Hatred & Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England

WHEN ROBERT BROWNING first told Julia Wedgwood that he “unduly like[d] the study of morbid cases of the soul,” he broached a topic that has intrigued and baffled scholars ever since.¹ An intelligent socialite to whom Browning was attracted and with whom he corresponded frequently between 1864 and 1870, Wedgwood demurred. His subjects were disturbing, she thought, and his characters inartistic. Instead of “belong[ing] to the world,” Guido Franceschini, arch villain in The Ring and the Book, seemed to her to inhabit a place “where Art finds no foothold.”²

Dismayed and quibbling, Wedgwood advised Browning to stick to more sanguine topics. She scolded him for spoiling her pleasure and upsetting her expectations: “I fear I shall not find much food in the remaining books. … Shame and pain and humiliation need the irradiation of hope to be endurable as objects of contemplation; you have no right to associate them in our minds with hopeless, sordid wickedness.”³ By the time Browning responded, fully seven weeks later, the friendship had cooled.

Wedgwood was an unimaginative reader, but her belief that Guido and his ilk live “where Art finds no foothold” merits serious attention. The idea is especially provocative because the hatred Browning dramatizes through misanthropes and other mavericks explodes aesthetic and philosophical assumptions about reciprocity and collective harmony. His intellectual interest—and, surely, poetic delight—lies in exposing the flip side of these ideals as rancorous and antiharmonious. Indeed, his antiheroes wreak revenge on society by insisting energetically that all such ideals about social and interpersonal harmony contain the seeds of their destruction.

As we saw in the introduction, many precedents to such misanthropic antiheroism pepper English literature, for instance Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare’s Iago, who says that Cassio “has a daily beauty in his life, / That makes me ugly.”⁴ What’s distinctive in Browning’s villains is a form of excess pushing them beyond normal states of being and motive, conventional reciprocity, and orthodox assumptions about social life. Probing and vital, wild and sly, his malefactors exude an energy that destroys not only interpersonal ties but also relationality as such. The Ring and the Book, a series of poetic testimonials about a brutal murder case in Renaissance Italy (1698), dramatizes man’s “surplusage of soul,” a life force indifferent to moral and physical constraint, and oblivious to personal and collective well-being.⁵ Guido alludes to an “overplus of mine,” a force “explod[ing]” in murderous violence like the “eruption of the pent-up soul” (11.144, 466, 1494), and the commentator Tertium Quid agrees: “Men, plagued this fashion”—by this force—“get to explode this way, / If left no other” (4.1541–42).

Coupled with Browning’s well-known fascination with hatred, these “explosions” accent a set of problems in his poetry that love and redemption can’t fully overcome. They mark society’s failure to absorb humanity’s “surplus” affect, and thwart conventional justice by tarnishing the legal system with malice. Browning comes close to implying that it’s irrelevant whether his protagonists are virtuous or corrupt, sociable or misanthropic (see FIGURE 5.1, Hill and Adamson’s midcentury photograph of an inscrutable Hugh Miller). Though many scholars rightly maintain that he stopped short of relativism—indeed, retained in his late work an interest in the synthesizing aims of Christian theology—his fascination with excess surpasses the Manichean basis of that theology. Browning amplifies (as would Freud) that we hate more easily than we love, and that extreme experiences corrode the social tie by destroying its central tenets.

This emphasis on energetic hate and antisocial motive departs from previous approaches to Browning’s work, including that he represented virtue as vulnerable while permitting evil to flourish. Certainly, compared with Guido’s lupine vigor, Pompilia, his murdered wife, resembles a pallid cipher. Likewise, in “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” Brother Lawrence seems pathetically—annoyingly—naïve beside his rancorous counterpart. My focus, however, is the philosophical and aesthetic ramifications of such excess, which, as Wedgwood’s revulsion reminds us, are extraordinary departures from utilitarian and positivist arguments about collective life. Moving from Browning’s interest in interpersonal rancor to his near-metaphysical accounts of the way hatred destroys sociality, we’ll see how comprehensively he revoked cherished assumptions of the time, including Bentham’s maxim that the collective good should override the vagaries of individual will.

In his complex lyric “By the Fire-Side,” Browning’s speaker—ostensibly the poet in propria persona—avows, in a moment that Romantic poetry might have represented by devoted union:

The poem ostensibly celebrates Browning’s devotion to Elizabeth Barrett, but the desire for union has unforeseen effects, showing that perfect reciprocity doesn’t exist, since the lover continually “misses”—surpasses, falters before, and even forgets—his beloved. Though memory and anticipation trick us into believing that the “shadowy third” will disappear, the lyric indicates that we’re never fully present with our beloved. The “third” is both an effect of closeness and its precondition.

If this were all that Browning described, it might be enough to say that he revealed, a century before Lacan, the asymmetry of love. But as the poet is also renowned for his “strange interest in morbid psychology” (Leslie Stephen’s complaint), we can’t call him solipsistic or even contrarian and leave matters there.⁷ While the asymmetry he explores is a basis for his villains’ motivations, it sounds new and disturbing ethical arrangements, in which his protagonists are answerable less to God and their beloveds than to a form of energy threatening to hurl them—and anyone in their way—into the abyss.

