Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women and Dramatis Personae
(1) Bells and Pomegranates
Between 1841 and 1846 B. published his poems and plays in a series of cheap paper-bound pamphlets, published by Edward Moxon, with the general title Bells and Pomegranates. There were eight numbers of B & P:
(i) Pippa Passes (1841)
(ii) King Victor and King Charles (1842)
(iii) Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
(iv) The Return of the Druses (1843)
(v) A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (1843)
(vi) Colombe’s Birthday (1844)
(vii) Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)
(viii) Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy (1846)
No. i was priced at 6d.; nos. ii–vi at 1s.; no. vii at 2s.; and no. viii at 2s. 6d.
Numbers iii and vii are collections of verse; the remaining numbers comprise seven plays, of which four (nos. ii, iv, v and vi) were written for the stage; one of these (no. v) was actually performed (11 Feb. 1843); for the circumstances, and consequences, of this disastrous episode, see Oxford iii 357–64. Pippa Passes and Luria were ‘closet dramas’; there is some doubt about A Soul’s Tragedy, which may have been intended for the stage when B. first conceived it, but was completed and published after B. had abandoned his theatrical ambitions.
None of the numbers went into a commercial second edition; for the technical ‘second’ edition of A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (no. v), see DeVane Handbook 136–7. After 1846 the remainder of the separate numbers were bound together and sold as a single volume. The B & P title was dropped in the two-volume Poems of 1849, and in subsequent collected editions.
Composition
The germ of the series first appears in a letter from B. to the publisher William Smith (7 April 1840, Correspondence iv 267):
Sir,
Mr Moxon has just published a long Poem of mine, “Sordello”, meant for a limited class of readers—and I am on the point of following it up by three new Dramas, written in a more popular style, and addressed to the Public at large:—a friend has called my notice to your handsome Reprints and suggested the proposal I am about to make. Would it answer your purpose to try the experiment of coming out with a new work as part of your series?—As in that case I will give you the 1st. Edition for nothing—for the sake of your large circulation among a body to which my works have little access at present. Of course I mean that these Dramas should form one publication, of the same size and at the same low price as your other pamphlets.
With this letter B. enclosed a torn-off leaf from Sordello containing the advertisement for the ‘three new Dramas’ he mentions, which were announced as ‘nearly ready’: Pippa Pases, King Victor and King Charles and Mansoor the Hierophant (later renamed The Return of the Druses). Note that at this stage B. is not thinking of a series but of a single volume; the emphasis is on the cheap format. The implication may be that Moxon, though he had advertised the works, was having second thoughts about publishing them, and that B. was looking elsewhere. On the other hand it is possible that Moxon himself recommended Smith, and this would partially confirm the traditional account of the genesis of the series, given, before B.’s letter to Smith was known, by Edmund Gosse (Robert Browning: Personalia [1890] 52–3, repr. Orr Life 112–13):
One day, as the poet was discussing the matter with Mr. Edward Moxon, the publisher, the latter remarked that at that time he was bringing out some editions of the old Elizabethan dramatists in a comparatively cheap form, and that if Mr. Browning would consent to print his poems as pamphlets, using this cheap type, the expense would be very inconsiderable. The poet jumped at the idea, and it was agreed that each poem should form a separate brochure of just one sheet,—sixteen pages, in double columns,—the entire cost of which should not exceed twelve or fifteen pounds. In this fashion began the celebrated series of Bells and Pomegranates … Pippa Passes led the way, and was priced first at sixpence; then, the sale being inconsiderable, at a shilling, which greatly encouraged the sale; and so, slowly, up to half a crown, at which the price of each number finally rested.
If Moxon was indeed the ‘friend’ to whom B. attributes the proposal in his letter to Smith, then Gosse’s account (based on conversations with B. in the year before his death) may conflate the two publishers; but it should be stressed that the ‘friend’ may be someone else, or an imaginary figure. Presumably Smith turned down the proposal, and B. eventually came to an agreement with Moxon himself, with the crucial added element of a series of pamphlets; Gosse’s phrasing does not make clear whose idea this was. Moxon’s list at this period includes reprints of editions of Ben Jonson (1838, price 16s.), Massinger and Ford (1840, 16s.) and Beaumont and Fletcher (2 vols, 1840, 32s.)—large volumes, which were indeed ‘comparatively cheap’, all in double columns, and using the same type and layout as for the pamphlets of B & P. Moxon’s similar edition of Samuel Rogers’s popular poem Italy, a work comparable in length to the early numbers of B & P and priced at 1s. 6d., may also have contributed to the idea. The price of the later numbers of the series went up not just for the reason Gosse gives, but because the pamphlets themselves became longer: the final number was twice the length of the first. B.’s father paid for the publication of the whole series.
In the ‘Advertisement’ in Pippa Passes, which was intended as a preface to the whole series, B. wrote:
Two or three years ago I wrote a play [Strafford, 1837], about which the chief matter I much care to recollect at present is, that a Pit-full of goodnatured people applauded it:—ever since, I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. What follows I mean for the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals, and I amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again. Of course such a work must go on no longer than it is liked …
This makes it clear that B. had no definite plan for the series’ length or contents, other than that it would consist of ‘Dramatical Pieces’; he planned at one time to include a revised version of Strafford itself (letter to Alfred Domett of 22 May 1842, Correspondence v 357). Initially he seems to have interpreted the term ‘Dramatical Pieces’ to mean plays, whether written for the stage or not, and it was Moxon who persuaded him to stretch the phrase to cover the shorter poems of Dramatic Lyrics; B. agreed to this ‘for popularity’s sake’, as he told Domett (ibid. 356), but felt the need to justify it by a brief ‘Advertisement’ at the start of the number:
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.
