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(#litres_trial_promo) Robert was not best pleased: Macready records in his Diary for 20 September a meeting with Forster who ‘told me of Browning’s intemperance about his play which he read to Fox, Forster, etc.’. On 6 August 1840, Macready was in another dilemma: Robert had delivered the text of The Return of the Druses. Macready sighed and despaired: ‘with the deepest concern I yield to the belief that he will never write again—to any purpose. I fear his intellect is not quite clear. I do not know how to write to Browning.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That he evidently found something to say is evidenced by a letter from Robert to Macready dated 23 August. It begins: ‘So once again, dear Macready, I have failed to please you! The Druzes [sic] return in another sense than I had hoped.’ On 12 August, Robert called on Macready and they talked, Macready giving his frank opinion both on Sordello and The Return of the Druses and ‘expressing myself most anxious, as I am, that he should justify the expectations formed of him, but that he could not do so by placing himself in opposition to the world.’ Nevertheless, Macready promised to read the play again.
On 27 August, Robert called at Elm Cottage, Elstree, to retrieve his manuscript. He came upon Macready before the great actor-manager had finished his bath, ‘and really wearied me with his obstinate faith in his poem of Sordello, and of his eventual celebrity, and also with his self-opinionated persuasions upon his Return of the Druses. I fear he is for ever gone. He speaks of Mr Fox (who would have been delighted and proud in the ability to praise him) in a very unkind manner, and imputed motives to him which on the mere surface seem absurd … Browning accompanied me to the theatre, at last consenting to leave the MS. with me for a second perusal.’
In his letter of 20 August to Macready, Robert had vigorously defended his play, in terms that it is not difficult to imagine he defended it to others, to anyone who would listen indeed, and had finished by hoping that The Return of the Druses might ‘but do me half the good “Sordello” has done—be praised by the units, cursed by the tens, and unmeddled with by the hundreds!’ The failure of Sordello and Macready’s plain misunderstanding of the finer points of his plays, which Robert was more than willing to explicate and exculpate, had caused the poet-dramatist to lose some of his customary aplomb, and the old actor to doubt the man’s sanity. Convinced of the inevitability of his future celebrity, Robert was anxious to promote it in poetry and in performance.
There is a note of panic in his attitude at this time, in his attempts to salvage a career that looked likely to be cut short by the incomprehensible incomprehension not only of the public but of his literary and dramatic peers. Little wonder that his behaviour and remarks (even about those he knew to be his supporters) might be somewhat intemperate and contributed to a reputation in the world that was doing him no good.
After yet another reading of Robert’s ‘mystical, strange and heavy play’, Macready could not revise his original opinion: ‘It is not good.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He wrote to say as much to Robert, who, two days later, on 16 August, turned up to collect his rejected manuscript.
There was no lasting difficulty for the time being between the two men, no serious disruption of their sociability: Robert continued to attend Macready’s plays, met him with mutual friends, dined with him. Mrs Orr supposes that Macready’s Diaries, edited for publication, omit some of the detail surrounding the production of Robert’s third attempt at a performable play—A Blot in the ’Scutcheon—which was produced at Drury Lane on 11 February 1843. This was some three years after Robert had written it, to judge by references in an undated letter to Macready that is likely to have been written before the end of December 1840. In this letter Robert says, in effect, third time lucky: ‘“The luck of the third adventure” is proverbial. I have written a spick and span new Tragedy (a sort of compromise between my own notion [i.e. in the Druses] and yours—as I understand it at least) and will send it to you if you care to be bothered so far. There is action in it, drabbing, stabbing, et autres gentillesses,—who knows but the Gods may make me good even yet? Only, make no scruple of saying flatly that you cannot spare the time, if engagements of which I know nothing, but fancy a great deal, should claim every couple of hours in the course of this week.’
This is a conciliatory, even faintly humble letter. It certainly counts on Macready’s patience and good grace, and concedes that some dramatic action might be required to hold the attention of the playgoing public. He is prepared to give Macready what he wants if Macready will take what Robert wants to give. Such diplomacy had become necessary: Macready was losing faith in his young dramatist. Robert’s correspondence includes a couple of letters to Macready, dated 26 April 1842, in which he tries to drum Macready into stating his intentions towards not only The Return of the Druses but also A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.
In Macready’s edited Diaries there is a curious silence about the play he calls Blot until 25 and 26 January 1843, when he refers to reading it. On the Saturday, 28 January 1843, there had been a reading of Blot during which the actors had laughed at the play. Macready told Robert of the actors’ reaction and ‘Advised him as to the alteration of the second act.’
