Browning and Victorian Medievalism

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.