скачать книгу бесплатно
(#litres_trial_promo)
There will be further occasions on which we will recognize that Robert Browning could be a good hater for the sake of conscience; this is one of the first and most significant. Wordsworth, heaped with honours, eulogized by friends and literary partisans such as Harriet Martineau, had become Poet Laureate in 1843. He had become, too, an object of absolute disgust for Robert, whose poem pulled no punches. This was not satire, this was not an elegant swipe: ‘The Lost Leader’ was a seriously-intended piece of lethal invective that found its mark not only through Robert’s authentic outrage but through his authentic poetic voice. His counterblast has stood as long as Wordsworth’s poetic reputation, and its venomous sting still poisons the old man in posterity.
There are other contradictions and misapprehensions concerning Talfourd’s famous party, none of them too surprising. It was a party celebrating a significant occasion; it was a party boiling and roiling with writers, actors, quantities of poets, lawyers, and journalists; and if it wasn’t an occasion for binding up old wounds and gouging open new ones, settling old scores and setting new grudges, for giving gossip and getting things wrong, then it can’t have been much of a party. But in fact it was all those things and more—it was a wonderful party. The more it is recalled, the more legends it accretes. The Ion supper is a sort of early Victorian charabanc, standing room only, for every notable of the period bundled and bumped together and bowled along, fired by their own fissiparous energies. Robert was noticed by one of the guests, Miss Mitford, who never forgot how he looked that night. Ten years or more later, in a letter of 1847,
(#litres_trial_promo) she wrote, ‘I saw Mr Browning once and remember thinking how exactly he resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes—and as to his poetry I have just your opinion of it—It is one heap of obscurity, confusion and weakness … I met him once as I told you when he had long ringlets and no neckcloth—and when he seemed to me about the height and size of a boy of twelve years old—Femmelette—is a word made for him. A strange sort of person to carry such a woman as Elizabeth Barrett off her feet.’
‘Femmelette’, applied to a man or a woman, means a feeble creature, lacking force and energy, a languishing, listless person, in distinct contrast to Miss Mary Russell Mitford herself, who tended to be pert. In 1836, she was a successful, middle-aged dramatist associated with Macready (who had taken roles in her plays); essayist; sometime poet (set on that path by the encouragement of Coleridge), and famous as the author of the sketches and stories that were published in 1832 as Our Village. Her nature was generally sunny, though she was as capable as anyone—and possibly more than some—of asperity and decided views. Perhaps Robert merely struck Miss Mitford as a little insipid, as at least modestly reserved: it was not his manner then to be full-voiced or conspicuously hearty. He would stand up for himself when necessary, but his mode was essentially placatory, as would be evident later to Macready when he noted Robert’s moderating, calming reaction to the impetuosity and hot-headedness of Forster.
The talk tended towards the literary and theatrical, and Macready ‘overtook Mr Browning as they were leaving the house and said, “Write a play, Browning, and keep me from going to America.” The reply was, “Shall it be historical and English: what do you say to a drama on Strafford?”’
(#litres_trial_promo) The Earl of Strafford had been in Robert’s mind, and even more to the fore in Forster’s mind since he happened to be writing the lives of Strafford and other statesmen of the period of Charles I, the Civil War, and the Commonwealth. Forster had temporarily stalled on his biographies, due partly to some personal difficulties with the fascinating Laetitia Landon, and Robert had been assisting him with some of the literary work on Strafford. Forster’s Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth was published in parts between 1836 and 1839 and his Life of Strafford had been published just a few weeks before the Ion party. Strafford was very much dans le vent.
Robert, seized by the idea of a great play for a great contemporary actor, delivered a full text some ten months later in March 1837. It might have been sooner—he was a fast writer once he had settled on his subject and theme—had he not been simultaneously working on the poem Sordello, which he had begun shortly after writing Pauline and which had already been displaced, to an extent, by the intervention of Paracelsus.
(#litres_trial_promo) Macready was willing to credit that Strafford, the play, would be his own salvation from some personal professional difficulties and rescue the English stage from the wretched condition into which it had sunk. Any play by Browning, for that matter, might do the trick, for he had surely seen John Forster’s imaginative, puffing article in March, in the New Monthly Magazine, entitled ‘Evidences of a new genius for Dramatic Poetry’, which declared, among other emphatic assertions, that ‘Mr Browning has the powers of a great dramatic poet’ and that his genius ‘waits only the proper opportunity to redeem the drama and elevate the literary repute of England’.
Macready, with his actor’s head sunk into his hands, might have felt his spirits rise a little. On 3 August 1836 Forster told Macready that ‘Browning had fixed on Strafford for the subject of a tragedy’. On 1 November, when Forster reported to Macready on the progress of Browning’s play, he praised it highly, but Macready feared that the young critic and would-be biographer of Strafford might be ‘misled as to its dramatic power; characters to him having the interest of action’. However, ‘Nous verrons! Heaven speed it! Amen!’ Despite pious sentiments, Macready began to feel faintly uneasy.
On 23 November, Macready confided to his diary that he ‘Began very attentively to read over the tragedy of Strafford, in which I find more grounds for exception than I had anticipated. I had been too carried away by the truth of character to observe the meanness of plot, and occasional obscurity.’ On 21 March 1837, when Macready and Robert read through Strafford together, he felt his heart fail. He is frank in his diary entry for that day: ‘I must confess my disappointment at the management of the story. I doubt its interest.’ Familiarity did not improve it. ‘I am by no means sanguine, I lament to say, on its success.’
On 30 March, Macready read the play to Osbaldistone, manager of Covent Garden, ‘who caught at it with avidity, agreed to produce it without delay on his part, and to give the author £12 per night for twenty-five nights, and £10 per night for ten nights beyond … Browning and Forster came in;’ records Macready in his diary for 30 March, ‘I had the pleasure of narrating what had passed between Mr Osbaldiston [sic] and myself, and of making Browning very happy.’ Macready suggested some further revisions that Robert ‘was quite enraptured with.’ Forster said he was trying to induce Longman to publish the text of the play. Robert asked if he could dedicate the play to Macready, who said ‘how much I should value such an honour, which I had not anticipated or looked for’. All of them, thoroughly pleased and in the highest good humour with one another and their prospects, looked forward to the production of Strafford, that most interesting new play by that great new dramatic poet Mr Robert Browning, and a stage success on the scale of, or surpassing, Talfourd’s Ion.
