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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, the young aristocrat was a Royalist, an active supporter of the dethroned Bourbons now living in England as a result of the French revolution of July 1830 that made Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, King of France until he in turn was toppled in 1848. Ripert-Monclar, as he confessed to the Brownings, was acting as a private agent of communication between the royal exiles and their legitimist friends in France. He was not himself an exile, though it can be assumed that he was no favourite of Louis-Philippe. There is a suggestion that he may have been briefly held in jail in 1830. It was diplomacy of a thrilling sort—clandestine, subversive, and romantic.
Amédée and Robert struck up an immediate, intimate friendship: they talked no doubt of royalty and republicanism, though they probably discussed art and poetry more than politics; they would have talked of France, particularly of Paris, and Robert’s French—already reliable enough to have enabled him to write part of Pauline in good French—would have become even more polished. The young Frenchman introduced Robert to the works of Balzac and the new French realist writers, he sketched his new friend’s portrait, and at some point or other he suggested the life of Paracelsus, the Renaissance alchemist and physician, as the subject of Robert’s next major poem. He then thought better of the idea, ‘because it gave no room for the introduction of love about which every young man of their age thought he had something quite new to say’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But too late, too late to withdraw the suggestion: besides, Robert had already dealt with love in Pauline, and there had been precious little profit in that. Better, perhaps, to steer clear for the time being, take another tack.
Though two or three months of preliminary research (‘in the holes and corners of history’, as Chesterton likes to put it) had been necessary, Paracelsus was already a familiar-enough character to Robert: there was the entry in the Biographie Universelle on his father’s shelves; there was the Frederick Bitiskius three-volume folio edition of Paracelsus’ works; there were relevant medical works to hand, including a little octavo of 1620, the Vitœ Germanorum Medicorum of Melchior Adam, with which he was already acquainted from his recent interest in medicine. By mid-March 1835, interrupting a work in progress called Sordello, which he had begun a couple of years earlier in March 1833, Robert had written a full manuscript entitled Paracelsus, a poem of 4,152 lines which was ‘Inscribed to Amédée de Ripert-Monclar by his affectionate friend R.B.’. This dedication was dated ‘London: 15 March 1835’. Paracelsus, divided into five scenes and featuring four characters, had taken Robert just over five months to complete. It was published at his father’s expense by Effingham Wilson, of the Royal Exchange, on 15 August 1835. Saunders and Otley had declined the privilege of publishing the poem, and it had taken some trouble and influence to induce even Effingham Wilson, a small publisher, to undertake the job. Wilson published Paracelsus, says Mrs Orr, more ‘on the ground of radical sympathies in Mr Fox and the author than on that of its intrinsic worth.’
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In a preliminary letter of 2 April
(#litres_trial_promo) to William Johnson Fox, Robert requested an introduction to Fox’s neighbour, Edward Moxon, printer and publisher of Dover Street, Piccadilly, ‘on account of his good name and fame among author-folk, besides he has himself written—as the Americans say—“more poetry ’an you can shake a stick at”’. Moxon was a high-flying old bird to be expected to notice a fledgling fresh out of the nest and bumping near to the ground like Robert Browning. Thirty-four years of age in 1835, when he gave up writing his own poetry, Moxon was less distinguished as a poet than as a publisher and bookseller. Leigh Hunt wittily described him as ‘a bookseller among poets, and a poet among booksellers’. The remark has stuck to Moxon, who in 1830 had established his business which quickly acquired a reputation for publishing poetry of high quality by a remarkable list of poets including Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb (who introduced many of them to Moxon), Southey, Clare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, who became Moxon’s close friend. Leigh Hunt remarked that ‘Moxon has no connection but with the select of the earth’, which was intended satirically but may have been true enough in literary terms, implying a discrimination that has proved itself in posterity and went far beyond the terms of mere business in Moxon’s defence of his poets against the famous attacks by Lockhart and the rest of the Scots critics of Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly reviews.
