Robert Browning.

Martens, Britta

As Robert Browning was not covered in "The Year's Work" for 2005, the present article reviews a selection of publications from the past two years. The three major items are the latest volumes of The Brownings' Correspondence and of the Oxford University Press Poetical Works of Robert Browning, and John Haydn Baker's monograph Browning and Wordsworth. Some of the articles in this review period share Baker's focus on Browning's attitude toward the Romantics, though the dominant theme here is the poet's creative response to various aspects of the Victorian cultural context, especially religion, but also a number of other cultural practices, such as art criticism, archaeology, and photography.

Volume 15 of The Brownings' Correspondence, edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, and Edward Hagan (Winfield: Wedgestone Press, 2006) is as ever carefully presented and copiously annotated, especially Elizabeth's letters to her sister Arabella, previously published separately by Lewis. The present volume covers the period between January 1848 and August 1849, an exceptionally unproductive period for Robert from an artistic point of view, but an eventful time both politically and in the Brownings' private life. Letters, mostly by Elizabeth, detail the excitement and worries surrounding her pregnancy and Pen's first six months, while also conveying a sense of Robert's deep sadness on the death of his mother only nine days after Pen's birth. Few are the letters which do not bear witness to the couple's intense interest in Italian and French politics. While other British residents flee Florence to avoid the tumult of the short-lived republic and the subsequent Austrian occupation, the poets with their republican sympathies stay behind to watch with dismay as the Florentines' initial enthusiasm for the republic is replaced by renewed allegiance to the returning Grand Duke, a fickleness which EBB repeatedly blames on the Italian national temperament.

Both Brownings are realistic in their evaluation of the French Second Republic, but there are also some disagreements between them, such as the first indications of a key difference on politics, as Elizabeth begins to succumb to the charisma of Louis Napoleon, while Robert remains more critical of the man he will later caricature in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. For instance, on April 22, 1848, Elizabeth writes to her sister Henrietta, alluding to the recent bloodshed in France: "Robert and I think just alike on most points--but if one of us two goes further than the other, I conscientiously believe it is I--Dont say that I say so, though! Sometimes, in joke, I call him an aristocrat." By contrast, on August 31, 1849, she declares:

 It seems to me that [Louis Napoleon] has given proof, as far as the
 evidence goes, of prudence, integrity, & conscientious
 patriotism--the situation is difficult & he fills it honorably. The
 Rome business [i.e. the French occupation of Rome] has been
 miserably managed--this is the great blot on the character of his
 government. But I, for my own part, (my husband is not so minded)
 do consider that the French motive has been good, the intention
 pure.

For the student of Robert's poetry, the main value of these letters lies in the insight which such passages give into his political opinions as they will be reflected in later works. Most of the material in this volume has been published previously, but the chronological presentation here of all known letters, with notes explaining references to specific events, makes it much easier to trace the development of Browning's views. The appendix of contemporary reviews contains not only reviews of the 1849 Poems but also notices of the 1848 revival of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon which are otherwise difficult to access.

The Ring and the Book, Books IX-XII, Volume 9 of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), completes Stefan Hawlin and T.A.J. Burnett's edition of Browning's magnum opus. Like the previous two volumes of this edition, Books IX-XII are meticulously presented and annotated, going beyond the less detailed notes in previous critical editions. Especially helpful are the notes which elucidate over fifty allusions to classical authors by Bottini, the Advocate of the Fisc who defends Pompilia, in Book IX, a monologue which has received much less critical attention than those by the Pope and Guido which follow. The full citation of all of Bottini's classical allusions allows the reader better to appreciate Browning's highly ironic characterization of the erudite lawyer as an arrogant orator manque, enamored of his own pompous rhetoric.

