The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The journey to Southern Italy the following year, in the autumn of 1850, was undertaken to benefit the eyesight of one of his daughters. They could not have visited Naples at a time when hopes for Italian unity and independence were lower. Mazzini, who dreamed of revolution against the Austrian occupation of Northern Italy, was in exile in London. Cavour, architect of the constitutional revolution, the creation of the kingdom of Italy, was also in exile. The revolutions of 1848 had led in the kingdom of Naples to savage reaction; three months staying at the British legation opened Gladstone’s eyes to the true nature of Bourbon rule. The British minister (ambassador) there was William Temple, the younger brother of Lord Palmerston. The secretary was the Anglo-Italian Joseph Lacaita, later a professor at Queen’s College, London, and an adviser to Gladstone about European matters in Italy and Greece. It was through Lacaita that Gladstone was able to visit the Neapolitan prisons and to see Baron Carlo Poerio, briefly a liberalizing Neapolitan minister, who had been put on trial and sentenced to twenty-four years in irons. The state of the prisons and the condition of the prisoners opened Gladstone’s mind to the effects which ‘stern unbending’ religious absolutism could achieve. He saw the political prisoners, many of them imprisoned without trial, shackled to violent common criminals. The insanitary conditions were such as Gladstone had never seen or dreamed of. Here was displayed ‘The Wisdom of Our Ancestors’ – medieval systems of government and repression such as gave pause to the religious prig and Tory. ‘Ignorance – Superstition – The Block – The Stake – The Rack – Dirt – Disease’ – those manifestations of ancestral wisdom with which Dickens humorously adorned the spines of his library-books – were alive and well in the Naples of the 1840s.

  Gladstone took the lessons to heart. How did his Anglican bigotry differ from the bigotry of the Bourbons and the Catholic Church in Naples? Why did he instinctively believe that the Italian desire for self-government was admirable and just, while turning a deaf ear to Irish aspirations for, if not self-government, then some autonomy and independence, religious and economic? The great transformation of Gladstone the Little Englander Tory to Gladstone the People’s William had begun, and the great political Lost Cause to which he gave his career – the ‘mission to pacify Ireland’ – really may be said to have begun in the prisons of Naples.

  Dickens in Italy – he went there in 1844 – merely demonstrated his ability to carry around with him his own imaginative world. The apothecaries’ shops in Genoa which he described so vividly could really have been in Chancery Lane – or his version of Chancery Lane; the public execution (by guillotine) in Rome could just as well have been in Paris. He ended his Pictures from Italy, however, with disappointingly predictable Victorian-Liberal observations on human progress. ‘Let us not remember Italy the less regardfully because, in every fragment of her fallen Temples, and every stone of her deserted palaces and prisons, she helps to inculcate the lesson that the wheel of Time is rolling for an end, and that the world is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing and more hopeful, as it rolls!’3 The most vivid part of his book is undoubtedly the passage which relates not to Italian culture, religion or history, but to the extraordinary phenomenon of Vesuvius, whose smouldering sulphurous heat and energy boiling beneath the very feet of Dickens and his party called forth a response in his own boiling cauldron of imaginative heat. Everything about the description is ‘Dickensian’, from the observation that the snow-covered mountain resembled ‘an antediluvian Twelfth-cake’ to the rechristening of their guide ‘Mr Pickle of Portici’.

  John Ruskin was a much more serious Italophile. In the eighteenth century, Italy was the grand object of aristocratic collectors and dilettanti. It is characteristic of the Victorian Age that the two great English interpreters of Italy should have been Ruskin, the son of a sherry merchant, and Robert Browning, the son of a clerk in the Bank of England. The moralities drawn from Italy were, for Ruskin, always of a much more complex variety than they had been for Gladstone or Dickens.

