Kitabı oku: «Browning», sayfa 2

PART 1 ROBERT AND THE BROWNINGS 1812–1846

ONLY ONE THING is known for certain about the appearance of Sarah Anna Browning, wife of Robert Browning and mother of Robert and Sarianna Browning: she had a notably square head. Which is to say, its uncommon squareness was noted by Alfred Domett, a young man sufficiently serious as to become briefly, in his maturity, Prime Minister of New Zealand and sometime epic poet. Mr Domett, getting on in years, conscientiously committed this observation to his journal on 30 April 1878: ‘I remembered their mother about 40 years before (say 1838), who had, I used to think, the squarest head and forehead I almost ever saw in a human being, putting me in mind, absurdly enough no doubt of a tea-chest or tea-caddy.’¹

Many people have square heads. There is little enough to be interpreted from this characteristic, though to some minds a square head may naturally imply sturdy common sense and a regular attitude to life. A good square head is commonly viewed as virtually a guarantee of correct behaviour and a restrained attitude towards vanity and frivolity. Lombroso’s forensic art of physiognomy being now just as discredited as palmistry or phrenology, we may turn with more confidence to Thomas Carlyle’s shrewd and succinct assessment of Mrs Browning as being ‘the type of a Scottish gentlewoman’.² The phrase is evocative enough for those who, like Carlyle, have enjoyed some personal experience and acquired some understanding at first hand of the culture that has bred and refined the Scottish gentlewoman over the generations. She is a woman to be reckoned with. Since we know nothing but bromides and pleasing praises of Sarah Anna’s temperament beyond what may be conjectured, particularly from Carlyle’s brief but telling phrase, we may take it that she was quieter and more phlegmatic than Jane Welsh, Carlyle’s own Scottish gentlewoman wife whose verbal flyting could generally be relied upon to rattle the teeth and teacups of visitors to Carlyle’s London house in Cheyne Walk.

Mrs Browning’s father was German. Her grandfather is said to have been a Hamburg merchant whose son William is generally agreed to have become, in a small way, a ship owner in Dundee and to have married a Scotswoman. She was born Sarah Anna Wiedemann in Scotland, in the early 1770s, and while still a girl came south with her sister Christiana to lodge with an uncle in Camberwell. Her history before marriage is not known to have been remarkable; after marriage it was not notably dramatic. There is only the amplest evidence that she was worthily devoted to her hearth, garden, husband, and children.

Mrs Browning’s head so fascinated Alfred Domett that he continued to refer to it in a domestic anecdote agreeably designed to emphasize the affection that existed between mother and son: ‘On one occasion, in the act of tossing a little roll of music from the table to the piano, he thought it had touched her head in passing her, and I remember how he ran to her to apologise and caress her, though I think she had not felt it.’³ Sarah Anna Browning’s head was at least tenderly regarded and respected by Robert, her son, who—since he has left no description of it to posterity in prose or poetry—either refrained from disobliging comment or regarded its shape as in no respect unusual.

Mrs Browning was a Dissenter; her creed was Nonconformist, a somewhat austere faith that partook of no sacraments and reprobated ritual. She—and, nine years into their marriage, her husband—adhered to the Congregational Church, the chapel in York Street, Walworth, which the Browning family attended regularly to hear the preaching of the incumbent, the Revd George Clayton, characterized in the British Weekly of 20 December 1889 as one who ‘combined the character of a saint, a dancing master, and an orthodox eighteenth-century theologian in about equal proportions’.⁴ Before professing Congregationalism, she had been brought up—said Sarianna, her daughter, to Mrs Alexandra Sutherland Orr—in the Church of Scotland. One of the books that is recorded as a gift from Mrs Browning to her son is an anthology of sermons, inscribed by him on the flyleaf as a treasured possession and fond remembrance of his mother. As a token of maternal concern for her son’s spiritual welfare it was perfectly appropriate, and might perhaps have been intended as a modest counterweight to the large and eclectic library of books—six thousand volumes, more or less—that her husband had collected, continued to collect, and through which her precocious son was presently and diligently reading his way.

