William Sharp describes Browning’s occasional long walks into the country: ‘One particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge, or deep in meadow-grasses, or under a tree … and there give himself up so absolutely to the life of the moment that even the shy birds would alight close by, and sometimes venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings for a brief space on his recumbent body.’ Sharp, in this pastoral mode, quotes Browning himself as having said that ‘his faculty of observation at that time would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iroquois’.29 His faculty of absorption and repose, in this imagery, would have done credit to a St Francis. His love for his mother’s flowers—particularly the roses and lilies that later he would gather to send to Elizabeth Barrett—was perhaps one contributory factor in his brief vegetarianism.
In a letter of 24 July 1838 to Miss Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, he makes a significant confession: ‘I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves—some leaves—that I every now and then,—in an impatience at being able to possess myself of them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent—bite them to bits.’ This devouring quality of Browning’s desire for sensation, to the extent of attempting to consume it literally in the form of vegetable matter, is remarkable. It is as though Browning’s passion to possess the world could only be achieved by eating it, by incorporating it within himself. In Pauline, he recognized some of this when he identified
a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all.
and he declared that,
I have lived all life
When it is most alive.
How apposite, then, to come upon the charmingly-named Flower sisters, Eliza and Sarah. It was to Eliza that Mrs Browning had confided the text of Incondita and it was Eliza, so taken with it, who had copied it for Mr William Johnson Fox, a friend of her father, Benjamin Flower, ‘known’, says Mrs Orr, ‘as editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer’. Robert, encouraged by her enthusiasm for his poems, began writing to Eliza Flower at the age of twelve or thirteen.30 She was nine years his senior. These letters, which she kept for her lifetime, were eventually and effortfully retrieved and destroyed—all but a few scraps—by Robert. It seems likely, even without the confirmation of the correspondence, that Eliza was his first, immature love, though the boyish, romantic attachment died out ‘for want of root’. Sentimental love, if that was what it amounted to, subsided into a lasting respect and affection for ‘a very remarkable person’ who, with her sister, was responsible for a number of popular hymns such as ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’, written by Sarah Flower Adams and set to music by Eliza. These were composed for Mr Fox’s chapel where Eliza ‘assumed the entire management of the choral part of the service’.31 Eliza, though Robert denied it, seems to have been the major identifiable inspiration for his second excursion into verse: the long confessional poem entitled Pauline.
Mrs Orr conventionally regrets that the headstrong Robert Browning was not sent to a public school where his energies might have been efficiently directed; but Griffin and Minchin take the more sensible view that a pre-Arnoldian public school education, if only and unrepresentatively to judge by the boy’s experience of the Ready school, would have been been ‘hardly encouraging … Nor were public schools in good odour.’ The reforms inspired by Dr Arnold of Rugby were a thing of the future.
Meantime, Robert’s father in 1825 had subscribed £100 to the foundation of the new London University, an investment that brought no dividends but procured one particular advantage: since Mr Browning was one of the original ‘proprietors’, he was entitled to a free education for a nominee. Robert, his son, could be admitted to London University as a student. In contrast to Oxford, Cambridge, and the other ancient universities, which required subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles as a necessary prerequisite to admission, London University was nonsectarian, the education was less costly than at other academic institutions, and it was possible to combine the university education with private home study.
Robert was earnestly recommended by his father, describing himself as ‘a parent anxious for the welfare of an only Son’ who deemed admission to the University ‘essential to his future happiness’. Furthermore, Mr Browning testified to Robert’s impeccable moral character (‘I never knew him from his earliest infancy, guilty of the slightest deviation from Truth’) and to his ‘unwearied application for the last 6 years, to the Greek, Latin & French languages’. Mrs Orr draws a discreet veil over the upshot, confining herself to the information that ‘In his eighteenth year he attended, for a term or two, a Greek class at the London University’—he registered for the opening session, 1829–30—and that ‘It was at about the time of his short attendance at University College that the choice of poetry as his future profession was formally made.’ The phrase ‘short attendance’ implies some length of time more than a week, which was the period Robert survived lodging away from home and his mother with a Mr Hughes in Bedford Square, and perhaps a little longer than the few months he endured the pedestrian German, Greek, and Latin classes for which he registered before quitting the college entirely. He was seventeen years old, an age at which, as Mrs Orr frankly acknowledges, he was naturally ‘not only more restless, but less amiable than at any other’.
‘The always impatient temper assumed a quality of aggressiveness,’ she reports. ‘He behaved as a youth will who knows himself to be clever, and believes that he is not appreciated, because the crude or paradoxical forms which his cleverness assumes do not recommend it to his elders’ minds.’ This is judiciously put. A little less indulgent is the bald admission that Robert ‘set the judgements of those about him at defiance, and gratuitously proclaimed himself everything that he was, and some things that he was not.’ School and college simply wearied him: the pedantic routine was stifling. It was not that he lacked aptitude for study, more that he lacked inclination to confine it to the well-worn track. Which is not to say Robert was unpopular: William Sharp quotes a letter from The Times of 14 December 1889, in which a friend loyally testified that ‘I attended with him the Greek class of Professor Long, and I well remember the esteem and regard in which he was held by his fellow-students.’
Poetry was the thing—a foregone conclusion, at least according to Robert. Some attempts seem to have been made to promote the professions of barrister (chosen by his friends Domett and Arnould), clergyman (though Robert had given up regular church attendance), banker (employment in the Bank of England and Rothschild’s bank being the family business), even desperately—it is said—painter or actor. For a short while, when he was sixteen years old, Robert attended medical lectures given by the celebrated physician Dr Blundell at Guy’s Hospital. These are said to have aroused in him ‘considerable interest in the sciences connected with medicine’,32 but perhaps more from a fascination with the morbid, since ‘no knowledge of either disease or its treatment ever seems to have penetrated into his life’. At any rate, there seems to have been no positive belief that Robert might be suited to the medical profession. The tentative suggestions of anxious parents—the adamantine refusal of a strong-willed son—sulks and silences: it is a familiar-enough scenario, distressing