  Ruskin’s objection to Gladstone’s expressions of horror in Naples was that they did not go far enough:

  The common English traveller, if he can gather a black bunch of grapes with his own fingers, and have his bottle of Falernian brought him by a girl with black eyes, asks no more of this world, nor the next; and declares Naples a Paradise. But I knew, from the first moment when my foot furrowed volcanic ashes, that no mountain form or colour could exist in perfection when everything was made of scoria, and that the blue sea was to be little boasted if it broke on black sand. And I saw also, with really wise anger, the horror of neglect in the governing power, which Mr Gladstone found, forsooth, in the Neapolitan prisons! But which neither he nor any other Englishman, so far as I know, except Byron and I, saw to have made the Apennines one prison wall, and all the modern life of Italy one captivity of shame and crime; alike against the honour of her ancestors, and the kindness of her God.4

  Ruskin’s first general purpose, as a European tourist, was to record as much of it as possible in his punctilious sketches before it was destroyed by neglect, by war, and by modern industry. He believed, rightly as it turned out, that his generation would be the last to look on old Europe before the belching chimney and the railway wrecked it forever. He saw the ruins of the Forum as Gibbon had seen them. That is something subsequent generations will never do.

  Ruskin hated the republican movements in Italy because he saw them as destructive. In 1845 he wrote to his father:

  I think verily the Devil is come down upon earth, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. And a short time he will have if he goes on at this rate, for in ten years more there will be nothing in the world but eating-houses and gambling houses and worse … the French condemned the Convent of San Marco where I am just going, and all the pictures of Fra Angelico were only saved by their being driven out.5

  Italy was, moreover, for Ruskin, a series of spiritual revelations. The Campo Santo at Pisa, with its depiction in fresco of the entire saving story of Christianity, revivified his understanding of the nature of Christian tradition. Having moved from the extreme evangelicalism of his mother to a secret and arid unbelief, he now revelled in an imaginative Catholicism, accepting the mythos of the Catholic story which formed and shaped the imagination of Europe. In Florence, to which so many middle-class American and English tourists and expatriates flocked, ‘the Newgate-like palaces were rightly hateful to me; the old shop and market-streets rightly pleasant; the inside of the Duomo a horror, the outside a Chinese puzzle’.6

  But the Italian city with which Ruskin’s name will ever be associated is Venice. On one level it would be inhuman not to sympathize with his wife Effie for the fact that when he took her, newly-wed, to Venice, he neglected her so woefully and spent his entire time obsessively inspecting the buildings with his sketchbook. Yet this is to ignore the bigger fact that Effie was never the love of his life, and Venice was. He had feared that the fighting in 1848 between Italians and Austrians would have destroyed his beloved buildings. The Stones of Venice, whose first volume was finished in 1850, was much more than a purely architectural handbook. It was the attempt to depict the soul of a civilization. Years later, when Ruskin was being sued by the American painter Whistler, he asked his lawyers to bring into the witness box a painting he had acquired in 1864 for £1,000. It was the depiction of the Venetian Doge Andrea Gritti, and during the libel trial Burne-Jones testified that it was evidence of what a perfectly finished painting should look like. (Unlike the work of Whistler, which Ruskin said was hurling a paint-pot in the face of the public.) Ruskin believed, as modern experts do not, that the painting was by Titian.7 One of his reasons for wanting the portrait of a Doge, however, was not merely the beauty of this picture as an object. For Ruskin, the mercantile, seafaring city-state and empire was an emblem of Britain. The good Doge was like Ruskin’s father, John James, a merchant. Everyone in Venice was ‘in trade’. The Merchant King was the symbol in
fact of Ruskin’s own class which now rose to prominence in Britain. Would contemporary Victorian Britain rise to the moral challenge, and be like Venice in its moral, political and commercial heyday – its Gothic days, when it built the Frari and the Doge’s Palace and St Mark’s, buildings which were part of Ruskin’s soul? Or would Britain, like Venice, ‘fall’ morally – a fall symbolized for Ruskin by the building of baroque and Palladian churches in an acceptance of the post-medieval secular viewpoint?

  The question could be asked in the terms of the most famous English poem set in the city – and written by Ruskin’s fellow Camberwell resident, Robert Browning:

  What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,

  Where Saint Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?

