Three weeks later, the Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, was dead. Punch carried a full-page valedictory cartoon in which Tennyson “crosses the bar”, standing like Dante, complete with laurel wreath, in an open boat. The lengthy verse elegy alongside begins: “Our fullest throat of song is silent”.
In contrast, Browning’s death, in December 1889, had been marked by a perfunctory scrap of elegy in Punch which included the line, “England loved you, though your song was oft mistaken.” The founding of the Browning Society while the poet was still alive attests to that love.
The “mistaken” nature of Browning’s song is a matter of judgement. It turns on his aim to “speak” to grown-ups (was “song” only for children?), and his interest in the macabre, the ambiguous, and the grotesque — an interest that he shared with his friend Charles Dickens, the bicentenary of whose birth also falls this year. Whereas 2012 has given us wall-to-wall Dickens coverage in the media, Browning’s bicentenary is being celebrated rather quietly.
Browning was born on 7 May 1812, three years after Tennyson, and seven years before John Ruskin, who was also brought up in tranquil Camberwell, south of London. Robert Browning senior held a Bank of England clerkship, and built up a large and varied library on which his young son feasted. Browning’s mother, Sarah, was a Congregationalist and an accomplished pianist.
Browning’s parents, like Ruskin’s, attended both Anglican and Dissenting services. Years later, the two literary sons, fellow members of the Athenaeum Club, were to swap memories of the fashionable preachers that they had both heard early in life, in Camberwell and Walworth.
WHEREAS Ruskin’s biography is overshadowed by an unconsummated marriage, Browning’s is dominated by his courtship of, and marriage to, Elizabeth Barrett. Today, the romantic story of The Barretts of Wimpole Street is better known than Browning’s
verse. Visit the shrine in Waco, Texas — the Armstrong Browning Library — and you will find not only literary manuscripts, but also the famous clasped hands of Robert and Elizabeth, moulded from life and cast in bronze. And it was the work of his wife rather than Browning himself which achieved early popularity and healthy sales.
The problem was that his early works of historical drama (like Tennyson’s efforts at the end of his career) did not take off, and Sordello, his lengthy historical poem of 1840, elicited from Jane Welsh Carlyle the celebrated comment that she was unsure whether Sordello was a man, or a city, or a book.
But some early poems, such as the disturbing “Porphyria’s Lover”, have gone into the canon. Also impressive are other dramatic monologues — psychological mini-dramas that create a whole imagined world — including wonderful studies in egoism such as “My Last Duchess” and “The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church”, both published in the 1840s.
BROWNING was moved and influenced by the Nonconformist piety of both his wife and his mother (who had recently died) when, in the middle of the century, he wrote two “crisis poems” that draw on a long tradition of spiritual autobiography.
In “Christmas-Eve” the speaker witnesses the different responses of three religious traditions to the mystery of the incarnation, finally choosing to stay with the elect of Mount Zion chapel. In “Easter-Day”, an unmediated vision of the deity silences all doubts.
As Victorian religious verse goes, these poems are unusually direct in their treatment of the Christian faith and their sympathy towards Evangelical doctrine.
More complex and ambiguous are the dramatic monologues in Men and Women (1855), to which modern readers return most often. Poems such as “Fra Lippo Lippi”, and “Andrea del Sarto” bring together Browning’s interest in aesthetics and his love of Italy, whence he and Elizabeth fled for the sake of her health (mental and physical), and where their son, Pen, was born.
The only poem in the collection which Ruskin liked was about the raising of Lazarus. In lyric 31 of In Memoriam (1850), Tennyson had only sketched the rejoicing at Bethany that followed the miracle, and had hinted at the dark side of that event: “A solemn gladness even crowned The purple brows of Olivet.”
Characteristically, Browning filled out the picture in his poem “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician”, where he defamiliarised the story by presenting it from the perspective of an outsider to the Christian faith. In describing Lazarus’s restored earthly existence as “the after-life”, Karshish misses the point of a miracle that enacts the promise of another kind of future life implicit in the logion “I am the resurrection and the life.”
THE Lazarus story is, of course, unique to St John’s Gospel, and in a later poem, “A Death in the Desert” (1864), Browning brilliantly exploits the complexities of multiple narration to evoke the last days on earth of St John the Evangelist, surrounded by his followers. In his poem, Browning wraps the dying saint’s dramatic monologue in other narrative, which only partly explains the provenance of the scroll on which it is written.
The reader’s sense of uncertainty is uncannily similar to that experienced by a biblical scholar working on the Fourth Gospel, who has read the higher critics. Similarly, within St John’s monologue — in effect his “last words” — the Evangelist creates in the listeners who gather around his bed, in the guarded desert cave, something of the experience he had as one of the disciples who heard the farewell discourses of Jesus, as recorded in the Fourth Gospel.