On 16 April 1835
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert again wrote to Fox to report on a visit to Moxon, whose ‘visage loured exceedingly’ and ‘the Moxonian accent grew dolorous’ on perusal of a recommendatory letter by Charles Cowden Clarke (who had been a close friend of Keats, and was now a friend of Fox) which Robert presented to him. This was not encouraging; even less encouraging was Moxon’s view of the poetry written by some of Robert’s tremendous contemporaries, far less a work by someone virtually unknown. Moxon gloomily revealed that Philip von Artevelde, a long dramatic poem by Sir Henry Taylor that had excited the Athenaeum, normally decorous, to rave enthusiastically in fifteen columns just the year before, had ‘not paid expenses by about thirty odd pounds’. Furthermore, ‘Tennyson’s poetry’, said Moxon, ‘is “popular at Cambridge” and yet of 800 copies which were printed of his last, some 300 only have gone off: Mr M[oxon] hardly knows whether he shall ever venture again, etc. etc., and in short begs to decline even inspecting, etc. etc.’ Poetry could no longer be relied upon as a paying proposition.
Robert offered to read his poem to Fox some morning, ‘though I am rather scared of a fresh eye going over its 4000 lines … yet on the whole I am not much afraid of the issue … I shall really need your notice on this account’; and finished off his letter with some heavy humorous flourishes that included a discreet swipe at John Stuart Mill advising him not to be an ‘idle spectator’ of Robert’s first appearance on a public stage (‘having previously only dabbled in private theatricals’). Paracelsus was to be Robert’s première, his big first night with the critics, who were invited to attend and advised to pay attention, ‘benignant or supercilious’ as Mill in particular should choose, but ‘he may depend that tho’ my “Now is the winter of our discontent” be rather awkward, yet there shall be occasional outbreaks of good stuff—that I shall warm as I get on, and finally wish “Richmond at the bottom of the seas,” etc. in the best style imaginable.’
Paracelsus received mixed reviews from those critics who did not pass it over in silence entirely. The reviewer for the Athenaeum gave the poem a brief, lukewarm notice in 73 words on 22 August 1835, reluctantly recognizing ‘talent in this dramatic poem’ but warning against facile imitation of Shelley’s ‘mysticism and vagueness’ in a work the reviewer found ‘dreamy and obscure’. There was worse from some other reviewers whose notices Robert, if he did not take them to heart as guides to future good poetic conduct, at least bore as scabs on his mind and as scars in his soul. He still scratched at them a decade later. On 17 September 1845, in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett, he recalled ‘more than one of the reviews and newspapers that laughed my “Paracelsus” to scorn ten years ago’ and contrasted, in a further letter to her of 9 December 1845, ‘that my own “Paracelsus”, printed a few months before, had been as dead a failure as “Ion” [by Thomas Noon Talfourd] a brilliant success … I know that until Forster’s notice in the Examiner appeared, every journal that thought it worth while to allude to the poem at all, treated it with entire contempt.’ Fox contributed a tardy review in the Monthly Repository in November: Robert had read Paracelsus aloud to him and they had discussed the poem, so he had had the benefit of the poet’s own industry, ideas and intentions to draw upon in his favourable notice, which declared the work to be ‘the result of thought, skill and toil’ and not—as the Athenaeum had judged it—a dreamy and obscure effusion. Paracelsus was not only a poem, declared Fox, but a poem with ideas.
His bold, informed defence of the poem had its effect: John Forster, in an article in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal early in 1836, promoted Robert to Parnassus: ‘Without the slightest hesitation we name Mr Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth.’ A vacancy had recently occurred, since Samuel Taylor Coleridge had died in 1834. But Forster had needed little or no prompting from a sympathetic review by Fox. As chief dramatic and literary reviewer of the Examiner, he had already dealt generously with Paracelsus in that publication: ‘Since the publication of Philip von Artevelde,’ he wrote, ‘we have met with no such evidences of poetic genius, and of general intellectual power, as are contained in this volume.’ Forster closed his review of Paracelsus with these words: ‘It is some time since we read a work of more unequivocal power than this. We conclude that its author is a young man, as we do not recollect his having published before.’ He was evidently, perhaps mercifully, unacquainted with Pauline, now immured in the British Museum Library. ‘If so, we may safely predict for him a brilliant career, if he continues true to the present promise of his genius. He possesses all the elements of a fine poet.’ Forster, unlike Fox, had not enjoyed the benefit of Robert Browning’s acquaintance, and his review is all the more valuable for that reason. He assumed Browning to be a young man, though it was difficult to tell from the poem itself: to repeat Chesterton’s line, Robert could have been anything between twenty and a thousand years old if the evidence of Paracelsus were the only criterion by which to judge his age.