Dramatists, even authors of books, will repress a grim smile when they hear of a celebratory mood in which congratulations are exchanged in circumstances such as these. Elation is excusable, euphoria is understandable—it is the very air that is breathed in a moment of head-spinning optimism and rare agreement: it’s like bouncing on a spring mattress before the bed frame gives way and the whole company is tumbled down, some coming off with worse bruises than others. Macready held fast to his first and subsequent doubts about the stage worthiness of the play that Osbaldistone’s enthusiasm had made all the more urgent to resolve. He went over the play laboriously with Robert himself, and even drafted in Forster to meddle with the text and structure in an attempt to relieve Strafford of what he perceived as its ‘heaviness’ and stiffen what he felt to be its ‘feebleness’. He had read it to his wife Catherine and his children, who were ‘oppressed by a want of action and lightness; I fear it will not do.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Quarrels were not unfamiliar to Macready. On 12 April there was positively a dust-up between Macready, Forster, and Browning: ‘There were mutual complaints—much temper—sullenness, I should say on the part of Forster, who was very much out of humour with Browning, who said and did all that man could to expiate any offence he might have given.’ Forster, at Macready’s behest, had been worrying for a while at the text of Strafford and—by Macready’s account—seemed to agree with the great actor’s cuts and alterations. ‘He thought my view of the work quite a clear one, and in the most earnest spirit of devotion, set off to find and communicate with Browning on the subject—a fearful rencontre.’ In fact, Macready seems to have been anxious to ‘furnish Browning with a decent excuse to withdraw the play’, to the extent of trying to find out if the actors who had been engaged were ‘restive about their parts’. But no luck there: Macready was ‘disappointed at their general acquiescence’. In his diary for 13 April, Macready acknowledged that, when Forster returned with Robert in tow, ‘Forster … showed an absence of sense and generosity in his behaviour which I grieved to see. There was a scene.’
Quite what the dispute was about is not entirely clear. Whatever offence had been taken by Forster, and whatever its cause, he blew up and—not for the first time—lost his considerable temper. This feature of Forster’s personality was well known, and it was a worry to Robert, who confided in Macready ‘how much injury he did himself by this temper’. The dispute ended when Robert ‘assented to all the proposed alterations, and expressed his wish, that coûte que coûte, the hazard should be made and the play proceeded with’. This seemed satisfactory.
Until the next day. Macready wrote a detailed report in his diary on 14 April of how he found Robert at Forster’s where the poet-dramatist ‘produced some scraps of paper with hints and unconnected lines—the full amount of his labour upon the alterations agreed on. It was too bad to trifle in this way, but it was useless to complain; he had wasted his time in striving to improve the fourth act scene, which was ejected from the play as impracticable for any good result. We went all over the play again (!) very carefully, and he resolved to bring the amendments suggested by eleven o’clock this evening. Met Browning at the gate of my chambers; he came upstairs and, after some subjects of general interest, proceeded to that of his tragedy. He had done nothing to it; had been oppressed and incapable of carrying his intentions into action. He wished to withdraw it.’ Macready sent Robert for Forster and they both came back. They turned over all the pros and cons, for acting the play, for not acting the play. Finally they all decided to go ahead with Strafford, though Robert asked for more time to complete his alterations. ‘It was fixed to be done. Heaven speed us all!’ wrote Macready at the end of a difficult day.
It was one thing to deal with writers and critics, but that was not the end of it for Macready or the fate of Strafford: hardly even the beginning. For as soon as it was decided to perform the play, the complications and intrigues of staging it took over. On 20 April, all Macready’s doubts about the play recurred. He read Strafford again. He groaned. He sweated. He strongly feared its failure: ‘it is not good.’ He had had five days for his fears to be fed by the fact that Osbaldistone was on the verge of bankruptcy and had imposed ‘parsimonious regulations’. That is to say, the production budget had been slashed to the bone. The actors were playing up. Miss Helen Faucit, a fine young actress, only twenty years old and already a popular favourite with audiences, complained to Macready that ‘her part in Browning’s play was very bad, and that she did not know if she should do it. She wanted me to ask her to do it. But I would not, for I wish she would refuse it, that even at his late point in time the play might be withdrawn—it will do no one good.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Even as he learned his own part, Macready’s spirits fell further: he felt a certain obligation to Robert Browning that compromised his better judgement that he should withdraw for his own benefit; but he could not help hoping for an accident that should prevent performance, relieve his own decision to proceed, avoid the play and—worse—his own performance in the leading role being grievously hissed by a disappointed house, bringing down his own reputation as much as that of Browning to damnation. Browning might recover some ground and rescue himself with Sordello, but in his worst moments the worried actor considered that the inevitable failure of Strafford would mean it would be all up for the great Macready. ‘It will strike me hard, I fear. God grant that it may not be a heavy blow.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The sole chance for the play, he thought, would be in the acting: his own, at least. He had his doubts about the performances of some of his co-players.
And sure enough, the notices of the première of Strafford in the newspapers of 2 May, the morning after the first night, were nothing like as bad as Macready had anticipated: he was gratified to find them ‘lenient and even kind to Browning. On myself—the “brutal and ruffianly” journal observed that I “acquitted myself exceedingly well”.’ When Macready called that day on Forster and found Robert with him, he told him candidly that ‘the play was a grand escape, and that he ought to regard it only as such, a mere step to that fame which his talents must procure him.’ It had been, in Macready’s estimation, a narrow squeak. Some small ill-feeling still rankled between the three of them: Forster had written up the play in the Examiner, judging it more poetic than dramatic, which was to Macready’s mind a ‘very kind and judicious criticism’, though the judiciousness thereof was evidently not to Robert’s liking. Robert suggested that if Forster wanted any future tragedies, he should write them himself. Forster expressed himself hurt by Robert’s ‘expressions of discontent at his criticism’ which Macready thought had, if anything, verged on indulgence ‘for such a play as Strafford’ and he was cross at Robert’s ingratitude ‘after all that has been done for Browning’.
