The Showman and the Show

Some poets outlive their fame, or their readers, and are forgotten, or if remembered at all, are remembered for one poem so good (and short) as to be irresistible to anthologists, or because some anecdote, or parody preserves their memory, but not their work. But even the greatest of our poets can fall, if not into disrepute then simple neglect for want of study, or worse, readers. Robert Browning now seems to survive largely by his least characteristic work; in brief lyrics, or excerpts from larger works, reduced to a more palatable size for contemporary readers used to more contemporary forms. Luckily, he wrote love poems and, as the lover and husband of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, his famous romance, and his poems as protagonist in that story, have survived the neglect of his larger reputation. (For a certain generation, now passing, rather than the bearded sage of the Victorians, he will always be Frederick March wooing Norma Shearer.) But Browning wrote in many voices besides his own, his best work often formed to express personalities invented or drawn from history. Even in his own day, much of what he did was considered strangely made, less than "poetic," frankly weird, both as a function of verse and in the writing. "He used poetry as a medium for writing prose," Oscar said, not meaning a compliment, though Wilde also said, "In art, only Browning can make action and psychology one."

Robert Browning has to be among the most written about of all the Victorians, recognized early on as an exceptional talent and a big, remarkable man. The Victorians did like big, remarkable men. Another thunderous, and somewhat more obviously Attic poet, Walter Savage Landor, himself no slouch when it came to large and violent gestures, if less inclined to any but stately measures, described Browning as unique, none having a "step so active, so inquiring eye, or tongue so varied in discourse." No mean praise from that irascible old party. (Remember, Landor knew Byron well. He had some experience by which to judge the vitality of English poets besides himself.) What made the man remarkable, besides his broad chested, handsome self, was the uncharacteristic, even anti-poetic vigor, the overt masculinity, he brought to his poetic work. Like Hugo, he stomps. Unlike Hugo, at least in verse, Browning can be clumsy. "Browning used words with violence," said Ford Madox Ford, and while his violence can be very exciting, Browning could also do real damage to his own poems and to the language. He was, to modify the cliche a little, a bull in the printer's shop.

The abandon with which he followed his curiosity and the wide range of his interests, led him off in almost every direction at once. As was not uncommon, he was a playwright as well as a poet. But Browning's technique was less respectful of the conventions, even if he was almost always perfectly respectable, even somewhat conventional in his philosophy. Speaking through various masks, and, unlike the Romantics that came before him, investing these assumed personalities with a robust and sometimes quite surprising, even disturbing psychological reality, Browning became something very like a novelist in verse. Like a novelist, he was more fascinated by character and incident than by the expression of beautiful sentiments or ideas, though he was certainly capable, if not of stringing pearls, then of scattering them by the fistful, like a boy sharing the treasures of his marbles-bag. He was traveled, read widely in at least the usual languages for his time, and his inquisitiveness, unlike that of most poets, most Englishmen of his day, was amazingly broad-minded, even respectful of the history and culture he encountered. If, for example, he had no use for Catholicism, it was as much a dislike of unchallenged and myopic hegemony and privilege, as evidenced to him daily in the Italy he loved, as it was the more usual habit of Anglican disdain for continental "superstition." Browning was no radical, like Shelley, but he brought an admirable skepticism, as well as a blazing enthusiasm, to his every encounter with humanity, past and present. If Browning was never revolutionary, in either politics or technique, he was always, solidly, sensibly humane in his liberalism.

So why then should Robert Browning not find more readers in our own time? In the first place, I can't help but think, too much having been made of his own biography, his reputation having been so loomingly large in his own time, it would have been impossible for those who followed him not to want to give his monument a regular kick. His famous marriage did him little good with readers in the latter part of the last century, allowing him to be seen, and dismissed, as a rather quaintly heroic figure, an old fashioned kind of gentleman, a versifying swain, rather than a serious writer. And then what he wrote, and his odd way of writing, his stories and his verse, have not sustained sufficient interest academically, or established the kind of lasting familiarity with the wider reading public, to keep him in his place among the English poets that matter most. He established no school, inspired few reputable imitators, and was, even in his own time, famously "difficult." His antique language, and his weird, rushing style, the "stutter in his utterance" as Rupert Brooke put it, put modern readers off. "Old Hippety-Hop o' the accents," old Ezra Pound called him, though I can think of few likelier ancestors for Ezra than Browning himself.

I met Robert Browning at a second hand book shop, in a discount bin. How appropriate this was should be clear to anyone who would open The Ring and the Book to find the poet, as his story opens, in Florence, plucking an old yellow book from the muddle of a street vendor's stall. Before I found Browning's book in a handsome little hardcover, marked down I think to just a dollar and therefore made irresistible, I knew the poet only as anyone might; from the dramatic tellings of his romance of his wife, and from, I should think, the stray lines that might have been loosed into the ordinary conversation of the likes of me, from Pippa Passing, for example, though I'd never read that excellent little drama. I should think I knew his face from Beerbohm's caricatures before I knew a proper poem of Browning's. I don't doubt I'd read about him before I'd read a book by him. I was lucky in the book I finally bought and read, and luckier still that my first purchase of Browning wasn't, say, Sordello!

The Ring and the Book is a wildly entertaining and strange book; a 'true crime" story, told from one perspective after another, from the point of view of various witnesses, of the criminal and the lawyers (at length!) and even of The Pope, to whom one last appeal for clemency is made. The book is a wonder. From what Henry James suggested might have been a "mere Criminal anecdote," had it not been seen in "Browning's inordinately colored light," the poet does all the parts in turn, stage-manages the whole drama, adds appropriate effects, is not above shocks, relishes reverses, satirizes, sympathizes, diverts and grows distracted, but always entertains, even as he considers not just the case, as it were, but cases.

I had never read anything remotely like it. I enjoy narrative poems, but this one has no hero, no stolid, epic, admirable man, no quest in it, beyond the poet's own to see things true and to let us not only know, but feel something of the times he recreates, and the crime, or rather the consequences of it, and the telling, that so intrigued him.

It is a long book, particularly by the standards of poetry and more particularly by the reading standards of the present day, but I would hope, should others be as lucky as I was to find it in some bookstore-bin, or on a proper shelf, they might be willing to chance it. Because I did, I've come to own a shelf of Browning, had for next to nothing, and I've had as much real pleasure from the poet as from any author I've come across in recent years. Whatever the state of his reputation, however unlikely he is now to be studied or touted, he ought to be read.