Forster, says Mrs Orr, ‘knew that a writer in the Athenaeum had called it rubbish, and he had taken it up as a probable subject for a piece of slashing criticism’. A young critic (Forster was twenty-three years old in 1835, only five months younger than Browning) will sometimes adopt this tactic—an acknowledged means of getting on in literary society by bringing one’s own talent more prominently to the attention of fellow-critics, editors, and publishers than the work being reviewed. However, intending to bury Browning, Forster paused to praise, though ‘what he did write’, says Mrs Orr, ‘can scarcely be defined as praise. It was the simple, ungrudging admission of the unequivocal power, as well as brilliant promise, which he recognized in the work.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This in turn is perhaps a little grudging of Forster’s real recognition that here was a poet, perhaps not yet fully formed but promising great things. Robert himself, weighing the laurel crown awarded by Forster in the balance against the ashes heaped on his head by others, did not feel as pleased as he might otherwise have done if Forster’s had been but one voice amongst a full chorus singing in praiseful tune. Though he privately enjoyed the wholehearted applause of family and friends for his ‘private theatricals’, his public reception, now that he had put himself stage front, was more problematical.
Paracelsus was important to Robert. If Pauline had been a preview, in theatrical terms, the aspiring player would have performed to an empty house before being hooked off the stage by dissatisfied critics. But now—as he himself had written to Fox—this latest poem was his ‘first appearance on any stage’. It had been better, maybe, to start again and afresh. However, Robert specifically disclaimed in the preface any intention to promote Paracelsus as a drama or a dramatic poem. It was, he insisted, a poem and of a genre very different from that undertaken by any other poet. He warned critics off judging it ‘by principles on which it was never moulded’ and subjecting it ‘to a standard to which it was never meant to conform’.
What he meant by this was his intention ‘to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of mind or the passions by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects along and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded.’
No doubt this sentence made his meaning entirely clear to his contemporaries. What in effect Browning did in Paracelsus was to divide the poem into five sections or scenes, each a monologue by Aureolus Paracelsus, ‘a student’, with occasional interruptions by three other characters—Festus and Michal, husband and wife, described as ‘his friends’, and Aprile, thought to be inspired by Shelley, described as ‘an Italian poet’. These three took the roles, mostly, of auditors and sometimes prompts, iterating his moods at a critical point in his life. In each section, Paracelsus examines the state of his own inner life. By means of the insights he successively gains, he is enabled to act.
Rather more clearly, in his preface to the poem, Browning defined its intended form: ‘I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such only so long as the purpose for which they were first instituted is kept in view. I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all those restrictions, only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves and all new facilities placed at an author’s disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected. It is certain, however, that a work like mine depends more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success: indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, should connect the scattered lights into one constellation—a Lyre or a Crown.’
The poem is not notably dramatic, nor is it a linear narrative, nor is it lyric. It is light years away in its obscure allusions, recondite references, novel form, and difficult philosophy from the comparatively undemanding verse narratives of, say, Sir Walter Scott (who was nevertheless considered difficult even by some contemporary critics) or, for that matter, the familiar brio and theatricality of Byron’s verses. If it required strenuous mental effort from a perceptive critic, it stretched to incomprehension the limits of the common reader whom Browning, however flatteringly, expected to co-operate with him, engage with him, in the very creation of the poem. Paracelsus was, in the modern term, ‘interactive’—it depended, as Browning said in his preface, ‘more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success’.
For the meantime, however, the common reader confirmed the most dolorous expectations of Moxon. The light-minded reader in 1835 preferred the sentimental verse of Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (who died in 1838 at the age of 36, styled herself in life for the purposes of authorship as ‘L.E.L.’, wrote several novels and copious poetry, attracted to herself a reputation for indecorous romantic attachments that caused her to break off her engagement to John Forster) and Felicia Dorothea Hemans (who was responsible in 1829 for the poem ‘Casabianca’ and its famous first line, ‘The boy stood on the burning deck …’); preferred, too, gift books of mawkish poetry, and other such comforting, easily digestible products, after-dinner bon-bons or bon-mots that demanded no effort or response more than an easy smile, a wistful sigh, a romantic tear or any momentary rush of unreflecting, commonplace feeling. Nothing but the most banal expression of sentimental emotion was likely to succeed in the market for new poetry. Robert accepted that a work such as Paracelsus, even if lucky enough to find a publisher ready to print it, would be not only a short-term casualty of the early nineteenth-century crisis in poetry publishing but even, in the long term, might stand more as a succès d’estime than as a source of short-term financial profit or a lasting resource of popular taste. It would have to be enough in the mid-1830s that a few discriminating readers should read Robert Browning and—so far as they were able—appreciate what he was trying to do and say.