On 31 January, Macready went to the Drury Lane theatre. ‘Found Browning waiting for me in a state of great excitement. He abused the doorkeeper and was in a very great passion. I calmly apologized for having detained him, observing that I had made a great effort to meet him at all. He had not given his name to the doorkeeper, who had told him he might walk into the green-room, but his dignity was mortally wounded. I fear he is a very conceited man. Went over his play with him, then looked over part of it.’ By 7 February, Blot was in rehearsal and Robert had recovered his temper. But there were difficulties looming. Macready, right up to the last minute, was considering significant alterations to the play that were resisted by Robert: on 10 February ‘Browning … in the worst taste, manner and spirit, declined any further alterations … I had no more to say. I could only think Mr Browning a very disagreeable and offensively mannered person. Voilâ tout!’ But Macready thought that about a lot of persons who contradicted or even mildly discomposed him, so this judgement on this playwright at this time can be taken with a pinch of salt. Tempers, in any case, were short all round. The next day, Robert reappeared at the theatre. He ‘seemed desirous to explain or qualify the strange carriage and temper of yesterday, and laid much blame on Forster for irritating him’. Macready ‘directed the rehearsal of Blot in the ’Scutcheon, and made many valuable improvements’, though the acting left something to be desired.
On 11 February the three-act tragedy A Blot in the ’Scutcheon was performed to no great acclaim. The play lasted three nights before it disappeared forever from Macready’s repertoire. The Times shortly declared it to be ‘one of the most faulty dramas we ever beheld’, and on 18 February the Athenaeum unkindly laid into the play: ‘If to pain and perplex were the end and aim of tragedy, Mr Browning’s poetic melodrama called A Blot in the ’Scutcheon would be worthy of admiration, for it is a very puzzling and unpleasant piece of business. The plot is plain enough, but the acts and feelings of the characters are inscrutable and abhorrent, and the language is as strange as their proceedings.’
(#litres_trial_promo) On 18 March, Macready records in his Diary: ‘Went out; met Browning, who was startled into accosting me, but seeming to remember that he did not intend to do so, started off in great haste. What but contempt, which one ought not to feel, can we with galled spirit feel for those wretched insects about one? Oh God! how is it all to end?’ One thing had certainly ended: the association and friendship between Robert and Macready, which was not resumed for some twenty years thereafter. When they did cross one another’s paths, as happened on 4 June 1846 at a garden party, Robert cut Macready: ‘Browning—who did not speak to me—the puppy!’
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Most of the preceding account leading to production of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon has been told from Macready’s point of view, taken from his Diaries (as edited for publication). Robert Browning’s side of the matter is naturally somewhat different in detail and emphasis. Much later in life, he gave his own version to Edmund Gosse, and Mrs Orr
(#litres_trial_promo) publishes in full a letter of 15 December 1884 to Frank Hill, in which Robert thanks Hill, then editor of the Daily News, for suppressing a paragraph referring to A Blot in the ’Scutcheon in an article about the theatre. What Robert had to say to Gosse pretty much corresponds with the frank account he disclosed to Hill. Additionally, a letter from Joseph Arnould to Alfred Domett substantially describes, from his own firsthand observation, the play’s first night; and finally a letter from Charles Dickens recommending the play completes the full knowledge we have of this crisis in Browning’s professional life before his personal life was about to be thrown into upheaval.
Macready, it should be understood by connoisseurs of the backstage drama to A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, was experiencing severe domestic as well as professional difficulties in the early 1840s, some of which were public knowledge, some of which were public gossip, and some of which were nobody’s business but Macready’s. When, in October 1841, he took over the management of the Drury Lane theatre, he needed new plays to add to his existing repertoire and John Forster, on 29 September 1841, had ‘importuned’ him to read A Blot in the ’Scutcheon. Macready, although doubtful of Browning’s ability to write anything ever again, and despite his wavering faith in Forster himself, whose intemperate enthusiasms by now matched not only his intemperance of character but increasingly his intemperate taste for the bottle, read Browning’s Blot and was not impressed. Forster, too, by now had his doubts about the play, which was dispatched to Charles Dickens for a third opinion. Dickens did not reply for a year. When he did, on 25 November 1842, Forster showed the great novelist’s response to Macready. Dickens’ letter read:
Browning’s play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most earnest feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. It is full of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and beautiful in its vigour. I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred’s recurrence to that ‘I was so young—I had no mother.’ I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it. And I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played: and must be played, moreover, by Macready … And if you tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.
This letter, as quoted by Forster in the biography he later wrote of Dickens, was not in fact known to Robert Browning until, some thirty years later, he read it in Forster’s Dickens. This unqualified testimonial to the sublimities of Blot put Macready in a difficult position: Dickens’ opinion could not be ignored. The plot and sentiments of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon had deeply affected Dickens not just as an objective critic, but subjectively for deep-seated reasons of his own that served to heighten his enthusiasm for the play, which took the eighteenth century for its setting and family pride as its theme.