  Ay, because the sea’s the street there; and ’tis arched by … what you call

  … Shylock’s bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:

  I was never out of England – it’s as if I saw it all.

  The poem, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, like Ruskin’s Stones of Venice stares at Venice in decline – ‘Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned’.8 Is it a poem about the transitoriness of all earthly things or a capitalist hymn to the folly of spending your savings, which should be heaped up in consolsfn1? No one can read Browning’s vivid word-paintings of Italy without feeling that they have been there.

  Mazzini himself used to read Browning’s ‘The Italian in England’ to fellow exiles to demonstrate that an Englishman could sympathize with their plight.9 It is in essence a compressed novel of espionage about an Italian freedom-fighter (clearly Mazzini) betrayed by comrades, exiled but, in spite of the continued domination of Austria, determined one day that his nation would be independent.

  Robert Browning himself, and his wife, were among the best-known of those English exiles who made Italy their home. Theirs had been an astonishing courtship. She was a tiny, sofa-bound invalid; her father, a decayed gentleman, had been aged twenty when she was born. The closeness of their relationship (he fathered twelve children in all) was increased by the death of Mrs Barrett in 1828. Elizabeth was both a sickly child whom he kept as a semi-prisoner in the house (she suffered from tuberculosis) and in some ways the mistress of the household. She had to escape, and love provided the best of reasons to do so.10 The first letter Browning wrote her (16 June 1846) proclaimed, ‘I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett – … and I love you too …’11 They could not fail to be caught up in one another’s personal dramas after an opening salvo as good as this. G.K. Chesterton was right to remind us that we should not expect the letters to provide delight to the ‘ordinary sentimentalist’. They are not overtly erotic, or even especially comprehensible. He quotes, ‘I ought to wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs … But not being exactly Phoibus Apollon you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on … , let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocated ankles.’ Chesterton adds, ‘What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it is difficult indeed to imagine.’12

  They met on 20 May 1845. On 12 September 1846, after a clandestine correspondence and even more clandestine meetings, they were married at St Marylebone parish church, with a cousin of Browning’s (James Silverthorne) and Elizabeth Barrett’s maid, Wilson, as witnesses. Miss Barrett returned to her father’s home in Wimpole Street as if nothing had happened. On 20 September, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, clutching their dog Flush and accompanied by the faithful Wilson, stepped ashore from the Southampton boat at Le Havre. It was not surprising that they headed for Italy: first to Pisa, and then, on 20 April 1847, to Florence where, on and off, they would spend the next fifteen years.13

  Browning was thirty-four when he was married. Elizabeth Barrett was forty, and tubercular. Neither of them expected her to live as long as she did, nor perhaps, after two miscarriages, that she would give birth to ‘a fine strong boy’ – Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, known as Pen.

  Browning, next to Ruskin, was the greatest English interpreter of Italy to his fellow countrymen. When he visited the Louvre with Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti discovered that Browning’s knowledge of early Italian art was superior to anyone that he had met, Ruskin included.14 Yet although Browning revelled in Italy, loved its art and literature, its tastes and colours and smells, he remained to his dying day (in the Ca’Rezzonico on the Grand Canal at Venice in 1889) a tourist. Though he and Elizabeth spoke Italian (and Wilson became fluent in her version of the language), they never established any lasting friendship with an Italian.

  Nor really, in spite of the radical sympathies of Elizabeth Barrett’s ‘Casa Guidi Windows’, were they much engaged, except in a generalized feeling of liberalism, with the political changes by which Italy was convulsed in their lifetimes. True, Florence had a much milder political atmosphere than Rome or Naples. The receptions and levées given by Grand Duke Leopold II (Austrian) in the Pitti Palace, just opposite the Casa Guidi where the Brownings had their flat, were undemanding occasions. More or less anyone could secure an introduction to the Grand Duke.