Paracelsus partook of the times not only in the experimental nature of its form, for the first half of the nineteenth century was an age of experiments and advances: it positively incorporated new thinking and new ideas and conflated them with the occult wisdom of the Renaissance, another distinct period of new thinking, new art, new science, and new technology. In The Life of Robert Browning, Clyde de L. Ryals
(#litres_trial_promo) points to Browning’s assimilation of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century scientific findings in biology, geology, and other sciences, to the extent that he was later to claim, very reasonably, that Paracelsus had anticipated Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (published in 1859) by some quarter of a century. Objecting to an assertion that he had ever been ‘strongly against Darwin, rejecting the truths of science and regretting its advance’, Robert only had to look back to find ‘all that seemed proved in Darwin’s scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning: see in Paracelsus the progressive development from senseless matter to organized, until man’s appearance.’
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Since all things are in nature, and Paracelsus was a natural philosopher and scientist, inexhaustibly desirous to plumb the secrets of nature (in Renaissance terms, an alchemist), it is hardly surprising that he appealed to Robert Browning as a bridge between science as it had been understood by the ancients and the perception of science by savants in his own age. Science itself was appropriate as a convenient vehicle for comment upon the facts of life that have always been known in one way or another, in one philosophy or another, but have been variously interpreted, when not entirely lost or forgotten or ignored, from generation to generation.
When Paracelsus died in 1541, he disappeared from the ken of all but the most esoteric scholars. Chesterton comments, wonderingly, on Browning’s choice of poetic protagonists—‘the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as that they are of no importance in ours’. In his choice of Paracelsus, Browning’s ‘supreme type of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful misers of dust. But for all that’, says Chesterton, ‘Browning was right.’ There could have been no better choice than Paracelsus, claims Chesterton, for Browning’s study of intellectual egotism and, he says, the choice equally refutes any charge against Browning himself that he was a frigid believer in logic and a cold adherent of the intellect—the proof being that at the age of twenty-three Browning wrote a poem designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy.
The entire poem is daringly experimental in form and philosophy: in both respects, it attempts to strip away the phenomenal world to reveal the noumenal world; to strip man of his physical integuments and reveal his psychical nakedness; to bare nature and reveal the natural. In the process, Robert Browning somewhat stripped himself psychologically bare: Paracelsus, for all his resolution after the personal revelations in Pauline, could not help but import some of his own state of mind and being into his work. Authors almost invariably write out of their own state of mind and being—there’s no help for it except rigorous self-awareness which is difficult consciously to attain, improbable to try to impose, and almost impossible thereafter to maintain.
The last thing Paracelsus was intended to be was confessional, but as Betty Miller acutely points out, two of the characters in the poem—Michal (M for Mother) and Festus (F for Father)—can be interpreted as Mr and Mrs Browning. They speak ‘out of the social and domestic environment of Robert Browning himself’. They ‘reveal, and with a singular candour on the part of their creator, the attitude of Browning’s own father and mother towards their brilliant, if ill-comprehended son’. In the discussions between the sober Festus, the gentle Michal, and the impatient, aspiring student Paracelsus, she says, ‘we catch an echo of the family conflict that preceded … the renunciation of a practical for a poetic career’.
Anyone familiar even with the barest biographical details of Robert’s life at this time, and beginning to read Paracelsus, will immediately grant the truth of Betty Miller’s astute psychological insight. It is perfectly plain, the entire difficult crisis; there it is, unmistakably recognizable in the pages, more harrowingly true to the turbulent family emotions and Browning’s own deepest feelings than any second-hand biographical fact and fancy can conjure. But then, too, as Ryals suggests, Paracelsus moves ‘back and forth between enthusiastic creation of a construct or fiction and sceptical de-creation of it when as “truth” or mimesis it is subjected to scrutiny’.
(#litres_trial_promo) With a poet as self-conscious at this time as Robert Browning, it should not easily be assumed that he would be unaware of using, even in disguise, his own life, its events and emotions; that he was not capable of a conjuror’s sleight-of-hand with a pack of cards, or an alchemist’s trick of turning lead into gold; that he would not make and unmake even these materials—now you see them, now you don’t; now lead, now gold—with as much ruthless facility as any others.