Of particular interest are two appendices which develop previously published research by their authors. In the first of these, Hawlin presents the main source for a curious anecdote in the opening lines of the Pope's monologue. This is the story of Pope Stephen VII's revocation of all decisions and ordinations by his predecessor, Formosus, which includes the grotesque scene of the "cadaver synod," Formosus' posthumous trial in which the late pontiff's cadaver, dressed in his pontifical robes, is put in front of a tribunal and charged with an offence of which Stephen himself is also guilty. Browning relies here on an offshoot of research by his father into the history of the Roman senatrix Marozia and her family's influence on the papacy. A comparison of the poem with the detailed notes taken by Browning senior and his attempts to turn these into a dramatic narrative leads Hawlin to conclude that the poet's representation of the papaw here is not driven by the urge to "make an aggressive or simplistic anti-Catholic statement" (p. 381). Since comments about Italian Catholicism by Victorian authors are too easily and frequently dismissed as chauvinistic prejudice, this more nuanced evaluation of Browning's position is welcome. The poet does not accept the authority of his father's narrative of events, but instead follows his example in weighing up the conflicting accounts of the story. The episode, which takes up only 87 lines, thus constitutes a revealing mise en abyme of Browning's creative engagement with divergent accounts of historical events such as those also found in the Old Yellow Book. His awareness here of how difficult it is to establish the facts of a case on the basis of historical documents should support scholars who reject the view that the poet was fully convinced by the documents in the Old Yellow Book which pleaded Pompilia's innocence.

In case there was still any doubt over the innocence of the historical Pompilia, the appendix by Michael Meredith and Simonetta Berbeglia, entitled "The Truth of the Franceschini Murder Case," sets the record straight. Meredith and Berbeglia's research in the Arezzo town archives establishes that Caponsacchi and Pompilia were lovers and were helped substantially in their flight by Caponsacchi's friend Guillichini, who was also suspected of amorous involvement with Guido's wife. The authors not only outline the genealogies of the Franceschini and Caponsacchi families but also paint a fascinating, lively picture of life in late seventeenth-century Arezzo and of the affair, complete with a table which details the stages of the lovers' nocturnal escape from the town. The real Guido appears "not [as] a monster, but [as] a weak, ineffective man, well suited to play the part of the cuckold" (p. 388), while Caponsacchi turns out to be a convicted rapist and member of an aristocratic gang of aggressive street brawlers whose "two most common activities were fighting and fornication" (p. 398).

John Haydn Baker's study of Browning's changing attitude toward Wordsworth, Browning and Wordsworth (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2004), takes inspiration from two scholars. Firstly, Baker applies Harold Bloom's theory of the Oedipal struggle by a "strong" poet against the influence of an overpowering precursor which Bloom has repeatedly illustrated with reference to Browning's confrontation with Shelley. Secondly, Baker is indebted to John Woolford, who supervised the Ph.D. thesis on which this book is based. Woolford has drawn attention to Browning's debt to Wordsworth's ideas on the relationship between the poet and his audience and to his emulation of the older poet's effort to reconcile Romantic idealism with both realism and a humanitarian dedication to mankind. Baker takes up the latter point and fits it into a Bloomian pattern of development which leads from Browning's initial imitation of Wordsworth, via a deliberate "misreading" of this precursor that allows Browning to deny his influence for three decades, toward an eventual reconciliation and acknowledgement of his influence.

Browning's essentially Romantic desire to combine idealism with practical realism is initially demonstrated through Pauline, which displays the dangers of solipsism and a too utopian idealism that the speaker cannot yet reconcile with humanitarian action. Whereas the value of Pauline lies, in Baker's view, in the statement of Browning's problem, Paracelsus offers a solution in the form of an emulation of Wordsworth. Like the other two early long poems, Paracelsus has so far been read mainly in terms of Browning's response to Shelley, but Baker argues here convincingly for the influence of Wordsworth's Excursion and the "Prospectus" to The Recluse. Above all, he reads Paracelsus' closing vision of mankind's gradual progression toward perfection with its synthesis of visionary idealism and realism as inspired by Wordsworth. However, this solution is, according to Baker, an instance of the fruitless imitation of a precursor which temporarily keeps an immature strong poet from developing his own poetic identity and which Browning himself condemns in the "Essay on Chatterton." His next step is therefore the willful "misreading" of Wordsworth in Sordello as self-absorbed and a mere nature poet who lacks the sympathy with his fellow men that Browning now claims for himself.

Having slain his poetic father by thus misrepresenting him, Browning can in the period between 1840 and 1869 "erase" Wordsworth from his poetry, but eventually he revises his unjust representation of this predecessor. Baker identifies three major reasons for this change of heart: Browning's realization that with his quasi-naturalist The Ring and the Book he has reached a dead end in poetry; his recognition that he had to an extent replicated Wordsworth's development from radicalism to conservatism; and his absorption of the humanitarian message of The Prelude. The text through which Browning encodes the apology for his misreading of Wordsworth as anti-humanitarian is the dream vision at the end of Fifine at the Fair, in which Baker detects echoes of The Prelude. He traces the same belated acknowledgement of Wordsworth's humanitarian commitment through an analysis of the list of Browning's favorite Wordsworth poems as sent to the President of the Wordsworth Society in 1887.