Lord Henry Mertoun, a landowner, asks Lord Tresham for the hand of his sister, Mildred, in marriage. Tresham, delighted, agrees. When Tresham is told by an aged servant that Mildred has been entertaining a secret lover—identity unknown—in her room, he confronts this clandestine cloaked figure and they fight. In the course of the duel, the secret lover—Lord Mertoun himself, whose awe of his idol Tresham has inspired his covert activity—is fatally wounded. Tresham, overwhelmed by remorse, takes poison. Mildred, overcome by her own remorse, dies of grief in her brother’s arms. The stage is littered with three corpses, and a fourth—the play itself—is dead by the time the curtain falls on it. This is to put the matter of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon a little bluntly: it is easy enough to render it ridiculous as melodrama; but the sentiment of pathos and the irony of self-righteousness were not fully realized in its principal characters, who lacked not for Shakespearean speeches but for Shakespearean credibility of character. This, then, is the play that Robert conceived when, two or three years earlier, he had written to Fanny Haworth, ‘I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love.’
Joseph Arnould attended the play’s first night, a lengthy account of which he wrote for the benefit of Alfred Domett in May 1843:
The first night was magnificent (I assume that Browning has sent you the play). Poor Phelps did his utmost, Helen Faucit very fairly, and there could be no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience. The gallery—and of course this was very gratifying, because not to be expected at a play of Browning’s—took all the points as quickly as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the action far more than the boxes, some of whom took it upon themselves to be shocked at being betrayed into so much interest in a young woman who had behaved so improperly as Mildred. Altogether the first night was a triumph. The second night was evidently presided over by the spirit of the manager. I was one of about sixty or seventy in the pit, and we yet seemed crowded compared to the desolate emptiness of the boxes. The gallery was again full, and again, among all who were there, were the same decided impressions of pity and horror produced. The third night I took my wife again to the boxes: it was evident at a glance that it was to be the last. My own delight and hers, too, in the play, was increased at this third representation, and would have gone on increasing to a thirtieth; but the miserable great chilly house, with its apathy and emptiness, produced on us both the painful sensation which made her exclaim that ‘she could cry with vexation’ at seeing so noble a play so basely marred.
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Arnould’s letter also painted in the background, backstage machinations, and mischief-making that, as much as the obvious shortcomings of the play, contributed substantially to its failure. The fault was not all Robert Browning’s, even allowing for the profundity of his anxiety that did him no good in the way it influenced his own behaviour towards Macready. Macready had his own agenda in respect of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon that contributed to its short, disastrous run, and it is possible that he deliberately undermined the play by orchestrating a bad reception for its performances.
Robert Browning’s own scrupulously detailed version to Frank Hill of the Daily News in a letter of 15 December 1884 reads thus:
Macready received and accepted the play, while he was engaged at the Haymarket, and retained it for Drury Lane, of which I was ignorant that he was about to become the manager: he accepted it ‘at the instigation’ of nobody,—and Charles Dickens was not in England when he did so: it was read to him after his return, by Forster—and the glowing letter which contains his opinion of it, although directed by him to be shown to myself, was never heard of nor seen by me till printed in Forster’s book some thirty years after. When the Drury Lane season began, Macready informed me that he should act the play when he had brought out two others—‘The Patrician’s Daughter’ and ‘Plighted Troth:’ having done so, he wrote to me that the former had been unsuccessful in money-drawing, and the latter had ‘smashed his arrangements altogether:’ but he would still produce my play. I had—in my ignorance of certain symptoms better understood by Macready’s professional acquaintances—I had no notion that it was a proper thing, in such a case, to ‘release him from his promise;’ on the contrary, I should have fancied that such a proposal was offensive. Soon after, Macready begged that I would call on him: he said the play had been read to the actors the day before, ‘and laughed at from beginning to end:’ on my speaking my mind about this, he explained that the reading had been done by the Prompter, a grotesque person with a red nose and a wooden leg, ill at ease in the love scenes, and that he would himself make amends by reading the play next morning—which he did, and very adequately—but apprised me that, in consequence of the state of his mind, harassed by business and various trouble, the principal character must be taken by Mr Phelps; and again I failed to understand—, what Forster subsequently assured me was plain as the sun at noonday,—that to allow at Macready’s Theatre any other than Macready to play the principal part in a new piece was suicidal,—and really believed I was meeting his exigencies by accepting the substitution. At the rehearsal, Macready announced that Mr Phelps was ill, and that he himself would read the part: on the third rehearsal, Mr Phelps appeared for the first time, while Macready more than read, rehearsed the part. The next morning Mr Phelps waylaid me at the stage-door to say, with much emotion, that it was never intended that he should be instrumental in the success of a new tragedy, and that Macready would play Tresham on the ground that himself, Phelps, was unable to do so. He added that he could not expect me to waive such an advantage,—but that, if I were prepared to waive it, ‘he would take ether, sit up all night, and have the words in his memory by next day.’ I bade him follow me to the green-room, and hear what I decided upon—which was that as Macready had given him the part, he should keep it: this was on a Thursday; he rehearsed on Friday and Saturday,—the play being acted the same evening,—of the fifth day after the ‘reading’ by Macready. Macready at once wished to reduce the importance of the ‘play,’—as he styled it in the bills,—tried to leave out so much of the text, that I baffled him by getting it printed in four-and-twenty hours, by Moxon’s assistance. He wanted me to call it ‘The Sister’!—and I have before me, while I write, the stage-acting copy, with two lines of his own insertion to avoid the tragical ending—Tresham was to announce his intention of going into a monastery! all this, to keep up the belief that Macready, and Macready alone, could produce a veritable ‘tragedy,’ unproduced before. Not a shilling was spent on scenery or dresses—and a striking scene which had been used for the ‘Patrician’s Daughter,’ did duty a second time. If your critic considers this treatment of the play an instance of ‘the failure of powerful and experienced actors’ to ensure its success,—I can only say that my own opinion was shown by at once breaking off a friendship of many years—a friendship which had a right to be plainly and simply told that the play I had contributed as a proof of it, would through a change of circumstances, no longer be to my friend’s advantage,—all I could possibly care for.
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One can hear Robert, in the course of this letter, warming to his reminiscence, waxing again with the indignation that through long years had not seriously cooled in his breast. If sin there had been in this dolorous sequence of events, it was that Macready had finally, fatally, been false to friendship. The heat of this disgrace flares through the letter, and Robert remarks that ‘my play subsists and is as open to praise or blame as it was forty-one years ago’. He is not about to encourage positively any latter-day production of the play: ‘This particular experience was sufficient: but the Play is out of my power now; though amateurs and actors may do what they please.’ In his account of an interview with Robert Browning on the subject of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, Edmund Gosse gives the Browning version a dramatic, journalistic, jaunty air that somewhat plays up the admittedly farcical aspects of the business that, nevertheless, caused Robert real pain. And Mrs Orr, uncharacteristically, cannot resist a humorous touch: ‘I well remember Mr Browning’s telling me how, when he returned to the green-room, on that critical day, he drove his hat more firmly on to his head and said to Macready, “I beg pardon, sir, but you have given the part to Mr Phelps, and I am satisfied that he should act it;” and how Macready, on hearing this, crushed up the MS., and flung it on to the ground. He also admitted that his own manner had been provocative; but he was indignant at what he deemed the unjust treatment which Mr Phelps had received.’
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The version according to Gosse admits what Robert had confessed in his letter to Hill: that he was not merely deceived in his dealings with Macready, but that his disappointments were founded less on simple misunderstandings than on total ignorance. Macready’s financial embarrassments only became clear to Robert on publication of the old actor’s diaries, and only in the light of these revelations, he wrote to Hill, ‘could I in a measure understand his motives for such conduct—and less than ever understand why he so strangely disguised and disfigured them. If “applause” means success, the play thus maimed and maltreated was successful enough: it “made way” for Macready’s own Benefit, and the Theatre closed a fortnight after.’
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Robert’s final excursion into the legitimate theatre was Colombe’s Birthday, which he finished writing in March 1844 but which was not produced until 1853—by Mr Phelps, as it happened, at the Haymarket Theatre, with Helen Faucit taking the role of the heroine. It played seven nights before vanishing forever from the boards of the London stage. The play had been originally written for Edmund Kean’s son, Charles, who was performing at Covent Garden and who was looking for new parts to play. His wife, Ellen Tree, was designated for the part of Colombe. Kean offered, it is said, £500 to Robert for a play, though Robert himself speaks in a letter to Christopher Dowson of ‘two or three hundred pounds’. But several complications got in the way of production. Kean wanted to postpone the play’s performance until Easter the following year; the engagement at the Haymarket was to be for twelve nights only; Kean was off to Scotland; Kean was a slow studier of new roles (a failing that incited Robert’s scorn as a fast-writing author). Robert was disinclined to ‘let this new work lie stifled for a year and odd, and work double tides to bring out something as likely to be popular this present season’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a disappointment that the play should not go immediately into production, particularly as Robert had been busy turning out other dramas—notably, Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy, which ‘I have by me in a state of forwardness’.
