Browning – The Company He Kept…

‘Within his work lies the mystery which belongs to the complex and within his life the much greater mystery which belongs to the simple.’ G. K. Chesterton, his biographer.

Henry James, who noted everything, noted the essential doubleness in Browning. There are, he said, ‘two Brownings – an esoteric and an exoteric. The former never peeps out in society, and the latter has not a suggestion of Men and Women. ‘The esoteric’ sought his own company. Characters who lived ‘on the dangerous edge of things. / The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist’. They echo Nietszche’s ‘pale criminal’ and prefigure Freud’s criminal ‘from a sense of guilt – the utilisation of a deed in order to rationalise this feeling’. His characters, his Dramatis Personae, his Men and Women speak out to us in all their moral complexity in some of the greatest monologues in English literature: ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ (‘You understand me:
I’m a beast, I know’), ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, ‘Karshish’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’. Their souls are revealed, unvarnished. ‘Little else,’ he said, ‘was worth study.’ Oscar Wilde said of Robert Browning (who would also write glorious love poetry and the ultimate hymn to nature, Pippa Passes: ‘God’s in his heaven – All’s right with the world’) that ‘considered from a point of view of creator of character [Browning] ranks next to him who made Hamlet’.

He was born in Camberwell, London, into a harmonious and intellectual household on 7 May 1812 (the same year as Dickens: they are, according to Harold Bloom, the two great masters of the grotesque) to
Sarah Anna Browning and Robert Browning Snr, a banker in the Bank of England, himself an aspiring poet with a passionate love of books, avidly collecting first editions.

Browning was educated mostly at home, learning music, languages, science, and – mens sana in corpore sano – boxing, fencing and riding, while, crucially, devouring everything in his father’s magnificent
library. This habit of intensive reading ‘while it gave him knowledge of everything else left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world’, in Chesterton’s telling phrase. In his early teenage years Shelley became an obsession and though he would later attempt to erase his manic scribbles in the margins of his treasured copy, he would also recall ‘the passionate impatient struggles of a boy towards truth and love . . . growing pains accompanied by temporary distortion of the soul also’, which his initial reading of Queen Mab inspired. There was nothing temporary about Browning’s decision, aged eighteen, to become a poet and nothing else. His parents supported him in what must have been a less than reassuring career choice, however noble the vocation of poet would have seemed to Browning’s father, whom Edmund Gosse believed saw in his son the realisation of his own thwarted ambition. There was a small allowance, Browning had ‘the singular courage to decline to be rich’ (though he would later change his mind!). These things are relative. ‘My whole scheme of life,’ Browning wrote, ‘with its wants – material wants at least – was closely cut down and long ago calculated . . . So for my own future way in the world I have always refused to care . . .’ That took self-belief. He needed it. Success came slowly, very slowly. In 1832, aged twenty, he published Pauline. Ten thousand words, some excellent reviews – but many were hostile, and alas, not a single copy was sold. Three years later ‘Paracelsus’ (1835) brought him favourable attention from Carlyle and Wordsworth, and a comparison (from Fox) with Shelley. However it was not a major success. Ten years later he would recall those who ‘laughed my Paracelsus to scorn’. Worse was to come. ‘Sordello’, published in 1840, took him seven years to write and though it became a cult text for the Pre-Raphaelites it was savaged by the critics. He was almost thirty and almost finished. Two years later in 1842 Dramatic Lyrics, which includes some of his best work, went largely unnoticed. He continued to write, but he would be middle-aged before he achieved the success he deserved, with the publication of The Ring and the Book. This success came shortly after the death of his wife, one of England’s most revered poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He was married to her for sixteen years. Her star shone so high in the firmament that when Wordsworth died her name was canvassed as Poet Laureate, while his was not mentioned, ‘even satirically’. ‘I love your verses with all my heart’, he wrote to her in January 1845, months after she’d published Poems 1844 to enormous critical acclaim. She read on and halfway down the second page she read the astonishing declaration ‘and I love you too’. Their story is well known: 547 letters, then secret meetings which finally led to an elopement and then flight to Italy. His invalided wife defied her deeply strange and controlling father to take her chances (which would include late motherhood) with the love of her life. ‘Determined, dared, and done’, one of his favourite lines from an eighteenth-century poem (Christopher Smart’s ‘A Song to David’), and which is quoted in a more sinister context in The Ring and the Book, applied to her as much as to him. The love poems did not come into being as mysteriously as the dramatic monologues did. They were open celebrations of their deep love and in his case this love came from an uncommonly capacious heart. He never resented her glory. Men and Women is dedicated to her with the words ‘Here they are – my fifty men and women / Take them, Love / the book and me together: / Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also’. In ‘Love Among the Ruins’ he sets the whole panoply of heroic endeavour and monuments to ambition beside the human joy of an arranged meeting with the love of one’s life and declares ‘Love is best’. He meant it. After Elizabeth’s death Robert Browning’s output continued to be prodigious and, at last, he was revered. ‘Do you object to all this adulation?’ he was asked once when surrounded by admirers. ‘Object to it? I’ve waited forty years for it!’ He died in 1889 aged seventy-seven from a heart condition, appropriately shortly after his son read out a telegram from his publisher to say that ‘Asolando’ had received excellent reviews. He was satisfied. He was buried at Westminster Abbey, an occasion of which Henry James wrote, ‘A good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones have been so odd.’

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