Iain Finlayson - Browning

Still, to be realistic, the failure was maybe all to the good. Diplomacy was certainly a creditable profession for a gentleman, though that gentleman needed not only financial assets to back it up, at least in the beginning, and, to advance it, the social contacts that most successful young diplomats had either acquired on their own account at Oxford or Cambridge or naturally possessed through upper-middle-class and aristocratic family relationships. To cut a career as a diplomat was as difficult and expensive as to make progress as a barrister (Alfred Domett and Joseph Arnould were already finding this out in their first years as young lawyers) or gain promotion as a military officer in a regiment of any social consequence. The cost to the Browning family purse of maintaining Robert as an embassy attaché would have weighed even more heavily than keeping him at home as a poet. Maisie Ward supposes that the Silverthornes would have found a place for Robert in the family brewery, but ‘this would have meant no less drudgery, no better future prospects than the bank, and if [Cyrus] Mason’s view of the worldliness of the family is correct, they would certainly have aimed at something more socially acceptable’.

A certain sense of heightened social awareness is imputed to the Brownings by Maisie Ward and by Cyrus Mason: it may fall short of social snobbery, but attitudes and aspirations do tend to suggest at least an impetus towards gentility—what we now regard more positively as ‘upward mobility’. Mrs Orr’s definite and regular distaste for any possibility of Robert’s being tarred by association with ‘lowlife’; the horror with which Cyrus Mason (and other Brownings even into the mid twentieth century) regarded any suggestion that even distant ancestors might have been of the servant class; the gentleman’s education that Robert enjoyed—these are pointers that perhaps speak more of prevailing social values in mid nineteenth-century England than of the particular case of the Brownings, though of course the Brownings were of the middle rank of the powerful middle classes that mostly subscribed without question to the desirability of self-improvement in their lives.

There were no awkward assertions of social superiority, however, to make any visitor to the Browning household feel ill at ease (Mrs Browning was no Mrs Wilfer, with her head tied up in a handkerchief and her aspirations affirmed in a superior sniff); it was a sociable house and many of Robert’s friends have recorded warm memories of happy evenings there among good company. Cyrus Mason gnashed his teeth in the darkness of outer family, dismally nursing into old age his own exclusion from this cheerful company—more than likely, says Maisie Ward, he simply bored the Brownings to death—and took his revenge cold as his abiding bitterness when he wrote of the ‘misty pride’ that hung like a dampness in the ‘genteelly dreary’ Browning household and shrouded its inhabitants, whose single, self-absorbed concern was to develop a poet of genius to the obliteration of natural affection within the near family and shameful neglect of its extended members. The fact that Reuben Browning and the Silverthornes, close family, were welcome guests, and are known to have been generous to Robert, would tend to put paid to Cyrus Mason’s more extreme accusations.

It is true, nevertheless, that Robert took the trouble to cultivate good acquaintance. A letter written in 1830 by Robert to a close friend, Christopher Dowson, refers to ‘the unfortunate state of our friend P[ritchard]’. 45 Pritchard is not a significant figure in Browning’s correspondence—the letters that have survived the conflagration of Browning’s personal papers contain only minor references to him—and nobody but Griffin and Minchin is interested in poor old Pritchard as a character in Browning’s life, either at this time or later. They describe him as ‘a brisk, dapper, little, grey-haired sea-captain, with a squint and a delightful fund of tales of adventure’. He lived at Battersea, and it was his whim to keep his address a close secret. However, he was the focus of a set, known as ‘The Colloquials’, of young men into whose orbit Robert was attracted and with whom he struck up lasting friendships. Pritchard’s ‘elasticity of mind bade defiance to advancing years and enabled him to associate unconstrainedly with those who were very considerably his juniors’, say Griffin and Minchin, and they further state that he had a chivalrous regard for women, to the extent of leaving his money to two maiden ladies on the ground that ‘women should be provided for since they cannot earn their living’. 46 One of these maiden ladies was Sarianna Browning, who later inherited £1000 by Pritchard’s will.

Through Pritchard, Robert met and associated with Christopher and Joseph Dowson, William Curling Young and his younger brother Frederick Young, Alfred Domett, and Joseph Arnould. The Dowsons knew Pritchard through shipping, their family business; Christopher Dowson later married Mary, Alfred Domett’s sister; Joseph Dowson associated himself with the Youngs through business interests; in short, the group developed close family and business ties that bound them together longer than their youthful debates—their ‘boisterous Colloquies’, as Arnould later characterized them—about politics, poetry, theatre, philosophy, science, and the business of the group magazine, Olla Podrida , which they produced to publish their own essays, poems, and whatever other of their effusions pleased them. Robert himself contributed ‘A Dissertation on Debt and Debtors’, an essay which characteristically quoted from Quarles and uncharacteristically—for a man whose horror of debt was later well known and to become deeply ingrained—defended debt as a necessary condition of human life. 47

A less regular member of the group was Field Talfourd, an artist and brother of Thomas Noon Talfourd, and it has been suggested that Benjamin Jowett, the future celebrated Master of Balliol College, Oxford, may have attended some Colloquial meetings—though his name is introduced more on the basis that he was then a native of Camberwell than on any sure evidence of his participation in the group’s activities. The Colloquials seem to have been a kindly, good-natured set of young, middle-class men whose aspirations and ambitions variously took them into the middle ranks of the law, politics, and business, at home and in the service of the Empire. Several of them, notably Arnould and Domett, wrote poetry for the rest of their lives: Arnould, while at Wadham College, Oxford, won the Newdigate Prize for poetry; Domett turned out stuff such as Ranolf and Amohia: a South-Sea Day Dream , inspired by his Antipodean travels and career, not wholly disrespected by public regard in his own day but entirely unknown to present fame. Of them all, Robert was forever closest to Alfred Domett.

Diplomacy had not yet done with Robert Browning, though Robert may have all but done with diplomacy. In 1834, a young Frenchman presented himself to the Brownings. This was Count Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, then in his mid-twenties. He was socially affable, urbane, cosmopolitan, and intellectually impressive, literate in European art and poetry, and interested in finance. He had been recommended to William Shergold Browning, of Rothschild’s in Paris, by the Marquis of Fortia, his uncle, who shared with William Browning an interest in literature. William in turn recommended young Ripert-Monclar to his brother Reuben in London, who introduced him into the Browning household. Ripert-Monclar claimed to be spending his summers in England, ostensibly for pleasure. 48 In fact, the young aristocrat was a Royalist, an active supporter of the dethroned Bourbons now living in England as a result of the French revolution of July 1830 that made Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, King of France until he in turn was toppled in 1848. Ripert-Monclar, as he confessed to the Brownings, was acting as a private agent of communication between the royal exiles and their legitimist friends in France. He was not himself an exile, though it can be assumed that he was no favourite of Louis-Philippe. There is a suggestion that he may have been briefly held in jail in 1830. It was diplomacy of a thrilling sort—clandestine, subversive, and romantic.