If A Blot in the ’Scutcheon had fragmented Robert’s friendship with Macready beyond ready repair, Colombe’s Birthday was to deal yet another devastating blow, this time to his friendship with John Forster. The play had been published by Edward Moxon as one of a continuing series of Browning’s works, and it was reviewed by Forster on 22 June 1844 in the Examiner. Forster concluded his generally respectful review with the fatal words, ‘There can be no question as to the nerve and vigour of this writing, or of its grasp of thought. Whether the present generation of readers will take note of it or leave it to the uncertain mercies of the future, still rests with Mr Browning himself. As far as he has gone, we abominate his tastes as much as we respect his genius.’ That did it for Robert Browning—until, a year later, Forster apologized, ‘very profuse of graciocities’ as Robert reported to Miss Barrett on 18 September 1845, and so ‘we will go on again with the friendship as the snail repairs its battered shell’. But the friendship was never the same, and much later there were no more than fragments of the shell strewn around to be trodden upon and utterly crushed.
To frustrate Macready’s attempts to edit or alter the text of his plays in production and performance, Robert had had them printed by Edward Moxon, who eventually suggested publishing Browning’s works at the expense of the Browning family as a continuing part work, a series of paper-covered pamphlets: ‘each poem should form a separate brochure of just one sheet—sixteen pages in double columns—the entire cost of which should not exceed twelve or fifteen pounds.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By using the same small, cheap type as was being used to print a low-priced edition of Elizabethan dramatists, Moxon could afford to offer bargain terms which Robert was quick to accept. The umbrella title of Bells and Pomegranates was, as usual, perfectly clear in its symbolism to Robert Browning, but he was obliged to provide some cues and hints to less erudite readers as to its origin. The perplexity of the general astonished Robert, but he finally, graciously explained that the intention was to express ‘something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought; which looks too ambitious thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred’.
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If this was still not clear enough, the reference to bells and pomegranates derived from the Book of Exodus, wherein is described the fashioning of Aaron the priest’s ephod: ‘And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about:/A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about.’ (Exodus 28: 33–4) There is poetry in the rhythm of these words and in their symbols, in the alternating images around the hem of the garment worn by Aaron whose ‘sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the Lord, and when he cometh out, that he die not’ (ibid., verse 35). Robert further explained that ‘Giotto placed a pomegranate fruit in the hand of Dante, and Raffaelle [Raphael] crowned his Theology (in the Camera della Segnatura) with blossoms of the same’—the fruit being symbolic of fine works.
The series of eight pamphlets was published over a period of some five years. It began in 1841 with Pippa Passes, a moderately long dramatic poem which Robert had written while he was finishing Sordello and after his trip to Italy. The second pamphlet, in spring 1842, comprised the text of an unperformed play, King Victor and King Charles. The third was Dramatic Lyrics, in November or December 1842. The Return of the Druses was the fourth pamphlet in January 1843. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, the fifth, was published on the day of its first performance on 11 February 1843. Colombe’s Birthday, published in March 1844, was the sixth pamphlet. The seventh in the series was a collection of short poems, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in November 1845. The final pamphlet, the eighth, on 13 April 1846, was the text of Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy, two unperformed plays.
These successive publications were prefaced in the first, Pippa Passes, with a dedication to Thomas Talfourd. The complete dedication, later omitted except for Talfourd’s name, expressed Robert Browning’s hopes and aspirations and also alluded subtly and ruefully to past experiences: ‘Two or three years ago I wrote a Play, about which the chief matter I much care to recollect at present is, that a Pit-full of goodnatured people applauded it:—ever since, I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. What follows I mean for the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals, and I amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again.’ The Pit-audience was to take its time—some twenty years—to applaud the eager poet-dramatist optimistic of acclaim and certain of celebrity.
A letter from Thomas Carlyle of 21 June 1841, acknowledging Robert’s gift of a copy of Pippa Passes and of Sordello, suggested some difficulties ahead: ‘Unless I very greatly mistake, judging from these two works, you seem to possess a rare spiritual gift, poetical, pictorial, intellectual, by whatever name we may prefer calling it; to unfold which into articulate clearness is naturally the problem of all problems for you. This noble endowment, it seems to me farther, you are not at present on the best way for unfolding;—and if the world had loudly called itself content with these two Poems, my surmise is, the world could have rendered you no fataller disservice than that same! Believe me, I speak with sincerity; and if I had not loved you well, I would not have spoken at all.’
