Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy

Challenging the Personal Voice

Britta Martens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409423034
• eBook ISBN: 9781317171188
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Taking an original approach to Robert Browning's poetics, Britta Martens focuses on a corpus of relatively neglected poems in Browning's own voice in which he reflects on his poetry, his self-conceptualization and his place in the poetic tradition. She analyzes his work in relation to Romanticism, Victorian reactions to the Romantic legacy, and wider nineteenth-century changes in poetic taste, to argue that in these poems, as in his more frequently studied dramatic monologues, Browning deploys varied dramatic methods of self-representation, often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker 'Browning'. The poems thus become devices for Browning's detached evaluation of his own and of others' poetics, an evaluation never fully explicit but presented with elusive economy for the astute reader to interpret. The confrontation between the personal authorial voice and the dramatic voice in these poems provides revealing insights into the poet's highly self-conscious, conflicted and sustained engagement with the Romantic tradition and the diversely challenging reader expectations that he faces in a post-Romantic age. As the Victorian most rigorous in his rejection of Romantic self-expression, Browning is a key transitional figure between the sharply antagonistic periods of Romanticism and Modernism. He is also, as Martens persuasively demonstrates, a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study for addressing the perennial issues of voice, authorial authority and self-reference.

Chapter 1
Youthful Romanticism Reviewed

One particular Romantic poet is alluded to again and again throughout Browning’s work: the young Browning himself. Only very few traces remain of this young Romantic, and from the dearth of surviving juvenilia, one would not expect Browning’s early literary taste and first poetic endeavours to assume such significance in the mind of the mature poet. However, the repeated reflection on his early poetics bears witness to Browning’s need to understand what attracted him to Romanticism and to construct a plausible narrative of how he accomplished the transition from derivative Romanticism towards his own distinctive poetics. The texts in which he undertakes this review of his earlier poetics concentrate on the Romantic features which he rejected, above all self-expression, but they also reveal continuities. Browning’s decision to follow the Romantic pattern of the artist’s review of his own development is itself an indicator of these continuities. Indeed, these texts are essentially compressed versions of the Romantic Künstlerroman through which the author traces his development towards artistic maturity. There is therefore an intriguing tension between indebtedness to and rejection of Romanticism in these texts.

The first section of the chapter will focus on Browning’s earliest publication, Pauline, which is already a transitional work between a Romantic confession and a dramatic performance and thus an illustration of how Browning developed, rather than fully rejected, elements of Romanticism.1 It will explore how the reception of this poem, exemplified by John Stuart Mill’s critical comments and informed by the prevailing tendency to read all poetry as confessional, played a crucial role in Browning’s development of his impersonal poetics and in his later need to justify his Romantic beginnings. The chapter will go on to consider various prose texts – a ‘private’ preface to Pauline and some other prefaces and letters as well as the ‘Essay on Chatterton’ – and chart his efforts to explain his early poetry as already containing the germ of his later poetics. It will then analyse his creative strategies for conducting a review of his development within his poems Pippa Passes, ‘Time’s Revenges’, ‘James Lee’s Wife’ and ‘Memorabilia’, which posit an opposition between his early and later poetics.

These texts in which the autobiographical import is usually disguised present a high degree of distance between the author and his literary self-representation. Browning splits himself into a mature self as either speaker or author and a younger self who is represented either by a character or by the speaker. In all but one poem, he increases this distance by presenting the younger self not as ‘Browning’ but as a distinct, fictional character. However, these efforts to mark an objectifying and / or protective distance only emphasize the importance which he accords to his younger self as a precursor of his mature self. Harold Bloom has held Browning up as a prime example of a poet who engages in creative misreadings of his predecessors in order to assert his originality. Bloom also suggests in an analysis of the development of Freud’s writings that a similar process can take place with reference to a writer’s own earlier works, but he does not indicate how this oedipal struggle of the older against the younger self may apply to a poet.2 This chapter proposes that there is such a hidden process of reinterpretation with reference to Browning’s own early poetics, but it will argue that this relationship is not necessarily always a conflictual one. Even when Browning’s older and younger selves appear to be in conflict, this seems partly a device to construct a coherent and plausible narrative of his development and to stress the distinctiveness of his mature work.

Cause for Embarrassment: Pauline

Browning’s first sustained poetic endeavour was a collection with the self-deprecating title Incondita (‘disorganised / artless pieces’), which he claimed to have written ‘perhaps at twelve or thirteen’, in 1824 or 1825.3 It was shown to William J. Fox, the editor of the Monthly Repository, who appears to have recognized the boy’s talent but advised him to ‘consign the present work to the fire’.4 Although Browning followed Fox’s advice, two pieces ascribed to this collection survived. They leave little doubt that Incondita was strongly influenced by Romantic poems. ‘The Dance of Death’ imitates Coleridge’s allegorical ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ and echoes some lines by Byron;5 ‘The First-Born of Egypt’ is not based on an identifiable model but is reminiscent of visionary, apocalyptic poems in the style of Byron’s ‘Darkness’. Neither of these poems is self-expressive, but there are suggestions in Browning’s later correspondence and his reported conversation that the collection was particularly indebted to this most egotistical and by then most popular Romantic poet, who had just died heroically at Missolonghi and who also inspired the first verses of Tennyson and Arnold. Browning’s friend and biographer, Mrs Orr, states that ‘Byron was his chief master in those early poetic days’, and William Sharp reports Browning as saying he had written a ‘Death of Harold’.6 More tellingly, in a letter to EBB, who had also admired Byron in her youth, Browning declared:

I always retained my first feeling for Byron in many respects. the interest in the places he had visited, in relics of him: I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure – while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge & Southey were condensed in the little china bottle yonder, after the Rosicrucian fashion […]7

John Maynard reads this remark as Browning’s admission of his ‘teenage worship’ of Byron.8 It contrasts sharply with the repeated sideswipes at Byron’s misanthropic egotism to be found in some later poems which will be considered in Chapter 6. In these, Browning seems not just to attack Byron and his Victorian followers but also to engage in a belated exorcism of his own juvenile emulation of Byronism, while paradoxically showing a more substantial debt to this predecessor’s subjects and technique than in his earlier years.

