"Meredith was a prose Browning, and so was Browning."
Although when quoted out of context Oscar Wilde appears to make light of Browning’s verse, the entire paragraph, from Wilde’s 1891 The Critic as Artist, recognizes Browning's inventive genius and poetical skill and actually compares him to Shakespeare for his dramatic power, concluding that as “a creator of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet.” Browning’s shrewd use of dramatic psycho-historical monologues was adopted by Pound, Eliot (although he dismissed Browning’s poetry), Frost, many contemporary poets, and perhaps unconsciously by the best contemporary rappers. And as we shall see, Browning's inventive genius, like that of so many before and after him, was excited and nurtured by the poet's life-long fascination with Italy.That genius would have a long and winding journey to acknowledgment. Many of Browning's eminent contemporaries, like John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin, were puzzled by his poetry and declared him either mad or unreadable. But when he died and was entombed in Westminster Abbey in December 1889, The Athenaeum magazine praised his originality and his “horror of all that is hackneyed in poetry.” Henry James, a Browning admirer who observed the burial ceremony in the Abbey, famously if ambiguously wrote that “a good many writers and a good many oddities have been entombed in the Abbey, but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd.”Browning was born May 7, 1812, the oldest of three children. His father was his teacher and mentor and encouraged him to acquire a thorough knowledge of the classics and history. In 1889, just before his death, Robert Browning described in a poem how his intellectual development began:
My father was a scholar and knew Greek.When I was five, I once askedWhat do you read?The siege of Troy.What is a siege and what is Troy?
By the age of eight, he had been introduced by his father to the English translation of Homer's Iliad made by Alexander Pope, and then to the original in Greek, in addition to Heine’s poetry:
Ready for the Iliad, nothing less?There Heine, thick books in which block the shelves:Do not skip a word, use your thumb and attentive to the lexicon!
The young Robert learned with gusto, and soon read the Essay on Satire of Dryden, Shelley's Queen Mab, the Odyssey of Homer, and entire 50 volumes of the Biographie Universelle. By age 12, he knew French, Latin and ancient Greek and had begun to study Italian with a private tutor Angelo Cerrutti, an Italian exile living in London who nourished his pupil's love of Italy and imparted an encyclopedic knowledge of Medieval and Renaissance history. The teenaged Browning learned German, studied music, and gained a knowledge of the arts by reading Vasari and Gerald de Lairesse. His formal education may have been limited to six months' attendance at the University of London, but by early adulthood, Browning, blessed with a remarkable memory, already possessed six languages and a vast body of knowledge.He began to write poetry. His first work, Pauline, was printed at the expense of a friend in 1833 but failed to sell even a single copy. Discouraged, Browning turned to writing for the theater, penning numerous works for the famous actor William Charles Macready. But this venture met with no better success: the plays failed, and the actor lost money.In the midst of this disappointment, Browning had started to write a long poem. Sordello, in composition for seven years and finally reaching some six thousand lines, was finally released in March 1840. Browning had nearly completed it in 1837 when a popular poet, Mary Margaret Blair Busk, released a 2,000 lines poem on this same famous 13th century troubadour; not wanting his work to be confused with hers, Browning took an additional three years polishing and editing his own poem.It was during this three-year period that the fateful first voyage happened: in April 1838, Browning first traveled to Italy, landing at Trieste, and, in the course of two weeks, visited Venice, the town of Asolo, north-west of Venice at the foot of the Alps, and Goito in the province of Mantua, the city where the actual historical hero of his poem had been born in 1226. This Sordello was a poet and courtier who fell in love with Conizza, the wife of Rizzato, Count of San Bonifacio. The two lovers fled to Provence to avoid Rizzato's revenge, and Sordello ended up immortalized in Canto VI of Dante's Purgatorio as an object lesson on the sorry political situation in Italy:
Ah! Servile Italy, grief's hostelry!A ship without a pilot in great tempest!No Lady thou of Provinces, but brothel!
Browning’s Sordello was another failure, full of the complex diction and obscure allusions that would make his poetry daunting to readers in his own time and ever since. In the 15 years after the poem's publication, it sold only 153 copies, while 86 copies were given away. Contemporary critics were uniformly negative: Tennyson, Browning’s friend (and competitor) claimed that of the 6,000 lines Browning had written he'd understood only the first, "Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told," and the last, "Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told," - and that both the two verses were lies. Thomas Carlyle said that his wife Jane, after reading the entire poem was not sure whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. The famous journalist and writer Douglas Jerrold had a better story: he had received the book as a present while convalescing and reading it he thought he was mad because he could not understand what he read. His body was recovering, but his mental faculties were gone!In 1842, in the wake of the failure of Sordello, Browning wrote a children’s poem. The poem, included in a series of eight pamphlets of poems published between 1841 and 1846 that he called Bells and Pomegranates, became very popular and is still read by youngsters today:
The Pied Piper of Hamelin…Rats!They fought the dogs and killed the cats,And bit the babies in the cradles,And ate the cheese out of the vats,And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,Split open the kegs of salted sprats,Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,And even spoiled the women’s chats…
Two other poems from these pamphlets, Home Thoughts from Abroad and My Last Duchess also brought Browning some acclaim. The mood is lyrical, descriptive, picturesque and romantic in the first:
Oh, to be in England,Now that April's there,And whoever wakes in EnglandSees, some morning, unaware,That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheafRound the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,While the chaffinch sings on the orchard boughIn England - now!...