(#litres_trial_promo)
The first night, on 1 May, had been a triumph: a full house; the end of each act attended with the plaudits of an enthusiastic audience; calls of ‘Author! Author’ from a partisan claque to which Robert did not respond—it is not clear whether he was even in the house—so that the hubbub took some time to die down; the critics generally positive, despite some serious shortcomings in the staging and the general dilapidation of Covent Garden. William Sharp writes sadly that ‘the house was in ill repair: the seats dusty, the “scenery” commonplace and sometimes noticeably inappropriate, the costumes and accessories almost sordid’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The less said about the acting and understanding of the actors, the better: though Robert himself had something to say in remarks he made to Eliza Flower, who communicated them eagerly in a letter to Sarah Fox: ‘he seems a good deal annoyed at the go of things behind the scenes, and declares he will never write a play again, as long as he lives. You have no idea of the ignorance and obstinacy of the whole set, with here and there an exception; think of his having to write out the meaning of the word impeachment, as some of them thought it meant poaching.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
The exceptions were very likely Miss Faucit as Lady Carlisle and Macready as Strafford. Both had acquitted themselves well; she tender and affectingly pathetic, he majestic in bearing and bearded to resemble a Vandyke courtier of the period. Mr Vandenhoff as Pym had taken a purely perfunctory interest in his part, which he reportedly played with a nauseating, whining drawl; Mr Dale as Charles I was deaf as a post; and ‘The Younger Vane’, says Sharp, ‘ranted so that a hiss, like an embodied scorn, vibrated on vagrant wings throughout the house’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The part of the Queen, Henrietta Maria, was taken by Miss Vincent, fresh from her triumph at Drury Lane where she had played with Burmese bulls to the greatest satisfaction of her audiences. It was thus all the more to the credit of the play itself that it transcended these ignoble obstacles. The second night, when Robert sat ‘muffled up in the pit to feel the pulse of the audience’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the house received the play with warm-enough applause.
And so on through to the fourth night’s ‘fervid applause’ from an ‘admirably filled house’ and playbills announcing two further performances, one of which took place as advertised, the second fatally handicapped by the absence of Vandenhoff, who, having secured a better offer in America, jumped stage and took ship. He failed to turn up to play the important part of Pym, Strafford’s principal antagonist. The performance was cancelled. The play’s run was terminated. The precarious financial condition of the Covent Garden theatre collapsed entirely, and the promising young author, for his pains, got not a penny of his promised reward of £12 for even four, five, far less the projected first twenty-five nights, and he might whistle forever for the £10 for each of the ten nights further envisioned.
It was something, however, never mind if Robert had made little or no money from the play’s performances, that Longman had at least published the text of his play on the occasion of the first night of Strafford, 1 May. The Brownings had not been required to dip into their own purse to pay for the honour, though neither the book nor the play brought any profit to either party. Five months later, Macready took over the management of the Covent Garden theatre from Osbaldistone with a troupe of good actors, and for two years thereafter indulged his mission and pursued his ambition to improve the English stage. Robert himself stuck for a decent while to the vow of renunciation he had made in the hearing of Eliza Flower: it was to be six years before he next ventured near a stage or a theatre except as a regular spectator.
The blank verse tragedy that was Strafford took as its principal character the English statesman Sir Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford (1593–1641), who from 1639 was chief adviser to Charles I. In 1640, Strafford was impeached by the House of Commons. On a Bill of Attainder, and with the assent of the king, he was executed on Tower Hill. The action, such as it is, of Browning’s play—rather, the course of events from which the drama derives—is centred around the character of Strafford himself; his monarch, Charles I; his antagonist, John Pym, formerly Strafford’s closest friend; and his would-be lover, Lady Carlisle. It is a drama of crossed loves and conflicted loyalties, passions and prejudices, public and personal: Strafford loves Pym, who considers himself betrayed by his friend’s defection to the royalist cause; Strafford loves Charles I whose unworthiness and weakness betray his adviser’s loyalty and send him to the block; Strafford is loved by the unhistorical character Lady Carlisle, whose devotion he does not perceive, blinded as he is by his fatal commitment to the king.
Strafford had not been a critical failure—that the production had abruptly stalled due to external circumstances was no fault of Robert Browning’s, but the fiasco of the fifth night and the abrupt, untimely termination of the play’s intended run has tended to colour posterity’s judgement of its success. Of course posterity has also had an extended opportunity to judge the published text of the play and to review it in the light of developments in drama since 1837. It does not stand out conspicuously in the modern, revised history of the English theatre. It has enjoyed occasional amateur college productions, but it has never been professionally revived—nor is it likely to be. But for all that, Strafford in its time was well-enough received by contemporary critics and those playgoers who happened to see it before it fell off the stage into the pit of English literary and theatrical history.
Robert retired hurt—by the stage, by Forster, by the low conduct of venal and inadequate actors, by a general disgust—though his disappointment did not stop him associating with the many new friends he had made, frequenting the backstage green room when he attended the theatre, dining with Macready and Forster and Talfourd and the rest, all of whom welcomed his good company. He retired for extended periods to Camberwell where, in his room, succoured by his immediate family and surrounded by his familiar and fetish objects, pictures, and books, an idea for another historical play occurred to him. But mostly he set himself back to work on his interrupted poem, Sordello, which he intended to finish during a visit to Italy.