Carlyle, in contemporary critical terms, was perfectly right, and much of what he had read of Robert’s work was obscure to him. On those grounds, critical and public discontent with Browning’s poetry was by no means a bad thing. His view that Robert had not yet come into full inheritance of his ‘noble endowment’ boiled down to a sort of headmaster’s mid-term report—in simple terms, ‘shows promise, could do better’. But of course, in Carlylean terms, it was not that simple. Carlyle continued sincerely but perhaps depressingly: his Scottish, rather Calvinistic, disposition assumed not only the value of struggle in itself but also the enhanced value of achievement as a result of it. What followed was virtually a moral sermon:
A long battle, I could guess, lies before you, full of toil and pain and all sorts of real fighting: a man attains to nothing here below without that. Is it not verily the highest prize you fight for? Fight on; that is to say, follow truly, with steadfast singleness of purpose, with valiant humbleness and openness of heart, what best light you can attain to; following truly so, better and ever better light will rise on you. The light we ourselves gain, by our very errors if not otherwise, is the only precious light. Victory, what I call victory, if well fought for, is sure to you.
Excelsior! was Carlyle’s hortatory word to Robert Browning who, if anyone, bore a banner with a strange, indecipherable device. Mocked and misunderstood, nevertheless the hero’s way led upward through—doubtless—a cold and lonely and desolate territory until the sunlit peak was reached. But even Carlyle recognized the difficulty. He kindly offered the weary wayfarer a short respite, a room for the night, as it were, where he could check his equipment, take his bearings, fully assess his commitment to the arduous journey ahead, consider the true philosophical meaning of the journey rather than be focused upon its artistic, symbolic value:
If your own choice happened to point that way, I for one should hail it as a good omen that your next work were written in prose! Not that I deny you poetic faculty; far, very far from that. But unless poetic faculty mean a higher-power of common understanding, I know not what it means. One must first make a true intellectual representation of a thing, before any poetic interest that is true will supervene. All cartoons are geometrical withal; and cannot be made till we have fully learnt to make mere diagrams well. It is this that I mean by prose;—which hint of mine, most probably inapplicable at present, may perhaps at some future day come usefully to mind.
Carlyle concluded his letter, sugaring the salt, by admitting to Robert that, ‘I esteem yours no common case; and think such a man is not to be treated in the common way. And so persist in God’s name as you best see and can; and understand always that my true prayer for you is, Good Speed in the name of God!’
Whatever Robert may have thought then of this letter would surely have been tempered later by a letter of 17 February 1845 from Elizabeth Barrett. She had sent her poems to Carlyle, who had evidently offered her the same advice as he had given to Robert Browning, and indeed freely to every other poet except Tennyson: ‘And does Mr Carlyle tell you that he has forbidden all “singing” to this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing? And have you told Mr Carlyle that song is work, and also the condition of work? I am a devout sitter at his feet—and it is an effort for me to think him wrong in anything—and once when he told me to write prose and not verse, I fancied that his opinion was I had mistaken my calling,—a fancy which in infinite kindness and gentleness he stooped immediately to correct. I never shall forget the grace of that kindness—but then! For him to have thought ill of me, would not have been strange—I often think ill of myself, as God knows. But for Carlyle to think of putting away, even for a season, the poetry of the world, was wonderful, and has left me ruffled in my thoughts ever since.’ And whatever Carlyle might think about Pippa Passes, the conception of it was, to Miss Barrett’s mind, ‘most exquisite and altogether original—and the contrast in the working out of the plan, singularly expressive of various faculty’.
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Thomas Carlyle was from the beginning, and remained, an important friend to Robert Browning and a significant intellectual influence in his life. On 5 May 1840, Macready attended a lecture by Carlyle. What it was about he could not recollect, ‘although I listened with the utmost attention to it, and was greatly pleased with it’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The title and subject matter of the lecture, which Macready could not well recall, was ‘The Hero as Divinity’. The second, on 8 May, he recollected very well: ‘“The Hero as Prophet: Mahomet”; on which he [Carlyle] descanted with a fervour and eloquence that only a conviction of truth could give. I was charmed, carried away by him. Met Browning there.’ Macready had met Robert at the earlier lecture, too, three days before. Robert also attended the third lecture, ‘The Hero as Poet’. This series of six lectures, the remaining subjects of which were ‘The Hero as Priest’, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, and ‘The Hero as King’, ran from 5 to 22 May. This lecture series, the sensation of the season, was published as that great and curious Carlylean work, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History in 1841.
Carlyle’s first impression of Robert Browning had not been wholly positive. Forty years later, Robert, in a letter of 18 March 1881,
(#litres_trial_promo) candidly admitted that Carlyle ‘confessed once to me that, on the first occasion of my first visiting him, he was anything but favorably impressed by my “smart green coat”—I being in riding costume: and if then and there had begun and ended our acquaintanceship, very likely I might have figured in some corner of a page as a poor scribbling-man with proclivities for the turf and scamphood. What then? He wrote Sartor [Resartus]—and such letters to me in those old days. No, I am his devotedly.’
