B R O W N I N G ’ S A R T O F P E R S P E C T I V E : “ T H E E N G L I S H M A N I N I T A L Y ” MICHAEL ROSS McMaster University X h e. .. ‘Englishman in Italy’ . .. is a long list of sights and sounds avail able to a sojourner or stroller. The first half presents the how and what of Italian foods; the second half is more discursive, but still chiefly a list. The poem is perhaps too long; it is all background, and lacks the plot or person ality which would sustain its length.” 1 Critical commentary on Browning’s “The Englishman in Italy” has often been kinder and less patronizing than this summary judgment by one recent critic. Yet even those discussions of the poem that are more sympathetic seem seldom to get very far beyond the quoted critic’s dismissive “long list of sights and sounds.” The work has typi cally elicited, at best, bland appreciations, rather than painstaking attempts to discover in it any distinctive and sustaining “plot” or “personality.”2 This is regrettable, because “The Englishman in Italy” gives the attentive reader much more than simply a vivid impression of Italian sights, sounds, and cookery. The poem is concerned, more fundamentally, with the nature and importance of different modes of perception — with seeing, above all, but with “seeing” from a variety of contrasted perspectives. Browning’s pre occupation, during the period from which the poem dates,3 with the impor tance of visual awareness is abundantly evident in his letters of 1845-46 to Elizabeth Barrett. An example is the spirited explosion of scorn to which he is provoked by the travel memoirs of Mary Shelley, who claims to have “found Italy for the first time, real Italy, at Sorrento” : And then that way, when she and the like of her are put in a new place, with new flowers, new stones, faces, walls, all new — of looking wisely up at the sun, clouds, evening star, or mountain top and wisely saying “who shall describe that sight!” — Not you, we very well see — but why dont you tell us that at Rome they eat roasted chestnuts, and put the shells into their aprons, the women do, and calmly empty the whole on the heads of the passengers in the street below; and that at Padua when a man drives his waggon up to a house and stops, all the mouse-coloured oxen that pull it from a beam against their foreheads sit down in a heap and rest. But once she travelled the country with Shelley on arm; now she plods it, Rogers in hand — to such things & E n g lish Studies in C anada, vii, i , Spring 198 uses may we come at last! . . . but she is wrong every where, that is, not right, not seeing what is to see, speaking what one expects to hear — I quarrel with her, for ever, I think.4 “Not seeing what is to see, speaking what one expects to hear” — the sub stituting of a blinkered conventionality for an open-eyed perception of the uniqueness of the actual world is as culpable a failing for the Browning who read Mrs. Shelley as it was to be for the more mature Browning who wrote “Fra Lippo Lippi.” And it is recognizably the same Browning who advises Elizabeth, only a year later, on the eve of their elopement: “ I think the fewer books we take the better; — they take up room — and the wise way always seemed to me to read in rooms at home, and open one’s eyes and see abroad.”5 His comment on Dickens’s Pictures from Italy lays a similar stress on the primacy of sight: “He seems to have expended his power on the least interesting places, — and then gone on hurriedly, seeing or describing less and less, till at last the mere names of places do duty for pictures of them. . . . ”6 Elizabeth’s declaration, made to such a correspondent, seems touch ingly appropriate: “I would not see Italy without your eyes — could I, do...
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Oct 1, 2005
Lewis R Gordon 
Open Access