Sarah Anna Browning doubtless had cause to attempt to concentrate young Robert’s mind more narrowly. He had begun with a rather sensational anthology, Nathaniel Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World, published in 1678, and sooner rather than later would inevitably discover dictionaries and encyclopedias, those seemingly innocent repositories of dry definitions and sober facts but which are, in truth, a maze of conceits and confusions, of broad thoroughfares and frustrating cul-de-sacs from which the imaginative mind, once entered, will find no exit and never in a lifetime penetrate to the centre.

But Mrs Browning’s head, square with religion and good intentions, was very liable to be turned by kindly feeling towards her son and poetry. Robert, in 1826, had already come across Miscellaneous Poems, a copy of Shelley’s best works, published by William Benbow of High Holborn, unblushingly pirated from Mrs Shelley’s edition of her husband’s Posthumous Poems. This volume was presented to him by a cousin, James Silverthorne, and he was eager for a more reliable, authoritative edition. Having made inquiries of the Literary Gazette as to where they might be obtained, Robert requested the poems of Shelley as a birthday present.⁵ Mrs Browning may be pictured putting on her gloves, setting her bonnet squarely on her head and proceeding to Vere Street. There, at the premises of C. & J. Ollier, booksellers, she purchased the complete works of the poet, including the Pisa edition of Adonais in a purple paper cover and Epipsychidion. None of them had exhausted their first editions save The Cenci, which had achieved a second edition.

On advice, as being in somewhat the same poetic spirit as the works of the late Percy Bysshe Shelley who had died tragically in a boating accident in Italy but three years before, Sarah Anna Browning added to her order three volumes of the poetry of the late John Keats, who had died, also tragically young, in Rome in 1821. Her arms encumbered with the books of these two neglected poets, her head quite innocent of the effect they would have, she returned home to present them to her son. There being not much call for the poetry of Shelley and Keats at this time, it had taken some effort to obtain their works. Bibliophiles, wrote Edmund Gosse in 1881 in the December issue of the Century Magazine, turn almost dazed at the thought of these prizes picked up by the unconscious lady.

The Browning family belonged, remarked G. K. Chesterton, ‘to the solid and educated middle-class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity’.⁶ Robert Browning senior, husband to Sarah Anna Wiedemann, was certainly educated, undeniably middle-class, and interested in literature not so much for its own sake—though he was more literate and widely read, it may safely be said, than many of his colleagues at the Bank of England—but more from the point of view of bibliophily and learning. There was always another book to be sought and set on a shelf. The house in Camberwell was full of them.

Literature and learning are not precisely the same thing, and Mr Browning senior, according to the testimony of Mr Domett, was accustomed to speak of his son ‘“as beyond him”’—alluding to his Paracelsuses and Sordellos; though I fancy he altered his tone on this subject very much at a later period’.⁷ Poetry safely clapped between purple paper covers is one thing, poets are quite another—and an experimental, modern poet within the confines of one’s own family is bound to be unsettling to a traditionalist, try as he may to comprehend, proud as he may be of completed and published effort. Mr Browning senior may initially have been more pleased with the fact of his son’s work being printed and bound and placed in its proper place on his bookshelves than with the perplexing contents of the books themselves.

That said, introductory notes by Reuben Browning to a small volume of sketches by Robert Browning senior refer kindly to his stepbrother’s bibliophily and store of learning—however much at random and magpie-like it may have been acquired: ‘The love of reading attracted him by sympathy to books: old books were his delight, and by his continual search after them he not only knew all the old books-stalls in London, but their contents, and if any scarce work were spoken of, he could tell forthwith where a copy of it might be had. Nay, he would even describe in what part of the shop it was placed, and the price likely to be asked for it.’⁸ So, ‘with the scent of a hound and the snap of a bull-dog’ for an old or rare book, Mr Browning acquired learning and a library.