It may seem odd that the impulse to publish a collection of shorter poems should come not from B. himself but from a third party, but the same thing happened some years later in the case of Men and Women (see below).
Reception
DeVane (Handbook 89–90) points out that all the pamphlets were published as ‘By Robert Browning, Author of Paracelsus’, and comments that ‘the Bells show Browning beginning anew in his attempt to rebuild his literary reputation after the havoc which Sordello had made of his old one’. However, the title of the series itself caused general bewilderment and was felt to be entirely in keeping with B.’s esoteric difficulty. ‘Mr. Browning’s conundrums begin with his very title-page’, wrote the reviewer of Pippa Passes in the Athenaeum (11 Dec. 1841, p. 952; repr. Correspondence v 399–400): ‘“Bells and Pomegranates” is the general title given (it is reasonable to suppose Mr. Browning knows why, but certainly we have not yet found out—indeed we “give it up”)’. The title derives from Exodus xxviii 33–5, and concerns the making of the ‘ephod’ (tunic) of Aaron the High Priest:
And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about: a golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about. And it shall be upon Aaron to minister: and his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the Lord, and when he cometh out, that he die not.
B. wrote to EBB. on 18 Oct. 1845: ‘The Rabbis make Bells & Pomegranates symbolical of Pleasure and Profit, the Gay & the Grave, the Poetry & the Prose, Singing and Sermonising—Such a mixture of effects as in the original hour (that is quarter of an hour) of confidence & creation, I meant the whole should prove at last’ (Correspondence xi 131). EBB. urged him, against his inclination, to make this explanation public:
Dearest, I persist in thinking that you ought not to be too disdainful to explain your meaning in the Pomegranates. Surely you might say in a word or two that, your title having been doubted about (to your surprise, you might say!), you refer the doubters to the Jewish priest’s robe, & the Rabbinical gloss … Consider that Mr. Kenyon & I may fairly represent the average intelligence of your readers,—& that he was altogether in the clouds as to your meaning … had not the most distant notion of it—while I, taking hold of the priest’s garment, missed the Rabbins & the distinctive significance, as completely as he did. Then for Vasari, it is not the handbook of the whole world … Now why should you be too proud to teach such persons as only desire to be taught? I persist—I shall teaze you.
(24 March 1846, Correspondence xii 173).
For the allusion to Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, a favourite book of B.’s, see below; B. had presumably mentioned it in conversation with EBB. He deferred to her in a letter of 25 March 1846: ‘I will at Ba’s bidding amuse and instruct the world at large, and make them know all to be known—for my purposes—about Bells & Pomegranates—yes, it will be better’ (ibid. 178). He placed a note between Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy in the last number of the series:
Here ends my first series of “Bells and Pomegranates:” and I take the opportunity of explaining, in reply to inquiries, that I only meant by that title to indicate an endeavour towards something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought; which looks too ambitious, thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred. It is little to the purpose, that such is actually one of the most familiar of the many Rabbinical (and Patristic) acceptations of the phrase; because I confess that, letting authority alone, I supposed the bare words, in such juxtaposition, would sufficiently convey the desired meaning. “Faith and good works” is another fancy, for instance, and perhaps no easier to arrive at: yet Giotto placed a pomegranate fruit in the hand of Dante, and Raffaelle crowned his Theology (in the Camera della Segnatura) with blossoms of the same; as if the Bellari and Vasari would be sure to come after, and explain that it was merely “simbolo delle buone opere—il qualo Pomo granato fu però usato nelle vesti del Pontefice appresso gli Ebrei” [a symbol of good works—for this reason the pomegranate was used in the vestment of the High Priest among the Hebrews; our transl.].
B.’s intense reluctance to ‘amuse and instruct the world at large’ may account for his omitting to identify the actual biblical text from which the phrase comes, and for his concluding his forced explanation with an untranslated Italian quotation from Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s [sic] Descrizione delle immagini depinte de Raffaello d’Urbino (1695); see Eleanor Cook, ‘Browning’s “Bellari”’, N & Q xvii.9 (1970), pp. 334–5. Cp. his exasperated response to Ruskin’s queries about the meanings of particular words or phrases in the poems of M & W (Appendix B, pp. 881–2). Even the placing of the note caused confusion: EBB. at first thought that it was meant to exclude A Soul’s Tragedy from the series (13 April 1846, Correspondence xii 243), but B. denied this (14 April, ibid. 246).
Eventually B & P became part of the legend of B.’s early literary career, and the pamphlets themselves collectors’ items; but its demise in collected editions went unremarked, and of its contents only Pippa Passes and the two collections of shorter poem have a secure place in the ‘canon’ of B.’s work. The juxtaposition of ‘music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought’ was replaced by the single, all-embracing opposition between ‘fancy’ and ‘fact’ in B.’s later work (see A Likeness 35–6n., p. 646). The impulse towards constructing larger structures of meaning for individual works can be seen in the ‘structured collections’ of the 1860s and beyond: on this subject see John Woolford, Browning the Revisionary (1988), chs 4–6.