When in “Cleon” the eponymous (and imaginary) Greek poet describes what “joy-hunger” “stings” us into doing, he gauges the volatile consequences, for people and communities, of “life’s [being] inadequate to joy” (328–29, 249), an idea comparable to that in “By the Fire-Side”:

Cleon says that “all this joy in natural life” is “exquisitely perfect” (203, 205); humanity alone experiences “failure” because its soul (whether consciousness, mind, or imagination in this pre-Christian context) “craves” more than the human body can absorb or accomplish (241). It is chastening that knowledge points up our sorry limitations, accenting what will always remain elusive happiness:

In standard interpretations of this argument, Cleon invokes the fatigue accompanying aging. We’re tempted to live just as “the soul sees joy, tempting life to take” (250), but our frailty makes this impossible: “life,” as he says, is woefully “inadequate” to this aim (249). But the phrase “tempting life to take” is also a pun. We can understand it both in apposition to “sees joy”—that is, as the path the soul yearns to pursue—and as alluding to the thoughts of comparison and deficiency surfacing earlier in the poem, contributing to Browning’s well-known theory of imperfection.⁸ In this second reading, humanity’s consciousness perceives the gap between absolute joy and its own paltry ability to feel it. Envying beings (such as animals) that experience this divide less acutely or not at all, consciousness is tempted to appropriate their and others’ joy in a bid to top up its own.⁹ According to Cleon, the root problem is an “intro-active … quality [that] arise[s]” in man’s soul; but the impulse to reflect on—and correct—the ensuing malaise is a “force” ruling our behavior (211–13).

Although there’s evidence here and in many other poems supporting conventional and counterintuitive interpretations of joy, Browning did not turn these notions of ecstasy, appropriation, and theft into a larger maxim. Indeed, his poetry offers many exceptions to the counterintuitive perspective, celebrating more-orthodox visions of love and harmony. Nevertheless, his vampiric portrayal of hatred often depletes the virtue that eventually, perhaps miraculously, overwhelms it; and hatred and ugliness are frequently zero-sum qualities in his work, their hostile relation to virtue proving corrosive rather than dialectical. Browning often doesn’t replace hatred with love or convert the first element into the second, that is, because both can be as dissimilar as proximate lovers hoping to unite. Triumphant virtue acquires extra piquancy after withstanding the onslaught, but the result is anticlimactic, even bizarre, because the vulnerability of goodness provokes Browning’s villains into attack: They are disgusted by modesty, and violating it gives them exquisite pleasure.

Given the recurrence of Browning’s counterintuitive emphasis, meekness acquires almost outrageous strength. Its representatives mustn’t in turn appear to enjoy outwitting evil, and in fact survive by disdaining schadenfreude. But whether the reader is as scrupulous in renouncing this glee is more doubtful. As we saw in the introduction, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” increases our satisfaction by making Brother Lawrence unaware of the hatred he inspires. His ignorance is presented as a factor that invites punishment, as if his naïveté cries out to be harmed. That we hear nothing from him directly compromises us, given the complicity established between speaker and audience “(He-he! There his lily snaps!),” but it doesn’t diminish our joy in overhearing the speaker’s rant against this harmless monk. Perhaps we laugh after hearing how the former keeps Lawrence’s flowers “close-nipped on the sly!” while plotting how to trip him, cursing, and thus “send him flying / Off to hell” (48, 55–56). With such robust imagery, the speaker’s mockery, blasphemy, onomatopoeia (“Gr-r-r-”), and feverish exclamations (four in the first stanza alone) make his hatred compelling. As the casuist Bishop Blougram declares elsewhere, in feigned apology, “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. … We watch while th[o]se in equilibrium keep / The giddy line midway” (“Bishop Blougram’s Apology” 395, 399–400). When colorful rhetoric frames this “dangerous edge,” it’s tempting to dismiss malice as “a splendid fault whereat we wink, / Wishing your cold correctness sparkled so!” (Ring 1.196–97). In the face of such entertainment, probity and decorum seem tedious indeed.

This dynamic is a central concern in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” which begins by describing the fearless rats that feast on everything from fine cheese to “gowns lined with ermine,” as if part of their pleasure lies in ruining everyone else’s (3.25). Their gorging anticipates the piper’s struggle with the mayor’s and council’s greed, the rats proving also metaphoric. After refusing to pay the agreed sum, the mayor winks, delighted that as the rats can’t return, the piper must settle for less reward. The musician takes revenge by “stealing” the villagers’ children. Indeed, after he assures them they’ll be happy in “a joyous land,” they vanish through a “wondrous portal,” so reaffirming a link in Browning’s poetry between “stolen” pleasure and the abyss (13.240, 227). Such conflicts over joy are structurally inevitable, enhancing the poem’s energy and restlessness (anapests, trochees, and amphibrachs syncopate its iambic beats) while helping us believe that correct payment would offset the imbalance between those taking happiness and those forced to relinquish it.

