I. Texts and Intertexts

The core of this paper is a reading of Robert Browning's “Clive” (1880); it attempts to account for the formalist demands of this generically complex and relentlessly ironic poetic text, while at the same time it construes the accomplishment of Browning's poetic language and form as intricate cultural critique. However, in order to better understand Browning's poem an additional discussion of its intertexts is required, the most important being Thomas Babington Macaulay's essay “On Clive” (1840).Footnote ¹

Such texts reconstruct the story of the supremely controversial figure of Robert Clive (1725–74), known as Clive of India, who played a key role in the transformation of the East India Company from trading company to Empire during the second half of the eighteenth century. As leader of the Company troops, and with substantial military skill, Clive defeated the troops of the rival trading company in India, the French (along with their indigenous allies), and conquered Bombay in 1756. One year later, he won the Battle of Plassey, for which he is most famous, and took control of the whole of Bengal, which consolidated most of India under British rule. However, in 1772, a few years after his final return to England, Clive was forced to face a parliamentary inquiry concerning possible corruption. He was “charged [with having used] both force and fraud to expand his own and the East India Company's power in the Carnatic, reputedly accepting bribes, issuing threats, procuring monopolies on foodstuffs and otherwise fleecing native nawabs and their subjects” (Wilson 50). He was vindicated, but two years later, in 1774, suffering from continual attacks of depression, bad health, and an opium addiction, he took his own life.

Clive was disparaged in his lifetime as one of “those ‘Nabobs’ who did get home with their ill-gotten gains [and] were welcomed for their money but detested for their insolence, and for the dissoluteness that was said to be infecting English society” (Kiernan 34–35).Footnote ² However, he was exonerated and established as a national hero during the Victorian period, at least where middle-class public feeling was concerned.Footnote ³ According to J. S. Bratton, in Victorian public schools, which by the time Browning's poem was published were systematically engaged in the production of future officers of empire, “stories of historical figures were often fictionalised and presented almost entirely in terms of myth,” in order to inspire the heroic ideal (79). And Clive “was particularly popular [with history teachers] because he could be represented as achieving greatness through a boyish delight in adventure” (79). To illustrate further Bratton's claim, I will examine an instructive fictionalised biography of Clive for juveniles, Grace Stebbing's Winning an Empire or The Story of Clive (1885), which depicts conquering foreign territory as a fascinating activity, just like any boys' game: Clive and his soldiers “naturally ignore the Indian piping hot weather” because “who feels too hot or too cold when they are in the middle of a downright good game of cricket, or standing out-of-doors on a biting November night to help stir up a sulky bonfire, or look at fireworks” (79).

My intention is obviously not an appraisal of Clive's intriguing career; rather, I read nineteenth-century texts which rewrite parts of Clive's story as partaking in a Victorian debate about heroism that is intricately linked to the imperial and military dimensions of masculinity. Such texts support recent claims by cultural historians that in the nineteenth century an interdependence of the condition of masculinity and empire was commonly assumed.Footnote ⁴ As John Tosh puts it, “[e]mpire was a man's business in two senses: its acquisition and control depended disproportionately on the energy and ruthlessness of men; and its place in the popular imagination was mediated through literary and visual images which consistently emphasised positive male attributes” (193). Similarly, Joanna de Groot contends that, “manliness and empire confirmed one another, guaranteed one another, enhanced one another, whether in the practical disciplines of commerce and government or in the escape zones of writing, travel, and art” (122). Cultural historians such as Tosh and De Groot provide a context for a better understanding of Browning's characters in “Clive,” where the very content of the speaker's (an old colonialist's) mind is identified with the map of the subjugated country: as he sits over his punch in the evenings thinking, he tells us, his “long-past life appears / Like an outspread map of country plodded through, each mile and rood” (ll. 12–13). But while the ideas of heroism, masculinity, and empire appear inexorably allied, the meaning of these terms is persistently volatile, and both Macaulay and Browning are variously involved in a process of challenging and amending them.

II. “Lord Clive” (1840) by Thomas Babington Macaulay

Macaulay's essay appeared in the Edinburgh Review as a response to the first acclaimed biography of Clive, written in 1836 by another important military officer, politician, and writer who had served in India, Sir John Malcolm.Footnote ⁵ Notwithstanding the scholarly qualities of Malcolm's well-documented history, this biography produced an unequivocally grand and rather Romantic image of Clive with respect to both his military genius and his private life and character.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, it may be fruitfully read in the context of “the enduring prominence within [nineteenth-century] bourgeois culture of the martial (and traditionally aristocratic) fantasies of manhood . . ., reflected in everything from adventure fiction to heroic biography, whether of political leaders or of Thomas Carlyle's Captains of Industry” (Adams, “Review” 658).