There is no real dispute, either, about Betty Miller’s judgement that, ‘In form, Paracelsus lies between the confessional of Pauline and the theatrical on which Browning wasted so many years. It is the closest of his early works to the dramatic monologues of his best period.’ Paracelsus did not make money for Browning, but it profited his reputation mightily. Future works would be styled and recommended as being ‘By the author of Paracelsus’. At the age of twenty-three, Robert Browning was a candidate for fame within London literary and theatrical circles. Paracelsus did not entitle him to a named and reserved seat in the Academy, far less the Siege Perilous at the literary round table; but he went confidently out and about, elegant and accomplished, affable and amusing, loquacious and learned, marked by those who mattered in the contemporary court of the London literati.
On 6 May 1835, the great actor-manager William Charles Macready was catching up with the most improving new books, reading ‘the pleasing poem of Van Artevelde’ that had so distressed Edward Moxon by its failure to recoup its costs. Reaching his London chambers, he found ‘Talfourd’s play of Ion in the preface to which is a most kind mention of myself’. Later in the day he called on the famously provocative young dramatic and literary critic John Forster, who was agitatedly considering a duel in Devonshire before thinking better of it.
(#litres_trial_promo) Macready was forty-two years old, and had succeeded to the place vacated on the English stage by the death of the actor Edmund Kean, whose grotesque, pathetic last performance of Richard III at Richmond had so much impressed and inspired Robert.
Macready was less barnstorming than Kean, who had acted vividly in the best Romantic manner, and he was certainly more seriously, in terms of intellect and artistry, attentive to the texts he produced and performed. He was ambitious, not only personally but for the English stage as a whole. Kean’s behaviour and attitudes, Macready considered, had brought the business of acting (‘my pariah profession’) into disrepute—though the low reputation of the English stage had never been higher than the sensational moral history of its best-known reprobates and its lowest hangers-on. It was Macready’s duty, as a rectitudinous Victorian—and, as he privately admitted, a reprehensibly envious rival of the disgraceful Kean—to raise the cultural level of the theatre to the virtue attained by the finest of the fine arts, to the most salubrious literary heights; in short, to purge the theatre of its most vicious elements and inspire it to the highest moral and artistic standards.
This ideal represented Macready’s conventional middle-class Victorianism crossed with his passionate egalitarianism, which, much as it reprobated the vile standards of the stage, also snobbishly scorned the high disdain and low virtue of society. Unfortunately for Macready, the English stage and its audiences resisted his energetic idealism.
On 27 November, Macready presented himself for dinner at the house of William Johnson Fox in Bayswater. ‘I like Mr Fox very much,’ wrote Macready in his diary entry for that day; ‘he is an original and profound thinker, and most eloquent and ingenious in supporting the penetrating views he takes.’ From which encomium we may take it that Macready and Fox harmoniously agreed, or amiably agreed to disagree, on most political, religious, and artistic matters. The evening got better still. ‘Mr Robert Browning, the author of Paracelsus, came in after dinner; I was very much pleased to meet him. His face is full of intelligence. My time passed most agreeably. Mr Fox’s defence of the suggestion that Lady Macbeth should be a woman of delicate and fragile frame pleased me very much, though he opposed me, and of course triumphantly. I took Mr Browning on, and requested to be allowed to improve my acquaintance with him. He expressed himself warmly, as gratified by the proposal; wished to send me his book; we exchanged cards and parted.’ The acquaintance warmed to the degree that on 31 December, the last day of 1835, Browning and five other guests were regaled with a dinner at Macready’s house where ‘Mr Browning was very popular with the whole party; his simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention and won opinions from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.’
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Macready thought it noteworthy to write in his diary on 1 February 1836 that John Forster ‘was talking much of Browning, who is his present all-in-all’. On 16 February, after one or two casual meetings, the acquaintance between Macready and Robert began to catch in earnest, to develop from personal friendship to professional association: ‘Forster and Browning called, and talked over the plot of a tragedy which Browning had begun to think of: the subject, Narses—a victorious general in the time of the Roman Emperor Justinian. He said that I had bit him by my performance of Othello, and I told him I hoped I should make the blood come. It would indeed be some recompense for the miseries, the humiliations, the heart-sickening disgusts which I have endured in my profession if, by its exercise, I had awakened a spirit of poetry whose influence would elevate, ennoble, and adorn our degraded drama. May it be!’
