Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry (review)

Suzanne Bailey is a clever, observant critic who has taken a serious wrong turn and produced an exasperatingly misguided book. Her work’s strength lies in its scrutiny of the way in which Robert Browning perceived and thought about the world, the way in which he reflected on his own thoughts and perceptions, and the ways in which these processes shaped his poetry. Bailey pays attention to the right material, especially Browning’s correspondence, and often achieves illuminating results; her insistence on the value of Browning’s later poetry, moreover, is wholly justified. But her project founders on its central contention: that Browning suffered from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and that this explains (if it does not explain away) much of his famous difficulty. As she puts it: “To read Browning without knowledge of the particular difficulties he struggled with is not to fully understand his aesthetic and expressive difference” (7). This claim’s bad grammar enhances its absurdity. No critical approach can “fully” account for anything, least of all one based on “knowledge” that amounts to speculation, mixing biographical anecdote and opinion with the partial reading of portions of text. Despite her own disclaimer, uneasily placed in an afterword, that “the point here is not to seek reductive causes for particular accomplishments,” the book gives precisely that impression (151).

The retrospective diagnosis of historical figures according to modern notions of psychology or neuroscience is an unprofitable pursuit: not only is it inherently unprovable, but it rests on the shaky assumption that modern concepts and methodology are stable and reliable tools. Our theories of how the mind works are constantly changing; our only certainty is that current techniques of description and analysis will be superseded. ADHD in this light is not a dwelling-place of objective fact, but a temporary shelter erected by sojourners in the wilderness; one day it will be dismantled, like the Victorians’ own hysteria and neurasthenia. Bailey’s sincere belief that ADHD should be recognized as a genuine syndrome and that there should be greater social understanding and tolerance of its effects interferes with her judgement and is a distraction from the exercise of her critical faculty. Her parti pris has an unpleasant tinge of proselytizing; it implies that those who do not accept her premise are inferior readers, excluded by wilful ignorance from access to Browning’s mind. By a kind of poetic justice, it also blinds her to the value of other perspectives, especially those that depend on literary rather than psychological analysis. A poet’s mind is formed in communion with other poets as much as by its own intrinsic nature, something Browning showed he understood in his first published poem, “Pauline” (1833). Bailey’s treatment of this poem is typically wrongheaded: she sees Percy Bysshe Shelley’s presence in “Pauline” as one of a number of instances of “unconscious imitation” produced by Browning’s “exceptional memory, together with his awareness of analogical patterns in concepts and in sound”—in other words, as a function of his neurological make-up (98). But the imitation of Shelley in “Pauline” is everywhere deliberate and artful: that, indeed, is the point of the exercise (or exorcism). It is not clear whether Bailey knows of such a reading and disagrees with it or whether she simply ignores it because it doesn’t fit.

Bailey draws attention to Browning’s rapid, associative thought process, his habitual thinking by means of sounds or images, his dual perception of wholeness and detail (physically manifested by one long-sighted and one short-sighted eye), his impatience and loquacity, and his social ineptitude (though as many examples might be given of Browning’s tact, considerateness, and practical competence; biography is fallibile in this area insofar as people tend to recall and accentuate the more highly-coloured aspects of a person’s manner). Nevertheless Bailey makes a good case for linking some of these characteristics to key aspects of Browning...