Macaulay, on the other hand, plays down Malcolm's idealisation of the conqueror: “We can by no means agree with Sir John Malcolm, who is obstinately resolved to see nothing but honour and integrity in the conduct of his hero” (382). Macaulay's re-telling of Clive's story has to be read in the context of what Abdul JanMohamed (82–83) has described as the difference between a “dominant” and a “hegemonic” stage in the history of colonialism. With respect to British India, the first, eighteenth-century phase, which includes the age of Clive, is marked by economic coercion and the brash pursuit of material gain;Footnote ⁷ but “with the early-nineteenth-century beginnings of a transformation in the means of subjugation, from coercion by economic practices to consent because of an internalisation of Western cultures, and in the aim of the coloniser from profit making to civilising, we see the emergence of a ‘hegemonic’ phase” (David 18). As in other writings by Macaulay,Footnote ⁸ the ideology and morality of the “hegemonic” phase saturate this essay, together with a forceful indictment of the East India Company's unprincipled conduct during the previous phase of “dominance.” Central to this text, however, is the striking account of Clive's character development, which is intricately managed so as to dramatise and symbolise precisely this transformation of colonialist practices from “dominance” to “hegemony.” Macaulay's Clive starts his career in India as a selfish adventurer, but gradually changes: first, he proves his genius as a military hero; finally and most importantly, he is reformed into a benevolent, civic leader motivated by a strong sense of patriotic duty.Footnote ⁹

Macaulay intended his essay as a corrective to Malcolm's biography, but by rationalising the instances of Clive's unscrupulous conduct, he manages to produce a much more credible image of a hero. First, he eloquently explains Clive's fraudulence as a mistaken but understandable decision, early in his career, to treat the Indians on their own terms: “[Knowing] that he had to deal with men destitute of what in Europe is called honour, . . . men who would unscrupulously employ corruption, perjury, forgery, to compass their ends, . . . [Clive] became himself an Indian intriguer”Footnote ¹⁰ (411). However, his great faults “were nobly repaired” later because “Clive used his power ably and vigorously for the advantage of his country” (411). Second, Macaulay represents the plunder of Bengal in extraordinarily ambiguous terms, using exotic, fairy-tale imagery: “Clive walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself” (421). A subtext, implying the difficulty any young man would have had to resist “helping himself,” underlies Macaulay's effort to appear condescending, that is, to simultaneously understand and censure the raiding of Bengal. Ultimately though, passages such as the above would have appealed directly to readers with a desire for splendid and easily acquired riches and would function effectively to enhance India's attraction as ideal destination for the potential coloniser.

Indeed, the land of Bengal, for Macaulay, is worthy of its reputation as a “garden of Eden” promising immediate gratification, its goods overflowing “exuberantly” and “marvellously,” inducing in the reader a fantasy of blissful, effortless existence (405). Still, and rather unreasonably given its status as the “rich kingdom,” Bengal is in great need of Britain's forceful energies, because the “langui[d]” and “sedentary” Bengalese people, “enervated by a soft climate” and “shrink[ing] from bodily exertion,” are obviously incapable of bearing the responsibility for their own country's government: “There never, perhaps, existed a people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke” (405). I would argue that Macauley's recasting of Clive in the role of an eminent Victorian intends to boost public engagement with the imperial enterprise; Macaulay's essay anticipates the critical shift that would mark public feeling in Britain more distinctly seventeen years later, after the so-called Indian Mutiny, when the emergent hegemonic discourse naturalised the oppression of Southern Indians (along with other non-Europeans) on the grounds that they were both effeminate and child-like, in need of guidance and rule.Footnote ¹¹

How does Macaulay manage the transformation of Clive from self-interested adventurer to altruistic national hero? The essay structures Clive's life story on the lines of a conventional adventure plot (in which a hero undergoes painful ordeals only to achieve glory in the end) but this narrative is overwritten by another, for which Herbert Sussman has coined the term the Victorian masculine plot. The Victorian masculine plot registers a strained movement from “maleness” to “manhood,” “a development from the condition of what the Victorians believed to be a biological maleness, the possession of a distinctively male, inchoate, aggressive and potentially dangerous energy, to ideal manhood, through what Foucault calls ‘practices or technologies of the self’ for properly regulating or managing this natural energy” (11).Footnote ¹² I adopt Sussman's terminology: “‘manhood’, the end goal of a long and painful process of ‘masculinisation’ [is] a condition not necessarily achieved by all males and that, once reached, is for the Victorians exceedingly difficult to maintain” (13).