Prompted perhaps by his theatrical disappointments (it is good form to remove oneself abroad temporarily after an embarrassing dramatic disaster), and probably also to add colour not only to his own life but to his poetic work in progress, he embarked on his adventure in the afternoon of Good Friday, 13 April 1838. He sailed from London’s St Katharine’s Docks as the only passenger on the Norham Castle, a merchant vessel bound for Trieste on Rothschild business. It may be supposed that passage had been arranged for Robert by Reuben Browning.
The journey to Trieste, where he was dropped off by the ship’s Captain, Matthew Davidson, took seven weeks. It was as terrible in its episodes of almost Byronic high drama as in constantly wretched periods of dispiritingly low seasickness. It took a full week of gales and snow before they even reached Start Point, Devon. On 26 April, they were off Lisbon; the next day they were sixteen miles north-west of Cape St Vincent. They passed the Straits of Gibraltar on Sunday 29 April, and on 6 May they came upon an upturned boat off the coast of Algiers. On 13 May, they were seven miles from Valetta; the next day they sailed close to Syracuse and were briefly becalmed on 16 May within sight of Mount Etna. It took another fortnight before they reached Trieste. The next evening, 31 May, Robert left by steamer for Venice, where he arrived early on the morning of 1 June.
(#litres_trial_promo)
A letter to Fanny Haworth in Elstree is normally quoted in full in any account of Browning’s life. It is worth repeating as a rare early example of Robert’s narrative prose. It is dated 24 July 1838, by which time he was back in Camberwell. The introductory passage has been partly quoted already—‘I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves … bite them to bits … snowdrops and Tilsit …’; it is a charming, literally flowery, preface to saying:
You will see Sordello in a trice, if the fagging-fit holds. I did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed thro’ the Straits of Gibraltar)—but I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you, two to the Queen … the whole to go in Book 3—perhaps. I called you ‘Eyebright’—meaning a simple and sad sort of translation of ‘Euphrasia’ into my own language: folks would know who Euphrasia, or Fanny, was,—and I should not know Ianthe or Clemanthe. Not that there is anything in them to care for, good or bad. Shall I say ‘Eyebright’? I was disappointed in one thing, Canova. What companions should I have? The story of the ship must have reached you ‘with a difference’ as Ophelia says,—my sister told it to a Mr Dow who delivered it, I suppose to Forster, who furnished Macready with it, who made it over etc. etc. etc.—As short as I can tell, this way it happened: the Captain woke me one bright Sunday morning to say there was a ship floating keel uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some floating canvas, and towed her towards our vessel. Both met half-way, and the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. Our men made the wreck fast, and went to breakfast in high glee at the notion of having ‘new trousers out of the sails,’ and quite sure that she was a French boat, broken from her moorings at Algiers, close by. Ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk) round her stanchions, and after a quarter of an hour’s pushing at the capstan, the vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were in the forecastle, and had probably been there a month—under a blazing African sun … don’t imagine the wretched state of things. They were, these six, the ‘watch below’—(I give you the results of the day’s observation)—the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard at first. One or two were Algerines, the rest Spaniards. The vessel was a smuggler bound for Gibraltar; there were two stupidly-disproportionate guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and [here Browning inserts three small drawings of the ship, noting (‘All the “bulwarks,” or sides at the top, carried away by the waves’)]—nay, look you, these are the gun rings, and the black square the place where the bodies lay. Well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up the aft deck, hauled up tobacco and cigars, good lord such heaps of them, and then bale after bale of prints and chintz, don’t you call it, till the Captain was half frightened—he would get at the ship’s papers, he said; so these poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the sea, the very sailors calling to each other ‘to cover the faces’: no papers of importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder and ball enough for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton &c that would have taken a day to get out, but the Captain vowed that after five-o’clock she should be cut adrift; accordingly she was cast loose, not a third of her cargo having been touched; and you can hardly conceive the strange sight when the battered hulk turned around, actually, and looked at us, and then reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some scoundrel French surgeon’s lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world: there—only thank me for not taking you at your word and giving you the whole ‘story.’
The image of the loosed boat as a ‘mutilated creature’ turning to look at Robert Browning and his shipmates before reeling off into a luridly effulgent sunset is stunning—worthy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, or any of the tuppence-coloured gothic horrors in Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World. Mrs Orr provides some supplementary detail, which Robert confided to Sarianna but withheld from Fanny as too sensational:
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Of the dead pirates, one had his hand clasped as if praying; another, a severe gash in his head. The captain burnt disinfectants and blew gunpowder, before venturing on board, but even then, he, a powerful man, turned very sick with the smell and the sight. They stayed one whole day by the side, but the sailors, in spite of orders, began to plunder the cigars, etc. The captain said privately to Robert, “I cannot restrain my men, and they will bring the plague into our ship, so I mean quietly in the night to sail away.” Robert took two cutlasses and a dagger; they were of the coarsest workmanship, intended for use. At the end of one of the sheaths was a heavy bullet, so that it could be used as a sling. The day after, to their great relief, a heavy rain fell and cleansed the ship. Captain Davidson reported the sight of the wreck and its condition as soon as he arrived at Trieste.’
Robert’s letter to Fanny continues with a brisk itinerary: ‘“What I did?” I went to Trieste, then Venice—then thro’ Treviso and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles, you will see.’ Presumably Robert means that Fanny will see them if not first in poetical form in Sordello, then certainly in other poems in due course—Pippa would soon and significantly pass, in April 1841, through delicious Asolo. ‘Then to Vicenza, Padua and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Inspruck (the Tyrol) Munich, “Wurzburg in Franconia”! Frankfort and Mayence,—down the Rhine to Cologne, thence to Aix-la-Chapelle, Liège, and Antwerp—then home.’ Robert here carefully blots out four lines, asking Fanny Haworth to ‘Forgive this blurring, and believe it was only a foolish quotation:—shall you come to town, anywhere near town, soon? I shall be off again as soon as my book is out—whenever that will be.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
It may or may not have been true that Robert had written only four for sure, no more than six, lines of poetry: while the Norham Castle passed through the Pillars of Hercules (Robert being hauled up to the deck by Captain Davidson and supported in his tottering, nauseous state so that he might see the tremendous Rock of Gibraltar), and skirted the north African coast, he wrote either now on this first journey to Italy, or later on a second trip, one of his best known poems, ‘How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, written in pencil on the cover of Bartoli’s De’ Simboli Trasportati al Morale, according to Mrs Orr a favourite book and constant companion of Robert’s.