Robert was not only balm for Macready’s suffering professional soul; he found him personally soothing. Forster and the rest could be rumbustious and depressing: ‘My nerves and spirits were quite quelled by them all’; but Browning’s ‘gentle manners always make his presence acceptable’.
(#litres_trial_promo)Paracelsus, on the evidence of Macready’s diary entry for 8 December 1835—the day he finished reading the poem and set himself to considering it with the same professional eye of a player that he had brought to Talfourd’s Ion—would not do as drama—(which Robert had never intended that it should). The ‘main design of the poem’, according to Macready, ‘is not made out with sufficient clearness, and obscurity is a fault in many passages’. That said, however, he admitted the poem’s ‘most subtle and penetrating search into the feelings and impulses of our nature, some exquisite points of character, the profoundest and the grandest thoughts and most musically uttered. The writer is one whom I think destined for very great things.’
John Forster had been invited as a guest to Macready’s New Year’s Eve dinner at Elm Place, his house in the rural village of Elstree, and so it was by no remote chance that both Forster and Robert happened to be waiting with other Macready invitees earlier in the day at the ‘Blue Posts’ in Holborn, a boarding stage, for the same rumbling and bumping Billing’s coach that Macready himself used almost daily in his journeys to his London chambers from his country home and back again. Mrs Orr says that the introduction between Forster and Robert took place at Macready’s house, whereupon Forster inquired, ‘Did you see a little notice of you I wrote in the Examiner?’ From this point on, Forster and Robert seem to have been pretty constantly together. It was at Elm Place, too, that Robert first met Miss Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, a neighbour of Macready’s, a young woman some ten or eleven years older than Robert, interested in art and literature.
Narses was abandoned as a probable dramatic subject, and no more was heard of Forster’s and Browning’s interest in writing for the theatre, and for Macready in particular, until a few months later in 1826, when Macready acted in a production of Talfourd’s Ion at Covent Garden. The first night, dedicated as a benefit night for Macready (who, after thirteen years, had just abandoned Drury Lane and its abominable manager Alfred Bunn), was on 26 May. Macready, having taken the principal role before a starry audience of literary and legal luminaries, social celebrities, politicians, and peers, was ‘called for very enthusiastically by the audience and cheered on my appearance most heartily. I said: “It would be affectation to conceal the particular pleasure in receiving their congratulatory compliment on this occasion. It was indeed most gratifying to me; and only checked by the painful consideration that this might be perhaps the last new play I ever might have the honour of producing before them. (Loud cries of ‘No No!’) However that might be, the grateful recollection of their kindness would never leave me.”’
Macready repaired after the performance to Talfourd’s house in nearby Russell Square, where he ‘met Wordsworth, who pinned me; Walter Savage Landor, to whom I was introduced, and whom I very much liked; Stanfield, Browning, Price, Miss Mitford—I cannot remember them all.’
(#litres_trial_promo) There were some sixty people in all, crowding around one another in congratulatory mode. Macready was placed at the supper table between Landor and Wordsworth, with Browning opposite—which speaks well for Robert’s own status in the company. Macready perhaps forgot or omitted to give some detail in his diary for this tremendous day, but Mrs Orr supplies the information that when Talfourd proposed a toast to the poets of England, Robert was included in their number, named by his host as the author of Paracelsus, and he stayed put in his chair while glasses were raised to him; according to Griffin and Minchin, Wordsworth ‘leaned across the table and remarked, “I am proud to drink your health, Mr Browning!”’
(#litres_trial_promo) This story is rubbished by Betty Miller, who points out that Robert had never much liked Wordsworth’s poetry or his politics and would not have been particularly flattered by the grand old placeman’s compliment—even if Wordsworth had been there to make it: he had gone home before the toasts were offered. The story has survived even the firm evidence that contradicts it.
Years later, on 24 February 1875, Robert wrote to the Revd Alexander B. Grosart to explain, with some embarrassment, why he had attacked Wordsworth in ‘The Lost Leader’, a poem published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845: ‘I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerable personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account: had I intended more, above all, such a boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about “handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon.” These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet; whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular about-face of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore.’
Wordsworth had abandoned liberalism, Robert’s preferred political position, and by so doing he had proved himself, in Robert’s estimation, that most disgraceful and detestable thing—a traitor. Throughout Robert’s poetical canon there are hissing references to the turpitudinous characters of turncoats. Unpleasant revenges, as unsparing as in Dante’s Inferno, are invented for them.
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote …
