Robert had become accustomed to the standards of early nineteenth-century suburban middle-class comfort, but he had been educated as a mid-to-late eighteenth-century gentleman, not only in the breadth of his acquired learning but equally in the departments of upper-class sporting activities such as riding, boxing, and fencing, the social graces of singing, dancing, music, and art, and the civilized values of a man of fine feeling in dress and deportment. The acquisition of these benefits was one thing—they required no financial outlay on his own part; to maintain them would be quite another. Refined tastes are generally expensive to indulge as a permanent style of life.
In his late teens and early twenties, Robert cut a noticeable figure: his appearance was dapper and dandified, verging in some respects on the Byronic, particularly in the manner of his hair, which he wore romantically long, falling over his shoulders and carefully curled. He was of middle height, neither tall nor short, slim, dark-haired, sallow-complexioned, brightly grey-eyed, charming in his urbane, self-confident manner. Robert presented himself to society as ‘full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what’s more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success.’ He was a model of punctilious politeness, good-looking, light-footed and—remarked Mrs ‘Tottie’ Bridell-Fox, daughter of William Johnson Fox, of his appearance in 1835 to 1836—‘just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid-gloves and such things: quite “the glass of fashion and the mould of form”.’33 He grew, when able to do so, crisp whiskers from cheekbone to chin.
In the absence of an assured annual unearned income, Robert made up his mind to a calculated economy in his private needs: writing to Elizabeth Barrett on 13 September 1845, he would later comment, ‘My whole scheme of life (with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down) was long ago calculated … So for my own future way in the world I have always refused to care’—though that was then, without any responsibility other than to his own material maintenance. The Brownings were not poor, but neither were they rich—they were generous not only in keeping Robert at home but equally in the confidence they displayed in allowing him to devote himself to writing poetry. They might, of course, have been merely marking time, hoping that something would turn up, catch Robert’s attention, fire his imagination and provide him with a good living. But on the best interpretation, his parents were large-minded and great-hearted in their confidence that this was the right thing to do for their son in particular and for the larger matter of literature in general. There was not much prospect of any financial return on their expenditure: it could hardly have been regarded as an investment except in the most optimistic view, poetry then, as now, being a paying proposition only in the most exceptional cases—Lord Byron being one in his own times; Sir Walter Scott, who also benefited from his activity as a novelist, being another.
But no doubt Mr Browning would have looked back on his own career and felt again the sigh of responsibility, of inevitability, with which he had given up his own artistic ambitions for routine employment as a banker. Robert ‘appealed to his father’, says Edmund Gosse, ‘whether it would not be better for him to see life in the best sense, and cultivate the powers of his mind, than to shackle himself in the very outset of his career by a laborious training foreign to that aim’. And, says Gosse, ‘so great was the confidence of the father in the genius of the son’ that Mr Browning acquiesced—though perhaps by no means as promptly as Robert Browning later convinced himself and Gosse to have been the case. But acquiesce he did. Whatever Mr Browning might have felt he owed his son, perhaps he felt he owed himself another chance, albeit at second-hand. It was an indulgence, no doubt, but Mr Browning was not a man to invite difficulties or disputes. It was also a matter of simple fact: Robert remained rooted at home.
William Sharp makes the point that the young Robert Browning is sometimes credited with ‘the singular courage to decline to be rich’, but that Browning himself ‘was the last man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision as “singular courage”’. He had, says Sharp, ‘nothing of this bourgeois spirit’. Money, for money’s sake, was not a consideration—as his letter of 13 September 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett later testified. He would prefer ‘a blouse and a blue shirt (such as I now write in) to all manner of dress and gentlemanly appointment’. He could, ‘if necessary, groom a horse not so badly, or at all events would rather do it all day long than succeed Mr Fitzroy Kelly in the Solicitor-Generalship’, though by 1845 that youthful insouciance was changing in the light of love and its prospective attendant domestic expenses and obligations. Nevertheless, for the time being, in 1830, he ‘need not very much concern himself beyond considering the lilies how they grow’. Or how the roses might blow in his mother’s garden.
In Robert Browning: A Portrait, Betty Miller reviews the Brownings’ financial situation, pointing remorselessly to the comparatively humble origins of Robert’s mother as the daughter of a ‘mariner in Dundee’ rather than aggrandizing her as the daughter of a more substantial ship owner, and playing down the status and salary of the Bank of England clerkship enjoyed by Robert’s father. She also instances some contemporary critics who perceived Robert’s lack of apparent professional middle-class occupation as disgraceful. The prevailing attitude of respect for what is now identified as the ‘Protestant work ethic’ was as incorrigible then as now: poverty was generally considered to be morally reprehensible and fecklessness was regarded as a moral failing. The ‘deserving poor’ (a fairly select minority of the hapless and the disadvantaged) received pretty rough charity, grudging at best and rarely without an attached weight of sanctimony.
An accredited gentleman with an adequate fortune might blamelessly lead a life of leisure and pleasure, but the Brownings pretended to no giddy gentility. They were of the middle class, and the men of the middle class contributed their work to the perceived profit (moral and pecuniary) of society and to their own interests (much the same). Faults in character evidenced by apparent idleness were probably vicious and not easily glossed over by any high-tone, high-flown talk of devotion to poetry or art as a substitute for masculine resolve or absolution from a moral and material responsibility to earn a decent living. There is in this a suggestion that a poet must be, if not effeminate, at least effete—in contrast to the virtuous character of the common man committed to his daily labour who takes his ‘true honourable place in society, etc. etc.’, as Robert himself remarked. He was not wholly indifferent to conventional social values and expectations.
His position as a family dependent, nevertheless, did not unduly worry Robert: he acknowledged his father’s generosity and airily supposed that, with a little effort, he might make ‘a few hundred pounds which would soon cover my simple expenses’; and furthermore he felt, too, ‘whenever I make up my mind to that, I can be rich enough and to spare—because,’ he wrote later to Elizabeth Barrett, ‘along with what you have thought genius in me, is certainly talent, what the world recognises as such; and I have tried it in various ways, just to be sure that I was a little magnanimous in never intending to use it.’ Robert could do it if he had to, but for the time being he didn’t see, or perhaps acknowledge, the necessity—he continued never to know ‘what it was to have to do a certain thing to-day and not to-morrow’, though that did not imply any inclination to do nothing. As Edmund Gosse reported from a conversation with Robert in his later life, ‘freedom led to a super-abundance of production since on looking back he could see that he had often, in his unfettered leisure, been afraid to do nothing’. For the time being, however, Robert settled back into the familiar routines of family life and his proper application to poetry. He gave up vegetarianism as damaging to his health and atheism as damaging to his soul. The prodigal had returned, though in this case he could barely be said ever to have been away.
In January 1833, Robert completed a poetic work entitled Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession. It had been written as the first item in a projected grander master plan conceived at Richmond on the afternoon shading to evening of 22 October 1832 when he had seen Edmund Kean, once a great actor, by then in decline and disrepair but still powerfully impressive even when debilitated by drink and tuberculosis, play Shakespeare’s Richard III. The poem, consisting of 1,031 lines, took Robert three months to write. He was twenty years old. Chesterton’s dry comment is that ‘It exhibits the characteristic