With this famous portmanteau phrase, Chesterton sweeps together such marvellous boys as John Ruskin ‘solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts’, Charles Dickens toiling in a blacking factory, Thomas Carlyle ‘lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire’, and John Keats, who ‘had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon’. Add to these Robert Browning, the son of a Bank of England clerk in Camberwell. These men, born to fame but not to wealth, were the inheritors of a new world that gave them a liberty that, in Robert Browning’s case, ‘exalted poetry above all earthly things’ and which he served ‘with single-hearted intensity’. Browning stands, observed Chesterton, ‘among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else’.
The matter of poetry as Robert’s sole vocation was mostly decided by the revelation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the atheistical poet. The effect was tremendous. It was like coming across a hitherto unknown brother who had thought everything, experienced everything, accomplished everything that Robert Browning, fourteen years old, living in Camberwell, had as yet only dimly felt and begun to put, somewhat derivatively of admired models, into words. Robert had read the cynical, atheistical Voltaire without obvious moral corruption; he had read of the world’s virtues and vices, irregularities and injustices, in the words of Wanley, Shakespeare, Milton, and in other works of dramatic historical fiction, without becoming contemptuous of virtue; he had read the sensational Byron without becoming mad or bad; he had read the waspish Horace Walpole without becoming overwhelmingly mannered. But the cumulative effect was bound, in some degree, to be unsettling. Shelley—who had, like young Robert, read Voltaire and encyclopedias, and who had consorted with Byron—ratcheted up the adolescent tension one notch too far.
Shelley’s musical verse hit every note. With exquisite Shelleyan technique, all the airs that had been vapouring in Robert’s head were given compositional form—delicate, forceful; and as the concert performance proceeded, Shelley’s genius, his creative spirit, played out the great work of the ideal world in which infamy was erased, God rebelled against Satan, and in which—as Chesterton remarks—‘every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy’. All things in heaven and on earth proclaimed the triumph of liberty. ‘O World, O Life, O Time,’ Robert in later life apostrophized with deliberate irony on the flyleaf of Shelley’s Miscellaneous Poems given to him by his cousin Jim Silverthorne, a book he vigorously annotated in his first enthusiasm and then thought better of in his maturity when he tried, on 2 June 1878, to erase ‘the foolish markings and still more foolish scribblings’ that ‘show the impression made on a boy by this first specimen of Shelley’s poetry’. What he could not vehemently blot out or rub at or scratch away or scribble over, he hacked at with a knife or finally—all these obliterating resources being inadequate—cut out with scissors. It seems an excessive reaction, some fifty years later, but the first enthusiasm had evidently come to seem itself embarrassingly excessive. Not only did Robert not wish to remember it, he was determined to efface it from memory—his own or posterity’s—absolutely, though without actually, as was his usual resort, burning the book to ashes. He could burn his own poetry, perhaps, but not another’s.
‘Between the year 1826, when Browning became acquainted with the work of Shelley, and 1832, when Pauline was written,’ says Betty Miller in Robert Browning: A Portrait, ‘there took place in the life of the poet a crisis so radical that everything that followed upon it, including his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett, was qualified in one way or another by the effects of that initial experience.’ This sums up the biographical consensus that began with Mrs Orr’s pronouncement that Robert held Shelley greatest in the poetic art because ‘in his case, beyond all others, he believed its exercise to have been prompted by the truest spiritual inspiration’.
The souls of Keats and Shelley were identified in Robert’s mind with two nightingales which sang harmoniously together on a night in May—perhaps his birthday, the 7th of May in 1826—one in a laburnum (‘heavy with its weight of gold’, as William Sharp says Browning told a friend) in the Brownings’ garden, the other in a large copper beech on adjoining ground. ‘Their utterance,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was, to such a spirit as his, the last, as in a certain sense the first, word of what poetry can say.’ The image was no doubt prompted in Robert’s mind by Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. At any rate, whether or not these birds were the transmigrated souls of Keats and Shelley, as Robert reverently convinced himself, they ‘had settled in a Camberwell garden’, says Chesterton less reverently, ‘in order to sing to the only young gentleman who really adored and understood them’.
The major impact on the tender sensibilities of young Robert Browning was made by Shelley’s Queen Mab, which later achieved a reputation, when issued in a new edition by the publisher Edward Moxon, for being that most horrid—indeed, criminal—thing, a blasphemous libel. ‘The Shelley whom Browning first loved,’ says Mrs Orr, ‘was the Shelley of Queen Mab, the Shelley who would have remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became a professing atheist and, for two years, a practising vegetarian. He returned to his natural diet when he found his eyesight becoming weak. The atheism cured itself; we do not exactly know when or how.’ In a letter to Elizabeth Barrett on 13 September 1845, Robert wrote of having lived for two years on bread and potatoes—a regime that, if strictly adhered to, would have tested the faith and asceticism even of the Desert Fathers.
Queen Mab is a lecture in poetic form to Ianthe, a disembodied spirit, on the sorry state of the temporal universe. Mab is a bluestocking fairy queen who takes intense issue with the various shortcomings of contemporary politics, conventional religion, and cankerous commerce, all of which are judged to be more or less hopelessly misguided when not actually corrupt. Queen Mab’s denunciation convinces less by rational argument than by the irresistible force of her—Shelley’s—convictions. She barely stops for breath (only now and then pauses for footnotes), fired by ideas and ideals that combine termagant intensity with tender sentiment, fiercely heretical in her inability to accept a creating Deity but spiritually softer in her recognition that there could be ‘a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe’ which might or might not, according to religious belief, be identified with the supreme maker, sometimes called God.
In an aside, dealing with the matter in a footnote, Shelley argued abstinence from meat as a means whereby man might at a stroke eliminate the brutal pleasures of the chase and restore an agricultural paradise, improve himself physically and morally, and probably live forever in health and virtue. The spiritual and the corporeal were virtually synonymous. Shelley recommended himself and the pure system of his ideas to youth whose moral enthusiasm for truth and virtue was yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. Queen Mab was pouring out a song which, if not of innocence, at least was addressing innocents. The force of Shelley’s expression rather more than the systematic reason of his argument is still powerfully appealing to idealists, and most of his vehement agitprop (as it might be called today) speaks to succeeding generations even unto our own times—so much so that the utterances of Queen Mab sound not unlike the conventional wisdom of modern environmentalists, new-agers, and bourgeois bohemians. It is difficult for us now to appreciate the thrilling horror with which Shelley’s words were received by his unnerved contemporaries who read not only blasphemy—bad enough—but revolution between, as much as upon, every irreverent line.
Vegetarianism worried Robert’s mother; atheism worried the Revd George Clayton. Robert stuck to his beliefs for a while, but forgave himself his youthful excesses, characterizing them later in his life as ‘Crude convictions