‘Thus his own library became his treasure,’ remarked Reuben Browning. ‘His books, however, were confessedly not remarkable for costly binding, but for their rarity or for interesting remarks he had to make on most of them; and his memory was so good that not infrequently, when a conversation at his table had reference to any particular subject, has he quietly left the room and in the dark, from a thousand volumes in his library, brought two or three illustrations of the point under discussion.’ The point under discussion, however esoteric, would rarely defeat Mr Browning senior’s search for an apposite reference: ‘His wonderful store of information,’ wrote Reuben Browning, ‘might really be compared to an inexhaustible mine. It comprised not merely a thorough scholastic outline of the world, but the critical points of ancient and modern history, the lore of the Middle Ages, all political combinations of parties, their descriptions and consequences; and especially the lives of the poets and painters, concerning whom he ever had to communicate some interesting anecdote not generally known.’

A portrait of Mr Browning senior, preserved throughout their lives by his children, was ‘blue-eyed and “fresh-coloured”’ and, attested Mr Browning’s daughter Sarianna to Alfred Domett, the man himself ‘had not an unsound tooth in his head’ when he died at the age of 84. In his youth he had been a vigorous sportsman, afflicted only by sore throats and a minor liver complaint. Altogether, his general health and recuperative powers were strongly marked. Alfred Domett took these facts of paternal health and heredity seriously, on the ground that ‘they have their significance with reference to the physical constitution of their son, the poet; which goes so far as to make up what is called “genius”’.

So far as Domett was aware, no cloud shadowed the home life of the Brownings: ‘Altogether, father, mother, only son and only daughter formed a most suited, harmonious and intellectual family, as appeared to me.’ Mr Browning senior, to Domett, was not often a physically significant presence: his friend’s father, ‘of whom I did not see much, seemed in my recollection, what I should be inclined to call a dry adust [sic] undersized man; rather reserved; fond particularly of old engravings, of which I believe he had a choice collection.’ Mr Browning took pleasure not only in collecting pictures but also in making them. He was liable to sketch the heads of his colleagues and visitors to the Bank of England, a habit so much encouraged by his employers that hundreds of these whiskered heads survive to this day.

Mr Browning also wrote poetry of a traditional kind. His son in later life praised his father’s verses to Edmund Gosse, declaring ‘that his father had more true poetic genius than he has’. Gosse, taking this with scarcely too gross a pinch of salt and allowing for filial piety, kindly but rigorously comments that, ‘Of course the world at large will answer, “By their fruits shall ye know them,” and of palpable fruit in the way of published verse the elder Mr Browning has nothing to show.’ The elder Browning’s poetic taste was more or less exclusively for double or triple rhyme, and especially for the heroic couplet, which he employed with ‘force and fluency’. Gosse goes on to quote the more celebrated son describing the moral and stylistic vein of the father’s vigorous verses ‘as that of a Pope born out of due time’. Mr Browning had been a great classicist and a lover of eighteenth-century literature, the poetry of that period having achieved, in his estimation, its finest flowering in the work of Alexander Pope. Though his son’s early poetry, Pauline and Paracelsus, confounded him, Mr Browning senior forgave the otherwise impenetrable Sordello because—says William Sharp in his Life of Browning—‘it was written in rhymed couplets’.

Pope, according to the critic Mark Pattison, ‘was very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant; that is, of everything but the one thing which he laboured with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonyms, and pretty turns of language.’ Mr Browning senior’s satirical portraits of friends and colleagues are said to be very Pope-ish in expression, quick sketches reminiscent in their style of Pope’s rhetorical (often oratorical) couplets. It is further said that he was incapable of portraying anyone other than as a grotesque. The sketch of his wife is certainly none too flattering.

This domestic, middle-class idyll, quiet-flowing and given muted colour by art, poetry, music, bibliophily and decent religious observances, was touching to Alfred Domett, who recollected his serene memories of the Browning family in the tranquillity that fell upon him after leaving public office in New Zealand and returning to London to look up an old friend now celebrated as an important poet and public figure.