However, this “surplus” energy doesn’t merely enhance the dynamism of Browning’s poetry; it adds, scandalously, to the works’ aesthetic effect by making hatred ebullient. We saw in “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” how the speaker’s rant overwhelms any impression that timid Brother Lawrence could make, and the same is true of Pompilia and others in The Ring and the Book, book 11, when Guido vents his bilious rage. When admitting, moreover, that he hates Pompilia “for no one cause / Beyond my pleasure so to do,” Guido rescinds his claim that he had her killed honoris causa after she cuckolded him (11.1432–33). The satisfaction he experiences in voicing his tirade snares him into betraying the more “reasonable” defense. As well, his rage pushes the poem’s conception of justice beyond conventional ideas of restraint, confounding legal disinterestedness. Since the murder occurs after a crisis of understanding, reciprocity is a crucial issue here, and it recurs when the poem must identify a punishment equal to his crime. Exulting in “wolfish” cruelty, Guido becomes increasingly contemptuous of others’ humanity, while those seeking legal redress, like Giuseppe Caponsacchi, appear as lacking in objectivity as the man they would gladly execute.

This asymmetrical vision of power and pleasure, by no means limited to The Ring and the Book, is in Browning’s poetry inevitable and oddly gratifying. A mechanism driving his plots, the vision also exposes relational difficulties among his characters. Roy Gridley lists how often Guido, bragging about his vigor, dismisses Pompilia as a heifer, a “Calfcreature,” a lamb, a brood-hen, a pullet, a hare, and a horse “fearful of the fire which is Guido” (11.977, 989, 1174, 1321, 1423, 1328, 1395).¹⁰ More important, he repeats Guido’s claim that Pompilia is “a nullity in female shape … [an] insipid harmless nullity” (11.1111, 1127). Such statements are a key to understanding this remarkable poem: They highlight then check a demand for freedom and release through which Guido tries to rescind all consequences. His pleasure in finding such freedom increases, moreover, from knowing that others will suffer immeasurably from its effects.

While Guido plays up his wife’s exasperating meekness, his fantasy of Pompilia and her parents magnifies their power, as if in their nothingness they deplete his vitality. Thus he likens Pompilia to a “sheep-like thing” whose meekness temporarily blinds Guido to “the veritable wolf beneath” (11.1174, 1176). He’s already called her, in book 5, a hawk with the semblance of a pigeon (5.703, 701), and in book 11 insists she’s like “some timid chalky ghost / That turns the church into a charnel” (11.2120–21). One might dismiss these claims as hyperbolic, but that would ignore the strength with which he sustains them as projections. At such moments, “negativity as such has a positive function,” since it “enables and structures our positive consistency.”¹¹ By extension, Guido depends on such virtue to justify his acts, briefly allowing Pompilia to embody goodness, as this increases the pleasure of violation.¹²

Let’s approach this issue and its ethical problems by engaging simpler poems where hatred seems to be only an interpersonal affair. “Porphyria’s Lover” is partly an outrageous rationalization of murder, stemming from the lover’s attempt to destroy Porphyria’s status and sexual power. Yet the poem’s most revealing lines describe how the speaker “warily oped her lids” to check whether Porphyria was still alive, only to find that “again / Laughed the blue eyes without a stain” (44–45). In one sense, this phrase conveys the lover’s psychotic belief that Porphyria, though dead, has achieved “her darling one wish” (57). The laughing eyes seem to mock him, extending her joy, which infuriates him at the start of the poem when Porphyria “glide[s]” into the cottage without apologizing for her delay (6). The inverted active voice marking the phrase “again / Laughed the blue eyes” emphasizes the lover’s inability to control Porphyria’s happiness, one of the factors that enrages him, culminating in “a kind of revenge for all her decision-making.”¹³ Lying beyond his control and reach is a form of happiness to which he fears he’s entirely incidental.

“My Last Duchess,” also published in Dramatic Lyrics, describes a similar scenario. What intrigues then repels the Duke is his wife’s “spot of joy” (twice mentioned), for such happiness surpasses him, pointing to other “cause[s]” that apparently are “enough / For calling up” her pleasure (20–21). He tells the Count’s emissary that he lacked the rhetorical wherewithal to accuse his now deceased wife, in a sentence nonetheless accompanied by his quotation marks,

Yet even without these quotation marks we would doubt his claim, for the Duke is articulate and quick to speak his mind, and Browning’s dramatic monologues shrewdly expose his speakers’ self-delusions, especially when attributing faults to others. The Duke’s haughty contempt—projected onto his wife because, by his lights, she wanders indiscriminately among other people and things—indicates that he has contemplated many times this “weakness,” despite claims to the contrary. And her “spot of joy”—arising, maddeningly, whether or not he’s present—betrays his apparent irrelevance to her:

Finally, his nonspecific objections (“Just this / Or that”), combined with the language of default and overreach (“here you miss / Or there exceed the mark”), mirror Browning’s account of energy and contempt in The Ring and the Book—as, for instance, when “Half-Rome” speaks about “the natural over-energy” lulling Guido into “Vault[ing] too loftily over what barred him late” (2.1534, 1532). What goads these speakers, we might say, is both the ineffable quality of joy and the intangible quality of this “over-energy”—the fact that one can’t possess, or reproduce unfailingly, the enigmatic factor that sparks another’s fancy. Consequently, hatred extends beyond interpersonal relations, raising larger questions about these characters’ relation to the world, and to the nothingness beyond it.

The Duke, Guido, and Porphyria’s lover aren’t simply obsessed with their lovers’ experience of joy—a claim that simplifies their psychological turmoil. Among other factors, they fear that other people—especially lovers—will experience happiness at their expense, and that strangers will glean this secret and mock them accordingly.¹⁴ (Consider Lippi’s mischievous glee in “play[ing] hot cockles, all the doors being shut, / Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops / The hothead husband!” [381–83].) What these “hotheads” covet, but of course can’t access, is less the key to their lover’s or spouse’s happiness than possession of the peculiar “something” beyond them, of which neither party has full control or understanding.¹⁵ As Earl G. Ingersoll explains of the Duchess, the Duke “murders desire in her.”¹⁶ Although this result outwardly is the same as taking her life, the motive for murder acquires different meaning in this light: It makes her person subordinate to what her desire represents to him, a shocking but fascinating outcome. Minimizing the power of this transference neutralizes the strength of Browning’s insights, the complexity of his ethical arrangements, and how the ensuing conflicts implicate us as readers. In detailing a lover’s apparently limitless contempt for his beloved’s joie de vivre, Browning’s poems do scandalous justice to a series of fantasies that most lovers would deny had ever crossed their minds.

“If we are to be judged by our unconscious wishful impulses,” says Freud in the second half of “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), “we ourselves are, like primaeval man, a gang of murderers.”¹⁷ Although clearly inadvertent on Freud’s part (Browning making no appearance in his written work),¹⁸ he could almost be alluding to Guido’s thugs in The Ring and the Book. Freud’s provocative assertion, intended as a rebuke to those “pious souls … who would like to believe that our nature is remote from any contact with what is evil and base,” surfaces after his discussion of our “denial of death” and its relation to the biblical proscription of murder (“Thoughts” 295). “The first and most important prohibition made by the awakening conscience was,” he claims,

Because of the erosion of this proscription’s symbolic power, we no longer love our neighbors—or, perhaps the same thing, our enemies—quite as we ought. Advancing this thesis after the outbreak of World War I, Freud views hostility among nations as intrinsic to civilizations, asking near the end of his essay whether humanity shouldn’t begin viewing peace as an exception rather than the rule.

But despite its varied historical and symbolic significance, the injunction against murder can’t eradicate “the satisfaction of the hatred” underpinning not only interpersonal relations but also modern civilization as such. This satisfaction is, Freud says, a legacy of evolutionary struggle, a pitiable consequence of our alienation in language, and an effect of the hostility we feel toward even loved ones. These are, in his words, “on the one hand an inner possession, components of our own ego; but on the other hand they are partly strangers, even enemies. With the exception of only a very few situations, there adheres to the tenderest and most intimate of our love-relations a small portion of hostility which can excite an unconscious death-wish” (298). As no one is exempt from this hatred, the question becomes whether we bestow hostility freely or temper it by apparent affection. As Freud put it, in a claim so devoid of romanticism that it sounds almost scandalous: “It might be said that we owe the fairest flowerings of our love to the reaction against the hostile impulse which we sense within us” (299).

One consequence of this assertion, to which most poems discussed in this chapter also point, is that we try covertly to rid ourselves of attachments. In the unconscious, at least, we are all partly misanthropic. As Tim Dean paraphrases Freud’s argument above: “We not only wish for the deaths … of our enemies, but often desire the speedy elimination of our nearest and dearest too, as a consequence of the ambivalence that infects all love.”¹⁹ In chapter 2, we saw this dynamic recur in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. The erosion of guards against such hatred widens the gap between hostility and its sanctioned release, leaving us fewer ways of processing it. Hence, according to Hazlitt, the role of literature and the arts in representing aggression or, today, the proliferation of true-to-life video programs, sadistic game shows, and “reality” TV, whose popularity flourishes the more observers decry the malice involved.²⁰

As I explained in the introduction, Bentham also anticipated this discussion, hoping the principle of utility would regulate “the pleasures of the malevolent or dissocial affections” to “prevent [their] doing mischief.”²¹ Still, Hazlitt countered that part of the “pleasure of hating” consists in “throw[ing] aside the trammels of civilisation, the flimsy veil of humanity” when we read.²² “The wild beast resumes its sway within us” as we do, “we feel like hunting-animals, and as the hound starts in his sleep and rushes on the chase in fancy, the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless, unrestrained impulses” (12:129).

Browning often replayed this last conflict in his work. When Guido pretends in 1698 to voice the equivalent of Benthamite concerns, he piously announces:

Though this last claim is probably irrefutable, Guido’s statement is completely insincere.²³ Indeed, because his speech in book 11 would challenge the foundations of Benthamite thought, given his fundamental indifference to others’ satisfaction and pain, the resulting philosophical vacuum makes us ask whether Victorian and contemporary readers remain loyal to Bentham or succumb, with Guido, to the lure of Hazlittian and Browningesque schadenfreude. As Daniel Karlin shows in Browning’s Hatreds, the poet certainly capitalized on that energy, representing hatred as emblematic of struggle in the broadest sense, and schadenfreude as a force transporting readers in excitement, helping them “Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,” before they “break … through the tumult” in search of radiancy (The Two Poets of Croisic 159.1269, 1271).²⁴

