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Chapter Five - FitzGerald, Browning, and the Limits of Indifference
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113 CHAPTER FIVE FitzGerald, Browning, and the Limits of Indifference One of the few major disagreements to break out between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning during their courtship concerned indifference . In February 1846 Barrett sent Browning a letter from her friend, the writer Harriet Martineau, which she found “delightful . . . & interesting for Wordsworth’s sake & her own” (Kintner 1:447). Part of the section of Martineau’s letter to which she directs Browning’s attention reads as follows: The Wordsworths are [i]n affliction just now. His only brother [Christopher] died a few days ago; & a nephew here is dying & they have had accounts from their sick daughter-in-law in Italy. But, as you can well conceive, he can lose himself completely in any interesting subject of thought, so as to forget his griefs. His mind is always completely full of the thing that may be in it; & there he was on Wedy , his face all gloom & tears at two o’clock from the tidings of his brother’s death recd an hour before, & lo! at three he was all animation, discussing the rationale of my extraory discourses (in the mesmeric state)—his mind so wholly occupied that he was quite happy for the time. (Kintner 1:461–62) After more than a year’s acquaintance with Browning, including forty-five meetings and over two hundred letters, Barrett might have known better. Browning’s response was a spluttering contempt for the indifference Martineau celebrates. He begins by damning the letter itself: it is merely “clever writing,” since it contains none of the dialogic intimacy that Browning demanded of letters. He rushes on without a paragraph break to shudder at the unaccountable (to him) change of mood in Wordsworth: “that amiable transition from two o’clock’s grief at the death of one’s brother to three o’clock’s happiness in the ‘extraordinary mesmeric discourse’ of one’s friend” (1:464). And this leads back to a critique of Martineau, whom he finds all too willing to turn, like Wordsworth, away from important 114 Chapter Five things—in her case, “book-making.” She seems to Browning to be culpably indifferent to “the importance & responsibilities of ‘authorship’.” Instead of laboring away at the writing “which is to inspire thousands, beyond computation,” Martineau has taken refuge for a time in gossip and games of mesmerism, and Browning strongly disapproves of the evasion (1:465). Barrett felt called upon to defend both Wordsworth and her friend; the debate continued over several letters, but was never resolved. Browning here associates two forms of indifference he finds equally distasteful. He blames Martineau for composing “clever” letters instead of prosecuting her true vocation—that is, for her indifference to noble literary ambition. He blames Wordsworth for a more blatant form of indifference , his seeming insensitivity to his brother’s death. Browning’s shock is understandable: in “Peele Castle,” after the death of his brother John, Wordsworth had written, “The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old” (39); forty years later the feeling of his loss seems to wear off in an hour. The indifference that “Peele Castle” at once regrets and repudiates—the “heart that lives alone”—appears to have won out, and Browning refuses to sympathize . In this angry intolerance, however, he differed from his future wife. In Aurora Leigh, as mentioned above (chapter 2), Barrett Browning expresses through her heroine a deep sympathy with the impulse to “live to one’s-self,” or in Aurora’s own words to live “Indifferently” (AL VII, 1188). Aurora is able to take relief in having paused from her emancipatory crusade, in being alone and unoccupied, even in the death of those who had known her formerly. For Barrett Browning, as for Wordsworth, such indifference was an indulgence, which must eventually be overcome with effort; but at least she admitted its human necessity, as her husband did not.1 The two forms of indifference that Robert Browning blames, without discriminating between them—indifference to ambition or effort and indifference to grief—were both characteristic of Edward FitzGerald, as we have seen. FitzGerald’s willingness to embrace the limits both of poetic endeavor and of human life, which found expression in his letters and especially in the Rubáiyát, puts him at the other end of the spectrum from Browning. Many writers, including Wordsworth, Keats, and Elizabeth 1. It took EBB many years to be reconciled to the fact of a posthumous existence. Early poems (“The Prayer,” “Remonstrance (and Reply)”) express...