Mr Browning, like his wife, became a Dissenter and a Nonconformist in middle life, though it had taken Sarah Anna Browning time and energy to persuade him from the Episcopal communion. In his youth, he had held principles and expressed opinions, uncompromisingly liberal, that had all but brought him to ruin—certainly had distanced him from the prospect of maintaining at least, perhaps increasing, the family fortune that derived from estates and commercial interests in the West Indies. His father, the first Robert Browning, had been born the eldest son in 1749 to Jane Morris of Cranborne, Dorset, wife to Thomas Browning who in 1760 had become landlord of Woodyates Inn, close to the Dorset-Wiltshire border, which he had held on a 99-year lease from the Earl of Shaftesbury. Thomas and Jane Browning produced five more children, three sons (one of whom died young) and two daughters.

Robert the First, as he may here be styled, was to become grandfather of the poet. He was recommended by Lord Shaftesbury for employment in the Bank of England, where he served for the whole of his working life, fifty years, from August 1769, when he would have been about the age of twenty, becoming Principal of the Bank Stock Office, a post of some considerable prestige which implied wide contact with influential financiers. This first Robert Browning was no man, merely, of balance sheets and bottom-polished trousers: at about the age of forty, he vigorously assisted, as a lieutenant in the Honourable Artillery Company, in the defence of the Bank of England during the Gordon Riots of 1780.

In 1778, he married Margaret Morris Tittle, a lady who had been born in the West Indies, reputedly a Creole (and said, by some, to have been darker than was then thought decent), by whom he sired three children—Robert, the eldest, being born on 6 July 1782 at Battersea. A second son, William, was born and died in 1784. A daughter, Margaret—who remained unmarried and lived quietly until her death in 1857 (or 1858, according to a descendant, Vivienne Browning)—was born in 1783. Nothing more is heard of Margaret, beyond a reference by Cyrus Mason, a Browning cousin, who in later life composed a memoir in which he wrote that ‘Aunt Margaret was detected mysteriously crooning prophecies over her Nephew, behind a door at the house at Camberwell.’

The picture of an eccentric prophetess lurking at keyholes and singing the fortunes of the future poet is not conjured by any other biographer of Robert Browning. Cyrus Mason is not widely regarded as a reliable chronicler of Browning family history. He begins with his own self-aggrandizing agenda and sticks to it. His reputation is rather as a somewhat embittered relation who took the view that the poet Robert Browning and his admirers had paid inadequate attention and given insufficient credit to the more remote branches of the family. The contribution of the extended family to the poet’s early education, he considered, had been cruelly overlooked and positively belittled by wilful neglect.

However, since the reference to Margaret Browning does exist, and since Margaret has otherwise vanished from biographical ken, a possible—rather than probable—explanation for this single recorded peculiarity of the poet’s aunt is that she may have been simple-minded and thus kept in what her family may have regarded (not uncommonly at the time) as a decent, discreet seclusion. The extent to which they succeeded in containing any public embarrassment may—and it is no more than supposition—account for Margaret’s virtually complete obscurity in a family history that has been otherwise largely revealed.

Margaret Morris Tittle Browning died in Camberwell in 1789, when Robert (who can be referred to as Robert the Second), her only remaining son, was seven years old. When Robert was twelve, his father remarried in April 1794. This second wife, Jane Smith, by whom he fathered nine more children, three sons, and six daughters, was but twenty-three at the time of her marriage in Chelsea to the 45-year-old Robert Browning the First. The difference of twenty-two years between husband and wife is said, specifically by Mrs Sutherland Orr, Robert Browning’s official biographer, sister of the exotic Orientalist and painter Frederic Leighton, and a friend of the poet, to have resulted in the complete ascendancy of Jane Smith Browning over her husband. Besotted by, and doting upon, his young darling, he made no objection to Jane’s relegation of a portrait (attributed to Wright of Derby) of his first wife to a garret on the basis that a man did not need two wives. One—the living—in this case proved perfectly sufficient.