But if Browning’s understanding of hatred (ostensibly resembling Freud’s) is coeval with love, is enlightenment in his poetry contingent on his characters’ renouncing enmity? The poetry I’ve interpreted suggests not; it shatters our assumption that desire serves life and collective harmony. Browning implies, scandalously, that we achieve enlightenment through hatred as well as its renunciation, a proposition that I’ll defend against some of his scholars. Indeed, as the poet understands hatred independently of love and conventional desire, even Freud’s argument that we unconsciously desire the elimination of loved ones can’t take us far enough when interpreting this poetry. Such assertions don’t turn Browning into a moral relativist. Nor do they dispute his poetry’s gesturing, in Clyde de L. Ryals’s words, “to the infinite and the Absolute.”²⁵ We may still view Browningesque negativity psychoanalytically, in other words, but we can’t reduce it to Freudianism, at least in its 1950s American idiom. We are more likely to grasp the cause of hatred in Browning’s poetry if we associate it with “life envy,” a principle that Lacan outlined in his 1959–60 seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis.

“Isn’t it strange, very odd,” asks Lacan, “that a being admits to being jealous of something in the other to the point of hatred and the need to destroy, jealous of something that he is incapable of apprehending in any way, by any intuitive path? … I don’t think one has to be an analyst to see such disturbing undulations passing through subjects’ behaviors.”²⁶ This rhetorical question surpasses Freud’s argument by associating “the need to destroy [besoin de détruire]” not with “ordinary” loathing or repressed desire but with jealousy of “something in the other”—something, as we saw earlier in Browning’s poetry, that needn’t exist in any material sense to have profound transferential power.²⁷ As this something is always mediated, we’re incapable of apprehending it directly—a lesson that Silas Marner taught us. We gauge our happiness, that is, by assessing—enviously or not, as the case may be—other people’s contentment. Lacan adopted the German term Lebensneid (“life envy”) to highlight the “strange malaise” resulting from such hostile comparisons. Life envy “is not an ordinary jealousy,” he insists; “it is the jealousy born in a subject in his relation to an other, insofar as this other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality [surabondance vitale], that the subject perceives as something that he cannot apprehend by means of even the most elementary of affective movements” (237; 278). That such vitality and malign joy elude us doesn’t diminish their imaginary power, then, but intensifies it. We might even experience the ensuing comparisons as a form of theft, resulting in murderous rage. As Dean puts it, extrapolating Lacan’s argument, “He whom I suppose to know how to enjoy, I hate.”²⁸ Those with apparently limitless joy are perceived—irrationally, of course—as robbing others of the opportunity to feel the same bliss.

By implication, gratuitous cruelty in Browning’s poems needs no primal basis in love. So, despite earlier allusions to the “eruption of the pent-up soul” (Ring 11.1494), the repressive hypothesis cannot help us here. And though Freud’s model sometimes ties conflict to repressed desire, keeping hatred in the realm of love, Browning’s and Lacan’s arguments free hatred from conventional ontology and affect. This idea converges with Browning’s “malleolable” understanding of character and speech (1.702). Both factors point up a performative dimension of identity, as well as an understanding of identification that repeatedly fails, since speech and character face an impasse beyond which they no longer mean anything. We might expect joy to support meaning, to carry significance, but in Browning’s poetry the opposite is generally true, and since the results are so devastating and violent it’s important to consider why. Forming a basis for life envy, joy points more often to a void, or what Lacan called “‘holes’ in … meaning.”²⁹

In The Ring and the Book, Guido alludes to “the honest instinct, pent and crossed through life, / Let surge by death into a visible flow / Of rapture” (11.2062–64). The instinct is “honest” here, not because it accords with consciousness but, on the contrary, because it exposes an ecstatic hankering for death-in-life. Not surprisingly, Browning’s characters and speakers often view death as both a blissful end to suffering and a final epiphany, as if, to invoke Easter-Day, annihilation would help them “at last awake / From life, that insane dream we take / For waking now” (14.479–81).³⁰ Yet despite enabling this discovery, the “honest instinct” is indifferent to the damage it causes. Put differently, if the death drive cuts through swaths of social and psychic dishonesty, it is jouissance, the malign joy and “superabundant vitality” lying beyond the pleasure principle, that bounces us into the void.

Despite Guido’s infectious enthusiasm for “rapture,” then, what goads him is, he says, a “hunger I may feed but never sate, / Tormented on to perpetuity” (5.1966–67). Here, as elsewhere, Browning blends insatiable “hunger” with nonredemptive “honesty,” making Guido’s expectation of lasting happiness result in greater suffering and joylessness. But though we witness, in book 11, Guido’s realization that he’ll be “tormented on to perpetuity,” the realization comes too late to cancel earlier manifestations of enmity, leaving these to reverberate at the poem’s end as gnashing rage and distress.