The Bishop of Durham, Brooke Foss Westcott, who wrote the best Victorian commentary on St John’s Gospel (1880), was also a fan of Browning. Drawing together his readings of the Evangelist and the poet in a Browning Society lecture of 1882, he argued that the keynote of Browning’s teaching was not knowledge, but love.
Some of Browning’s most memorable lyrics are love poems: “Love Among the Ruins” and “Two in the Campagna” are well-known examples. It was after the death of his beloved wife in 1861, and his return to England — where he threw himself into the busy social life of literary London — that Browning gained a real following, and then became world-famous. And it is typical of him that his most ambitious work and greatest achievement, The Ring and the Book (1868-9), is as much about hate as it is about love.
Although the plot revolves around the murder trial of Count Guido Franceschini in Rome in 1698, recorded in the old Yellow Book that he had picked up in Florence, Browning also drew upon events in England in the 1860s. Like Ruskin, he was a narrow-eyed observer of Anglican squabbles, and the trials of Bishop Colenso, author of The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined, and of Rowland Williams and H. B. Wilson, contributors to Essays and Reviews, provided him with useful sources.
But after 15 years living in Roman Catholic Italy, he was most intrigued by Pope Pius IX, or “poor old ‘infallibility’”, as he called him; and it was John Henry Newman’s triumph over Charles Kingsley in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and the growing power of English Roman Catholicism, which seem to have spurred him to plan the poem in the summer of 1864, and start writing that autumn.
But after 15 years living in Roman Catholic Italy, he was most intrigued by Pope Pius IX, or “poor old ‘infallibility’”, as he called him; and it was John Henry Newman’s triumph over Charles Kingsley in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and the growing power of English Roman Catholicism, which seem to have spurred him to plan the poem in the summer of 1864, and start writing that autumn.
EVER since he first corresponded with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845, Browning had said “savage things about Popes and Imaginative religions”, and had associated the Oxford Movement with Roman Catholicism. His unease with modern English “Papists” is reflected in what the reviewer in The Spectator rightly described as “extremely bad puns” in Book I of The Ring and the Book: “Go get you manned by Manning and new-manned By Newman and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot By Wiseman, and we’ll see or else we won’t!”
There is no evidence that Pope Innocent XII took any interest in the case of Count Francheschini, but Browning’s Pope has absolute power over the life and death of the Count, and of the four assassins whom he hired, and has the power to overturn the guilty verdict. As he is close to death himself, however, being in “grey ultimate decrepitude” (“The Pope”, Book X), he will be answerable only to God for his decision. He is “near the end; but still not at the end; All till the very end is trial in life.”
EVEN in the final lines of Book X, the Pope’s reflections on his own and the Count’s deaths, before he dispatches his fatal decision, are upon the contrast between the “flash” of the moment of insight, and the death-blow and the dreary in-between state of purgatory which will follow:
So may the truth be flashed out by
one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be
saved.
Else I avert my face, nor follow him
Into that sad obscure sequestered
state
Where God unmakes but to
remake the soul
He else made first in vain; which
must not be.
Enough, for I may die this very
night:
And how should I dare die, this
man let live?
Carry this forthwith to the
Governor!
Ever the dramatist, or writer of dramatic monologues, Browning is wholly or partially concealed behind his dramatis personae. Whereas Tennyson’s unkempt locks and wideawake hat bespoke the poet, Browning dressed like a banker — thus anticipating T. S. Eliot sartorially, as well as poetically.
When Browning did break cover, he stated that he was a Liberal. Appropriately, Gladstone’s Library at Hawarden is launching a project this year: “Re:defining liberalism”, for which Andrew Reid’s Why I am a Liberal (1885) provides a launching pad. The ideas presented by the various celebrities of the day who contributed did not cohere into a body of political doctrine. Gladstone believed that the principle of Liberalism was “trust in the people, qualified by prudence”, whereas the principle of Conservatism was “mistrust of the people, qualified by fear”.
Reid, on the other hand, defined the ideal Liberal as one who would “love the approval of his own conscience more than the approval of the conscience of the people”.
Browning, whose father had witnessed the terrible abuse of slaves in Antigua, offered a keynote prefatory sonnet, “Why I am a Liberal”, in which Liberalism is associated with liberty and emancipation:
But little do or can the best of us:
That little is achieved through
Liberty.
Who, then, dares hold,
emancipated thus,
His fellow shall continue bound? Not I,
Who live, love, labour freely, nor
discuss
A brother’s right to freedom. That
is “Why.”
Dr Michael Wheeler is a visiting Professor of English Literature at the University of Southampton. His most recent book is St John and the Victorians (Cambridge University Press).
Dr Michael Wheeler is a visiting Professor of English Literature at the University of Southampton. His most recent book is St John and the Victorians (Cambridge University Press).