Clive's life story as depicted by Macaulay, as well as the Browning poem, have to be read in accord with this plot, by means of which we can achieve an understanding of both the hero's moments of greatness and his moral failings: As a young boy Clive's violent temper was uncontrollable, at seven years of age he was the leader of a children's gang that sold protection to local shopkeepers, he was no good at school, and his family thought of him as “a dunce, if not a reprobate” (383). At eighteen he was severed from home and sent off to India to die or get rich. Initially, Macaulay writes, he suffered intensely, both emotionally and physically, from the harshness of the conditions, poverty, bad climate, and loneliness; but eventually colonial service enabled him to discipline and channel his violent drives into a constructive masculinisation process. Interestingly, it allowed him to engage with those basic Victorian practices of the self that Sussman identifies as indispensable tools for a successful growth into mature manhood: not only did it liberate him from the confinements of domesticity, it also offered a library where Clive read systematically for the first time in his life and provided him with the support of an older and wiser male friend, Captain Sringent Lawrence, who played the role of Clive's mentor and instructor in military matters. Clive thus managed “to form himself, to form his officers, and to form his army” (452). He developed into a military genius amidst demanding and strenuous circumstances: “The only man,” writes Macaulay, “who at an equally early age ever gave equal proof of talents for war, was Napoleon Bonaparte”; Macaulay then proceeds to augment Clive's image further, comparing him to the great Roman conquerors: “Such an extent of cultivated territory, such an amount of revenue, such a multitude of subjects, was never added to the dominion of Rome by the most successful proconsul. . . . The fame of those who subdued Antiochus and Tigranes grows dim when compared with the splendour of the exploits which the young English adventurer achieved at the head of an army not equal in numbers to one half of a Roman legion” (452).

The climax of the essay, however, comes later. Clive is a great hero, Macaulay argues, not because he was a great soldier and certainly not because he managed to accumulate a fortune. Rather, Clive's greatness derives from his third appointment in India in 1765, when, as Governor, he applied his martial skills, prowess, and determination to restrain, discipline, and direct productively the misshapen energies of the corrupt Company functionaries and its army and so reform the Company into a benevolent administrative body:

This is the conclusion of Macaulay's essay; as Clive gradually changes from rapacious adventurer to military hero and is finally transformed into a “gentleman” statesman, the physiognomy of the empire changes along with him. It also turns into a manly and altruistic organisation, working not only for the benefit of Britain, but for the benefit of the people it has subdued. The term “gentleman” here is used with reference to a Victorian model of masculinity defined “in resistance to degrading involvement in economic competition, or (more broadly) to economic schemes of value” (Adams, Dandies 54), so as to emphasise Macaulay's extraordinary attempt to disassociate the imperialist politics of the “hegemonic phase” from its plainly economic incentive. Clive's life story inscribes or symbolises the coming of age of eighteenth-century British colonialism. For Macaulay, the ultimate hero is the administrator, not the warrior, and that is a specifically Victorian version of heroism. Deemed equal to Napoleon where military skill was concerned, Clive was granted superiority to him because, unlike Napoleon, he moved beyond the role of the conqueror to that of the civilising agent. But while Clive acted upon and changed the physiognomy of the empire, the empire simultaneously provided him with the means to progress and advance as an individual. His story is not only used as an instructive allegory to promote the idea, shared by Utilitarians and Evangelicals alike, of the Englishman's civilising duty, but as an illustrative example of how the making of a heroic Englishman is enabled by and dependent upon the course and practices of empire-building.Footnote ¹³ In order to realise the full implications of Browning's poem when setting it against Macaulay's essay, then, we have to remember how profoundly the figure of Clive is symbolically charged.

III. “Clive” (1880) by Robert Browning

Browning's “Clive” is the best known of his Dramatic Idylls, a collection of poetic texts that represent the poet's final experimentations with genre. Browning called it “idyllic (in the Greek sense)” (Pettigrew and Collins 1076), emphasising the fact that it tells a story of moderate length. However, it is important to stress that “Clive” also involves a strong dramatic component. It consists of a story told, or rather, performed by two “actors,” the main speaker/narrator of the poem, a fictional colleague of Clive whose perspective dominates the text, and Clive himself. The main function of the text is the construction of their respective characters. They both express and dramatise themselves, but Clive's performance is embedded in his friend's narration, so it is framed and “staged,” so to speak, by the first speaker. Clive is imagined speaking a week before his death, depressed and unfocused due to his use of drugs, “absorbed into his cloud” (235). Yet, he comes alive when he remembers his legendary duel with a military bully at the beginning of his career in Madras, which served to establish early his reputation as a man of outstanding courage. His version of the story is, however, mediated by his friend, who both repeats and interprets Clive's words. I would suggest contrary to common critical opinion that the protagonist of this poem is not Clive, but the anonymous speaker/narrator, a claim I hope the following analysis will make apparent.