In The Last Duchess, a poem loosely based at the court of the Duke of Ferrara during the 16th century, Browning, through the duke’s monologue, psychologically explores sex and violence, as the duke tells a visitor about his late wife and how she was so pleasant to everybody - causing him to believe that she must be betraying him and therefore deserves to smile no more:
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were alive. I callThat piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's handsWorked busily a day, and there she stands……E'en then would be some stooping; and I chooseNever to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,Whene'er I passed her; but who passed withoutMuch the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;Then all smiles stopped together. There she standsAs if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet …
These poems enjoyed some success and led to his acquaintance with poet Elizabeth Barrett, whom he married. Elizabeth Barrett was the oldest child in the brood of the 11 children of Edward Moulton Barrett. Self-taught, she became a popular poet, publishing a book in 1838. At that point, she had begun to show symptoms of tuberculosis and after a brother drowned in 1840, she was overcome with grief and became a near-invalid, self-medicating with opium, remaining secluded at home in her room, devoting herself to poetry - including one published in 1844 that mentions Browning: “ ... some 'Pomegranate' Browning, if split in half shows a heart within blood-stained, but tinged with humanity.”Robert Browning, who had been given a copy of the Barrett book by his sister Sarianna, liked the compliment, and on January 10, 1845, he wrote to her, saying, "I love your poems with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett … and I love you too." At first, Elizabeth was surprised and suspicious of this stranger professing his love sight unseen and the next day responded cautiously: "Your sympathy is very dear to me, but the sympathy of a poet and a poet like you, is the quintessence of sympathy for me."Thus, the two began exchanging letters and started meeting in May 1845, often alone in her house while her beloved dog Flush moved about the room. When her father refused to let Elizabeth go to southern Europe to see if her poor health would improve in a warmer climate, as had been recommended by her doctors, the two young people, who had fallen in love, decided to get married in secret and leave England for Italy. On September 19 Robert Browning and his new bride traveled overland through France to Marseilles, and from there by ship, first to Genoa and eventually to Pisa, where they lived briefly in an apartment near the famous Leaning Tower before moving on to Florence, in time signing a lease for the second floor of Casa Guidi, near by the Pitti Palace.Italy had a revivifying effect on both of them. Shortly after their arrival, Elizabeth's health did indeed improve. In May 1849 the couple had a son, Robert Wiedermann Barrett Browning, known as "Pen." Except for occasional trips to England, the Brownings continued to live in Florence until 1861, when Elizabeth died and was buried in the city's Protestant Cemetery.The Florence the Brownings encountered was the favorite city of many British and American intellectuals and artists. Some of the most prominent of these emigres were poet Walter Savage Landor, Seymour Kirkup Stocker, the British Consul, antiquarian, and Dante scholar, spiritualist and artist Arthur Hughes Clough, famous novelist and travel-writer Frances Trollope, and humanitarian Florence Nightingale, who had been born there.In this environment, the art of the Brownings flourished. Elizabeth wrote the Casa Guidi Windows collection, the poem Aurora Leigh, and the 44 famous Sonnets from the Portuguese, a series of love poems addressed to her husband:
Sonnet 43How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of Being and ideal Grace…
In 1850 Browning urged her to publish them, saying: “I dare not keep for myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's time.” Why the title Sonnets from the Portuguese? Browning, at first, told friends that the author was the 16th century Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes who had written the poems to his mistress Lady Catherine. Afterward, they admitted that Elizabeth had taken the inspiration from the de Camoes poems, that they were entirely her creation and the title referred to the nickname Robert had given her "My little Portuguese."Robert also wrote at least two collections of poems in Florence, including Men and Women (1855). In this book, containing 51 poems, the common subject is the human soul, its growth and travails, love, and the ever-present threat of our own mortality. Many of his best and most famous poems appeared in this collection: A Toccata of Galuppi’s, A Lover's Quarrel, Andrea del Sarto, The Last Ride Together, and Fra Filippo Lippi.In Andrea Del Sarto, a famous Renaissance painter known as The Faultless Painter, bemoans to his wife that despite his great skill, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael have more important patrons because their works display more emotional power and they do not have petulant wives. At one point he describes ambition:
…Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,Or what's a heaven for?...