(2) Men and Women1
Publication
M & W was published in two volumes by Chapman and Hall on 10 Nov. 1855, priced at 12 shillings (a little over a third of the price of a new three-volume novel). The first American edition, printed from advance proofs, was published in one volume by Ticknor and Fields, Boston, on 8 Dec. 1855, but dated 1856 on the title page. The contents of the English edition were as follows:
Volume 1
Love Among the Ruins
A Lovers’ Quarrel
Evelyn Hope
Up at a Villa—Down in the City
A Woman’s Last Word
Fra Lippo Lippi
A Toccata of Galuppi’s
By the Fire-Side
Any Wife to Any Husband
An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
Mesmerism
A Serenade at the Villa
My Star
Instans Tyrannus
A Pretty Woman
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came”
Respectability
A Light Woman
The Statue and the Bust
Love in a Life
Life in a Love
How It Strikes a Contemporary
The Last Ride Together
The Patriot
Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha
Bishop Blougram’s Apology
Memorabilia
Volume 2
Andrea del Sarto
Before
After
In Three Days
In a Year
Old Pictures in Florence
In a Balcony
Saul
“De Gustibus—”
Women and Roses Protus
Holy-Cross Day
The Guardian-Angel Cleon
The Twins
Popularity
The Heretic’s Tragedy
Two in the Campagna
A Grammarian’s Funeral
Another Way of Love
“Transcendentalism:” A Poem in Twelve Books Misconceptions
One Word More
In the Poetical Works of 1863, and subsequent collected editions, B. undertook a comprehensive re-ordering of the contents of his three collections of shorter poems, Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) and M & W. The latter was reduced to 13 poems, not all of them from the original volume. For details of this re-ordering, see Appendix D, III 747–50.
The manuscripts
Only a few MSS survive from the period in which B. composed the poems of M & W, along with a few MSS from later periods, written as album contributions, or as dedications, or as printer’s copy for volumes of selections. Some of the printer’s copy for M & W would have been in the hand of the Brownings’ close friend Isa Blagden, who acted as B.’s amanuensis in the spring and early summer of 1855 (see Appendix C, III 739). The most important surviving pre-publication MSS are those of Love Among the Ruins, The Twins, One Word More and A Woman’s Last Word; there are also MSS for two poems written in the early 1850s but not published in M & W, A Face and May and Death. The status of the MS of Love Among the Ruins is a mystery: it is a fair copy, but not made for the printer; it has an alternative title, Sicilian Pastoral, but few other variants; and it carries no indication of date or of the occasion for which it was written. The MSS of The Twins and One Word More are printers’ copies (One Word More has an alternative title, A Last Word. To E. B. B.); both were probably preserved by B. because of their association with EBB. The MS of A Woman’s Last Word is in some ways the rarest of the four, since it represents, as Michael Meredith argues (‘Foot Over the Threshold: Browning at Work’, BSN xxvi [May 2000] 48–54) a genuine working draft. The MS is on a leaf torn from a notebook, and presented to Mrs Mary Ford on 18 March 1866. The draft of the poem is on the recto, ‘neatly copied in two columns, presumably from RB’s original rough working. This has been further worked on and a number of minor changes made’ (Meredith, p. 49). The poem is untitled, and dated at the bottom ‘Feb. 18’. The whole of the draft has subsequently been crossed through. As Meredith remarks, the MS ‘provides evidence that RB used to copy out completed poems in a notebook, rework them at leisure, and then copy them out again for the printer … Once recopied, he would cross through the drafts in the notebook’ (p. 51).
The proofs
The Huntington Library has two documents which record pre-publication readings. One is a set of bound proof-sheets (H proof ) which B. presented to the painter Frederic Leighton, probably in late Oct. 1855, when he sent lists of corrections and revisions to the first edition to D. G. Rossetti in England and to Fields in America (Peterson, p. 33; see below, Errata). Several handwritten corrections in H proof, mainly in Old Pictures in Florence, correspond to the readings in these lists. The second document (H proof 2) is a copy of the first edition of M & W (1855), with proof-readings written in by hand. The readings in H proof 2 may have been transcribed from H proof, but the evidence allows the possibility that they were transcribed from a different set of proofs, and we therefore record variants from H proof 2 on the same basis as those from H proof. For a detailed discussion of the evidence, see Appendix C, III 742–3.
B.’s lists of ‘errata’
The Brownings left for Paris on 17 Oct., before the final printing of M & W. B. was sent a final set of proofs (or something more in the nature of an advance copy), and noticed several errors, which he listed in letters to his American publisher James T. Fields and to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. These lists contain revisions as well as corrections, and we have emended our text only with regard to the latter. For details, see Appendix C, III 743–4.
Composition and date
B.’s first new publication after his marriage in September 1846 was CE & ED, begun in Nov. 1849 (though probably conceived earlier: see headnote, III 35–6) and published in April 1850. Up to this point he had written (at most) only a handful of shorter poems, and of these only Guardian-Angel (III 13) can be dated with certainty. His main effort had been backward-looking, namely the major revision of his earlier work which he undertook for the two-volume Poems of 1849. The intellectual and emotional ferment of CE & ED may be attributed to the influence of EBB., and may also have been a reaction to the death of B.’s mother in March 1849, which took place barely a week after the birth of his son. But after the burst of energy represented by CE & ED, B. seems to have written only sporadically for the next two years; we conjecture that the longest poem in M & W, Bishop Blougram, was begun in 1850–1 (again as the result of a strong stimulus, B.’s anger at the so-called ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850: see head-note, pp. 279–81) but not completed until 1853–4. It seems clear that B. had, at this time, no plans to compile a volume of shorter poems along the lines of Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845). Modern readers are used to thinking of these two volumes as containing some of B.’s most popular and enduring works (My Last Duchess, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Home-Thoughts, from Abroad, The Lost Leader) and as having established B. as the master of a central Victorian poetic genre, the dramatic monologue; but contemporary criticism did not endorse this view. B.’s best-known, and still best-liked, work was Paracelsus (1835), followed by Pippa Passes (1841), and both works, though in different modes, were dramas rather than collections of dramatic monologues.