The fictional speaker of the poem emerges as a character in the present through his speech, narration, and performance. His utterance is supposedly delivered sometime after Clive's death, and historicized thereby. When young, the speaker used to be a colleague and friend of Clive's in India. Now, as an older man in London, he addresses his adolescent son, who plays the role of the silent interlocutor in the poem. An anachronism is in evidence here, as the attitude of the son is Victorian rather than eighteenth century. Given that the silent interlocutors in Browning's dramatic monologues are known to prefigure the reader in the text, we may assume that the implied audience is late Victorian, and that the poem promises to be an intervention in a late-Victorian debate regarding the meaning and value of empire. A tragicomic, rather grotesque figure, Browning's fictional colonialist did not distinguish himself while in service in India, became neither rich nor famous, is apparently a dejected alcoholic, and spends his sleepless, lonely nights brooding over tormenting memories. He performs his speech conspicuously drunk, and his language is accordingly incoherent (though well fitted into rhyming couplets). His style is strikingly abrasive and underlined by distinctive harshness in the sound patterns of his voice. He comments on his own gestures and movements, so we may visualise him, for example, banging the table (as in, “what's the sudden mocking light that breaks / On me as I slap the table till no rummer-glass but shakes” [ll. 15–16]). It is clear from the beginning that he has become the object of his son's scorn; the latter functions in the text as a typical product of Victorian middle-class schooling and predictably admires Clive as a hero and role model. Given that Clive's life was often used in the Victorian period as educational subject matter, the poem is appropriately addressed to an adolescent boy. According to Woolford and Karlin, the young interlocutor “imperson[ates] . . . the future towards which the speaker looks for his meaning” (186) but a further implicit question emerges here concerning the future turns and twists of imperialism's ideology and practices.

The old colonialist speaks from within the exceedingly painful subjective position of the so-called Victorian “mouse.” Mouse was an insult, defined within the discourse of Victorian manhood as an opposite of “man,” and used to stigmatise those males who failed to successfully bear to the end the process of masculinisation, in that they did not manage to sustain the aggressive energy required to keep up with competition in the arena of the capitalist market-place.Footnote ¹⁴ “Mouse” denotes a scared person, a coward, and a failure. Following Althusser, we may read it as an ideological category, included in the workings of the interpellation that constituted Victorian male subjects as “men” or as failed “men,” and which produced a lowly population of Victorian masculine subjects by shaming, insulting, and marginalizing them. In this context, the fact that the old colonialist is also a father oddly feminises him, in that, as he says, all he has given England is a son. That, however, is a woman's duty, to give England sons, not a man's, like Clive, who “gave England India . . . Conquered and annexed and Englished.” It is worth quoting the relevant lines from the poem in full, to show how emphatically the antithesis between “man” and “mouse” is registered here:

Line 8 reiterates Macaulay's definition of the imperialist hero, someone who works for British territorial expansion and also, ambiguously, “Englishes”; that is to say, he both serves England's aggrandisement and anglicises (hence civilises) the subjugated other. Above all, the hero's status depends on his usefulness to the state of England.

The speaker does not intend to question this definition of the national hero, but his resentful tone and his aggravation prepare us for resistance against his own position of “mouse” and his delivery soon transforms into self-defence against his son's – and the world's – mockery, an apologia, intended to prove that while he has lost in wealth and glory, he, unlike Clive, has won a moral victory.

Where Macaulay structures Clive's story as an adventure asserting the greatness of the hero as statesman, Browning's speaker undercuts Clive's reputation as a brave and fearless man by emphasising his drug addiction, his public humiliation in London, his mental deterioration, and, finally, his death by suicide (elements of Clive's life story that mark his uselessness and even liability to the state of England). Browning, too, writes of masculinity in terms of the Victorian masculine plot, but he registers an anxiety of potential regression into psychic chaos and insanity. This poem, like other dramatic monologues by Browning spoken by mentally-disturbed males, exemplifies Herbert Sussman's thesis, that “for nineteenth-century men, manhood was conceived as an unstable equilibrium of barely controlled energy that may collapse back into the inchoate flood or fire that limns the innate energy of maleness, into the gender specific male pathology that the Victorians saw as male hysteria or male madness” (13). As Northrop Frye would have it, when an adventure ends with the destruction of the hero, it turns into tragedy or irony. In this case we have an extraordinary mixture of irony and tragedy, made possible by the grotesqueness of the speaker's strained but forceful metaphors. For example, the two friends appear in London a week before Clive's suicide “tired as tombstones, head-piece, foot-piece, when they lean / Each to other, drowsed in fog-smoke, o'er a coffined Past between” (ll. 61–62); the “extinguishment” of Clive's soul shows in his “glazing eyeball” and in the way his “furtive fingers went / Where a drug-box skulked” (ll. 63–65). Such gross descriptions inexorably damage the image of the hero, but we have to remember that it is not only Clive implicated here. The speaker, too, is identified with these images of death. A metaphor extended for fifteen lines compares Clive to a ruined castle, where “vile rains invade” and “grass o'ergrows . . . till night-birds congregating find no holes / Fit to build in . . . / So Clive crumbled slow in London – crashed at last” (ll. 56–59). The great colonialist's career ends with ignominy, mortification, and destruction.

