On first publication, Robert had been anxious to allay any interpretation of Dramatic Lyrics as expressing anything that might be construed as personal to the author. A plain disclaimer asserted: ‘Such poems as the following come properly enough, I suppose, under the head of “Dramatic Pieces”; being, though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.’ This was largely true in principle: the poems are not notably introspective but are mostly based on legend or history; they depend on dramatic action more than philosophical themes; and—with the exception of ‘Cavalier Tunes’—they are distinctly flavoured with Robert’s observations of nations and nationalities other than England and the English. The title of the collection also directs readers away from any psychological analysis: the poems are by an author recently known for dramatic works and the word Lyrics in the title specifically casts them back to the lyrical poetry of the Romantic poets. Of course, this is somewhat disingenuous—they are in a distinctively modern, Browning idiom.
Robert might have saved himself all the trouble of dissociating himself personally from the utterances in Dramatic Lyrics since the pamphlet attracted little or no attention from readers or critics. John Forster reviewed it, more or less admiringly, in the Examiner, writing that ‘Mr Browning is a genuine poet, and only needs to have less misgiving on the subject himself.’ But difficult, of course, to believe in one’s genuine poetic ability when nobody else notices it or pays good money to read it. Perhaps Forster meant, however, that Robert had identified his true manner in Dramatic Lyrics. If so, he was right. The pamphlet proved definitively, for the first time, Robert’s personal, inimitable mastery of the dramatic lyric and the monologue.
‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, a last-minute addition to fill up space in the volume, had been written for young Willie Macready, the actor’s eldest son, when the boy was ill in bed. Willie liked to draw pictures and had asked Robert for something to illustrate. His retentive mind recalled a story about the death of the Pope’s Legate at the Council of Trent from Wanley’s The Wonders of the Little World. Willie’s clever drawings inspired the final version of the improvised poem, now a nursery classic, which was perfectly designed to thrill an imaginative little boy:
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats. (ll. 10–20)
The poem is a perfectly structured, perfectly paced, perfectly psychologically judged dramatic story, perfectly suited to the human voice—to recitation, which Robert loved. If we are to look for the cadences of his own voice in conversation, we may look no further than ‘The Pied Piper’. Robert very likely enjoyed it as much as Willie. Indeed, it became one of his party pieces when entertaining at children’s parties. The rhythms are important here, just as they are in another poem in Dramatic Lyrics: ‘Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr’, said to have been composed on horseback in 1842. The thudding phrase ‘As I ride, as I ride’ resonates throughout the poem, just as effectively creating the sense of a rhythmic, steady gallop as the cadences of ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, published in 1845 in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics:
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. (ll. 7–12)
If ‘The Pied Piper’ was aesthetically a great dramatic success, no less were other poems in the pamphlet. Robert had been impressed by Tennyson’s poetry, though he preferred reality to Tennyson’s romance. It is this insistence on reality, rather than romance or sentiment, that gives such power not only in the fantasy of legend to the ambiguously happy though unambiguously moral ending of ‘The Pied Piper’, but also to the grim amorality of poems like ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’. Both these latter poems concern the murder of women. It is possible that the murderers in both are mad—fantasists to whom reality is a mirage; but to suppose any such thing is to flinch from Robert Browning’s insistence on character over the detail of narrative, in contrast to Tennyson’s emphasis on story over characterization. Ian Jack makes this important point: ‘Tennyson tells us that the old man who narrates the story is an artist, but we have to be told—whereas in Browning we would know from the smell of the paint.’115 G. K. Chesterton had earlier made this point in a different way: Robert knew about painting, sculpture, music, and the rest because he had practised painting, sculpture, and music with his own hands.
And in these two poems of muted horror, just as in the poems of action and adventure, the unemphatic pace of the narrative underlines the matter-of-fact nature of the act and its matter-of-fact acceptance:
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain. (ll. 33–42)
And we, too, are sure: the tenor of the lines might do just as well for telling us that her lover was tying Porphyria’s shoelaces as an act of humble homage. Just so the Duke, in ‘My Last Duchess’, refers to the death of his wife:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.’ (ll. 1–4)
Porphyria’s lover waits quietly for the rain to stop and the wind to die down, the girl’s ‘smiling rosy little head’ propped up on his shoulder.
And