A Toccata by Galuppi’s, describes in a melancholy philosophy the musing of a player (or listener) to a Toccata, a short musical piece designed to display musical skill, by 18th-century Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi:
Oh, Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;But although I give you credit, ’tis with such a heavy mindHere you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it brings.What, they lived once thus at Venice, where the merchants were the kingsWhere St. Marks is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?...As for Venice and its people, merely born to bloom and drop,Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop,What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the goldUsed to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
In late 1850, Elizabeth became a promoter of Italian independence and was saddened when the political architect of Italian unity, Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, died on June 7, 1861. She died shortly afterwards on June 28, saying to Robert in her last minutes: "My Robert - my heaven, my love ... God bless you." Elizabeth was 55, and Robert Browning was 49. Up to that point, she had been the more famous of the two.On August 1, 1861, planning to break completely with the past, Browning left Florence forever and returned to London. There, he continued to write poetry and in 1864, he published another book of poems, Dramatis Personae, which contained the famous poem of Rabbi Ben Ezra.
Grow old along with me!The best is yet to be,The last of life, for which the first was made.
This latest book and his previous, Men and Women, brought him notoriety and in 1867, it was proposed that he be given the chair of poetry at Oxford. As he was not a college graduate, this was impossible, but in consolation in June 1867, through the influence of classical scholar Benjamin Jowett, then Master of Balliol College at Oxford, Browning was honored with a Master of Arts degree. He thus became the first non-royal to be so honored by the University of Oxford since the 1766 Oxford’s grant of an honorary degree to the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson.The lure of historical Italian subjects deepened into a special attraction for Robert Browning, and in 1869 he published a monumental new poetic work, The Ring and the Book. It is the story of Count Guido Franceschini, a gentleman of Arezzo, who in 1693 married Pompilia Comparini, a girl of thirteen, and then, once he had gained their wealth, conspired to have her and her parents killed. Her parents were murdered, but she survived and lived to see the count beheaded and his accomplices hanged.The book is Browning's masterpiece, 22,000 lines long (Homer's Iliad has about 20,000 lines). Browning, mixing historical facts with his imagination, creates a fascinating world and moves the action along like a Victorian Rashomon in a series of monologues, each from the perspective of a different participant: Count Franceschini, Pompilia, a priest, lawyers, and Pope Innocent XII. Much more than just a drama, the poems describes life in Arezzo and Rome at the turn of the end of the 17th century and contains many beautiful passages:
…Why comes temptation but for man to meetAnd master and make crouch beneath his foot,And so be pedestaled in triumph?...…It is the glory and good of Art,That Art remains the one way possibleOf speaking truths, to mouths like mine at least…
In 1878, while continuing to maintain his residence in London, Browning succumbed to the lure and returned to Italy, where he slowly fell in love with Venice and the small medieval town of Asolo, 52 miles to the northwest. From 1878 on, every year he would go to Venice for a long stay, taking with him his sister Sarianna who helped manage his personal affairs. In the early years, they stayed in a Venetian hotel, but from 1881 on they were guests of Mrs. Katherine DeKay Bronson, who ran a series of literary salons in various palazzi, attracting prominent personalities like Henry James, John Ruskin, and James Whistler.After her husband's death, Browning began to pay assiduous court to Mrs. Bronson, hoping also that his son Pen, who visited Venice from time to time, would marry the lady's daughter Edith. Pen wasn't interested, and nothing came of Browning's pursuit of Mrs. Bronson except a deep friendship, which lasted until the lady's death in Florence in 1901 (both mother and daughter were immortalized under pseudonyms in James's novel The Aspern Papers).In Venice, Browning’s social circle was wide and included English and American artists, writers, art collectors, composers, and the rich who had left their countries for a new life in the "Serenissima."Among Browning’s acquaintances in Venice were the famous American painters John Singer Sargent and James McNeil Whistler, Swedish painter Anders Zorn, novelist Henry James, novelist Constance Fenimore Cooper Woolson, novelist Frederick Rolf, an Englishman known as Baron Corvo, English writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, ) and for a short period, William Dean Howells, who was for a while U.S. Consul in Venice.And Browning died in Venice, on December 12, 1889, the same day his publisher in London had informed him that his latest book of poems Asolando ("Walking in Asolo") was a success, its first edition selling out in one day. In the last poem, Epilogue to Asolando, written not long before he died, Browning summed up his philosophy of life:
…One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,Never doubted clouds would break,Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight betterSleep to wake…
Browning was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 31, 1889, near Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Henry James, who was present, wrote, "The delivery of his ashes in the great temple of the famous English race was just one of those occasions on which his analytical mind would have rejoiced.”____Luciano Mangiafico is a retired U.S. diplomat who served, among many postings abroad, as consul in Milan and Consul General in Palermo.