Because the process of masculine self-engenderment is the end result of a narrative that takes place over time, the speaker has to return to his past so as to retell his story anew. The old colonialist systematically compares and juxtaposes himself with Clive; in the second and third stanzas he refers to disgraceful eighteenth-century practices of the English in India, in a way that both discredits Clive's reputed heroism and proves the superiority of his own conduct: wealth used to be too readily available, the narrator says. It did not call for heroics, just the audacity and unlawfulness required for “trespassing.” He describes the pressure he suffered from a unanimous, brutal, possibly ritualised demand to embezzle the other's land: thousands of louts, he says, “noisy in a smock-frocked ring, / All-agog to have me trespass . . . be Clive their king” (ll. 27–28). He resisted not because of cowardice but on moral grounds, because the “Scripture says the land's the Lord's” (l. 26); he proceeds to prove his gallantry with the story of his participation in another colonial man-making activity, a tiger hunt: “Rarely such a royal monster as I lodged the bullet in! / True, he murdered half a village, so his own death came to pass” (ll. 36–37).Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, the speaker's utterance is permeated by an argument for the use of Christian self-control and a set of moral principles to check colonialist avarice, which may be seen as paralleling Macaulay's call for a pure administration of the empire. However, the speaker's alliance with the precepts of Christian morality is primarily employed as an offensive strategy to counter Clive's commitment of the sin of suicide, one of the main themes of the poem.

Foreshadowing the manner of his death, Browning's fictional Clive is imagined at twenty-five years of age to consider the option of suicide, an issue that is missing from all historical accounts of the duel episode, recorded by Sir John Malcolm (Reference Malcolm1836) as follows:

When Browning re-writes the above episode, he adds a different ending: in the poem, the officer in the wrong, taken aback by young Clive's reaction and unable to shoot him, both admits he had been cheating and pays tribute to Clive's demeanour. “Did this boy's eye wink once? No! / There's no standing him and Hell and God all three against me, – so, / I did cheat!” (ll. 149–51). Perversely though, the speaker of the poem uses this episode not to show Clive's bravery, but to demonstrate his moral weakness.

Browning's Clive, a week before the end of his life, chooses the duel episode to represent the moment of his greatest bravery; it was also the time when he felt the most fear, he says, but the questions of what “fear” means and how it relates to “courage” triggers a passionate dispute between the two friends, who clearly argue here at cross purposes. Clive's fear was not caused, he tells us, by the threat of the pistol's muzzle at his head, but by the thought of what would have happened if his opponent had not admitted his wrongdoing, and had shamed and stigmatised Clive as a cowardly swindler: “Suppose the man, / . . . quietly had bade me ‘There! / Keep your life, calumniator! – worthless life I freely spare’” (ll. 211, 213–14). What could he have done then, Clive asks? “This, and only this, remained / Pick his weapon up and use it on myself” (ll. 219–20).

Clive appears trapped and victimised by a terrible, onerous code of manly honour that compels him to die rather than suffer humiliation and disrepute. The speaker, on the other hand, cannot discern any “fear” in the story; he insists that, on the contrary, Clive's conduct is based on plain lack of fear and employs the precepts of Christian morality to discredit Clive's code of honour altogether, naming it “desperation, madness” (l. 226) and “a rush against God's face” (l. 228).Footnote ¹⁶ For the speaker, Clive's priorities, in which fear of disgrace overcomes the fear of death, are a form of mental deficiency, the incapacity to endure pain, a failure in insightfulness, and a lack of a sinner's self-awareness. The word “fear” itself bears very different meanings when used by Clive, as a warning of the danger of being unmanned, and when used by the speaker, who implies that the emotion of fear has certain advantages, as it enables a perception of God and the human condition. This is why he says he wishes he could have detected fear in Clive's account (ll. 225–26). Significantly, the speaker's version of Christianity is a “feminine” one, a legacy his mother left him to oppose and counteract the sinful practices involved in life in “foreign climes.” This reference to his mother is the only mention of a woman in all 240 lines of the poem:

It is possible, of course, to discern in the speaker's words a certain degree of envy and speculate on the suspect reasons why he tries to gloss over the degrading emotion of fear. In fact, he is obsessed with his now-dead friend, Clive, and this homosocial rivalry permeates the poem.Footnote ¹⁷ The generic complexity of the text allows, on the one hand, a direct display of the kind of heroic masculinity that Clive represents together with its simultaneous rejection. On the other, it permits the concurrent expression and ironic exposure of the speaker's own affliction and bewilderment. His reliability is debatable. As Clyde de L. Ryals observes, “[t]he beautiful irony of the poem is that we are permitted insight into two characters by a narrator who understands neither” (176). When the narrator announces that Clive “crumbled slow in London / crashed, at last” his malicious pleasure is rather evident. His duplicity is further exposed when he accuses Clive of being a degenerate drug addict: the narrator himself is similarly inert and clearly a drinking man. His recourse to the discourse of Christian morality is not convincing because we have no proof that he possesses the self-control and the composure that such morality requires. Lacking in energy, he is far removed from the Victorian ideal of the muscular Christian. Forever subject to (and subject through) the dominant discourses that determine masculinity, he fails to generate himself anew and fails to offer his son an alternative role-model. He thus exemplifies Judith Butler's contention that “[w]here there is an ‘I’ who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that ‘I’ and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will” (225). The objectification of the speaker's historicised utterance allows us to link it with the external forms of culture in which he exists. Like Clive, he is living proof, so to speak, of the degenerating potential of colonialist practices. The fact that we may interpret his state of disintegration, frustration, and suffering as symptomatic allows us to read his character, as well as Clive's, as a case against Macaulay's inflated claims for a magnificently man-making and civilising British imperialism. One could argue that the main form of irony in the poem is tragic, as whatever the expectations, values, and efforts of the two characters, they seem doomed to failure and destruction by forces beyond their command. However, if these forces are specified as the historical and cultural context of British imperialism, then the poem's irony acquires a somewhat satirical edge. Its object is precisely the two male figures, who cannot fully grasp why their attempts at gestures and practices presumed to make them noble, worthy Englishmen have disastrous consequences. Still the comic element in their representation is always counterbalanced by a sense of horror at their situation – the reader is compelled to sympathise with both of them and Browning here again makes use of the grotesque mode as a means of cultural critique.Footnote ¹⁸

IV. Winning an Empire or The Story of Robert Clive (1885) by Grace Stebbing

Grace Stebbing was known as a religious, didactic novelist for boys. In addition to several novels, she wrote popularised versions of important “chapters” in the history of Britain for adolescents and young adults.Footnote ¹⁹ Her books sold enough copies to warrant more than one edition and were often offered as school prize books (her Story of Clive is one such example).

Winning an Empire or The Story of Robert Clive is, in fact, a rather challenging text, as one of its functions is to introduce the young reader to demanding history books and sources. Stebbing includes some of Clive's long letters, which were first published in John Malcolm's biography, as well as generous extracts from Macaulay's essay and from The History of British India by James Mill. Of course, Stebbing quotes selectively from her sources and carefully guides her reader's responses to them. She does not hesitate to correct Macaulay on several occasions; for example, whereas Macaulay implies that Clive's delinquency as a child was a sign of mental illness, Stebbing represents him as a pugnacious but kind boy, who would protect animals and old ladies. She argues systematically against the charge that Clive's excessive fearlessness could be interpreted as a sign of insanity or a form of “queerness,” attributing such insinuations to the envy of his rather spineless comrades.Footnote ²⁰

Indeed, the main difference between Stebbing's account of Clive's life and the versions presented by Macaulay and Browning is that Stebbing is not preoccupied with the anxiety of male hysteria or madness Sussman so compellingly theorises. “You must understand,” her Clive declares, and “his eyes glowed with a deep burning light, the broad chest heaved with strong emotion, . . . that I want to live a full life, a life of action and stir, a life in which the vigour of energies shall not be bound, but shall be tried, and strained, and stretched, till I make men stand by to see and wonder at their power” (48). Indeed, in Stebbing's construction Clive would have been the perfect man, were it not for the sole weakness that ultimately destroys him: his inability to bear the physical pain caused by an (unspecified) illness, which leads to his habit of using opium as a painkiller. “I like Clive so much,” Stebbing writes. “I admire him so greatly, that I feel half wild with sorrow and indignation when the course of his life's story brings me to touch on this dismal, weak indulgence of his in drugging himself with opium. Had he broken through that, there would have been neither moral nor mental blot upon his character” (98). Stebbing produces a biography of an adventurer-hero and soldier worthy of inspiring the desire for emulation in her juvenile readers, but simultaneously, she uses his story to moralise against vices such as gambling and opium, a favourite theme in contemporary children's prize-books (Entwistle 85).

