His father, for some reason which has not been made public, but was doubtless excellent, and is, in the light in which we now regard it, a matter for which to be thankful, decided to send his son neither to a large public school, nor, later, to Oxford or Cambridge. A more stimulative and wider training was awaiting him elsewhere.
For a time Robert’s education was superintended by a tutor, who came to the house in Camberwell for several hours daily. The afternoons were mainly devoted to music, to exercise, and occasionally to various experimental studies in technical science. In the evenings, after his preparatory tasks were over, when he was not in the entertaining company of his father, he read and assiduously wrote. After poetry, he cared most for history: but as a matter of fact, little came amiss to his eager intellectual appetite. It was a period of growth, with, it may be, a vague consciousness that his mind was expanding towards compulsive expression.
”So as I grew, I rudely shaped my life
To my immediate wants, yet strong beneath
Was a vague sense of powers folded up —
A sense that though those shadowy times were past,
Their spirit dwelt in me, and I should rule.”
When Mr. Browning was satisfied that the tutor had fulfilled his duty he sent his son to attend a few lectures at University College, in Gower Street, then just founded. Robert Browning’s name is on the registrar’s books for the opening session, 1829-30. “I attended with him the Greek class of Professor Long” (wrote a friend, in the `Times’, Dec. 14:’89), “and I well recollect the esteem and regard in which he was held by his fellow-students. He was then a bright, handsome youth, with long black hair falling over his shoulders.” So short was his period of attendance, however, and so unimportant the instruction he there derived, that to all intents it may be said Browning had no University training.
Notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Browning but slightly appreciated his son’s poetic idols and already found himself in an opposite literary camp, he had a profound sympathy with the boy’s ideals and no little confidence in his powers. When the test came he acted wisely as well as with affectionate complaisance. In a word, he practically left the decision as to his course of life to Robert himself. The latter was helped thereto by the knowledge that his sister would be provided for, and that, if need be, there was sufficient for himself also. There was of course but one way open to him. He would not have been a true poet, an artist, if he had hesitated. With a strange misconception of the artistic spirit, some one has awarded the poet great credit for his choice, because he had “the singular courage to decline to be rich.” Browning himself had nothing of this bourgeois spirit: he was the last man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision as “singular courage”. There are no doubt people who estimate his resolve as Mr. Barrett, so his daughter declared, regarded Horne when he heard of that poet having published “Orion” at a farthing: “Perhaps he is going to shoot the Queen, and is preparing evidence of monomania.”
With Browning there never could have been two sides to the question: it were excusable, it were natural even, had his father wavered. The outcome of their deliberations was that Robert’s further education should be obtained from travel, and intercourse with men and foreign literatures.
By this time the poet was twenty. His youth had been uneventful; in a sense, more so than his boyhood. His mind, however, was rapidly unfolding, and great projects were casting a glory about the coming days. It was in his nineteenth year, I have been told on good authority, that he became ardently in love with a girl of rare beauty, a year or two older than himself, but otherwise, possibly, no inappropriate lover for this wooer. Why and when this early passion came to a close, or was rudely interrupted, is not known. What is certain is that it made a deep impression on the poet’s mind. It may be that it, of itself, or wrought to a higher emotion by his hunger after ideal beauty, was the source of “Pauline”, that very unequal but yet beautiful first fruit of Browning’s genius.
It was not till within the last few years that the poet spoke at all freely of his youthful life. Perhaps the earliest record of these utterances is that which appeared in the `Century Magazine’ in 1881. From this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times and in various ways, we know that just about the time Balzac, after years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast the Titanic range of the `Comedie Humaine’, Browning planned “a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls — a gigantic scheme at which a Victor Hugo or a Lope de Vega would start back aghast.”
Already he had set himself to the analysis of the human soul in its manifold aspects, already he had recognised that for him at least there was no other study worthy of a lifelong devotion. In a sense he has fulfilled this early dream: at any rate we have a unique series of monodramatic poems, illustrative of typical souls. In another sense, the major portion of Browning’s life-work is, collectively, one monodramatic “epic”. He is himself a type of the subtle, restless, curious, searching modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter. Through a multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks, and delivers himself of a message which could not be presented emphatically enough as the utterance of a single individual. He is a true dramatic poet, though not in the sense in which Shakespeare is. Shakespeare and his kindred project themselves into the lives of their imaginary personages: Browning pays little heed to external life, or to the exigencies of action, and projects himself into the minds of his characters.