The hard man of business and urban battle, the doughty Englishman of Dorset stock, the soundly respectable man who annually read the Bible and Tom Jones (both, probably, with equal religious attention), the stout and severe man who lived more or less hale—despite the affliction of gout—to the age of eighty-four, was easily subverted by a woman whose gnawing jealousy of his first family extended from the dead to the quick. Browning family tradition, says Vivienne Browning, a family historian, also attributes a jealousy to Robert the First, naturally anxious to retain the love and loyalty of his young wife against any possible threat, actual or merely perceived in his imagination. Their nine children, a substantial though not unusual number, may have been conceived and borne as much in response to jealousy, doubt, and fear as in expression of any softer feelings.

Jane Browning’s alleged ill-will towards Robert the Second, Robert the First’s son by his previous marriage to Margaret Tittle, was not appeased by the young man’s independence, financial or intellectual. He had inherited a small income from an uncle, his mother’s brother, and proposed to apply it to a university education for himself. Jane, supposedly on the ground that there were insufficient funds to send her own sons to university, opposed her stepson’s ambition. Then, too, there was some irritation that Robert the Second wished to be an artist and showed some talent for the calling. Robert the First—says Mrs Orr—turned away disgustedly when Robert the Second showed his first completed picture to his father. The household was plainly a domestic arena of seething discontents, jealous insecurities, envious stratagems, entrenched positions on every front, and sniper fire from every corner of every room.

Margaret Tittle had left property in the West Indies, and it was Robert the First’s intention that their son should proceed, at the age of nineteen, to St Kitts to manage the family estates, which were worked by slave labour. He may have been glad enough to go, to remove himself as far as possible from his father and stepmother. In the event, he lasted only a year in the West Indies before returning to London, emotionally bruised by his experience of the degrading conditions under which slaves laboured on the sugar plantations. Robert the Second’s reasonable expectation was that he might inherit perhaps not all, but at least a substantial proportion of his mother’s property, had he not ‘conceived such a hatred of the slave system’.

Mrs Sutherland Orr states: ‘One of the experiences which disgusted him with St Kitts was the frustration by its authorities of an attempt he was making to teach a negro boy to read, and the understanding that all such educative action was prohibited.’ For a man who, from his earliest years, was wholly devoted to books, art, anything that nourished and encouraged inquiry and intellect, the spiritual repression of mind and soul as much—perhaps more than—physical repression of bodily freedom, must have seemed an act of institutionalized criminality and personal inhumanity by the properly constituted authorities. He could not morally consider himself party to, or representative of, such a system.

Certainly as a result of the apparent lily-livered liberalism of his son and his shocking, incomprehensible disregard for the propriety of profit, conjecturally also on account of a profound unease about maintaining the affection and loyalty of his young wife—there were only ten years between stepmother Jane and her stepson—Robert the First fell into a passionate and powerful rage that he sustained for many years. Robert Browning, the grandson and son of the protagonists of this quarrel, did not learn the details of the family rupture until 25 August 1846, when his mother finally confided the circumstances of nigh on half a century before.

‘If we are poor,’ wrote Robert Browning the Third the next day to Elizabeth Barrett, ‘it is to my father’s infinite glory, who, as my mother told me last night, as we sate alone, “conceived such a hatred to the slave-system in the West Indies,” (where his mother was born, who died in his infancy,) that he relinquished every prospect,—supported himself, while there, in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father’s profound astonishment and rage—one proof of which was, that when he heard that his son was a suitor to her, my mother—he benevolently waited on her Uncle to assure him that his niece “would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged”!—those were his very words. My father on his return, had the intention of devoting himself to art, for which he had many qualifications and abundant love—but the quarrel with his father,—who married again and continued to hate him till a few years before his death,—induced him to go at once and consume his life after a fashion he always detested. You may fancy, I am not ashamed of him.’

As soon as Robert the Second achieved his majority, he was dunned by his father for restitution in full of all the expenses that Robert the First had laid out on him, and he was stripped of any inheritance from his mother, Margaret, whose fortune, at the time of her marriage, had not been settled upon her and thus had fallen under the control of her husband. These reactions so intimidated Robert the Second that he agreed to enter the Bank of England, his father’s territory, as a clerk and to sublimate his love of books and sketching in ledgers and ink. In November 1803, four months after his twenty-first birthday, he began his long, complaisant, not necessarily unhappy servitude of fifty years as a bank clerk in Threadneedle Street.