Encouragement to publish a volume of shorter poems came to B. from his friend Bryan Waller Procter (the poet ‘Barry Cornwall’). In an unpublished letter of 5 Nov. 1851 (now at University of Iowa), Procter wrote to B., who was then in Paris:
I should like to see a book of your lyrics—any book of yours indeed;—but lyrics (like your others) indicative of your different moods of thought & feeling—would draw less upon your time than any long elaborate poems—& might be quite as popular perhaps. They might be dotted down at once as the easy expression of your mood—one at a time. Twould amount to a book before you would be aware of it. (Here Mrs. Browning joins me I know in urging you to this pleasant little task.)—How many things you will see where you are—how many things you are seeing now—how many dreams—everyone of which will suggest a poem to you.
Procter’s idea of lyric poetry as ‘the easy expression of [one’s] mood’ is almost comically alien to B., who satirized it in the late poem ‘Touch him ne’er so lightly, into song he burst’, the epilogue to DI2 (1880), but the mention of ‘popularity’ may well have struck a chord. B. suffered from recurring fits of optimism about his chances of reaching a wider public; cp., e.g., his remarks about Sordello (see headnote, I 350) and in this volume see his preface to the Bells and Pomegranates series (p. 884), and headnote to Popularity (p. 446). To this motive may be added that of self-reproach for not being as productive as he had anticipated in his courtship of EBB., during which he had repeatedly declared that marriage would lead to a regeneration of his art: ‘I look forward to a real life’s work for us both: I shall do all,—under your eyes and with your hand in mine,—all I was intended to do’ (6 Feb. 1846, Correspondence xii 45).
According to accounts which he gave late in life, B. decided in January 1853 that he had been ‘rather lazy’ and ‘resolved [he] would write something every day’; he duly wrote Women and Roses (see headnote, III 235) and Childe Roland (p. 348), but then ‘relapsed into [his] old desultory way’. But this latter statement seems not to correspond with an increasing rate of production in the winter and spring of 1853, which can be traced in a series of letters from EBB. In a letter of 15–17 Jan. she wrote to her sister Arabella: ‘Robert & I are doing a little writing, & passing a happy tranquil time’ (EBB to Arabella i 539); on 2 March: ‘Robert’s work is a collection of Lyrics in which he will assert himself as an original writer I dare say—there will be in them a good deal of Italian art … pictures, music. Both he & I mean to make a success if we can’ (i 542); on 15 March she wrote to Mary Russell Mitford that B. was ‘busy with another book’ (EBB to MRM iii 381); on 30 April–1 May, to Arabella: ‘Robert & I are very busy with our new books, & he has nearly enough lyrics to print he announced to me the other day’ (i 575). On 11 June she anticipated publication in 1854: ‘Depend on it Arabel, if we are alive & God suffers it, we shall be with you early in next year’s summer. … We shall be in England as soon as the weather is mild enough, printing our books … that will be a business-necessity’ (i 583). This last prediction was too optimistic: the Brownings did not in fact travel to England until the summer of 1855, and a considerable portion of M & W had not yet been written.
EBB.’s wording, especially in the letter of 2 March, confirms that B. had begun to think along the lines suggested by Procter, substituting for Procter’s ‘moods of thought & feeling’ the dramatic representation of ‘Italian art … pictures, music’. In a letter of 24 Feb. 1853 to his friend and admirer, the French critic Joseph Milsand, B. wrote: ‘I am writing a sort of first step towards popularity—(for me!)— ‘Lyrics,’ with more music & painting than before, so as to get people to hear & see … something to follow, if I can compass it!’ (first publ. in Revue Germanique xii [1921] 253; corr. text from EBB to Arabella i 542 n.34). As Scott Lewis points out, A Toccata (p. 367) and Woman’s Last Word (III 273) date from this period; the latter poem reminds us that B.’s concentration on ‘music & painting’ was not exclusive, and indeed such poems make up a small, though important, part of the finished M & W. B.’s desire for commercial success is evident in a letter of 5 March 1853 to his publisher Edward Chapman, in which he mentions Helen Faucit’s forthcoming production of his 1844 play Colombe’s Birthday and adds: ‘if there were to be any sort of success, it would help the poems to fetch up their lee-way, I suppose. Hadn’t you better advertise? … Meantime, I shall give you something saleable one of these days—see if I don’t’ (New Letters 59).