Consequently, scholars have disputed Robert Langbaum’s much-discussed assertion that Guido is saved soon after book 11 ends. Because Guido cries out, “Pompilia, will you let them murder me?” (11.2425) and shuns the hypocrisy he earlier voiced in his apparent defense, Langbaum comments: “Far from making Guido the devil incarnate, this self-portrayal is a station on his way to self-understanding and therefore salvation.”³¹ Like other critics, I dispute especially the final transition in this argument (“and therefore salvation”), believing that the poem frustrates Langbaum’s expectation. Biographical details can’t settle literary debates, especially given Browning’s fondness for impersonation, but we should at least acknowledge the evidence. When, in the letter cited earlier, Wedgwood urged him: “Oh, be merciful to us in Guido’s last display!,”³² Browning responded with exasperation that the story is factual rather than imaginary, adding: “Guido ‘hope?’—do you bid me turn him into that sort of thing? No, indeed! Come, I won’t send you more, if you will but lift your finger!”³³

This well-known reply is, Langbaum concedes, “the strongest argument against me, and I must do what I can to try to diminish its force.” He tries to do so by arguing that the “letter was written in pique” (292). One could as easily claim that Langbaum shares with Wedgwood the same recalcitrant belief in happy endings that Browning wanted to dislodge—the same regret that “so large a part of your canvas is spent in delineating what is merely hateful.”³⁴ “Given Browning’s often stated views of the afterlife,” Langbaum explains, “there should be no doubt of Guido’s eventual salvation” (291–92). But especially in Browning’s case, there’s always some doubt about poetic intention; and other concerns also press this reading: Why should we assume, as Langbaum puts it, that redemption is the necessary conclusion to draw once Guido attains self-understanding?³⁵

Because Guido’s pride in consistency impedes any suggestion of evil’s use-value—its being bent toward virtue—he betrays Victorian expectations about reform that Wedgwood also exemplifies. Since Guido’s near-final words are “All that was, is; … / Nor is it in me to unhate my hates” (11.2397–98), his impulse clearly is not to forgo revenge, but to embrace the seeds of rancor nourishing it, thereby “go[ing] inside my soul / And shut[ting] its door behind me” (11.2289–90):

As we saw earlier, the “honest instinct” that Guido believes will help him “glut the wolf-nature” thwarts his ideas of wholeness and satiation. The energy he boasts about defies containment and conventional limits. That “growing out of” manhood will, paradoxically, help him “grow [back i]nto” it is fallacious for other reasons, too; one can’t augment part of an already split identity and expect to restore balance. What Guido’s fantasy exposes is the violent division and crisis of understanding between Pompilia and him that provoked the murder in the first place.³⁶ That he wants to substitute wolfishness for his existing identity ideally would free the result—“all man”—from any residual loyalty to humanity. “Away with man!” he exclaims, before asking mockingly, “What shall I say to God?” (Ring 11.934). Similar accounts of Guido’s misanthropy recur throughout the poem, as when “Half-Rome” insists: “’Twas in his very brow / Always to knit itself against the world” (2.283–84).

Guido is in this respect not only ill-suited to sociability, but also poised to shatter its central tenets, in ways resembling his earlier Renaissance counterparts, like Vindice in Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy and Edmund in King Lear (“Wherefore should I / Stand in the plague of custom …?” [1.2.2–3]). More than an attribute associated with Guido’s villainy, this misanthropy bears out Browning’s notion of evil as arelational and antiharmonious. Denying the most elemental reciprocity, Guido’s rebellion against the world culminates in his near-perfect estrangement from “civilized life” (11.1660), compounding the conflicts that beset most relations in the poem. His hatred exposes the emptiness—the relational inadequacies—that we encountered before in Browning’s poetry. So, after his rejection of society, Guido’s near-metaphysical strife is inevitable, for he has no one left to argue with.

If we followed Langbaum here, our perspective on Guido’s condition would “depend on whether we see [him] as human and therefore capable of development, or whether we see him as belonging to another order of existence, as an Iago or devil figure” (290). But the lines are too starkly drawn here and, as Freud and Lacan have shown, the summation of psychological possibilities too limited. A commitment to evil is, after all, still a form of development. Critics—especially those influenced by theology—often recoil from Guido’s contempt for virtue, saying it disqualifies him from membership in humanity. As Wedgwood urged Browning, he should write as “one who has been taught supremely to believe in goodness by the close neighbourhood of a beautiful soul.”³⁷ But this cant dissociates evil from humanity, ignoring all that we’ve learned from anticommunitarian philosophy, including Freud’s indictment of human cruelty: “Homo homini lupus,” man is a wolf to man. “Who,” asks Freud, “in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”³⁸ Since Guido brags (pace Ovid) that the cruel Lycaon lived forever when he became a wolf, Browning—had he lived to hear Freud’s rhetorical question—would surely have agreed with it (11.2050–51).

While Guido clearly perceives what redemption entails, then, he voices an ethics of detachment, not of moral improvement. Coupled with his commitment to destruction, this perspective indicates what aspects of community life are to him intolerable. Granted, his understanding occurs after Pompilia is murdered, a crime we can’t ignore. But his refusal to cede to religious, legal, and community demands has important ethical ramifications of its own, stemming partly from his failure to sacrifice radically antisocial forms of enjoyment. And though we would call abhorrent the consequences of this violence when it’s unleashed on Pompilia, the unflinching honesty with which Guido directs violence at himself, before confronting his own abyss of being, remains striking. As Žižek explains, such honesty is

Partly for this reason, Guido’s brief amplification of “Benthamite” thought clashes with his disingenuous attempt at appeasing Cardinal Acciaiuoli and Abate Panciatichi. Instead, Guido raises profound doubts about what constitutes the good and why we would even dream of renouncing our enjoyment and vitality for collective gain. The significance of his misanthropy lies in his refusing to sacrifice this bliss for a community in which he’s ceased to believe and about which he no longer cares.

