Seeing Browning Plain
Robert Browning: a Portrait. By Betty Miller. (John Murray. 21s.) MRS. MILLER has written an excellent book which will be for many years the standard life of the poet. Equipped with material hitherto unpublished, with letters—chiefly written by Elizabeth Browning— which have been wholly or partially suppressed from the printed collections by high-minded editors, she is able to give a fuller and less simply-coloured account of the Brownings' wooing and marriage than previous biographers, to present a less conventionally bustling and optimistic poet than the figure which recent generations have come to despise. She gives us, in fact, a neurotic Browning, inter- preted for a neurotic age in terms never overtly Freudian yet tinged always with the fashionable wash of psycho-analysis. Though almost nothing is known of the poet's mother, Mrs. Miller is able conclusively to prove the poet's unhealthy dependence upon her, and to trace its effects on his relations with Elizabeth Barrett. In these relations, too, she can trace an element of decay that has not been noticed by previous biographers, to cite "Two in the Campagna" and Browning's perpetual party-going in the last years of his marriage as evidence of a decline in his love, which arose from his too great dependence on his wife and his resulting poetic sterility.
Now all this exploration reduces Robert Browning from the status of a Great Victorian figure to the most human of contemporary proportions; and it is no doubt better to search with Mrs. Miller for the reasons of his weakness than to hymn with the Browning Society and his friend and first biographer, Mrs. Sutherland Orr, his profound philosophical message to the world. For Browning had no deep moral message, and his blustering exterior certainly hid an inner self-dissatisfaction. His poetry, however, speaks repeatedly of experience at a deeper emotional level than is revealed by the letters and gossip on which Mrs. Miller bases her findings. In the case of "The Ring and the Book," for instance, she makes much of a statement by the poet to Julia Wedgwood that his wife would have disliked the poem, since she had never shown the least interest in the papers on which he had based his plot. Against this, however, one must put the address "0 lyric Love, half angel and half bird," and the whole symbolism of the ring which gave his masterpiece one half of its name. "The Ring and the Book" was undoubtedly conceived as the memorial to his marriage, whatever the poet's subsequent doubts as to his wife's hypothetical attitude to it. Nor is the poem the bald record of a crime; it is rather the record of a miracle; of Pompilies innocence and her martyrdom; of its effect on a worldly priest; on a Pope imprisoned in his own intellectuality and on her violent, unhappy husband and murderer. "The Ring and the Book" is the tale of beauty unnoticed in a world where "Half-Rome" gossips, "the Other Half-Rome" slanders and yet a third witness gives an ironic account of events to some unfeeling and curious Highness who has missed the spectacle.
Our own age, and Mrs. Miller with it, is in danger of seeing the great so plain as to identify itself with the ironic spectators at the back of the court rather than with the true and emotionally involved witnesses. She has much to say about the differences between the married poets on the subject of Napoleon III, of spiritualism, of the pampering and adulation of their unfortunate son, of the poet's pecuniary dependence on his wife and on other points which reduce the legend of their love to all too human proportions. In all these matters she weighs her evidence fairly; she does not strive to deflate the poets' reputations. Even when he shows Elizabeth creeping back into the Wigmore Street house to gossip with her sisters on her visits to London, and trembling at the sound of her father's approach- ing footstep, the undignified picture is not intended to denigrate. Only in her conclusion that Elizabeth was glad to die since she felt herself to have become a drag upon her husband does Mrs. Miller venture what I feel to be an unwarrantable and ugly assumption, against which I would quote Admetos' speech over the dying Alkestis in " Bala ustion 's Adventure."
In her psychological analysis Mrs. Miller is always most pene- trating, and her writing is throughout sensitive. It is in her comparative neglect of Browning's poetry, in her failure to use it as evidence of his thoughts and feelings of at least equal validity to that of events and letters, that her weakness lies. Again in her refusal to examine Browning's religious beliefs, and the genuine experiences—recorded in many of the poems—on which they were based she has confined herself within limits which debar this excellent book from the highest class. It is nevertheless a true portrait of Robert Browning. Yet can one believe that the man it depicts was capable of drawing the resurrected Lazarus, as he did in the Karshish epistle, of showing knowledge turning to wisdom in the Pope's speech from "The Ring and the Book" or of the subtle and mysterious symbolism of "Childe Roland"? For a man is his clinical picture, his psychological picture—and something more, which in a poet is sometimes evident in his poetry.
J. M. COHEN,
Previous page