Several poems can be assigned to the summer and early autumn of 1853, e.g. In a Balcony and By the Fire-Side, both associated with the Brownings’ stay at Bagni di Lucca. On 10 Aug. EBB. wrote to H. F. Chorley: ‘Robert is working at a volume of lyrics, of which I have seen but a few, and those seemed to me as fine as anything he has done’ (Letters of EBB ii 131); the last phrase suggests that some of the longer poems in the volume had already been drafted. On 7 Oct. EBB. wrote to her brother George: ‘We have been very happy here, & not idle either. Robert especially has done a great deal of work, & will have his volume ready for the spring without failure, he says’ (George Barrett 200). The autumn of 1853 in Florence was ‘disturbed’ by ‘too much coming and going even with agreeable people’, EBB. wrote to B.’s sister Sarianna. ‘There has been no time for work. In Rome it must be different, or we shall get on poorly with our books, I think. Robert seems, however, by his account, to be in an advanced state already’ (Letters of EBB ii 144). The next major phase of productivity seems accordingly to have come in the winter of 1853–4, during the Brownings’ stay in Rome: An Epistle, Love Among the Ruins, Holy-Cross Day, Two in the Campagna and Cleon are among the poems likely to date from this period, at least in their conception; B. wrote to William Wetmore Story on 11 June 1854, after his return to Florence: ‘I am trying to make up for wasted time in Rome and setting my poetical house in order’ (cited in Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends [Boston 1903] i 288). A week earlier he had written to John Forster in terms which strongly suggest that this process was already well under way: ‘I must be in London, or Paris at farthest, to print my poems. … This is what I have written—only a number of poems of all sorts and sizes and styles and subjects— not written before last year, but the beginning of an expressing the spirit of all the fruits of the years since I last turned the winch of the wine press. The manner will be newer than the matter. I hope to be listened to, this time, and I am glad I have been made to wait this not very long while’ (New Letters 77). By late summer of 1854 the collection had grown sufficiently for B. to write to the American publisher James T. Fields: ‘I expect to bring out in London, next season, a collection of new Poems, containing about 5000 lines’ (24 Aug. 1854, publ. Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine lxxxiv [May–Oct. 1912] 130). Since M & W contains a little over 7,000 lines, the implication is that more poems were added between this date and the spring of 1855, when the contents of M & W were more or less finalized. On 10 Jan. 1855 EBB. wrote to Arabella: ‘Robert & I do work every day—he has a large volume of short poems which will be completed by the spring’ (EBB to Arabella ii 125), and on 15 May: ‘Robert has six thousand lines written out clear, & the rest nearly ready’ (ii 143). The phrase ‘written out clear’ suggests that B. was by now engaged in making fair copies from his drafts, not writing new poems, though this process probably involved a good deal of revising. The Brownings arrived in England in July 1855, and M & W was in proof by 6 Sept., when B. wrote to Fields: ‘I find that my poems are grown so considerably as to fill two books, not one. The first is before me, in the same type & form as [Tennyson’s] “Maud” [publ. July 1855], but with 260 pages instead of 154: and two thirds of the second volume are printed—(it will extend to the same number of pages.) […] These poems, too are all new entirely—unpublished I mean. They are the best of me, hitherto and for some time to come probably—and I have given my whole mind to the correcting & facilitating’ (B to Fields 28). A letter from EBB. to Arabella of 10 Sept. 1855 makes it clear that she helped B. with the proofreading of the volume (EBB to Arabella ii 170). The whole of M & W had been set up in type by 1 Oct., when B. sent proofs of ‘the last of the second volume’ to his and EBB.’s close friend and financial supporter John Kenyon (MS at Harvard University). In this letter B. repeated that he had ‘gone over the preceding portion of the two volumes perhaps half a dozen times or more very carefully, making minute improvements which “tell” on the general effect’. He told Kenyon that he had adopted several of his suggestions with regard to Saul (see l. 37n., III 498), and it is likely that other readers made suggestions which affected the text: proofs were sent to Forster, to B.’s ‘literary father’ W. J. Fox (for whom see Correspondence iii 313–14), to a more recent friend, the young Robert Bulwer Lytton, and to Milsand. On 3 Oct. EBB. wrote to Arabella: ‘We have just despatched Robert’s last proof. I am most sanguine about the work, believing in it, I for one’ (EBB to Arabella ii 178). M & W was published on 10 Nov.
Reception
B. had high hopes of M & W; he was buoyed up not just by EBB.’s praise but by the all-but-unanimous opinion of those friends to whom he showed the collection in proof (see above, Composition). The one dissenting voice was that of Kenyon, who, while greatly admiring Saul, regretted the preponderance of ‘dramatic’ poetry in the volume (Kenyon’s reverence for Wordsworth, who had been a friend of his for many years, may have played a part in this reaction). B.’s respect and affection for Kenyon did not prevent him from rebutting his criticism and from expressing optimism about the prospects for M & W:
In your remarks on the little or no pleasure you derive from dramatic—in comparison with lyric—poetry (understanding the vulgar or more obvious form of drama,—scene & dialogue,—for lyrics may be dramatic also in the highest sense)—I partake your feeling to a great degree: lyric is the oldest, most natural, most poetical of poetry, and I would always get it if I could: but I find in these latter days that one has a great deal to say, and try and get attended to, which is out of the lyrical element and capability—and I am forced to take the nearest way to it: and then it is undeniable that the common reader is susceptible to plot, story, and the simplest form of putting a matter “Said I,” “Said He” & so on. “The whole is with the Gods” as Cleon sums up in one of the things I send you. Well, dear Mr Kenyon, of this you are sure, I hope and believe,— that I have done my very best, with whatever effect and acceptance: and I really believed, like a goose, that this time I should get your white ball in my urn,—it was not to be! But why should not I tell you, what will give you the pleasure you would give me were it in your power—that Fox and Forster,— and I will associate with them Lytton, young as he is,—these three and yourself being my sole referees hitherto, with one exception,—well, these three take one’s breath away with their—not sympathy merely—but anticipations of success—of “a sale” in short: and Chapman, shrewd as he is, makes no scruple of declaring that he expects the same. My exception—my fourth critic is the fine fellow of the Revue des Deux Mondes—who writes of the first volume (to me) “il y a là du colossal!”. I put all this down impudently on paper to please you, as I say—for I know whether you will grieve or no to find your dark auguries met by some blue bits in various parts of my poor horizon. So I leave it till another month [to] justify one or the other prophecy. (Harvard MS; the ‘fine fellow of the Revue des Deux Mondes’ is Joseph Milsand, whose opinion may be translated as ‘there’s tremendous stuff in there!’)