In his quite rigid categorization of Browning's career into three distinct phases, Baker follows the customary view of the poet's development but arguably glosses over some of the complexities of Browning's ever evolving and sometimes contradictory attitude toward his predecessor. Fortunately, he is less rigid in his application of Bloom's schematic theory of influence. Aware of the limitations of Bloom's ahistorical approach, he integrates contextual factors, such as biographical explanations for Browning's changes in attitude toward Wordsworth, and the reading of Paracelsus includes a pertinent consideration of the poem in the context of the discussion over electoral reform in the early 1830s. The book's most compelling sections are the analyses of this poem and of Fifine in terms of Browning's confrontation with Wordsworth, although there are more obvious references to Romantic precursors than those to Wordsworth in these works, namely to Shelley in Paracelsus and to Byron in Fifine. Other similarities between Wordsworth's and Browning's poetics could have been explored in a study of this length, for instance both poets' rejection of poetic diction in favor of realistically presented language as a formal equivalent of their humanitarian ethics. Nevertheless, with its focus on the synthesis of idealism and realistic humanitarianism, the study offers a coherent, well-presented argument that rightly stresses the central influence of Wordsworth's ideas on Browning's aesthetics.

Turning to articles, we find consideration given to poems through which Browning participates in Victorian cultural debates. Stuart Peterfreund's "Robert Browning's Decoding of Natural Theology in 'Caliban upon Setebos'" (VP 43, no. 3 [2005]: 317-331) traces various allusions to Darwin's writings in the description of flora, fauna, and geography in this poem, arguing that Browning sides with Darwin in making his Caliban a satire on the natural theology of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Much of the article is devoted to a discussion of works on natural theology, but it also contains some perceptive remarks about the poem's style, especially Caliban's idiosyncratic use of elliptical chiasmus.

Christopher M. Keirstead's "Stranded at the Border: Browning, France, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism in Red Cotton Night. Cap Country" (VP 43, no. 4 [2005]: 411-434) makes some connections between this poem and Victorian attitudes toward Catholicism and the Franco-Prussian war, but the article is mainly preoccupied with relating the text to critical discourses of our own period: travel writing, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism and even queer theory. The article grapples with the problem that, while Browning repeatedly expressed his dislike for the blending of national identities, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country advocates immersion in the foreign culture and values the liminal position between two cultures. This is symbolized by the poem's setting on the coast of Normandy, a borderland between Britain and France, and personified by the poem's central reference to Browning's closest male friend, the French critic Joseph Milsand. Keirstead argues that the anglophile Milsand, who is able to strike a balance between sound faith and rationality, represents a positive countermodel to the false cosmopolitanism of the poem's anti-hero, Miranda. The protagonist suffers from his inability to inhabit a liminal space and is torn apart by typically French extremes, his fanatic Catholicism which leads him to believe in miracles and the "soulless rationalism which finds its logical outcome in the Paris Commune" (p. 425). The poem's addressee, Anne Thackeray, with her vision of Normandy as peaceful and sleepy, can certainly be interpreted as another example of false cosmopolitanism. However, it is rather baffling to see Browning's critical view of Thackeray's conventional, mediocre novels conflated with his comments about the versification and effeminacy of Swinburne and Rossetti in order to support the argument that "Browning attempts to validate homosocial bonding as a key to cosmopolitan understanding, so long as it does not cross over into a more threatening kind of physical indulgence" (p. 426). The article does well to relate Browning's poem to current critical interests in national identity and space, but the effort to read queer theory into the text seems too strained. It is undoubtedly useful to consider Browning through the lens of new critical theories, but not every author fits into every paradigm.

