Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

The final victory, however, did not come until three years later, when Sir Robert Peel, who became Prime Minister to defend the Corn Laws, announced that he had been completely convinced of their injustice, and that he was an “absolute convert to the free-trade principle, and that the introduction of the principle into all departments of our commercial legislation was, according to his intention, to be a mere question of time and convenience.” This was in January, 1845, and shortly after, June, 1846, the bill for the total repeal of the Corn Laws passed the House.

How much longer it might have been before the opposition was carried is a question if it had not been for the failure of the grain crops and the widespread potato disease which plunged Ireland into a state of famine, and threatened the whole country with more or less of disaster.

Even when this state of affairs became apparent in the summer of 1845 there was still much delay. The Cabinet met and discussed and discussed; still Parliament was not assembled; and then it was that the Mansion House Relief Committee of Dublin drew up resolutions stating that famine and pestilence were approaching throughout the land, and impeaching the conduct of the Ministry for not opening the ports or calling Parliament together.

But still Peel, already won over, could not take his Cabinet with him; he was forced to resign. Lord John Russell was called to form a ministry, but failed, when Peel was recalled, and the day was carried.

Browning’s brief but pertinent allusion to this struggle in “The Englishman in Italy” shows clearly how strongly his sympathies were with the League and how disgusted he was with the procrastination of Parliament in taking a perfectly obvious step for the betterment of the people.

“Fortnu, in my England at home,
Men meet gravely to-day
And debate, if abolishing Corn laws
Be righteous and wise
If ’twere proper, Scirocco should vanish
In black from the skies!”

An occasional allusion or poem like this makes us aware from time to time of Browning’s constant sympathy with any movement which meant good to the masses. Even if he had not written near the end of his life “Why I am a Liberal,” there could be no doubt in any one’s mind of his political ideals. In “The Lost Leader” is perhaps his strongest utterance upon the subject. The fact that it was called out by Wordsworth’s lapse into conservatism after the horrors of the French Revolution had brought him and his sans culotte brethren, Southey and Coleridge, to pause, a fact very possibly freshened in Browning’s mind by Wordsworth’s receiving a pension in 1842 and the poet-laureateship in 1843, does not affect the force of the poem as a personal utterance on the side of democracy. Browning, himself, considered the poem far too fierce as a portrayal of Wordsworth’s case.[2] He evidently forgot Wordsworth, and thought only of a renegade liberal as he went on with the poem. It was written the same year that there occurred the last attempt to postpone the passing of the Anti-Corn Law Bill, when the intensity of feeling on the part of all who believed in progress was at its height, and the bare thought of a deserter from Liberal ranks would be enough to exasperate any man who had the nation’s welfare at heart. That Browning’s feeling at the time reached the point not only of exasperation but of utmost scorn for any one who was not on the liberal side is shown most forcibly in the bitter lines:

“Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devil’s triumph and sorrow for angels,
One more wrong to man, one more insult to God!”

Browning speaks of having thought of Wordsworth at an unlucky juncture.

Whatever the exact episode which called forth the poem may have been, we are safe in saying that at a time when Disraeli was attacking Sir Robert Peel because of his honesty in avowing his conversion to free trade, and because of his bravery in coming out from his party, in breaking up his cabinet and regardless of all costs in determining to carry the bill or resign, and finally carrying it in the face of the greatest odds—at such a time, when a great conservative leader had shown himself capable of being won over to a great liberal principle; the spectacle of a deserter from the cause, and that deserter a member of one’s own brotherhood of poets, would be especially hard to bear.