In the light of this and other such expressions of confidence, it is not hard to see how dismayed B. must have been by the reception of M & W in England. He saw the English newspapers and magazines at Galignani’s Reading Room in Paris; on 5 Dec. he wrote to Chapman that he had seen a few, ‘the Examiner being the best,—as for the worst, there’s no saying that. The serious notices are to come, it is to be hoped. How this style of thing helps or hinders the sale, is what you must counsel me about’ (New Letters 84). By ‘this style of thing’ B. presumably meant reviews such as the one in The Saturday Review (24 Nov. 1855, i 69–70): ‘It is really high time that this sort of thing should, if possible, be stopped. Here is another book of madness and mysticism—another melancholy specimen of power wantonly wasted, and talent deliberately perverted—another act of self-prostration before that demon of bad taste who now seems to hold in absolute possession the fashionable masters of our ideal literature’ (repr. Critical Heritage 158; the conjectural attribution of this review to B.’s friend Joseph Arnould may be confidently dismissed). The review in The Athenæum (17 Nov., pp. 1327–8), with one of whose editors, H. F. Chorley, both B. and EBB. had been on friendly terms in the 1840s, takes a similar line, a little less intemperately: ‘Who will not grieve over energy wasted and power misspent,—over fancies chaste and noble, so overhung by the “seven veils” of obscurity, that we can oftentimes be only sure that fancies exist?’ (Critical Heritage 155). EBB. was indignant: ‘The Athenaeum has treated us very shabbily, and, if Mr. Chorley wrote that article—shame on him for it!’ (22 Nov. 1855, EBB to Arabella ii 190; the review was indeed by Chorley). On 17 Dec. B. wrote again to Chapman: ‘don’t take to heart the zoological utterances I have stopped my ears against at Galignani’s of late. “Whoo-oo-oo-oo” mouths the big monkey—“Whee-ee-ee-ee” squeaks the little monkey and such a dig with the end of my umbrella as I should give the brutes if I couldn’t keep my temper, and consider how they miss their nut[s] and gingerbread!’ (New Letters 85). Further ‘zoological utterances’ arrived in January 1856 in the shape of Fraser’s Magazine (liii 105–6): ‘genius unfaithful to its trust … what might have been a beautiful garden is but a wilderness overgrown with a rank and riotous vegetation … strong natural powers weakened by self-indulgence, by caprice, by hankering after originality, by all the mental vices which are but so many names of vanity and self-seeking’ (Critical Heritage 165). January also brought more thoughtful and discriminating judgments by George Eliot in The Westminster Review (lxv 290–6) and by David Masson in The British Quarterly Review (xxiii 151–80), but they were not sufficient to stem the tide. Sales of the book, initially promising, rapidly tailed off. In America reviews and sales were both more positive, but B. earned nothing in royalties from the sales and it is clear that popularity abroad could not console him for rejection at home. He wrote nothing of substance for several years, and EBB. became alarmed at his apparent indifference to poetry; only towards the end of the 1850s (and the end of EBB.’s life) are there signs of a creative revival. Several of the major long poems of Dramatis Personae (1864) have their roots in this latter period, notably Caliban upon Setebos.
One particular response to M & W in the months after its publication deserves special mention, both because it provoked B. to an articulate and sustained defence of his poetics, and because it exposed the extent of his frustration and anger at the incomprehension of his readers, even those who professed to admire him. In Dec. 1855 he received a long letter from Ruskin, criticizing M & W wholesale and in detail; the centrepiece was a sustained (and sharply satirical) close reading of Popularity (p. 446 in this volume), a poem which, as Ruskin put it, ‘touches the matter in hand’. Ruskin’s letter, and B.’s equally eloquent reply to it, are printed in Appendix B.
By the spring of 1856 B. had turned his attention to negotiating terms for a new edition of EBB.’s collected poems, and her forthcoming ‘novel-poem’ Aurora Leigh; at the end of a long letter to Chapman on this subject he remarked: ‘As to my own Poems—they must be left to Providence and that fine sense of discrimination which I never cease to meditate upon and admire in the public: they cry out for new things and when you furnish them with what they cried for, “it’s so new,” they grunt. The half-dozen people who know and could impose their opinions on the whole sty of grunters say nothing to them (I don’t wonder) and speak so low in my own ear that it’s lost to all intents and purposes’ (New Letters 92–3). B. implies that influential friends such as D. G. Rossetti, Ruskin and Carlyle might have been more active in their public support; his sense of being an exile from literary London is at its sharpest in such comments. He could not, of course, appreciate that the tide of his reputation had begun to turn, and that the passionate enthusiasm of Rossetti and his circle, though it could not yet affect his wider public image, or increase his sales to match those of his wife, foretold the fame he achieved in the 1860s. B. was never to reach the popularity of Tennyson, and remained in many ways an acquired taste for the ‘British Public, ye who like me not’, as he addressed them in Ring (i 410); but as his reputation grew, the poems of M & W became, and have continued to be, its cornerstone.
