May 7, 2012, will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of Robert Browning (1812-1889), the great English Victorian poet to whom we owe such works as The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Pippa Passes. If, on that birthday, the poet were to be awakened from his grave for a day to join in the celebrations, he would be appalled and disgusted by the overheated “2012” talk of rapture, catastrophe, apocalypse, and shifting realities.
Browning was a tough-minded, near-Agnostic Christian deeply interested in science, who held in contempt many aspects of mysticism and all aspects of “psychic” phenomena. He was especially scornful of mediumship, or “channeling,” and for a particular reason. The poet, whose hearty optimism masked a deep despair at man’s capacity for evil, had several encounters with Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886), the most celebrated medium of his day and a man whose uncanny, seemingly supernatural skills always provoked a strong reaction. Browning took away from those encounters a profound skepticism of all things spiritualist and a violent hatred of Home. This latter spurred him to write a 2,000-line poem, “Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium’” (1864), which constitutes a crushing indictment of all aspects of mediumship and is a portrait of a D.D. Home-like medium who is no better than a psychopath and fraud.
Love and sex lurked in the background to add fuel to the fire of Browning’s animosity toward Home. On July 23, 1855, the poet attended, at the house of Mr. and Mrs. J.S. Rymer, of Ealing, England, a séance presided over by the tall, pale, consumptive-looking medium. At Browning’s side was his wife, the almost equally famous English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), who is best known today for her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Elizabeth was initially enchanted by this séance and became, for a while, a believer and near-acolyte of Home. Robert was furious, not only at what he saw as an insult to his intelligence, but because he believed Home was using these trumped-up displays of paranormal power to flirt with his wife and perhaps seduce her.
The details of the courtship and marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are well-known and were famously depicted in the 1934 film The Barretts of Wimpole Street starring Norma Shearer. It was only with the success of his long series of poems, Bells and Pomegranates (1841-1845), that Robert finally made his name as a poet. Elizabeth Barrett, better known at the time, read Bells and Pomegranates and inserted glowing praise for Browning’s poetry in an upcoming volume of poetry of her own. Robert read the praise, wrote Elizabeth to thank her for the compliment and declare that he had fallen in love with her poetry—and with the poetess! He asked to come round and see her.
This wasn’t easy to arrange. Elizabeth had been a semi-invalid from an early age, suffering from the early stages of tuberculosis. Now she was 39. The hothouse-like confinement of her early years had perhaps helped her gifts to mature early. She was to write: “At four I first mounted Pegasus [began writing poetry].” Between the ages of seven and eight she read the history of England, Rome, and Greece “and began poetry in earnest”—Scott, Pope’s Iliad, Shakespeare. “At eleven I wished to be considered an authoress—novels were thrown aside, poetry and essays were my studies.” Her father privately printed her first major poem, The Battle of Marathon, in 1820, when she was 14. By the time Robert contacted her, she was, along with Alfred Lord Tennyson, the most famous English poet of her day.
By now, though, Elizabeth Barrett was virtually a prisoner in the Barrett household on Wimpole Street in London, not only because of her poor health but because of the tyranny of her father. Mr. Barrett, who had been a widower for 10 years, forbade all 11 of his children, including not only his beloved, frail, brilliant eldest daughter Elizabeth but also all of his sons, to ever marry. It was only with great difficulty, and surreptitiously, that Robert could get to see Elizabeth. A torrid romance, in exquisite prose, was carried on by letter. In 1846 Robert and Elizabeth eloped, first to Paris then on to Italy, without telling Mr. Barrett. (He disinherited his daughter immediately upon hearing the news.) The happily married couple lived in Italy almost continuously for the next 16 years until Elizabeth’s death in 1861 at the age of 55. All this time her father never saw or communicated with Elizabeth in any way.
One of Robert Browning’s poems famously begins, “Oh, to be in England/ Now that April’s there.” It was on July 12, 1855, that the Brownings touched the soil of Britain on a first, rare, visit. July 23 found them sitting across from the gaunt, red-haired, shyly-smiling figure of D.D. Home at a heavy, seemingly normal, table that, in a few moments, would shudder and tilt uncannily sideways. Elizabeth must have awaited the beginning of the séance with trepidation. Years earlier, she’d written that she shrank from the “temptations” of spiritualism as from a “stew of infant children,” and that she regarded communicating with the dead as only—possibly—an adjunct to certain biblical texts. She wrote, “We read of a prophecy concerning ‘angels ascending and descending upon the son of man.’ What if this spiritual influx and afflux were beginning? It seems to me possible—but we have to wait quietly and see.”
D.D. Home’s huge fame, preceding the séance attended by the Brownings, may well have predisposed Elizabeth a little bit toward the medium. Born in Scotland, reared by an aunt in the U.S., Daniel Dunglas Home returned to Great Britain at age 22 to quickly garner excited admiration as someone through whose agency spirits spoke, tables moved mysteriously, hands materialized and dematerialized. Witnesses claimed Home could elongate his body at will; some said they had seen him float up to the ceiling; sounds issued from his personal accordion when there was no visible sign of a player. Home’s greatest feat lay in floating out through the closed window of a London building, hovering 35 (some said 85) feet above the street, and re-entering through another closed window. Sir William Crookes, discoverer of the element thallium, inventor of the radiometer, and a pioneer in the study of electrical discharge in a vacuum, wrote of the medium’s capabilities: “I have heard from the lips of three witnesses to the most striking occurrences of this kind . . . To reject the recorded evidence on this subject is to reject all testimony whatever, for no fact in sacred or profane history is supported by a stronger array of proofs.”