  As for the traditions of Florentine radicalism, the radicals of the city staged a demonstration in 1849 chanting, ‘Death to the Austrians!’ When one of the Austrian soldiers fell from his horse, the demonstrators gathered round him sympathetically, made sure he was unhurt and gave him a leg up to remount before resuming their good-humoured ‘Death to the Austrians! Death to the Austrians!’15 Like nearly all Englishmen, Browning was pleased when the Austrians eventually withdrew from Italy and he had wanted them to go long before they did (‘Go, hated house …’16). But like the majority of English Italophiles, he left Italian politics to the natives.

  Most of Browning’s great poems with Italian settings – ‘Pippa Passes’, ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ and, the towering masterpiece, The Ring and the Book – are set in the past. But Browning is in many respects the first modern writer – acknowledged as such by proto-modernist poets such as Ezra Pound. From the first he made no concessions to his readers. Much of his subject-matter is obscure, and his diction can be so eccentric as to be impenetrable. Tennyson declared of Sordello (1840) that he only understood the first and last lines –

  Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told.

  and

  Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.

  – and they were both lies.17

  Sordello, the thirteenth-century poet who welcomes Virgil as a fellow Mantuan in the shades of Purgatory, was praised by Dante for writing in different genres and dialects.18 For Browning he becomes the type of the modern artist, not a Wordsworthian introvert but a man of masks. The poet is one who dares

  to try the stuff

  That held the imaged thing, and let it writhe

  Never so fiercely, scarce allowed a tithe

  To reach the light – his Language.19

  … accordingly he took

  An action with its actors, quite forsook

  Himself to live in each.20

  Browning’s oeuvre is an astounding variety of monologues, dramas, impressions, in which more vividly than any English dramatist except Shakespeare he allows characters to speak for themselves – murderers, adulterers, tyrants, old roués, young women, musicians. It is this gift for drama which makes him one of the best writers on religion, since in such masterpieces as ‘The Death in the Desert’ (an old, old man dies, recalling the death in turn of the author of the Fourth Gospel) or ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ or perhaps best of all ‘Caliban upon Setebos or, Natural Theology’ the issues of doubt and faith which so tormented Browning’s contemporaries can be seen as part of an eternal dialectic, indissoluble from the human characters who entertain or lose beliefs. Browning is the great poet of human
complexity, the poet of success stories which feel like failures, of failures more interesting than success, of doubt which is more religious than faith.

  No, when the fight begins within himself,

  A man’s worth something.21

  Unburdened by membership of the Established Church, Browning was not allowed to go to Oxford. A lucky escape for anyone in the nineteenth century wishing to keep an open mind about religion. His spell at University College, Gower Street,22 did nothing to damage his essentially independent outlook: he was able to cast an oblique and always penetrating beam of light on the religious conflicts of his time.

  fn1 British Government Securities – Consolidated Annuities.

  8

  Doubt

  THE PHENOMENON OF the Zoo is characteristic of the Victorian Age, providing the chance of popular scientific inquiry, entertainment, and communal self-congratulation. The Leisure Hour of 1849, in an article entitled ‘Saturday Afternoon at the Zoological Gardens’, opined that ‘it shows a high state of civilization when a great and overcrowded city devotes part of its energies and space to the preservation and kindly treatment of animals, which the savage looks upon as things made solely and on purpose to be hunted and destroyed’.1 Opinions differed about the kindness and humaneness of the Zoo. In 1836 the Quarterly Review found something morally questionable about the notion of forcing animals to exchange their natural habitat for cages and pens. (It was making the same point nineteen years later – ‘Why do we coop these noble animals in such nutshells of cages? What a miserable sight – to see them pace backwards and forwards in their box-like dens?’)2 Mortality rates were high. But from their inception, the Zoological Gardens in London’s Regent’s Park were enormously popular. The Zoological Society first moved there in 1828 to enclosures and grounds laid out by Decimus Burton. The original collection of 430 animals and birds was donated from the Royal Menagerie. In its first two decades of life the Zoo was an exclusive resort, open only to fellows of the Zoological Society or their guests and those prepared to pay a shilling’s entrance fee. Nevertheless, it received 30,000 visitors within its first seven months of opening.3