(3) Dramatis Personae
Publication
DP was published on Saturday 28 May 1864 in London by Chapman and Hall, and simultaneously in Boston by Ticknor & Fields (from advance proofs supplied by B.). There are minimal differences between the 1st British and American editions. The volume had no dedication or preface and consisted of the following poems:
i James Lee
ii At the Window
iii By the Fireside
iv In the Doorway
v Along the Beach
vi On the Cliff
vii Under the Cliff
viii Among the Rocks
ix Beside the Drawing-Board ix On Deck
Gold Hair
The Worst of It
Dîs Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de nos Jours
Too Late
Abt Vogler
Rabbi Ben Ezra
A Death in the Desert
Caliban upon Setebos: or, Natural Theology in the Island
Confessions
May and Death
Prospice
Youth and Art
A Face
A Likeness
Mr. Sludge, “the Medium”
Apparent Failure
Epilogue
B., against his usual practice, gave Ticknor & Fields permission to publish some of the poems in their journal the Atlantic Monthly; in a letter to James T. Fields of 16 Oct. 1863, he wrote: ‘With respect to your offer of “£60 for the sheets of my new volume, one month in advance of publication,—or £100 for the additional right of printing one or two of the pieces (not printed elsewhere) in your magazine”—I accept it’ (Houghton Library MS; cited in Gertrude Reece Hudson, Robert Browning’s Literary Life [Austin, Tx: 1982], p. 413). Gold Hair appeared in the issue for May 1864 (vol. xiii, pp. 596–8), and Prospice and Under the Cliff (section vi of James Lee) in the June issue (xiii 694, 737). There is no evidence to suggest that B. had any say in which poems were chosen. James Lee incorporates two previously-written poems, one of which had been published many years earlier: see headnote, p. 665.
A second (British) edition was issued in September 1864, the first time this had happened in B.’s career. The copy of the first edition used by B. in preparing this second edition is now in the Tinker Library at Yale. The only notable change was the addition of three stanzas to Gold Hair, in response to a comment by George Eliot. In the Poetical Works of 1868, DP was included in vol. VI, following In a Balcony, and contained two additional short poems, inserted on either side of Prospice: Deaf and Dumb; a Group by Woolner and Eurydice to Orpheus; a Picture by Leighton. The title of James Lee was altered to James Lee’s Wife. In the Poetical Works of 1888 DP was included in vol. VII, again following In a Balcony.
Manuscript and proofs
DP marks a watershed in the textual history of B.’s poems, since from this point on we have all the printer’s-copy manuscripts for his individual volumes. Moreover, unlike the MS of CE & ED and the (lost) MSS of M & W, the DP MS is all in B.’s hand. The MS, consisting of bound pages written on one side only, is at Morgan (M.A.33). With some notable exceptions, it is a fairly clean fair copy of the poems in the order they appeared in the volume. Up to the end of Mr. Sludge, “the Medium”, the pages of the MS are numbered in pencil and the poems are also numbered in order of appearance; the last eleven pages, containing Apparent Failure and Epilogue, are separately numbered in ink and the poems themselves carry no number, suggesting that they were added to the volume at a late stage. Two poems contain substantial evidence of drafting and revision, Caliban upon Setebos and Mr. Sludge: the state of the latter in particular suggests that it may have undergone some redrafting while the volume was in press (see headnote, p. 771).
B. gave his sister Sarianna a set of proofs with some corrections in his hand, now in the Tinker Library at Yale, and another set to Moncure D. Conway, also with a few corrections, for use in preparing a review, now in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. As Ohio notes, these proofs are identical except that the Yale set bears the date ‘London, April 12, 1864’ at the end, and they represent a very late stage of the text: there are no significant variants with 1864. We cite only B.’s autograph corrections in our notes (1864 proof ).
Composition and date
The critical and commercial failure of M & W plunged B. into a depression from which he began to recover only towards the end of the 1850s. He told Isa Blagden in a letter of 1 Aug. 1857—after perpetrating a three-line skit on her name—that he had ‘begun to write poetry again’ (Dearest Isa 3; see also our edition, III 703), but the one serious poem that can be dated to this period, Study of a Hand, by Lionardo, is a by-product of activities (drawing and clay-modelling) which B. took up as alternatives to writing (see headnote, III 701). It was not until the winter of 1859–60 that he engaged in a sustained bout of composition: in a letter of 18 May 1860 to Fanny Haworth, EBB. reported that during the winter he had been ‘working at a long poem which I have not seen a line of, and producing short lyrics which I have seen, and may declare worthy of him’ (Letters of EBB ii 388). B. showed some of these shorter poems to Isa Blagden at Siena in the late summer of 1860 (Dearest Isa 176, 180) but we have not been able to identify them with any certainty. We can discount A Face (an album-poem from 1852: see headnote, III 230), May and Death (publ. in The Keepsake for 1857; see headnote, III 361), and the three poems inspired by B.’s trips to Brittany after EBB.’s death: James Lee, Gold Hair and Dîs Aliter Visum. For the rest, conjecture may point in different directions. DeVane, for example, mentions ‘such pieces as Confessions, Youth and Art, Too Late, A Likeness and The Worst of It’ (Handbook 281), but the first two are just as likely to have been the product of B.’s return to England and his renewed contact with British social and intellectual life, and the third, which concerns the death of a woman married to a poet who is accused of ‘tagging [her] epitaph’, hardly seems a tactful choice of subject for B. in 1860. Nor is there any indication as to how far he got with the ‘long poem’. He seems to have made little or no progress in the months that followed: writing from Rome in March 1861 to B.’s sister Sarianna, EBB. attempted to explain this lack of productivity. B. was ‘peculiar in his ways of work as a poet’ and would not (unlike Tennyson, she noted) put in regular hours of work; he ‘waits for an inclination— works by fits and starts—he can’t do otherwise he says. … I wanted his poems done this winter very much—and here was a bright room with three windows consecrated to use. But he had a room all last summer, and did nothing. Then, he worked himself out by riding for three or four hours together—there has been little done since last winter, when he did much. He was not inclined to write this winter. … He has the material for a volume, and will work at it this summer, he says’ (Letters of EBB ii 434–6). But B. was not able to fulfil this pledge.