A little over seven years later, at Camberwell on 19 February 1811, in the teeth of his father’s opposition, Robert the Second married Sarah Anna Wiedemann, whose uncle evidently disregarded Robert the First’s predictions. She was then thirty-nine, ten years older than her husband and only one year younger than his stepmother Jane. They settled at 6 Southampton Street, Camberwell, where, on 7 May 1812, Sarah Anna Browning was delivered of a son, the third in the direct Browning line to be named Robert. Twenty months later, on 7 January 1814, their second child, called Sarah Anna after her mother, but known as Sarianna by her family and friends, was born.

William Sharp, in his Life of Browning, published in 1897, refers briskly and offhandedly to a third child, Clara. Nothing is known of Clara: it is possible she may have been stillborn or died immediately after birth. Mrs Orr never mentions the birth of a third child, and not even Cyrus Mason, the family member one would expect to seize eagerly upon the suppression of any reference to a Browning, suggests that more than two children were born to the Brownings. However, William Clyde DeVane, discussing Browning’s ‘Lines to the Memory of his Parents’ in A Browning Handbook, states that ‘The “child that never knew” Mrs Browning was a stillborn child who was to have been named Clara.’ The poem containing this discreet reference was not printed until it appeared in F.G. Kenyon’s New Poems by Robert Browning, published in 1914, and in the February issue, that same year, of the Cornhill Magazine. Vivienne Browning, in My Browning Family Album, published in 1992, declares that her grandmother (Elizabeth, a daughter of Reuben Browning, son of Jane, Robert the First’s second wife) ‘included a third baby—a girl—in the family tree’, but Vivienne Browning ‘cannot now find any evidence to support this’.

It is known that Sarah Anna Browning miscarried at least once. In a letter to his son Pen, the poet Robert Browning wrote on 25 January 1888 to condole with him and his wife Fannie on her miscarriage: ‘Don’t be disappointed at this first failure of your natural hopes—it may soon be repaired. Your dearest Mother experienced the same misfortune, at much about the same time after marriage: and it happened also to my own mother, before I was born.’ Unless Sarah Anna’s miscarriage occurred in a very late stage of pregnancy, it seems improbable that a miscarried child should have been given a name and regarded, in whatever terms, as a first-born—but natural parental sentiment may have prompted the Brownings to give their first daughter, who never drew breath, miscarried or stillborn, at least the dignity and memorial of a name.

The small, close-knit family moved house in 1824, though merely from 6 Southampton Street to another house (the number is not known) in the same street, where they remained until December 1840. Bereaved of his mother at the age of seven, repressed from the age of twelve by his father and stepmother, denied further education and frustrated in his principles and ambitions in his late teens, all but disinherited for failure to make a success of business and to close a moral eye to the inhumanity of slavery, set on a high stool and loaded with ledgers in his early twenties, it is hardly surprising that Robert the Second sought a little peace and quiet for avocations that had moderated into hobbies. He settled for a happy—perhaps undemanding—marriage to a peacable, slightly older wife, and a tranquil bolt-hole in what was then, in the early nineteenth century, the semi-rural backwater of Camberwell.

His poverty, counted in monetary terms, was relative. His work in the Bank of England, never as elevated or responsible as Robert the First’s, was nevertheless adequately paid, the hours were short and overtime, particularly the lucrative night watch, was paid at a higher rate. There was little or no managerial or official concern about the amount of paper, the number of pens, or the quantity of sealing wax used by Bank officials, and these materials were naturally regarded as lucrative perquisites that substantially bumped up the regular salary. Though Mrs Orr admits this trade, she adds—somewhat severely—in a footnote: ‘I have been told that, far from becoming careless in the use of these things from his practically unbounded command of them, he developed for them an almost superstitious reverence. He could never endure to see a scrap of writing-paper wasted.’