An article which offers fresh insights without recourse to new theoretical approaches is Barry Bullen's "Browning's 'Pictor Ignotus' and Nineteenth-Century 'Christian' Art" (Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26, no. 3 [September 2004]: 273-288), also published in a revised form in his monograph Continental Crosscurrents (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005). Bullen makes a valuable contribution to research into the context of Browning's painter poems, going beyond David J. DeLaura's discovery that the poet responded to the neo-Catholic art critic A. F. Rio. Browning agreed with Rio that interest in the High Renaissance painters had eclipsed the merits of the Italian pre-1500 painters, the so-called Primitives, but for very different reasons. While Rio, whose aesthetic judgments were determined by his religious agenda, praised the Primitives for their spiritual purity, the Protestant Browning was attracted to their naturalism which did not fit into the neo-Catholic concept of art but chimed with the realism of his own poetry. Bullen explores an additional dimension of the nineteenth-century aesthetic debate about the Primitives, the fashion for the contemporary German Nazarene painters, who took their inspiration from the religious paintings of the Primitives. Bullen traces the frequent analogies which were drawn between the two groups of painters in the writings of Browning's acquaintances, including Anna Jameson and Richard Monckton Milnes, arguing that "Pictor Ignotus" can be read both as a portrayal of the Primitive Fra Bartolommeo and of the Nazarenes, especially the prominent figure of J. F. Overbeck. To support his point, Bullen cites parallels between the decision by Browning's speaker to sacrifice his aesthetic standards and submit to religious conformity and the criticism made of Overbeck's art. However, it is difficult to establish the extent to which these similarities are a result of the Nazarenes' debt to the Primitives rather than Browning's conscious reference to contemporary painting, and Bullen cites no paratextual evidence of Browning's interest in the Nazarenes. Nevertheless, his unearthing of a lively aesthetic debate about religious art does much to reinforce a reading of Browning's painter monologues as interventions in the nineteenth-century debate about the relation between (Catholic) religion and art.

Another article which touches on Browning's painter poems, but from a completely different angle, is Lawrence J. Starzyk's "Browning's 'Childe Roland': The Visionary Poetic" (VN 107 [Spring 2005]: 11-18). Starzyk reads this poem as Browning's experimental exploration of an unresolved dialectical tension between objective and subjective poetry. This tension is primarily manifested in the speaker's self-projection onto the landscape and the poem's open-ended, circular structure. Starzyk traces the origins of this opposition to the Wordsworthian desire for self-disclosure and the poet's self-effacing ability to inhabit an other as described by Keats. He then detects it in a number of poems from Pauline to Men and Women. The very brief readings of "Pictor Ignotus" and "Old Pictures in Florence" as comments on the artist's need to combine self-expression and self-denial form an interesting contrast with Bullen's contextual reading. Starzyk argues, for instance, that the speaker of "Pictor Ignotus" condemns himself to anonymity by choosing the route of self-annihilation rather than self-expression. Starzyk rightly points out that the tension between objective and subjective art is closely linked to Browning's belief in the superiority of the Incomplete over closure, a fact which accounts for the open-ended structure of "Childe Roland." A more detailed reading of other poems such as "Old Pictures in Florence" with its closing celebration of the Incomplete would have supported this point. In drawing attention to Browning's interest in the possibilities of combining objective and subjective art, the article counterbalances the many analyses of the poet's work which, on the basis of the "Essay on Shelley," focus on the diametrical opposition of these two modes. However, Starzyk seems to misread the essay on a crucial point. He refers to "Browning's hope in the essay on Shelley that in the future poetry may somehow represent both the objective and the subjective tendencies" (p. 12, my italics). Browning actually states that a combination of objective and subjective genius is the norm in all poetry: "A mere running-in of one faculty upon the other, is, of course, the ordinary circumstance."

My own "'Knight, Bard, Gallant': The Troubadour as a Critique of Romanticism in Browning's Sordello" in Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism, edited by Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer A. Palmgren (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 39-52, discusses related issues with reference to the text in which Browning accomplishes his transition from egotistical self-expression to his mature, impersonal poetics. I argue that he uses the poem's medieval setting to stage his critique of Romanticism, which had to a large degree shaped the nineteenth-century concept of the Middle Ages:

 This critique is developed in two related ways: firstly, in his
 adaptation of the Romantic version of a medieval genre, the
 narrative verse romance, which displays an attitude towards the
 Middle Ages that distinguishes Browning from the nostalgic
 medievalism of more popular (post-) Romantic texts; and secondly,
 in his representation of Sordello, who turns out to be partly a
 medieval troubadour, partly a Romantic poet, and partly a
 precursor of the Renaissance. (p. 40)