(#litres_trial_promo) Robert himself declared, in a letter of 20 October 1871 responding to an inquiry about the antecedents of the journey from Ghent to Aix, ‘I have to say there were none but the sitting down under the bulwark of a ship off the coast of Tangiers, and writing it on the fly-leaf of Bartoli’s Simboli; the whole “Ride” being purely imaginary.’ This seems definite, but Robert could be often contradictory and sometimes plain wrong in his recollections about where and when and how a particular poem was written.
‘We can imagine,’ says Mrs Orr with a sympathetic shudder, ‘in what revulsion of feeling towards firm land and healthy motion this dream of a headlong gallop was born in him.’
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three …
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
Better, perhaps, to think of happier times, of Robert inspired by this floundering journey on the swell of the sea to recall the first journey into Russia, and hear again in the slap of water against the sides of the Norham Castle the rhythmic beat of his own and Benkhausen’s galloping horses as they ran through northern Europe, their hooves thudding through the silences of white snow and green firs. He wrote, too, ‘Home Thoughts, from the Sea’, a short poem ‘written at the same time, and in the same manner’
(#litres_trial_promo)—in pencil on the cover of a book—a colourful riot of geography (‘Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away’), history (‘Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay’), and triumphant English victory (‘Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?—say’) in eight rhythmic, rhyming, ringing lines.
Not much remains of first-hand information about Robert’s first excursion to Italy and his journey home through Germany and the Low Countries. On his return, he was back in touch with William Johnson Fox, that great man who, as Robert wrote to Fanny Howarth in April 1839, ‘is my Chiron in a small way’, referring to him as the possessor of a ‘magnificent and poetical nature’. Robert regarded Fox as ‘my literary father’ and took care to maintain the connection with him and his family. William Sharp
(#litres_trial_promo) reports a reminiscence of Fox’s daughter ‘Tottie’ (later Mrs Bridell-Fox), who wrote: ‘I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palaces, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced.’
Robert had spent two weeks in Venice out of his four in Italy, and images of his impressions would surface later in poems such as Pippa Passes, ‘In a Gondola’, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, and—significantly for the time being—in the work in hand, Sordello, the poem that is confirmed as having been in the making since at least 1835, and probably for a while before, very likely soon after Pauline. Robert wrote to Fox on 16 April 1835, in a letter referring to Paracelsus, that ‘I have another affair on hand, rather of a more popular nature, I conceive, but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two.’ This ‘other affair’, Sordello, had already been subject to several revisions since its inception in or about 1833, and would again be revised to incorporate first-hand impressions of the Italian sites and sights still remaining, however much altered, some six hundred years after the thirteenth-century troubador (trovatore or, more literarily, trouvère) Sordello had walked and talked among them.
On the day of his departure for Italy, Robert had written to John Robertson, a friend who was connected with the Westminster Review, to say, ‘I sail this morning for Venice—intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes.’
(#litres_trial_promo)Sordello, the poem, is also referred to in a letter to Fanny Haworth that Mrs Orr cannot date precisely but is likely to have been written in the summer of 1838 or 1839: ‘I am going to begin finishing Sordello—and to begin thinking a Tragedy (an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticism on Strafford) and I want to have another tragedy in prospect, I write best so provided: I had chosen a splendid subject for it, when I learned that a magazine for next, this, month, will have a scene founded on my story; vulgarizing or doing no good to it: and I accordingly throw it up. I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love, to contrast with the one I mean to have ready in a short time.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The plays he had in mind were to be King Victor and King Charles, and The Return of the Druses. With his hopes for the popular appeal of Sordello, and the prospective play devoted to a theme of ‘the most wild and passionate love’, it can be taken that Robert was aiming now at the wild hearts as well as the impassioned minds of the market for poetry and plays.
Which begs a question about the condition of his own heart: love, remarks Mrs Orr very astutely at this point, had played a noticeably small part in Robert’s life. His adolescent feelings of affection for Eliza Flower were never very serious, nor likely to be taken very seriously, considering her long-standing devotion to William Fox. No woman—so far as we know from the scant evidence remaining of Robert’s early years—detained his romantic attention or redirected it from the affection he maintained for his mother. Nobody else, for the time being, could count on being kissed goodnight every night by Robert Browning. Mrs Orr suggests that, in the absence of any personal experience of ‘wild and passionate love’, Robert turned to Fanny Haworth to supply the deficit, though what he supposed she might know of it is beyond conjecture. There was a lively sympathy, but no romantic feeling, between Robert and Fanny, and it would certainly have been indelicate, if not improper, for him to inquire too closely into the passions of an older, unmarried woman living cloistered at home with her mother. In a letter of April 1839, he tells Fanny direct, ‘Do you know I was, and am, an Improvisatore of the head—not of the hort [sic] …—not you!’
In March 1840, Edward Moxon, at the expense of Robert’s father, published Sordello—‘that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry’, as even the partisan William Sharp is obliged to describe the poem. Alfred Tennyson read the first line:
Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told,
and finally he read the last line:
Who would, has read Sordello’s story told,
whereupon he famously said that the first line and the last line were the only two lines of the poem that he understood and they were lies since nothing in between made any sense to him. Douglas Jerrold, at the time a well-known playwright and later an original staff member and contributor to Punch, is said to have started reading Sordello while recuperating from illness. No sooner had he picked up the book than he put it down, saying, ‘My God! I’m an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind’s gone. I can’t understand two consecutive lines of an English poem.’ He called his family to his bedside and gave them the poem to read. When they sadly shook their heads and could make no more of it than he could himself, he heaved a sigh of relief and, confirmed in his sanity, went to sleep. Thomas Carlyle wrote to say that he had read Sordello with great interest but that Jane, his wife, wished to know whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book.