EBB. died in Florence on 29 June 1861. B.’s decision to leave Italy was immediate: he announced it to his sister in the letter he wrote to her the following day (LH 62). He arrived in London on 27 September. His immediate concern was with his son Pen’s education; his first professional business was the preparation of EBB.’s Last Poems, published in March 1862. As far as his own work was concerned, his friends John Forster and B. W. Procter were compiling a volume of Selections from the Poetical Works published by Chapman and Hall in November 1862 (with the date 1863), and though the choice of poems was theirs, he made some revisions and corrections to the text; he also carried out more extensive revisions for the three-volume Poetical Works of 1863. He probably wrote James Lee in Brittany in August 1862 (see headnote, p. 665), and possibly also Gold Hair, and these would have joined the group of shorter poems he had already drafted in 1860; but the date of composition of the longer poems in DP—Caliban upon Setebos, A Death in the Desert, and Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium’—is uncertain. One of these must be the ‘long poem’ he was working on in the winter of 1859–60 and which EBB. had not seen; the likeliest candidate, in our view, is Caliban, but it is not known when B. completed it. He probably continued to work on the volume in London in the autumn of 1862; he told Isa Blagden on 19 Dec. 1862 that it would be published in the spring of 1863 (Dearest Isa 142). In a letter to the Storys of 5 March 1863, however, he announced a delay, which he attributed to the slow progress being made with the printing of the Poetical Works: ‘I shall not be able to bring out the new book till Autumn: wanting to draw a distinct line between past & present’ (American Friends 118). Then, in a letter to Isa Blagden of 19 November 1863, he gave a different reason for delay: he wrote that he would soon ‘go to press’ with the new poems (i.e. have them set up in type) but that publication would be deferred to the spring of 1864: ‘we wait, because there is some success attending the complete edition, and we let it work’ (Dearest Isa 180); he told Mrs Story the same thing a week later (American Friends 136). This commercial tactic seems to have been suggested by Frederick Chapman, B.’s publisher. On the whole we think it unlikely that the volume as it stands was ready to appear in the spring of 1863 (in particular, there are strong indications that Mr. Sludge was written, or substantially revised, in the spring and summer of that year: see headnote, p. 771). However, it seems probable that with the exception of the Epilogue, the volume was ready by November 1863. This does not mean, of course, that B. made no changes between then and the date of publication: he thought of the first typesetting of his work as a necessary stage of composition (see Karlin and Woolford, Robert Browning, p. 27).
In a letter to Isa Blagden of 18 Oct. 1862, B. referred to the volume as ‘a new book of “Men and Women” (or … some such name)’ (Dearest Isa 128). To the Storys he specified that the reason for choosing an alternative title would be ‘to please the publisher’ (5 Sept. 1863, American Friends 130).
Reception
The fact that a second edition of DP appeared in the same year as the first suggests that the tide of B.’s popularity had turned. DeVane (Handbook 283) argues that M & W ‘had been slowly making an impression upon the British public’, and that both the Poetical Works of 1863 and the Selections edited by Forster and Procter helped B. ‘to be recognized for the force he was’. In this light, Chapman’s tactic of delaying the appearance of DP until these editions had made their way seems shrewd, though B. was angered by an article (by William Stigand) in the Edinburgh Review in October 1864 (repr. CH 230–60) which subsumed its critique of DP in a hostile survey of his whole career: as he put it to Julia Wedgwood: ‘The clever creature rummages over my wardrobe of thirty years’ accumulation, strips every old coat of its queer button or odd tag and tassel, then holds them out, “So Mr. B. goes dressed now!”—of the cut of the coats, not a word’ (RB & JW 103). However, this article was not a sign of the times; in January 1865 the Edinburgh was itself attacked in the Saturday Review (repr. CH 262–70) not just for criticizing B., but for doing so in a dated tone of captious sarcasm. John Woolford (‘Periodicals and the Practice of Literary Criticism, 1855–64’, in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. J. Shattock and M. Wolff, Leicester University Press 1982) suggests that this controversy signalled a sea-change in the style of periodical literary criticism from which B. was to benefit for the remainder of his career.
B.’s return to England, and his greater visibility in the social and intellectual life of the capital, undoubtedly contributed to his rehabilitation, pace his own view of the matter, expressed in a letter to Isa Blagden of 19 Aug. 1865:
I suppose that what you call “my fame within these four years” comes from a little of this gossiping and going out, and showing myself to be alive: and so indeed some folks say—but I hardly think it: for remember I was uninterruptedly (almost) in London from the time I published Paracelsus—till I ended that string of plays with Luria: and I used to go out then, and see far more of merely literary people, critics &c—than I do now,—but what came of it? There were always a few people who had a certain opinion of my poems, but nobody cared to speak what he thought, or the things printed twenty five years ago would not have waited so long for a good word—but at last a new set of men arrive who don’t mind the conventionalities of ignoring one and seeing everything in another: Chapman says, “The orders come from Oxford and Cambridge”, and all my new cultivators are young men: more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don’t like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval and take those words out of their mouths “which they always meant to say”, and never did. When there gets to be a general feeling of this kind, that there must be something in the works of an author, the reviews are obliged to notice him, such notice as it is: but what poor work, even when doing its best!
(Dearest Isa 219–20)
The phrase ‘ignoring one and seeing everything in another’ almost certainly alludes to Tennyson, whose Enoch Arden and Other Poems was published in the same year as DP. B.’s acknowledgment of success is still marked by a sense of injury and resentment, vividly conveyed in his sardonic dig at his ‘old friends’.
1 Our tracing of the history of composition and publication of M & W has been greatly helped by William S. Peterson’s article ‘The Proofs of Browning’s Men and Women’ (SBC iii, no. 2 [Fall 1975], pp. 23–39), the first scholarly study of the document we refer to as H proof.