Just so the Duke goes down to—possibly—dinner with his guest, calling attention casually on the stairs to another interesting work of art:
Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (ll. 53–6)
The Duke gave commands and his wife died; Porphyria’s lover wound her hair around her neck and strangled her: in neither case was there remorse or retribution; no police to break down the ducal door, no God to strike down Porphyria’s murderous lover with a thunderbolt. Like Johannes Agricola, similarly complacent, the murderers may have felt:
I have God’s warrant, could I blend
All hideous sins, as in a cup,
To drink the mingled venoms up;
Secure my nature will convert
The draught to blossoming gladness fast: (ll. 33–7)
The point about these characters—ruthless, cold, passionate, hot—is their natures, fully and subtly realized. Their actions depend upon in the act, and are informed in the aftermath, by their characters, and not vice versa. Murder is banal enough: it is the character who commits it who is the interesting subject, and Robert Browning is so much in complete control of the poem that gives the character to us fully-formed that we are largely unaware, on a first reading, of the artistry—the poetic authenticity, the artistic integrity—with which he does it.
Robert Browning, if his works were not often or generally read, was frequently and widely discussed among his friends. He breakfasted with John Kenyon, took six o’clock tea with the Carlyles, dined with Serjeant Talfourd, supped with Macready and William Johnson Fox. All these were social occasions that broadened his acquaintance and at which he was welcome for his confidence in conversation and aptitude for anecdote. Harriet Martineau, though mystified by Sordello, admitted that in conversation ‘no speaker could be more absolutely clear and purpose-like’ than Browning. ‘He was full of good sense and fine feeling, amidst occasional irritability, full also of fun and harmless satire, with some little affectations which were as droll as anything could be. A real genius was Robert Browning assuredly.’116
Joseph Arnould, writing in 1845 to Alfred Domett, described a dinner party at which Robert was also a guest: ‘Glorious Robert Browning is as ever—but more genial, more brilliant and more anecdotical than when we knew him four years ago.’ And yet, and yet, in this year, 1845, the polished social performance was becoming tedious to Robert, as though he were Macready toiling through a familiar role, night after night, in the same company of players, speaking the same words, throwing in a few ad-libs, in a long run of a popular play. Too often, it felt like an exercise in public relations.
In ‘Respectability’, published in Men and Women on 10 November 1855, Robert wrote:
How much of priceless time were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society’s true ornament.
In a letter of 12 March 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett, he wrote, ‘So you have got to like society, and would enjoy it, you think? For me, I always hated it.—have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by foregoing it I should let some unknown good escape me, in the true time of it, and only discover my fault when too late; and now that I have done most of what is to be done, any lodge in a garden of cucumbers for me!’ He does not ‘even care about reading now’, he confesses. ‘But you must read books in order to get words and forms for “the public” if you write, and that you needs must do, if you fear God. I have no pleasure in writing myself—none, in the mere act—though all pleasure in fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other!’ He supposes Miss Barrett likes ‘the operation of writing as I should like that of painting or making music … After all, there is a great delight in the heart of the thing; and use and forethought have made me ready at all times to set to work—but—I don’t know why—my heart sinks whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it.’
A month earlier, Robert had been writing to Miss Barrett about critics, trying to be fair-minded and even-handed in response to her inquiry about his ‘sensitiveness to criticism’. What he had said then was, ‘I shall live always—that is for me—I am living here this 1845, that is for London.’ For himself—‘for me’—he writes from a thorough conviction of duty, and he does his best: ‘the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope in nowise affect me.’ And yet, ‘I must, if for merely scientific purposes, know all about this 1845, its ways and doings’, and if he should take a dozen pages of verse to market, like twelve cabbages (or pomegranates, he might have said, but didn’t) he had grown himself, he should expect to get as much as any man for his goods. If nobody will buy or praise, ‘more’s the shame … But it does so happen that I have met with much more than I could have expected in this matter of kindly and prompt recognition. I never wanted a real set of good hearty praisers—and no bad reviewers—I am quite content with my share. No—what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place—enough to make an apostle swear.’
In this selfsame letter to Miss Barrett, a few lines previously, Robert had seized eagerly on her wish that they should ‘rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and I, on each side’117 and given himself up to her—and their developing correspondence—entirely: ‘I had rather hear from you than see anybody else. Never you care, dear noble Carlyle, nor you, my own friend Alfred over the sea, nor a troop of true lovers!—Are not these fates written? there!’ These fates were written—what about Robert’s own? The work—far less, or far more, the life, the entire fate of Robert Browning—seemed in 1845 to be in the balance: the achievement so far, what did it amount to? ‘What I have printed gives no knowledge of me—it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will—and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion … that I think—But I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end—“R. B. a poem”—’. At most, ‘these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you.’
This is the letter of a man whose lightning or lighthouse flashes illuminate his world fitfully and reveal himself, though captain of his own ship, becalmed on a dark flood. Robert’s perplexity and discouragement was of long standing. In short, he was depressed: the weeks passed, Carlyle talked wisely and beautifully, there had been quarrels with Macready and Forster, the rarely positive critical response to his work was pleasing enough but misguided, the plays were defunct, the poems had sold disappointingly. On 9 October 1843 he wrote to Alfred Domett, who had thrown up the law and disappeared to the colonies, to New-Zealand, ‘People read my works a little more, they say, and I have some real works here in hand; but now that I could find it in my heart to labour earnestly, I doubt if I shall ever find it in my head, which sings and whirls and stops me even now—an evening minute by the way.’118 Perhaps to still his whirligig head, or to give it something substantial to dance around, Robert sailed for Naples in the late summer of 1844.
As is the case with his previous journeyings abroad, precious few relics survive to substantiate the itinerary or illuminate the events. There is some dispute as to whether Robert wrote the poems ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’ and ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ on this voyage or on the first voyage to Italy—Robert himself said the