Carlyle, seventeen years older than Robert, might deplore his dandyism, but he admitted his young friend to be beautiful, striking in his facial features, and possessing a full head of dark, flowing hair. Besides, the ‘neat dainty little fellow’ professed a marked enthusiasm for the philosophy of the Scottish philosopher whose intellectual distinction in London literary society added a lustre to his otherwise gaunt, somewhat dour appearance. As Carlyle got to know Robert better, he formed a close personal attachment to him and a high opinion of his capabilities. To Gavan Duffy, the young Irish nationalist, Carlyle declared Robert Browning to possess not only a powerful intellect but, ‘among the men engaged in England in literature just now was one of the few from which it was possible to expect something’. Browning, said Carlyle, responding in 1849 to Duffy’s suggestion that the poet might be an imitator of Coleridge’s ‘The Suicide’s Argument’ (first published in 1828), ‘was an original man and by no means a person who would consciously imitate anyone’.
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Robert and Thomas Carlyle had certainly met by 27 March 1839, when they are recorded as dining together at Macready’s table.
(#litres_trial_promo) In a letter of 30 December 1841 to Fanny Haworth, Robert tells her that he ‘dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people “dear,” in a hurry, except in letter-beginings!) yesterday—I don’t know any people like them—there was a son of [Robert] Burns’ there, Major Burns whom Macready knows—he sung “Of all the airts”—“John Anderson”—and another song of his father’s.’ This reference speaks confidently of some considerable intimacy and friendship beyond mere literary respect or intellectual hero-worship. In a letter to Robert of 1 December 1841, Carlyle lamented that, ‘The sight of your card instead of yourself, the other day when I came down stairs, was a real vexation to me! The orders here are rigorous. “Hermetically sealed till 2 o’clock!” But had you chanced to ask for my Wife, she would have guessed that you formed an exception, and would have brought me down.’ Carlyle goes on to invite Robert to pay visits on Friday nights for tea at six or half-past six. A letter of 1842 from Robert to Mrs Carlyle accepts an invitation to breakfast. Carlyle’s letters to Robert in this period are those of a man corresponding with an intellectual equal and a friend interested in the common domestic matters of life as well as the more rarefied matters of the mind and the human condition. Browning had, wrote Carlyle to Moncure Daniel Conway, ‘simple speech and manners and ideas of his own’. He was ‘a fine young man … I liked him better than any young man about here.’ And though Carlyle ‘did not make much out of’ Paracelsus, he conceded that ‘that and his other works proved a strong man’.
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Robert not only rode into town to visit Carlyle at his house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, but Carlyle rode out to Hatcham to visit the Brownings, whose decent domestic respectability he admired as much as the tidy trim of ‘the little room’ in which Robert kept his books. Perhaps Mrs Browning played the piano for him, perhaps Carlyle now and again burst into song. It was not unlikely—despite Elizabeth Barrett being convinced of his having ‘forbidden all “singing” to this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing’. Robert revealed to her, in a letter of 26 February 1845, an occasion a couple of weeks before when Carlyle had abruptly asked him, ‘Did you never try to write a Song? Of all the things in the world, that I should be proudest to do.’ It may be that Carlyle was mindful of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun’s remark in 1703, ‘I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Chr—’s sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ If he could not make a song, Carlyle could at least sing one. Six months before, Robert had heard the sage of Ecclefechan, the prophet of Craigenputtock, the great Cham of Chelsea, ‘croon if not certainly sing, “Charlie is my darling” (“my darling” with an adoring emphasis)’.
Of this enduring but improbable friendship, Chesterton puts the matter succinctly: ‘Browning was, indeed, one of the few men who got on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most other poets of the day, had something amounting to a real attachment to him … Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all companies.’
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Dramatic Lyrics had been published, at Mr Browning senior’s expense, in late November 1842. The pamphlet consisted of sixteen poems, fourteen of them new: ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’ had already been published in the Monthly Repository in 1836. Moxon had suggested a collection of small poems for popularity’s sake, and so Robert had collected up poems he had written over the past eight years, during and after his trip to Russia. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (first titled ‘The rain set in early to-night …’) and ‘Johannes Agricola’ (first titled ‘There’s Heaven above …’) are said to have actually been written in the spring of 1834, in St Petersburg. ‘Cavalier Tunes’, a set of three poems—‘Marching Along’, ‘Give a Rouse’, and ‘My Wife Gertrude’ (later titled ‘Boot and Saddle’)—was probably written in the summer of 1842, arising out of Robert’s background reading for Strafford and coinciding with the two-hundredth anniversary of the Civil War. Sordello and Robert’s visit to Italy in 1838 had inspired ‘My Last Duchess’ (here titled ‘Italy’) and ‘In a Gondola’. ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is said to have come from reading in his father’s library. These, together with ‘Waring’, were to figure among Robert’s most famous poems and, with ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Johannes Agricola’, are among the best known, best loved, and best studied poems in the English language, from high school to high table.
