‘We can imagine,’ says Mrs Orr with a sympathetic shudder, ‘in what revulsion of feeling towards firm land and healthy motion this dream of a headlong gallop was born in him.’
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three …
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
Better, perhaps, to think of happier times, of Robert inspired by this floundering journey on the swell of the sea to recall the first journey into Russia, and hear again in the slap of water against the sides of the Norham Castle the rhythmic beat of his own and Benkhausen’s galloping horses as they ran through northern Europe, their hooves thudding through the silences of white snow and green firs. He wrote, too, ‘Home Thoughts, from the Sea’, a short poem ‘written at the same time, and in the same manner’78—in pencil on the cover of a book—a colourful riot of geography (‘Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away’), history (‘Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay’), and triumphant English victory (‘Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?—say’) in eight rhythmic, rhyming, ringing lines.
Not much remains of first-hand information about Robert’s first excursion to Italy and his journey home through Germany and the Low Countries. On his return, he was back in touch with William Johnson Fox, that great man who, as Robert wrote to Fanny Howarth in April 1839, ‘is my Chiron in a small way’, referring to him as the possessor of a ‘magnificent and poetical nature’. Robert regarded Fox as ‘my literary father’ and took care to maintain the connection with him and his family. William Sharp79 reports a reminiscence of Fox’s daughter ‘Tottie’ (later Mrs Bridell-Fox), who wrote: ‘I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palaces, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced.’
Robert had spent two weeks in Venice out of his four in Italy, and images of his impressions would surface later in poems such as Pippa Passes, ‘In a Gondola’, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, and—significantly for the time being—in the work in hand, Sordello, the poem that is confirmed as having been in the making since at least 1835, and probably for a while before, very likely soon after Pauline. Robert wrote to Fox on 16 April 1835, in a letter referring to Paracelsus, that ‘I have another affair on hand, rather of a more popular nature, I conceive, but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two.’ This ‘other affair’, Sordello, had already been subject to several revisions since its inception in or about 1833, and would again be revised to incorporate first-hand impressions of the Italian sites and sights still remaining, however much altered, some six hundred years after the thirteenth-century troubador (trovatore or, more literarily, trouvère) Sordello had walked and talked among them.
On the day of his departure for Italy, Robert had written to John Robertson, a friend who was connected with the Westminster Review, to say, ‘I sail this morning for Venice—intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes.’80 Sordello, the poem, is also referred to in a letter to Fanny Haworth that Mrs Orr cannot date precisely but is likely to have been written in the summer of 1838 or 1839: ‘I am going to begin finishing Sordello—and to begin thinking a Tragedy (an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticism on Strafford) and I want to have another tragedy in prospect, I write best so provided: I had chosen a splendid subject for it, when I learned that a magazine for next, this, month, will have a scene founded on my story; vulgarizing or doing no good to it: and I accordingly throw it up. I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love, to contrast with the one I mean to have ready in a short time.’81 The plays he had in mind were to be King Victor and King Charles, and The Return of the Druses. With his hopes for the popular appeal of Sordello, and the prospective play devoted to a theme of ‘the most wild and passionate love’, it can be taken that Robert was aiming now at the wild hearts as well as the impassioned minds of the market for poetry and plays.
Which begs a question about the condition of his own heart: love, remarks Mrs Orr very astutely at this point, had played a noticeably small part in Robert’s life. His adolescent feelings of affection for Eliza Flower were never very serious, nor likely to be taken very seriously, considering her long-standing devotion to William Fox. No woman—so far as we know from the scant evidence remaining of Robert’s early years—detained his romantic attention or redirected it from the affection he maintained for his mother. Nobody else, for the time being, could count on being kissed goodnight every night by Robert Browning. Mrs Orr suggests that, in the absence of any personal experience of ‘wild and passionate love’, Robert turned to Fanny Haworth to supply the deficit, though what he supposed she might know of it is beyond conjecture. There was a lively sympathy, but no romantic feeling, between Robert and Fanny, and it would certainly have been indelicate, if not improper, for him to inquire too closely into the passions of an older, unmarried woman living cloistered at home with her mother. In a letter of April 1839, he tells Fanny direct, ‘Do you know I was, and am, an Improvisatore of the head—not of the hort [sic] …—not you!’
In March 1840, Edward Moxon, at the expense of Robert’s father, published Sordello—‘that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry’, as even the partisan William Sharp is obliged to describe the poem. Alfred Tennyson read the first line:
Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told,
and finally he read the last line:
Who would, has read Sordello’s story told,
whereupon he famously said that the first line and the last line were the only two lines of the poem that he understood and they were lies since nothing in between made any sense to him. Douglas Jerrold, at the time a well-known playwright and later an original staff member and contributor to Punch, is said to have started reading Sordello while recuperating from illness. No sooner had he picked up the book than he put it down, saying, ‘My God! I’m an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind’s gone. I can’t understand two consecutive lines of an English poem.’ He called his family to his bedside and gave them the poem to read. When they sadly shook their heads and could make no more of it than he could himself, he heaved a sigh of relief and, confirmed in his sanity, went to sleep. Thomas Carlyle wrote to say that he had read Sordello with great interest but that Jane, his wife, wished to know whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book.82
It is as well to get these three memorably funny stories dusted off at the