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Browning and Victorian Medievalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Beverly Taylor
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Extract

The fascination with the Middle Ages that stimulated Carlyle's Past and Present, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume, and Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse registered slight effect in Browning's poetry. Perhaps alone of Victorian poets, Browning recorded no impressions of Malory's Morte Darthur — which appeared in three separate editions early in the century and not only inspired the Laureate's magnum opus and the Pre-Raphaelite murals in the Oxford Union, but nearly prompted Morris to found a chivalric order before he alighted on the more practical scheme for a furniture company. Whereas Browning used specifically medieval settings and characters in two early unsuccessful works, Sordello and The Return of the Druses, he later returned to the Middle Ages in only a small number of poems. Though Arthur Symons praised Browning for having “distilled the very essence of the Middle Ages,” the claim that “there is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge” holds true for the Renaissance and later periods far more than for the Middle Ages. Even though his medieval interests, compared to those of his contemporaries, seem slight, Browning's perception and uses of the Middle Ages constitute an intriguing and rather neglected facet of the many-sided phenomenon, Victorian medievalism. To understand his sense of the Middle Ages – the period's viability and meaning as a contemporary subject – we may turn, first, to Browning's evaluations of nineteenth-century medieval works, and then to his poems themselves.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 8 , Spring 1980 , pp. 57 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

NOTES

1. See Mackail, J. W., The Life of William Morris (London: Longmans, Green, 1901), i, 63–64.Google Scholar

2. Symons, , An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning (London: Dent, 1906), p. 10.Google Scholar

3. Ruskin, , Modern Painters (Pt. v, chap. xx), in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Cook, E. T. and Wedderburn, Alexander (London: George Allen, 1904), vi, 449.Google Scholar

4. DeVane, , A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed., (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), p. 282.Google Scholar Subsequently cited as Handbook.

5. Letter to Houghton, Lord, 1865, in The Swinburne Letters, ed. Lang, Cecil Y. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–1962), i, 98.Google Scholar

6. All quotations from Browning's works are from The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning (New York: Macmillan, 1914; rpt. 1941).Google Scholar

7. 20 Mar. 1845, in The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846, ed. Kintner, Elvan (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), i, 43.Google Scholar (The double periods are ebb's.) Subsequently cited as Letters. Browning had suggested that ebb write a monologue or a drama to accompany her translation of Aeschylus; see Letters, i, 37–38.Google Scholar

8. Aurora Leigh, v, 155–66, 200–03Google Scholar, in Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Porter, Charlotte and Clarke, Helen A. (New York: Crowell, 1900), v, 6–7.Google Scholar

9. For an account of this pressure exerted by critics, see Houghton, Walter E., The Poetry of Clough: An Essay in Revaluation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 93–99.Google Scholar

10. Letters, i, 428–29.Google Scholar

11. Letter of 19 01 1870Google Scholar, in Dearest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. McAleer, Edward C. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951), p. 328.Google Scholar Subsequently cited as Dearest Isa.

12. See the discussion of landscape as characterization in Rosenberg, John D., The Fall of Camelot: A Study of Tennyson's ‘Idylls of the King’ (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 66 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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17. See Handbook, pp. 74–85.Google Scholar

18. Carlyle, Thomas, “Sir Walter Scott,” Works (London: Chapman & Hall, 1899), xxix, 77–78.Google Scholar

19. MrsOrr, Sutherland attests Browning's historical research in A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1937; rpt. New York: Kraus, 1969), p. 32.Google Scholar

20. Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman (London: Smith, Elder, 1877), iii, 207.Google Scholar

21. See Sharrock, Roger, “Browning and History,” in Writers and their Background: Robert Browning, ed. Armstrong, Isobel (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), pp. 77–103.Google Scholar

22. 17 Mar. 1883, cited by Woolford, John in “Sources and Resources in Browning's Early Reading,” in Writers and their Backgrounds, pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

23. Dearest Isa, p. 328.Google Scholar

24. Letter to W. M. Rossetti, cited in Griffin, W. Hall and Minchin, H. C., The Life of Robert Browning (New York: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 287–88.Google Scholar

25. Dearest Isa, p. 328.Google Scholar

26. Ibid.

27. The only metaphor with historical significance refers to Julius Caesar.

28. On Browning's use of his sources and the date of the event, see Handbook, pp. 128–30.Google Scholar

29. Donald Smalley suggests some echoes of Ezra, Ben's teachings in Browning's poem; see Poems of Robert Browning, ed. Smalley, Donald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 520.Google Scholar

30. On Browning's sources, see Handbook, pp. 453–55.Google Scholar

31. Browning described a superstition associated with Pietro in nineteenth-century Italy; see Letters, i, 444.Google Scholar

32. Browning's probable source, the account in the Biographie universelle, suggests Molay's innocence.

33. E.g., Handbook, pp. 110, 227.Google Scholar

34. See, e.g., Hagopian, John, “The Mask of Browning's Countess Gismond,” Philological Quarterly, 40 (1961), 153–55Google Scholar; and Tilton, John W. and Tuttle, R. Dale, “A New Reading of ‘Count Gismond,’” Studies in Philology, 59 (1962), 83–95.Google Scholar

35. The two poems were paired in 1842 under the heading “Italy and France”; they were separated in 1849 and given their familiar titles and subtitles.

36. Browning once vigorously defended the medieval practice of duelling – and seriously alarmed Miss Barrett with the letter. See Letters, ii, 601–08.Google Scholar He later implied in the paired poems “Before” and “After” (1855) the folly of thinking that force can establish the moral legitimacy of a claim.

37. Letters, i, 252.Google Scholar The story had been told by Leigh Hunt and by Schiller.

38. See McGann, Jerome J., Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 210–20.Google Scholar

39. Browning separated the two poems in 1849.Google Scholar

40. Ruskin, , The Stones of Venice (vi), Works, ed. Cook, and Wedderburn, , x, 183 ff. On the philosophy of the imperfect, see especially pp. 190 ff.Google Scholar

41. Although he insisted he had in mind no specific allegorical significance when he wrote the poem, Browning agreed to a reader's suggestion that it signified “He that endureth to the end shall be saved.” See Handbook, pp. 229, 231.Google Scholar