Browning’s first published work, Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833), already goes beyond mere Romantic imitation, despite being, as the subtitle indicates, derived from two central Romantic genres: the poetic fragment and the confessional lyric. The autobiographical elements in the speaker’s account of his development as a poet are plain to see. After a youth informed (like Browning’s) by extensive reading and early poetic endeavours in imitation of older poets, he models his work on Shelley’s (once more like Browning, who seems to have discovered Shelley in 1826). But this creative phase inspired by his enthusiasm for Shelley’s idealism and political radicalism does not last. The speaker becomes disillusioned and lives through a phase of misanthropic and artistically unproductive solipsism. He overcomes this state when Pauline’s selfless love for him awakens him to the dangers of his attitude. Pauline also allows him to regain his creativity by encouraging him to recount his development.

The poem is one of several works by Victorians that explore the decadent extremes of Romantic introspection. It is particularly reminiscent of early poems by Tennyson such as ‘Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind’ (1830) or ‘The Palace of Art’ (1832). The speaker of Pauline describes the height of his solipsism in terms reminiscent of the palace imagery in ‘The Palace of Art’:

as some temple seemed

My soul, where nought is changed, and incense rolls

Around the altar – only God is gone,

And some dark spirit sitteth in his seat! (Pauline, 469–72)

And like the soul in Tennyson’s poem who in the end reluctantly abandons her splendid isolation, Browning’s speaker eventually decides to ‘look within no more’ (937). The speaker’s development recalls Carlyle’s representation of the transition from solipsism to his new work ethic in Sartor Resartus, which was published shortly after Pauline in 1833–34 – a resemblance pointed out by Browning’s friend Joseph Arnould, who called Pauline ‘psychologically speaking, his “Sartor Resartus”’.9

The formal presentation of Pauline also constitutes a move beyond the quite obviously autobiographical Romantic confession, and in this Browning is more radical than Tennyson. Through the title of the ‘Supposed Confessions’, Tennyson labels his poem as the utterance of a mind which is ‘Second-Rate’ and hence presumably not identical with the poet, and the personification of the speaker’s soul in ‘The Palace of Art’ also implies a certain distance. Browning outdoes Tennyson by devising an intricate paratextual framework. Through its epigraph from Clément Marot, ‘Plus ne suis ce que j’ai été, / Et ne le sçaurois jamais être’ (‘I am no longer what I have been and will never be able to be it again’), Pauline announces itself as a distanced evaluation of an unrecoverable phase in personal development. Moreover, a long Latin epigraph from the alchemist and occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa first warns against misreadings of the main text by the perverse or rashly ignorant and then calls for an unprejudiced reader who will forgive the possible offence caused by an adolescent author. This is followed by a date and place (‘London: January 1833’) which probably record the poem’s completion, mirrored by another date and place at the end of the poem (‘Richmond: 22 October 1832’) which refer to its conception. There is also a note in French by Pauline, who criticizes the speaker’s attitude. All of these paratexts suggest that, despite the poem’s strong fascination with egotism, Browning was already making an attempt to distance himself from his earlier self as represented by the speaker.

It became clear soon after the poem’s publication that Browning’s suggestions of his distinctiveness from the speaker and his formal originality had not been appreciated by his reviewers. Three fairly favourable reviews were overshadowed by four adverse notices of the poem, which must have made such an impression on potential readers that, as Browning later remarked, ‘to the best of my belief no single copy of the original edition of Pauline ever found a buyer; the book was undoubtedly “stillborn”’.10 It was therefore easy for him to cover up this unsuccessful venture. He retrieved the remaining unbound sheets of his anonymous work from his publisher and did not publicly acknowledge the poem for 35 years.

When he did republish it with ‘extreme repugnance’ in his Poetical Works of 1868, it was only, as he stated in his apologetic preface to that edition, in order to forestall unauthorized pirated editions. In this preface, to which he added in the 1888 edition, and in a note to the above epigraphs (also added in 1888), he distanced himself not just from the speaker but also from the ‘boyish’, ‘juvenile’ and ‘pretentious’ author of Pauline.11 On the one hand, this can be read as a way of spelling out explicitly the poem’s more tentative gesture of drawing a distinction between an older and a younger self. On the other hand, the older poet may be engaged in what he hopes will remain an unperceived re-writing of his past intentions, just as he tries to hide his retrospective editing of the poem itself. The textual revisions in the 1868 and 1888 editions are not major, but they go beyond Browning’s claim in the 1868 preface that he had only corrected ‘some misprints (not a syllable is changed)’ and in the 1888 preface that he had ‘simply removed solecisms, mended the metre a little, and endeavoured to strengthen the phraseology’.12

Herbert Tucker considers the whole of the poem’s paratext as a complex system of apologies which has the speaker’s review of his life at its core and through which the mistakes of an earlier self are acknowledged as such from a mature vantage point.13 This is indeed the overall effect in the 1888 edition, but there is an important difference between the paratext included in the original edition and the later additions, in that the former does not give the read...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Texts
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Search for New Identity
• 1 Youthful Romanticism Reviewed
• 2 Beyond the Romantic Long Poem: Sordello
• 3 Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Model and Countermodel
• 4 Reclaiming Visionary Lyricism
• 5 The Poet Under Pressure: The Ring and the Book
• 6 Victorian Taste and Romantic Imitators
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index