Despite the incorporation of scholarly sources, Stebbing's text is structured like a novel, with an adventure plot skilfully manipulated to produce suspense, ample realistic detail, sufficiently dramatic dialogue, and a sound infusion of fiction in her character construction. The allegations of corruption and abuse of power, which prompted the ensuing parliamentary inquiry into Clive's affairs as Governor of the East India Company, are conspicuously omitted.

A central device that marks Stebbing's character construction is the projection back into Clive's childhood of the most important figures surrounding Clive in India. Important secondary and minor characters are imagined to have been Clive's childhood friends (who grew up with him in the same small town, near Market-Drayton, in Shropshire) and members of his gang. In Macaulay's words, “he had formed all the idle lads of the town into a kind of predatory army, and compelled the shopkeepers to submit to a tribute of apples and half-pence, in consideration of which he guaranteed the security of their windows” (384). In Stebbing's version, it is the small town's shortage of means to contain and productively absorb Clive's surplus amounts of energy that leads to his offensive behaviour. He has to invent dangerous situations to exercise his drive for adventure, because “danger and adventure were two things which young Robert Clive considered the only spices that could make life palatable.” The child Clive argues vehemently with the members of his gang against the “base” desire to possess things: “What a set of fellows you all are! . . . You are all for the things themselves. . . . Of course, I'm all for getting them. Everybody ought to be for getting everything; but not for the sake of the things, but for the sake of getting them” (19).

The first two chapters of the novel, then, focus on Clive's childhood, introduce the characters, and show that ethical attributes such as impetuousness, leadership, honesty, cowardice, and even an inclination to thinking are paradoxically both inborn and related to social class. One Jim Carter, for example, who proves his meanness by bullying and tormenting those weaker than himself (an old spinster and her cat), turns out to be the same officer who cheats Clive at a game of cards, thereby provoking the famous duel. One John Moor, the honest, clever son of a poor peasant, grows into the carpenter who devises the special raft that takes the soldiers across the river Coloroon to fight the French, a river full of sand hills, forbidding to regular boats. Clive's dearest friend, Charles Nuneman (based on an historical figure), the son of the wealthy land-owner of Shropshire, who disapproves of the gang raids, is an intelligent and sophisticated aristocratic type known by the nickname “Hush-a-bye Barley” because he is rather delicate, inert, and half-asleep most of the time. Even though he is a positive character with a reliable moral sense, Nuneman is strikingly feminised and completely ineffective; during difficult times in India, he tries to act as Clive's conscience but is actually too weak to prevent him from wrongdoing: “Had he been as strong-natured, as vigorous, as impetuous as Clive himself, it is possible he might have rescued his friend. . . . But the clear, pleading voice, the earnest, grieved blue eyes pained the young commander, but could not hold him back” (217). The problem is that being a man of influence and action, that is to say, a real man, according to Stebbing, is clearly incompatible with too much intellectual activity and the tendency to waste time speculating over right or wrong. Despite his impressive wit and education, Hush-a-bye's lack of energy and virility renders him totally useless; he functions as a symbol of a failing aristocracy that has lost its power to influence the direction of history.

An analysis of Stebbing's novel serves to contextualise further the theme of suicide in the Browning poem by illuminating its significance for the late Victorians. In the first place, Stebbing's story chronicles the continual rise of a hero: she painstakingly moulds the figure of Clive to match her ideal of man, a charismatic military leader who “loves to fight” and chooses to “fight for his country,” who is generous with his family at home (supports them financially), is obviously middle class, rough, and uncompromisingly hostile to the conventions of decorum (this is why, while still a clerk, Clive is disliked by his superiors), adverse to “excessive” reading, especially the reading of poetry (he reacts with ignorance when his friend quotes poems), and prone to acting before thinking (he has “no time for metaphysics”). The latter is not a negative attribute for Stebbing, but rather an acknowledgment of Carlyle's anti-self-consciousness stance. Still, her story drops without an ending. It must be left unfinished, because the mere mention of the word “suicide” would suffice to subvert the whole effort Stebbing has put into her elaborate construction of a heroic personality. She does add an epilogue to explain her tactic of leaving the story unfinished: “I do not choose to record [the manner of Clive's death] here; it is too much pain. So mean, so paltry, so cowardly an ending to such a glorious life, . . . one suddenly stops short, midway in that life, lest one should draw too near that murk and dismal blot in which a splendid career of free will chose to have its never forgotten close” (379).