In a word, Shakespeare’s method is to depict a human soul in action, with all the pertinent play of circumstance, while Browning’s is to portray the processes of its mental and spiritual development: as he said in his dedicatory preface to “Sordello”, “little else is worth study.” The one electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities; the other flashes upon our mental vision the inner, complex, shaping potentialities. The one deals with life dynamically, the other with life as Thought. Both methods are compassed by art. Browning, who is above all modern writers the poet of dramatic situations, is surpassed by many of inferior power in continuity of dramatic sequence. His finest work is in his dramatic poems, rather than in his dramas. He realised intensely the value of quintessential moments, as when the Prefect in “The Return of the Druses” thrusts aside the arras, muttering that for the first time he enters without a sense of imminent doom, “no draught coming as from a sepulchre” saluting him, while that moment the dagger of the assassin plunges to his heart: or, further in the same poem, when Anael, coming to denounce Djabal as an impostor, is overmastered by her tyrannic love, and falls dead with the too bitter freight of her emotion, though not till she has proclaimed him the God by her single worshipping cry, `Hakeem!’ — or, once more, in “The Ring and the Book”, where, with the superbest close of any dramatic poem in our literature, the wretched Guido, at the point of death, cries out in the last extremity not upon God or the Virgin, but upon his innocent and murdered wife — “Abate, — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, — God, . . . Pompilia, will you let them murder me?” Thus we can imagine Browning, with his characteristic perception of the profound significance of a circumstance or a single word even, having written of the knocking at the door in “Macbeth”, or having used, with all its marvellous cumulative effect, the word `wrought’ towards the close of “Othello”, when the Moor cries in his bitterness of soul, “But being wrought, perplext in the extreme”: we can imagine this, and yet could not credit the suggestion that even the author of “The Ring and the Book” could by any possibility have composed the two most moving tragedies writ in our tongue.
In the late autumn of 1832 Browning wrote a poem of singular promise and beauty, though immature in thought and crude in expression.* Thirty-four years later he included “Pauline” in his “Poetical Works” with reluctance, and in a note explained the reason of his decision — namely, to forestall piratical reprints abroad. “The thing was my earliest attempt at `poetry always dramatic in principle, and so
many utterances of so many imaginative persons, not mine,’ which I have since written according to a scheme less extravagant, and scale less impracticable, than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch — a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of the characteristic features of that particular `dramatis persona’ it would fain have reproduced: good draughtsmanship, however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time.” These be hard words. No critic will ever adventure upon so severe a censure of “Pauline”: most capable judges agree that, with all its shortcomings, it is a work of genius, and therefore ever to be held treasurable for its own sake as well as for its significance.
—
* Probably from the fact of “Richmond” having been added
to the date at the end of the preface to “Pauline”,
have arisen the frequent misstatements as to the Browning family
having moved west from Camberwell in or shortly before 1832.
Mr. R. Barrett Browning tells me that his father “never lived at Richmond,
and that that place was connected with `Pauline’, when first printed,
as a mystification.”
—
On the fly-leaf of a copy of this initial work, the poet, six years after its publication, wrote: “Written in pursuance of a foolish plan I forget, or have no wish to remember; the world was never to guess that such an opera, such a comedy, such a speech proceeded from the same notable person. . . . Only this crab remains of the shapely Tree of Life in my fool’s Paradise.” It was in conformity with this plan that he not only issued “Pauline” anonymously, but enjoined secrecy upon those to whom he communicated the fact of his authorship.
When he read the poem to his parents, upon its conclusion, both were much impressed by it, though his father made severe strictures upon its lack of polish, its terminal inconcision, and its vagueness of thought. That he was not more severe was accepted by his son as high praise. The author had, however, little hope of seeing it in print. Mr. Browning was not anxious to provide a publisher with a present. So one day the poet was gratified when his aunt, handing him the requisite sum, remarked that she had heard he had written a fine poem, and that she wished to have the pleasure of seeing it in print.
To this kindly act much was due. Browning, of course, could not now have been dissuaded from the career he had forecast for himself, but his progress might have been retarded or thwarted to less fortunate grooves, had it not been for the circumstances resultant from his aunt’s timely gift.
The MS. was forthwith taken to Saunders & Otley, of Conduit Street, and the little volume of seventy pages of blank verse, comprising only a thousand and thirty lines, was issued by them in January 1833. It seems to us, who read it now, so manifestly a work of exceptional promise, and, to a certain extent, of high accomplishment, that were it not for the fact that the public auditory for a new poet is ever extraordinarily limited, it would be difficult to understand how it could have been overlooked.
“Pauline” has a unique significance because of its autopsychical hints. The Browning whom we all know, as well as the youthful dreamer, is here revealed; here too, as well as the disciple of Shelley, we have the author of “The Ring and the Book”. In it the long series culminating in “Asolando” is foreshadowed, as the oak is observable in the sapling. The poem is prefaced by a Latin motto from the `Occult Philosophy’ of Cornelius Agrippa, and has also a note in French, set forth as being by Pauline, and appended to her lover’s manuscript after his death. Probably Browning placed it in the mouth of Pauline from his rooted determination to speak dramatically and impersonally: and in French, so as to heighten the effect of verisimilitude.*
—
* “I much fear that my poor friend will not be always perfectly understood
in what remains to be read of this strange fragment,
but it is less calculated than any other part to explain
what of its nature can never be anything but dream and confusion.