(#litres_trial_promo)
It is as well to get these three memorably funny stories dusted off at the start. They live forever in Browning’s life and legend, not just because they are sharply humorous or because they comfort our own confusion on reading the poem with the satisfaction of knowing that it confounded even the greatest intellects of its time, but also because they express a genuine, general bewilderment that explanations by critics of the poem’s form and expositions by researchers of the poem’s references have not wholly redeemed. Sordello has been incorporated into the fabric of English literature, but—still and all—its reputation persists, unfairly say some modern revisionary critics, as a notoriously difficult work, a monument to obscurity and a testament to tedium.
Robert Browning himself, says Sharp, came to be resigned to the shortcomings of Sordello as an accessible work of art: years later, ‘on his introduction to the Chinese Ambassador, as a “brother-poet”, he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression he particularly affected. The great man deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as “enigmatic.” Browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship.’ Sharp adds, rather nicely, that Browning’s holograph dedication of a copy of Sordello to a later friend, the French critic Joseph Milsand, read: ‘My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then or since.’
That was—and remains—simply true. George Santayana, in an essay, ‘The Poetry of Barbarism’, declares that if we are to do justice to Browning’s poetry, we must keep two things in mind: ‘One is the genuineness of the achievement, the sterling quality of the vision and inspiration; these are their own justification when we approach them from below and regard them as manifesting a more direct or impassioned glimpse of experience than is given to mildly blatant, convention-ridden minds. The other thing to remember is the short distance to which this comprehension is carried, its failure to approach any kind of finality, or to achieve a recognition even of the traditional ideals of poetry and religion.’ This latter qualification is now more disputed than the preceding encomium.
However, the estimation of Browning’s contemporaries was naturally foreshortened by the immediate, looming presence of Sordello, which had not then achieved the longer perspective of later critical perception nor the farther horizon of literary history. It was right under their noses. Sharp
(#litres_trial_promo) characterizes the poem as ‘a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan’. He compares its monotony to ‘one of the enormous American inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight’—which is a pretty way of dressing up the word ‘stagnant’. He regrets the ‘fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness’ and this, ‘coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, has been Browning’s ruin here’. Nevertheless, on the charge of Sordello’s obscurity, Sharp admits that ‘its motive thought is not obscure. It is a moonlit plain compared to the “silva oscura” of the “Divina Commedia”’—a tract of open country compared to Dante’s ‘dark wood’.
It is irresistible, though irreverent, to think of comparing Sordello to the smuggler’s ship that Robert came across on his voyage to Italy: the poem first setting sail on publication, heavily armed with emotion and erudition, fully ballasted with all the approved poetic paraphernalia, confident of successfully accosting and overwhelming readers and critics that cross its path, foundering on the unexpected obstacle of public bewilderment and upturned by a sudden storm of critical abuse, all hands dead, wounded, lost in attitudes of frightful prayer, finally righting itself and—with an ineffably battered dignity—turning to look mutely, uncomprehendingly at those critic-surgeons who butchered it and cast it adrift, reeling off into the sunset like a ‘mutilated creature’. It is a painful metaphor for the unsuspected end of a brave adventure.
As Chesterton remarks,
(#litres_trial_promo)Sordello is almost unique in literary history, in the sense that praise or blame hardly figured in its reception: both were overwhelmed by an almighty, universal incomprehension that stopped informed criticism in its tracks. ‘There had been authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with Sordello enters into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding.’ So far in his career, Robert’s reputation as a poet and playwright had seemed to be advancing much in step with those of his contemporaries. Pauline had fallen stillborn and anonymously from the press, but since nobody had noticed, nobody had heard the dull thud, its failure made no difficulties, and it had had the useful result of attracting the interested attention and positive regard of William Johnson Fox. Paracelsus had obtained a reasonable critical reception, though the poem itself had not sold out its first edition; and Strafford had been received with general enthusiasm, though how it would have fared in a longer theatrical run could never be known. So far, so good, all things considered: one undoubted failure, two moderate successes, nothing to be ashamed of (though Pauline remained decently veiled and in a permanent purdah). But Sordello suddenly blighted this promise in the bud.
Chesterton perceptively and properly disputes and demolishes the persistent myth of Sordello’s unintelligibility: its literary qualities, when perceived and understood, render the poem clearer. As Sharp admits, too, ‘its motive thought is not obscure’ and is perceptible to intelligent critical analysis. The final verdict on Sordello’s appeal to posterity may be given by Ezra Pound, who, perhaps exasperatedly, exclaimed, ‘Hang it—there is but one Sordello!’ And yes, there is no getting round it—we could not now or for the future do without Sordello, any more than Robert Browning could then or later have done without it. Since Pound regarded Browning as ‘my poetic father’, it is not irrelevant here to refer to T. S. Eliot, who admitted that Pound himself, in his time, suffered from being simultaneously judged to be ‘objectionably modern’ and ‘objectionably antiquarian’. The fellow-feeling and the sense of paternity that Pound bore for Browning is, in this sense, perfectly understandable.
The charge of Browning’s wilful obscurity, though it does not begin with Sordello, is sometimes attributed to Browning’s intellectual vanity and, by extension, arrogance. Chesterton speaks true when he says that ‘throughout his long and very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man who was intellectually vain.’ It is plain that, in his early career, he had little or no awareness that nobody knew as much as he did, and that that profound ignorance made him unaware that what was perfectly clear to Robert Browning was of the uttermost obscurity to almost everyone else. But that is a different matter: had he been aware of it, and had he made allowance for it, he would have committed a worse sin of being consciously condescending and patronising, of writing de haut en bas—which is one fault for which he is never successfully prosecuted.