Guido isn’t alone in enduring this problem or in feeling “hate / Of all things in, under, and above earth.” Consequently, it’s worth examining why glee in general obstructs justice in The Ring and the Book and related works. In book 6, Caponsacchi, the man with whom Pompilia eloped to Rome, voices what Karlin calls a “lurid, violent, and nauseating daydream,” though one that’s also, in Karlin’s view, “the most powerful expression of hatred in the poem.”⁴⁰ Caponsacchi’s joyous rumination on Guido’s imminent suffering is at least three dozen lines long, but one of its recurring motifs, influenced by Dante’s Inferno, is a wish that Guido “slide out of life,”

Further, Caponsacchi hopes Guido will suffer the consequences of his misanthropy by having the community sever all ties to him, as if returning hatred to its apparent source could neutralize Caponsacchi’s own bile.

As his fantasies transport Caponsacchi, however, this last expectation is denied him. Browning thereby mocks those who believe that their vicious judgments of others are disinterested, unfettered by rage. Caponsacchi’s investment in Guido’s suffering defeats his hope of relinquishing ties to Guido, betraying any notion that hatred is self-contained and reducible to misanthropes. His conception of justice is almost as punitive and sadistic as his enemy’s.

But nowhere in Browning’s work does this coupling of revenge and hatred recur more powerfully than in “‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,”’ a popular, allusive 1855 poem whose speaker pursues a form of exploration that flirts with personal harm, even self-extinction. In ways similar to Guido’s resistance to salvation, the wandering speaker of “Childe Roland” is goaded, revolted, and excited by a quest into which he’s partly trapped into consenting and over which he apparently has little control. Both the poem’s setting and its speaker’s identity are disturbingly vague, the former resembling a horrific dreamscape (fostering a host of allegorical and quasi-psychoanalytic readings) that replaces the merciless “eye” Guido imagines drives him relentlessly toward annihilation (11.924). And we can’t finally say whether the narrator is Roland—legendary knight of Charlemagne—one of his peers, or someone wanting to eulogize him. At the start of the poem, Browning directs us to Edgar’s song in King Lear, which gives the work its title, but the Norman poet Turold was probably the first to herald Charlemagne’s knight in the French epic La chanson de Roland (c. 1100).

What, however, could one celebrate in Browning’s poem? In it, the giddy sense of freedom accompanying the speaker’s missing self-concern collides with a set of metaphysical forces rendering his courage humiliatingly small. The poem anticipates why Hardy’s protagonists—themselves recording a debt to Browning⁴²—battle stubbornly against a faceless “Immanent Will.” Also uniting “Childe Roland’s” speaker with Guido is a “daemonic energy” and a belief that integrity consists in turning away from the collective good, rather than sacrificing themselves for it.⁴³ (The isolation and medievalism of “Childe Roland” underscore this even more powerfully than does the Renaissance setting of The Ring and the Book.) Put differently, both poems substitute brutal confrontations between the subject and nothingness for courtship and kinship, highlighting how the individual might withstand the impersonal forces that would obliterate it. As Karlin observes, “Childe Roland” is not “about relationship, and indeed … might … be thought to achieve [its aim] by the sacrifice of relationship.”⁴⁴ This far-reaching insight returns us to “By the Fire-Side” and the implications of Browning’s swerving away from reciprocity even when invoking it, by advocating a more elemental, precarious understanding of being. Departing from conventional Victorian morality, he often considers it irrelevant whether his protagonists are pure or corrupt, altruistic or misanthropic—one reason critics often (and inaccurately) call him a relativist.⁴⁵

Like “Porphyria’s Lover,” with its opening references to the “sullen wind” tearing down treetops “for spite” (2, 3), “Childe Roland” frequently uses the pathetic fallacy to capture this widespread hostility. The speaker crosses a vast plain that initially seems “grey … all round: / Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound” (52–53), but on closer examination it is pockmarked with holes, extrusions leaking “substances like boils” (153), and grass that “gr[ows] as scant as hair / In leprosy” (73–74), as if the speaker were stumbling across a massive head. Since the river confronting him is “petty yet so spiteful!” and nature as a whole is “starved [and] ignoble” (115, 56), the landscape is not only hostile to humanity, but also anthropomorphized as one of its enemies. In this sense it is more alive than the speaker, whose character, as John Willoughby astutely notes, is so thinly drawn as to appear “not quite there.” He “seems unreal or more than real, a patent fiction or a symbol for something more than himself.”⁴⁶ Thus does the speaker anticipate Guido’s self-surpassing aims. Devoid of conventional being, he is closer to resembling pure drive.

For the duration of this poem, then, we inhabit a Browningesque terrain familiar only to the extent that it describes a fierce zero-sum game, in which the landscape, the “hoary cripple,” and presumably the secret inhabitant of the Dark Tower seek every possible opportunity to rob the speaker of life. If this is a pre-Freudian allegory about the unconscious, as many have claimed, it’s also one in which destructive forces of nature and the speaker’s own reckless quest prove indistinguishable. “Freudian” readings of the poem forestall this conclusion, arguing that we awake from such nightmares and so put them in their proper place.⁴⁷ But Browning’s poem inverts this fantasy, making clear that our “awakening” as such is to an alienated state that guards against our ongoing attraction to death. It is society, we might say, that intercedes between the tower and us, though no community can really dupe us into forgetting the powerful lure of self-extinction.