To return to research into Browning's cultural context, Jude V. Nixon's essay collection Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), which re-examines the central role of religion in relation to Victorian national and individual identity, contains two chapters on Browning: Suzanne Bailey's "'Decomposing' Texts: Browning's Poetics and Higher-Critical Parody" (pp. 117-129) and Joseph A. Dupras' "Hearing Adventure: Giuseppe Caponsacchi, Browning's 'Hollow Rock'" (pp. 157-173). Bailey considers Browning in the context of mid- and late-nineteenth-century parodies of Higher Criticism, including a precedent for his late poem "Development" which shows that he was not alone in exploring the dichotomy between fact and fancy in relation to the Homeric epics. Bailey suggests that Browning's epistemological concern throughout his career with the fading of oral testimony is derived from the Higher Critics' interest in the vanishing of historical subjects and the instability of texts. She offers an intriguing reading of "Jochanan Hakkadosh," with its foregrounding of the materiality of language, the disciple's efforts to extract wisdom from the dying Rabbi and its tongue-in-cheek editorial note, as influenced by the Higher Critics' emphasis on the independence of language from experience and on the limits this imposes for interpreting a text.

Religion is not as central to Dupras' contribution to the collection as one might expect. Instead, the chapter offers an insight into the author's work in progress on Browning's audiovisual poetics. Dupras proposes that the critical concern with perspective and optics in Browning's monologues should be balanced by a consideration of "his canon in terms of listening and deaf spots" (p. 158). He examines the "[a]ural dimensions of creativity and religion" (p. 159) in a poem which has attracted many comments on textuality rather than voice, The Ring and the Book. Focusing on Caponsacchi's monologue, he traces how hearing plays a central role in the speaker's self-definition as priest and in his interaction with Pompilia.

Another article which situates Browning's place within (less orthodox) Christian discourse is Richard Lines's "Swedenborgian Ideas in the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning" in a themed issue of the Journal of the Swedenborg Society, edited by Stephen McNeilly and entitled Essays on Swedenborg and Literature: In Search of the Absolute [London: Swedenborg Society, 2004], pp. 23-43). Drawing on the Brownings' letters and late nineteenth-century publications on the two poets' interest in the Swedish mystic, Lines identifies the mediators of this influence and illustrates it in the Brownings' work. Not all of the Brownings' ideas which are attributed to Swedenborg here are exclusive to him, but the article is to be commended for its rare focus on Robert's response to Swedenborg and for pointing out the importance of his Conjugal Love not just for Elizabeth's but also for Robert's poetic representation of marriage as transcending life on earth.

The two Brownings are also considered together in my own "'Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows': Robert Browning's Engagement with Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poetics" (VP 43, no. 1 [Spring 2005]: 75-98). The article examines three poems in propria persona from Men and Women ("The Guardian-Angel," "Old Pictures in Florence," and "One Word More") in which Robert responds to Elizabeth's recommendation from the courtship correspondence that he write in the self-expressive mode. However, through tensions between the self-expressive voice and devices from the dramatic monologue, all three poems expose in different ways his reluctance to follow her ideal and thus reaffirm his commitment to his impersonal, dramatic poetics.

Finally, the past year has also seen two articles on Browning's translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon (for the reader who does not know Ancient Greek, probably Browning's most inaccessible text): Will Turtle's "'The Truth of Mere Transcript': Browning's Agamemnon" (Translation & Literature 14, no. 2 [2005]: 196-211) and Eugenio Benitez's "On Literal Translation: Robert Browning and the Agamemnon" (Philosophy and Literature 28, no. 2 [October 2004]: 259-268). Turtle's point of departure is the fact that Browning conceived the idea to translate the play when reading about Schliemann's excavations at Troy and proposed to his publisher to illustrate the translation with photographs of the archaeologist's finds. Having demonstrated that at the time both photography and archaeology had some currency as analogies for the process of translation, Turtle suggests that Browning's text engages with these two practices. He comments, for instance, on Browning's "freeze-frame syntax" (p. 198) and on his attempt at quasi-photographic verisimilitude in his representation of Ancient Greek culture. In this respect, Browning's agenda is akin to that of the popular contemporary ethnographic photographers who tried to preserve records of disappearing cultures. Turtle also commends Browning for his self-conscious foregrounding of the translator's inability to lend a voice to a historically, geographically, and linguistically distant culture. The article includes some interesting appreciations of Browning's intentional ambiguities in the text which either emphasize Aeschylus' own obscurities or play with archaic and modern meanings of words. Of less immediate interest to Browning scholars is the article by Benitez, who has recently translated the Agamemnon. However, the consideration of Browning's defense of literal translation in his preface, from the pragmatic point of view of a writer who has personal experience of the difficulties of translating Aeschylus' text, forms a noteworthy complement to Turtle's more scholarly approach. Both articles whet the reader's appetite for the Oxford University Press edition of Browning's Greek plays which is due to be published soon.