We know,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘how strangely he was impressed by some of the circumstances of the journey: above all by the endless monotony of snow-covered pine forest through which he and his companion rushed for days and nights at the speed of six post-horses, without seeming to move from one spot.’

‘How I remember the flowers—even grapes—of places I have seen!’ wrote Robert to a friend, Fanny Haworth, on 24 July 1838, ‘—some one flower or weed, I should say, that gets some strangehow connected with them. Snowdrops and Tilsit in Prussia go together’; and throughout Browning’s work there are associations of this sort that testify to the power of his memory for detail: ‘Wall and wall of pine’ and, from the poem ‘A Forest Thought’:

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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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)’.

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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]’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.