According to this stronger psychoanalytic reading, for which Freud’s thoughts on hatred and Lacan’s on life envy have prepared us, the speaker accepts—even perversely embraces—his likely extinction. As this proposition is counterintuitive (most critics viewing triumph as the experience of “cheating” death, rather than of surrendering to it),⁴⁸ they’ve long been baffled by the poem’s opening lines:

The speaker suspects this “cripple,” and intuits that following his bad advice will give the old man such malign joy that his mouth will be “scarce able to afford / Suppression of the glee” (4–5), a dynamic we’ve witnessed before in Browning’s poetry. But why does the speaker accept his directions when any sensible hero would run the other way? Raising still greater complications, the cripple doesn’t lie—his advice, resulting in extraordinary hardship, is correct. And, though he perceives this accuracy, the speaker curiously implies that he would follow the directions anyway:

Following the cripple’s directions ends the speaker’s equivocation, then, along with any firm conviction that he’ll prevail. Such rationalizations may be paradoxical, but they turn, finally, on this third stanza’s last line, the overall conclusion to the poem’s introductory material: knowledge that “some end might be” results in “gladness,” not fear or anxiety. The speaker isn’t suicidal, we stress, but his inability to rule out death makes him oddly pleased.

Although the poem elaborates this disturbing idea in thirty more stanzas, the speaker explains in the fourth what’s at stake in rationalizing this outcome. He concedes that failure has accompanied him for so long now that his hope has

Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope

With that obstreperous joy success would bring. (21–22)

The admission reverses Guido’s boast that, concerning life and, of course, virility, he could “spill this overplus of mine” among those who would “make … hay of juicy me,” and still “brighten hell and streak its smoke with flame!” (11.144, 148, 150). “Childe Roland’s” speaker experiences the joy accompanying success as so “obstreperous”—so clamorous and troublesome—that he can’t bring himself to “rebuke the spring / My heart made, finding failure in its scope” (23–24). If we viewed desire only as serving life, survival, and the good, as I’ve strongly discouraged in this chapter, then the speaker’s elation that he needn’t do so would puzzle us. The lines acquire piquancy, in Browningesque terms, by supporting the disturbing, counterintuitive idea that defeat and self-extinction are the stronger aim of life, surpassing community, redemption, and even affection for other people.

This second emphasis puts in doubtful light the speaker’s ostensibly triumphant blowing of his “slug-horn” (203). Like many critics, I view this final act as paradoxical rather than relief-filled and optimistic, though I stress once more that Browning’s fascination with hatred’s antisocial effects didn’t muzzle his love poetry and doesn’t expose as disingenuous the adoration he expressed for his wife, son, and friends. Although I have identified places in his poetry where Browning challenges, even confounds, the idea of perfect reciprocity, the poems rarely spiral off into solipsism. More commonly, they show that love and hatred aren’t coeval in his poetry, and that the expectations we’ve inherited from much Victorian fiction, in which misanthropy either “expires” or passes into love, are not merely facile and naïve but also conceptually impoverished descriptions of humanity’s attachment to enmity.

I have argued in this chapter—and throughout this book—that this attachment highlights at least one ethical principle, since it underscores what forms of community life induce anguish, rather than pleasure. During this book, we’ve seen Victorians portray self-righteous neighbors as invasive, even grotesque, but few could match Browning for the horror and repulsion his characters voice when contemplating endless, involuntary life among strangers or rivals. It would be easy to pronounce him merely curmudgeonly in this regard, as if we could take comfort in tracing his characters’ inspired rancor back to him. Certainly, there are ample records of him fulminating at critics, unscrupulous editors (“their paws in my very bowels”), and deriders of his wife’s poetry (“to spit there glorifies your face,” concludes “To Edward Fitzgerald,” the vituperative sonnet that caused an uproar when Browning rashly published it in the Athenæum).⁴⁹ His work also shows artists working in a rage—among them, Paracelsus, Sordello, and of course “Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper.”

But as Browning was also immensely sociable, a devoted husband and father, and the author of some of the most famous love poetry in the language, the psychobiographical path cannot help us here, and it’s fitting that it cannot. We must struggle instead with the impasse arising when conventional wisdom and platitudes fall away. Moreover, this resistance to conventional explanation is emancipatory, since it frees his works from simple motivation and allows them to pursue, with Browningesque detachment, a more profound inquiry into what Conrad—our final study, and a writer arguably indebted to Browning’s dramatic monologues—called the “sombre” elements that “lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”⁵⁰ Granted, this phrase is now a cliché, inviting us to parse the virtuous from the damned in ways that neither Conrad nor Browning surely intended. For Conrad retitled his best-known work, first published in Blackwood’s as “The Heart of Darkness,”⁵¹ deleting the definite article and reprinting the novella as simply Heart of Darkness. The phrase floats ominously, somewhat detached from identifiable cultures and landscapes, peoples and causes. Its effect is disorienting, paring clichés that used to comfort. We’re forced to acknowledge, with him and Browning, that the symbolism we’ve inherited about the heart no longer protects us from all that humanity desires.