On first publication, Robert had been anxious to allay any interpretation of Dramatic Lyrics as expressing anything that might be construed as personal to the author. A plain disclaimer asserted: ‘Such poems as the following come properly enough, I suppose, under the head of “Dramatic Pieces”; being, though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.’ This was largely true in principle: the poems are not notably introspective but are mostly based on legend or history; they depend on dramatic action more than philosophical themes; and—with the exception of ‘Cavalier Tunes’—they are distinctly flavoured with Robert’s observations of nations and nationalities other than England and the English. The title of the collection also directs readers away from any psychological analysis: the poems are by an author recently known for dramatic works and the word Lyrics in the title specifically casts them back to the lyrical poetry of the Romantic poets. Of course, this is somewhat disingenuous—they are in a distinctively modern, Browning idiom.
Robert might have saved himself all the trouble of dissociating himself personally from the utterances in Dramatic Lyrics since the pamphlet attracted little or no attention from readers or critics. John Forster reviewed it, more or less admiringly, in the Examiner, writing that ‘Mr Browning is a genuine poet, and only needs to have less misgiving on the subject himself.’ But difficult, of course, to believe in one’s genuine poetic ability when nobody else notices it or pays good money to read it. Perhaps Forster meant, however, that Robert had identified his true manner in Dramatic Lyrics. If so, he was right. The pamphlet proved definitively, for the first time, Robert’s personal, inimitable mastery of the dramatic lyric and the monologue.
‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, a last-minute addition to fill up space in the volume, had been written for young Willie Macready, the actor’s eldest son, when the boy was ill in bed. Willie liked to draw pictures and had asked Robert for something to illustrate. His retentive mind recalled a story about the death of the Pope’s Legate at the Council of Trent from Wanley’s The Wonders of the Little World. Willie’s clever drawings inspired the final version of the improvised poem, now a nursery classic, which was perfectly designed to thrill an imaginative little boy:
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats. (ll. 10–20)
The poem is a perfectly structured, perfectly paced, perfectly psychologically judged dramatic story, perfectly suited to the human voice—to recitation, which Robert loved. If we are to look for the cadences of his own voice in conversation, we may look no further than ‘The Pied Piper’. Robert very likely enjoyed it as much as Willie. Indeed, it became one of his party pieces when entertaining at children’s parties. The rhythms are important here, just as they are in another poem in Dramatic Lyrics: ‘Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr’, said to have been composed on horseback in 1842. The thudding phrase ‘As I ride, as I ride’ resonates throughout the poem, just as effectively creating the sense of a rhythmic, steady gallop as the cadences of ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, published in 1845 in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics:
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. (ll. 7–12)
If ‘The Pied Piper’ was aesthetically a great dramatic success, no less were other poems in the pamphlet. Robert had been impressed by Tennyson’s poetry, though he preferred reality to Tennyson’s romance. It is this insistence on reality, rather than romance or sentiment, that gives such power not only in the fantasy of legend to the ambiguously happy though unambiguously moral ending of ‘The Pied Piper’, but also to the grim amorality of poems like ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’. Both these latter poems concern the murder of women. It is possible that the murderers in both are mad—fantasists to whom reality is a mirage; but to suppose any such thing is to flinch from Robert Browning’s insistence on character over the detail of narrative, in contrast to Tennyson’s emphasis on story over characterization. Ian Jack makes this important point: ‘Tennyson tells us that the old man who narrates the story is an artist, but we have to be told—whereas in Browning we would know from the smell of the paint.’
(#litres_trial_promo) G. K. Chesterton had earlier made this point in a different way: Robert knew about painting, sculpture, music, and the rest because he had practised painting, sculpture, and music with his own hands.
And in these two poems of muted horror, just as in the poems of action and adventure, the unemphatic pace of the narrative underlines the matter-of-fact nature of the act and its matter-of-fact acceptance:
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain. (ll. 33–42)
And we, too, are sure: the tenor of the lines might do just as well for telling us that her lover was tying Porphyria’s shoelaces as an act of humble homage. Just so the Duke, in ‘My Last Duchess’, refers to the death of his wife:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.’ (ll. 1–4)