I do not know, moreover, whether in striving at a better connection
of certain parts, one would not run the risk of detracting from
the only merit to which so singular a production can pretend —
that of giving a tolerably precise idea of the manner (genre)
which it can merely indicate. This unpretending opening,
this stir of passion, which first increases, and then gradually subsides,
these transports of the soul, this sudden return upon himself,
and above all, my friend’s quite peculiar turn of mind,
have made alterations almost impossible. The reasons which
he elsewhere asserts, and others still more cogent, have secured
my indulgence for this paper, which otherwise I should have advised him
to throw into the fire. I believe none the less in the great principle
of all composition — in that principle of Shakespeare, of Raphael,
and of Beethoven, according to which concentration of ideas
is due much more to their conception than to their execution;
I have every reason to fear that the first of these qualities
is still foreign to my friend, and I much doubt whether redoubled labour
would enable him to acquire the second. It would be best to burn this,
but what can I do?” — (Mrs. Orr.)
—
“Pauline” is a confession, fragmentary in detail but synthetic in range, of a young man of high impulses but weak determination. In its over-emphasis upon errors of judgment, as well as upon real if exaggerated misdeeds, it has all the crudeness of youth. An almost fantastic self-consciousness is the central motive: it is a matter of question if this be absolutely vicarious. To me it seems that the author himself was at the time confused by the complicated flashing of the lights of life.
The autobiographical and autopsychical lines and passages scattered through the poem are of immediate interest. Generously the poet repays his debt to Shelley, whom he apostrophises as “Sun-treader”, and invokes in strains of lofty emotion — “Sun-treader — life and light be thine for ever.” The music of “Alastor”, indeed, is audible ever and again throughout “Pauline”. None the less is there a new music, a new poetic voice, in
”Thou wilt remember one warm morn, when Winter
Crept aged from the earth, and Spring’s first breath
Blew soft from the moist hills — the black-thorn boughs,
So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
Like the bright side of a sorrow — and the banks
Had violets opening from sleep like eyes.”
If we have an imaginary Browning, a Shelleyan phantasm, in
”I seemed the fate from which I fled; I felt
A strange delight in causing my decay;
I was a fiend, in darkness chained for ever
Within some ocean-wave:”
we have the real Browning in
”So I will sing on — fast as fancies come
Rudely — the verse being as the mood it paints.
. . . . .
I am made up of an intensest life,”
and all the succeeding lines down to “Their spirit dwelt in me, and I should rule.”
Even then the poet’s inner life was animated by his love of the beautiful Greek literature. Telling how in “the first dawn of life,” “which passed alone with wisest ancient books,” Pauline’s lover incorporated himself in whatsoever he read — was the god wandering after beauty, the giant standing vast against the sunset-light, the high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos — his second-self cries, “I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the place, the time, the fashion of those lives.” Never for him, then, had there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric awakening flash from �
��work of lofty art, nor woman’s beauty, nor sweet nature’s face” —
”Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea:
The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves —
And nothing ever will surprise me now —
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine’s hair.”
Further, the allusion to Plato, and the more remote one to Agamemnon, the
“old lore Loved for itself, and all it shows — the King Treading the purple calmly to his death,”
and the beautiful Andromeda passage, afford ample indication of how deeply Browning had drunk of that vital stream whose waters are the surest conserver of the ideal loveliness which we all of us, in some degree, cherish in various guises.
Yet, as in every long poem that he has written (and, it must be admitted, in too many of the shorter pieces of his later period) there is an alloy of prose, of something that is not poetry, so in “Pauline”, written though it was in the first flush of his genius and under the inspiring stimulus of Shelley, the reader encounters prosaic passages, decasyllabically arranged. “‘Twas in my plan to look on real life, which was all new to me; my theories were firm, so I left them, to look upon men, and their cares, and hopes, and fears, and joys; and, as I pondered on them all, I sought how best life’s end might be attained, an end comprising every joy.” Again: “Then came a pause, and long restraint chained down my soul, till it was changed. I lost myself, and were it not that I so loathe that time, I could recall how first I learned to turn my mind against itself . . . at length I was restored, yet long the influence remained; and nought but the still life I led, apart from all, which left my soul to seek its old delights, could e’er have brought me thus far back to peace.” No reader, alert to the subtle and haunting music of rarefied blank verse (and unless it be rarefied it should not be put forward as poetry), could possibly accept these lines as expressionally poetical. It would seem as though, from the first, Browning’s ear was keener for the apprehension than for the sustained evocation of the music of verse. Some flaw there was, somewhere. His heart, so to say, beat too fast, and the singing in his ears from the o’er-fevered blood confused the serene rhythm haunting the far perspectives of the brain, “as Arab birds float sleeping in the wind.”
Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series Page 385