‘He was not unintelligible because he was proud,’ says Chesterton, decisively and characteristically turning the difficulty on its head, ‘but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And because they were obvious, he fell into that concision of expression, allusion, and imagery which Sharp perceives as a fault and which, admittedly, compounded the unintelligibility of the poem for his readers. If Browning is accused of intellectual complexity, it is paradoxical that that complexity derives from his efforts to reduce it to a simplicity that, in the event, was fully comprehensible—and then only intermittently—solely to himself. By not writing down to his readership, Browning’s Sordello, says Chesterton, was ‘the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man’. It is a compliment that has not, then or now, been easily understood or greatly appreciated. The compliment was rebuffed, indeed, by the Athenaeum on 30 May with reference to the poem’s ‘puerilities and affectations’, and by the Atlas on 28 May which found Sordello full of ‘pitching, hysterical, and broken sobs of sentences’.
Even Macready finally gave up on the book: ‘After dinner tried—another attempt—utterly desperate—on Sordello; it is not readable.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Only Fanny Haworth had much good to say for it, a kindness to which Robert responded gratefully in a letter to her of May 1840: ‘You say roses and lilies and lilac-bunches and lemon-flowers about it while everybody else pelts cabbage stump after potato-paring—nay, not everybody—for Carlyle … but I won’t tell you what [Richard Monckton] Milnes told me Carlyle told him the other day: (thus I make you believe it was something singular in the way of praise—connu!).’ In fact, it is pleasing to report that Carlyle did have a good word to say.
Nobody now reads Sordello—or if they do, not idly, not without a good reason, and rarely without a concordance conveniently to hand. This is fair enough: Robert himself, in later life, when asked to explain a reference in one of his poems, was obliged to reply that once God and Browning knew what he meant, but ‘now only God knows’. And in modern times, quite aside from the poem’s literary difficulties, its sheer length—divided into six cantos (or ‘Books’) it amounts to five or six lines short of a total of 6,000 lines—is a deterrent to the casual reader. Chesterton is kindly inclined to exonerate Browning, finally, on the grounds of innocence and inexperience: ‘The Browning then who published Sordello we have to conceive, not as a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from each other.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Substitute, then, for Sharp’s image of ‘the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan’, the idea of Robert Browning as a Laocoön entangled in the coils of serpents so intertwined that they become one indistinguishable, roiling mass. Robert, all unwitting, called up leviathans from the vasty deep of his unconscious mind and conjured them off the pages of his conscious reading, so that they devoured him.
‘A very great part of the difficulty of Sordello,’ instances Chesterton, ‘is in the fact that before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of Browning’s actual narrative, he is supposed to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epochs—the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in medieval Italy.’ Griffin and Minchin
(#litres_trial_promo) say that, ‘In 1844, when Browning landed at Naples, among the first sights that met his view were advertisements of the performance of an opera on Sordello’, and that as late as 1910 (the publication date of their biography) ‘in the windows of Italian bookshops, one may see paper-covered volumes on the legend of Sordello and of the Ezzelini family who figure so prominently in Browning’s poem’. This is like saying an Italian arriving in London and seeing advertisements of the performance of a play on the Earl of Strafford would know instantly the historical treat he might expect from a stage version of the story, or that paper-covered volumes on the legend of Richard the Lionheart and Blondel the troubador would immediately engage his attention with a thrill of long familiarity.
Chesterton and others might later, with hindsight, excuse Sordello on several counts, but youth, except by the special indulgence of Mrs Orr,
(#litres_trial_promo) cannot be one of them. In 1840, Robert was twenty-eight years old and henceforth, says Mrs Orr, ‘his work ceases to be autobiographic in the sense in which, perhaps erroneously, we have felt it to be’. Erroneously, certainly, if we take it to be true-to-fact; not so far off the mark if we take it and interpret it, in the light of the known biographical facts about Browning, as perceptive emotional self-confession. His future work will, says Mrs Orr, be ‘inspired by every variety of conscious motive, but never again by the old (real or imagined) self-centred, self-directing Will … in Pippa Passes, published one year later, the poet and the man show themselves full-grown. Each has entered on the inheritance of the other.’
Chesterton picks up this cue from Mrs Orr and runs with it a little further, saying that Sordello ‘does not present any very significant advance in Browning on that already represented by Pauline and Paracelsus. Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent phrase used about the first by Mr Johnson Fox, “confessional” … Browning is still writing about himself, a subject of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant.’ And Chesterton, like Mrs Orr, recognizes Pippa Passes as a significant step forward not only in the technical development of Browning’s poetry but in the personal development of the poet himself. Both speak in a new voice from another place.
Poetry was the principal string to Robert’s bow; but he could not help pulling on another, trying to shoot a true arrow from it. As he had written to Fanny Haworth, it suited his way of working to keep several things on the go simultaneously. This is interesting to know, but nothing to make too much of: it is not uncommon—few writers conscientiously finish one job (book, play, poem or essay), dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s, before committing themselves to the next. Writers tend to work on several (more than one, anyhow) projects in parallel rather than serially or consecutively, and none of them will ever be at the same stage of development at the same time. It is only pedants and plodders and publishers who insist that one cannot do two things (or three, or four or more) at the same time. Since Strafford, Robert had taken his opportunities to keep up and broaden his acquaintance with the theatre and those associated with it. The untimely death of Strafford had been a blow, but his fascination with the stage had not died with it. Somewhat smoke-scented, its feathers a little ruffled, shaking out the ashes and preening the charred tips from its wings, the phoenix of Robert’s theatrical ambition was ready for another flight.
Macready, in his tenure as manager of Covent Garden (he reigned there from 30 September 1837 to 18 July 1839), was one focus of Robert’s attention; another was the well-disposed William Johnson Fox. Between Macready and Fox, two substantial rocks in the social life of London, Robert was naturally pulled by the eddies and currents that flowed around and between them into contact with a wide literary, legal, political, and social acquaintance.