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Stebbing also quotes selectively from Browning's poem, in a manner that strips the latter of all irony and ambiguity, and uses the poet's authority to argue for Clive's outstanding sense of honour. Indeed, I believe she completely misreads Browning. The evident concurrence of empire and glory for the British, charged with the force of a categorical, tacit assumption in Stebbing's text, is not questioned openly by Browning's speaker, but the conspicuous lack of any positive or inviting image of empire in the poem may support the view that Browning does not endorse imperialist expansion and violence of any sort.Footnote ²¹ Browning's poem is the only one of the three texts here considered that refuses to gloss over colonialist greed, links “wealth and honour” blatantly, a conjunction that rings ironic in the context of Macaulay and Stebbing's consistent efforts to disassociate the “base” pursuit of material gain from ennobling “manly” attributes such as fighting for the glory of victory rather than its material prizes, and clearly represents eighteenth-century India as a place of sin for the British. Moreover, Browning's speaker suppresses completely the assumed link between colonialism and the excitement of adventure; he rejects the kind of thoughtless, unselfconscious rush into extreme danger for which Clive was famous (and which in turn produces a debate over the thin line between madness and heroism). He also rejects an age-old definition of heroic conduct, the inability to endure public disgrace.Footnote ²²

Indeed, in Browning's poem the speaker's whole case against Clive's conduct relies on an argument for manly self-discipline and control. He locates and emphasises Clive's essentially “unmanly” attributes – his lacking in self-restraint and the incapacity to endure pain – which he represents as Christian precepts. The difference between Browning's narrator and Stebbing's is that Browning's speaker cramps together with such manifestly negative aspects of Clive's story as his opium addiction and suicide his much-celebrated performance in the duel that proved his extraordinary nerve. Essentially, he detects in all of the above proofs of thoughtless, compulsive recklessness. By singling out and conjoining a few chapters of Clive's story, and by narrating them to his son in such a dark light, the speaker demystifies the legendary duel and sketches the portrait of an essentially self-destructive personality. He seems thus to be arguing for what James Eli Adams (Dandies) has called, “the [Victorian] cultural authority of an ideal of manhood as disciplined power” (134). As with the male speakers in Tennyson's tropical fantasies and the male characters in Charles Kingsley's novels, which Adams reassesses with respect to questions about what kind of man can face up to the dangers of the empire and respond most effectively to the challenge of the colonialist enterprise, Browning's speaker in “Clive” attempts to elicit “the cultural authority of an ideal of manhood as disciplined power . . . through its apparent lapse – and as a pervasive, even crippling fear of failing to display adequate self-discipline” (134). The difference between the texts by Tennyson and Kingsley that Adams examines, on the one hand, and Browning's “Clive,” on the other, is, of course, that the argument of Browning's speaker is itself ironised and satirised by the wider context of his whole performance (his drinking, his dejection, his envy of Clive, and, in general, his confused delivery and limited understanding of the issues he tries to tackle) to the extent of rendering him an unconvincing narrator, suspect of hypocrisy. In the process of his own moralising, Browning's speaker tries, not altogether honestly, to identify himself as a kind of Christian martyr, analogous to St. Paul, who, again according to Stebbing, “was a hero better worth the name [than Clive]”, because, even though “he too had his thorn in the flesh [like Clive], he wrote, ‘I take pleasure in infirmities, for when I am weak, then I am strong’” (379). But his appeal to Christianity does not suffice to challenge effectively the stigma of being a cowardly “mouse.” In the last analysis, Browning's text does not allow for any potentially positive correlation of what Sussman has called a successful masculinisation process and the practices of colonialism. Rather, it intimates the opposite: that the experience and politics of colonialism may have caused Clive's tragic ending as well as the speaker's unhappy situation. Furthermore, the poem can be read as a “staging” of an inquiry about ideas such as fear and its relation to courage and heroism, honourable conduct, rightful violence, justice, etc., while ironically suspending the concluding answers to the questions raised. It avoids identifying explicitly with any one “politically correct” position, but it turns tacit assumptions, such as the ideal of heroic manhood and the civilising mission of the imperialist project, into questions, registers a crisis of Victorian masculinity, and exposes the problematic interlocking of certain – typical of the age – formations of the masculine with imperial politics.Footnote ²³ All three texts discussed in this paper – Macaulay's, Stebbing's, and Browning's – are, in the last analysis, political interventions, involved in an ideological debate whereby arguments or questions regarding a politics of gender construction intersect with the question of imperialist politics.