The séance in the Rymer household at Ealing was every bit as incendiary as Elizabeth and Robert had been led to expect. They both shivered as the table moved; the two sat rigidly as they were touched by invisible as well as visible, “ectoplasmic,” hands. Elizabeth would later write in a letter to her sister, Henrietta, that, “At the request of the medium, the spiritual hand took from the table a garland [of clematis] which lay there and placed it upon my head. The particular hand that did this was of the largest human size, as white as snow, and very beautiful. It was as near to me as this hand I write with, and I saw it distinctly.” Elizabeth asserted that she was “not troubled in any way” by these happenings, even putting on her eyeglasses to see the hands when they were farther away (thus, she wrote, “proving that it was not a mere mental impression”). It seemed to her that the hands were coming out from under the table, though she reported the opinion of another participant that they rose from out of the wood of the table. A spirit hand finally elongated itself to a height of two yards above the table and then floated out the window.
The séance infuriated Robert, who saw outrageous sexual innuendo in the placing of the garland on Elizabeth’s head; this was, he concluded, simply a conjurer’s trick. As Martin Ebon writes, “with Home on the scene, an exploitative, pseudo-erotic element” entered into the séance. Still, Robert, giving an account of the sêance not long afterward to Elizabeth Kinney, an American friend, expressed bafflement at just how all these things could have been done. He had seen a heavy lamp moving all alone on the table and admitted, “I don’t know how it was done.” He saw Elizabeth’s dress “slightly but distinctly uplifted in a manner I cannot account for—as if by some object inside.” He could not fathom just how a hand “appeared from the edge of the table opposite to my wife and myself; was withdrawn, reappeared and moved about, rose and sank—it was clothed in loose white folds, like muslin, down to the table’s edge—from which it was never separated—then another hand, larger, appeared, pushed a wreath, or pulled it, off the table, picked it from the ground, brought it to my wife . . . and put it on her head.”
In a letter written to a friend sometime later, Browning angrily dismissed this “whole display of ‘hands,’ ‘spirit-utterances,’ etc.” as “a cheat and imposture.” He could not keep himself from bursting out in personal invective against Home, declaring that the medium was “acting like a child around the Rymers, affecting the manners, endearments and other peculiarities of a very little child indeed,” addressing his hosts as “Papa and Mama,” and “kissing the family abundantly.”
A few days after the séance, when Home and Rymer called on the Brownings, Robert pointed in a rage to the way out and told Home, “If you’re not out of that door in half a minute, I’ll fling you down the stairs.” Before the medium left, Elizabeth (according to Home) placed both her hands in his and said in a voice filled with emotion, “Oh, dear Mr. Home, do not, do not blame me. I am so sorry but I am not to blame.” Robert responded by calling Home “a dungball” to his face.
Years later, Home, responding in his autobiography to the vicious accusations seemingly leveled against him by Browning in Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium,’ claimed the poet had reacted to the séance in the way he did because he was jealous that the disembodied hands were placing the garland on Elizabeth’s head and not his own.
The paths of Home and the Brownings were to cross, or almost cross, in France and in Italy just a few more times over the coming years. Each time, Robert unceremoniously shooed Home away and loudly lectured Elizabeth on the perfidious and fraudulent nature of mediums and the claims they made to be in touch with the spirit world. He was never quite able to convince Elizabeth. A few years later, she wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a quiet believer in the occasional positive achievements of mediumship, that, “I don’t know how people can keep up their prejudice against spiritualism with tears in their eyes, how they are not at least thrown on the wish that it might be true . . . My tendency is to break up against it like a crying child.” Elizabeth felt that there was a need for a serious appreciation of spiritualism so that channeling could at least be kept from “the desecration of charlatans and fanatics.”
Martin Ebon writes that at bottom Browning regarded channeling as the expression of a power the poet had always feared (and wrote about in his poem on mesmerism, which is a vehement denunciation of the phenomenon), namely, “the power of one human being to envelope and dominate other souls, in ways beyond man’s comprehension. The poet saw the human soul as belonging to God, not to man.” Ebon concludes: “Browning’s dislike for mediums, aside from [their] actual cheating, was a feeling of reverence for the integrity of the human soul.”
The briefest glance at any part of Browning’s poem Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium’ shows us how strangely obscure and jarringly vitriolic this odd poem is. The poem seems to be a confession by Sludge that mediumship, in his practice of it, is fawning, deceitful, and almost psychopathic in its heartless manipulation of a mankind desperately in search of succor. G. K. Chesterton suggests this may not be the whole story. The English critic tells us that there was nothing Robert Browning loved more than “the utterance of large and noble truths by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings.” Chesterton agrees that the entire poem as narrated by Sludge consists in the medium’s confessing to every last one of all the terrible and dishonest things that he has done in the name of the corrupt art of mediumship. But Chesterton believes that what Sludge has been indulging in is really a gigantic winnowing-out of the wheat from the chaff. For, at the very end of the poem, after having thrown out so much, Sludge is, it seems, left with a few grains that suggest there may be something to channeling after all. Chesterton points, summarizing Sludge’s words:
“And then, when the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot and meaning of the poem. He says in effect: ‘Now that my interest in deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final infamy, the frauds that I have practiced, now that I stand before you in a patent and open villainy which has something of the disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe that there is something in spiritualism. The avowal itself is not only expressed clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:”
‘Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though?
You’ve heard what I confess: I don’t unsay
A single word: I cheated when I could,
Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work,
Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink.
Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match,
And all the rest; believe that: believe this,
By the same token, though it seem to set
The crooked straight again, unsay the said,
Stick up what I’ve knocked down; I can’t help that,
It’s truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day.
This trade of mine—I don’t know, can’t be sure
But there was something in it, tricks and all!’ “It is strange,” Chesterton concludes enigmatically, “to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack on spiritualism.”