This included men such as Charles Dickens (exactly Browning’s age and already prolific, with Sketches by ‘Boz’, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby under his belt); Walter Savage Landor (the famously and intractably temperamental poet, dramatist, and polemicist, recently returned from Italy after bitter separation from his wife); Edward Bulwer (the fashionable novelist, playwright, and politician who was to become Bulwer-Lytton in 1843, when he inherited the great house Knebworth from his mother, and thereafter first Baron Lytton); Daniel Maclise (the Irish portrait and history painter); Leigh Hunt (who had personally known Byron, Shelley, and Keats and whom Robert liked for his childlike nature and because he had rescued Shelley’s heart from the funeral pyre on the beach at Viareggio and now treasured it, along with a wisp of Milton’s hair, in his collection of literary relics); John Forster, of course, who was by now a close friend of Dickens and was to become his biographer; Richard Henry (sometimes Hengist) Horne (adventurer, critic, sometime editor of the Monthly Repository, author of plays that were never acted); Richard Monckton Milnes (later the first Baron Houghton, a tremendous social swell of wide literary and political acquaintance who amassed a large library of pornography that included the thrillingly wicked works of the Marquis de Sade); the literary and legal lion Thomas Noon Talfourd; and other playwrights, critics, actors, and men and women of fashion who thronged the times, the theatres, the salons and the dinner tables of London.
From the time of Strafford, Robert became a regular diner-out: he seems, indeed, rarely to have refused a decent invitation. Such social activity was useful: having attracted the public eye, he was not about to drop out of its sight. Acquaintance with the author was more sought after than with his books: Robert was talkative, intelligent, personable, and—having got over early reserve in company—was by now confident in conversation and socially assured. By chance, fatefully, when dining at Talfourd’s in 1839, Robert made the acquaintance of John Kenyon, described by Mrs Orr as being at that date ‘a pleasant, elderly man’, who turned out to have been a schoolfellow of Robert’s father.
(#litres_trial_promo) This encounter led to the reunion of Mr Browning and Mr Kenyon, who were as delighted with one another in their advancing years as they had been as schoolboys. This first meeting after so long a break prospered into an enduringly warm friendship with the whole Browning family. Mrs Orr quotes from a letter, dated 10 January 1884, from Robert to Professor Knight of St Andrews, some twenty-eight years after Kenyon’s death: ‘He was one of the best of human beings, with a general sympathy for excellence of every kind. He enjoyed the friendship of Wordsworth, of Southey, of Landor, and in later days, was intimate with most of my contemporaries of excellence.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
At about this time—even the thorough Mrs Orr cannot put an exact date on it—the Brownings moved to a larger, three-storeyed house, Hanover Cottage, to be near Jane Browning, Robert the First’s widow, who had moved nearby from Islington with her daughter Jemima and son Reuben. A letter conjecturally dated December 1840 by Robert to William Macready specifically states, ‘we remove into a new house, the week after next,—a place really not impossible to be got at’, and another to Macready, which on internal evidence must be dated no earlier than 1840, gives ‘Hanover Cottage Southampton [St]’ as Robert’s address. The reference to Southampton [St] must be provisional. To Laman Blanchard, the author of Offerings, Robert wrote in April 1841 to advise him of his new address: ‘if, in a week or two you will conquer the interminable Kent Road, and on passing the turnpike at New Cross, you will take the first lane with a quickset hedge to the right, you will “descry a house resembling a goose-pie”; only a crooked, hasty and rash goose-pie. We have a garden and trees, and little green hills of a sort to go out on.’ Mr Browning’s books, six thousand and more, were lodged in ‘the long low rooms of its upper storey.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Robert’s description of the house as ‘resembling a goose-pie’ has vexed many Browning scholars, who have scoured all of literature to discover an appropriate association. One might offer to this inquiry the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and perruquier Allan Ramsay, who became a bookseller in Edinburgh and promoted the city’s first circulating library. He built a round house known as the ‘Goose-Pie’ on the lower slopes of the Edinburgh Castle hill, above what are now the Princes Street gardens. Perhaps—and it’s not unlikely: Carlyle would have known them—Robert had read Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany, a collection of Scottish songs and ballads, the first volume of which was published in 1723, or The Ever Green (1724), which contained Ramsay’s revisions of representative work by the late medieval Makars of Scotland, notably the great poets Dunbar and Henryson. From Ramsay’s editions of Scottish poetry Robert might have gone on to glean a little gossip about Ramsay’s life, and a house known as the ‘Goose-Pie’ is striking enough to have stuck in anyone’s memory to be retrieved later as an amusing and typically recondite reference.
Mr Browning’s stepbrother Reuben, Robert’s young uncle, was allowed to put up York, his horse, which Robert was encouraged to ride, in the stable and coach-house which was attached to the house and accessible from it. The horse was groomed by the gardener, who was also responsible, with Mrs Browning, for the large garden ‘opening on to the Surrey hills’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sarianna spoke later of trees in the front of the new house, and Mrs Orr refers specifically to a white rose tree in the garden under which lived a toad which became so much attached to Robert that it would follow him about and suffer him to tickle its head. Hanover Cottage was larger than the family’s previous house and is referred to in several literary memoirs of the period, always with affection and respect for the warmth of its welcome to Robert’s guests.
After Strafford, Robert’s brain teemed with ideas for further dramatic productions, including an adaptation of a ballad, ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’, just lately published by John Payne Collier (who in 1840 founded the Shakespeare Society and busied himself thereafter with falsifications and forgeries in folios of Shakespeare’s plays that are the subject of academic debate to this day). His interest in the ballad was eclipsed by another rendering of it in dramatic form by Richard Hengist Horne in 1837, but no matter; there were other subjects. He wrote two plays, King Victor and King Charles and Mansoor the Hierophant (later retitled The Return of the Druses), both of which were submitted to Macready for his attention and refused by the great actor.
(#litres_trial_promo)
On 5 September 1839, Macready ‘Read Browning’s play on Victor, King of Sardinia—it turned out to be a great mistake. I called Browning into my room and most explicitly told him so, and gave him my reasons for coming to such a conclusion.’
