Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  With regard to Mrs. Browning, however, there is no room for doubt upon these points. These letters, familiarly written to her private friends, without the smallest idea of publication, treating of the thoughts that came uppermost in the ordinary language of conversation, can lay no claim to make a new revelation of her genius. On the other hand, perhaps because the circumstances of Mrs. Browning’s life cut her off to an unusual extent from personal intercourse with her friends, and threw her back upon letter-writing as her principal means of communication with them, they contain an unusually full revelation of her character. And this is not wholly unconnected with her literary genius, since her personal convictions, her moral character, entered more fully than is often the case into the composition of her poetry. Her best poetry is that which is most full of her personal emotions. The ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese,’ the ‘Cry of the Children,’ ‘Cowper’s Grave,’ the ‘Dead Pan,’ ‘Aurora Leigh,’ and all the Italian poems, owe their value to the pure and earnest character, the strong love of truth and right, the enthusiasm on behalf of what is oppressed and the indignation against all kinds of oppression and wrong, which were prominent elements in a personality of exceptional worth and beauty.

  An editor can generally serve his readers best by remaining in the background; but he is allowed one moment for the expression of his personal feelings, when he thanks those who have assisted him in his work. In the present case there are many to whom it is a pleasure to offer such thanks. In the first place, I have to thank Mr. R. Barrett Browning and Miss Browning most cordially for having accepted the proposal of the publishers (Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., to whom likewise my gratitude is due) to put so pleasant and congenial a task into my hands. Mr. Browning has also contributed a number of suggestions and corrections while the sheets have been passing through the press. I have also to thank those who have been kind enough to offer letters in their possession for inclusion in these volumes: Lady Alwyne Compton for the letters to Mr. Westwood; Mrs. Arthur Severn for the letters to Mr. Ruskin; Mr. G.L. Craik for the letters to Miss Mulock; Mrs. Commeline for the letters to Miss Commeline; Mr. T.J. Wise for the letters to Mr. Cornelius Mathews; Mr. C. Aldrich for the letter to Mrs. Kinney; Col. T.W. Higginson for a letter to Miss Channing; and the Rev. G. Bainton for a letter to Mr. Kenyon. It has not been possible to print all the letters which have been thus offered; but this does not diminish the kindness of the lenders, nor the gratitude of the editor.

  Finally, I should wish to offer my sincere thanks to Lady Edmond Fitzmaurice for much assistance and advice in the selection and revision of the letters; a labour which her friendship with Mr. Browning towards the close of his life has prompted her to bestow most freely and fully upon this memorial of his wife.

  F.G.K.

  July 1897.

  CHAPTER I. 1806-1835

  Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, still better known to the world as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was born on March 6, 1806, the eldest child of Edward and Mary Moulton Barrett. I Both the date and place of her birth have been matters of uncertainty and dispute, and even so trustworthy an authority as the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’ is inaccurate with respect to them. All doubt has, however, been set at rest by the discovery of the entry of her birth in the parish register of Kelloe Church, in the county of Durham. She was born at Coxhoe Hall, the residence of Mr. Barrett’s only brother, Samuel, about five miles south of the city of Durham. Her father, whose name was originally Edward Barrett Moulton, had assumed the additional surname of Barrett on the death of his maternal grandfather, to whose estates in Jamaica he was the heir. Of Mr. Barrett it is recorded by Mr. Browning, in the notes prefixed by him to the collected edition of his wife’s poems, that ‘on the early death of his father he was brought from Jamaica to England when a very young child, as a ward of the late Chief Baron Lord Abinger, then Mr. Scarlett, whom he frequently accompanied in his post-chaise when on circuit. He was sent to Harrow, but received there so savage a punishment for a supposed offence (burning the toast)’ — which, indeed, has been a ‘supposed offence’ at other schools than Harrow— ‘by the youth whose fag he had become, that he was withdrawn from the school by his mother, and the delinquent was expelled. At the age of sixteen he was sent by Mr. Scarlett to Cambridge, and thence, for an early marriage, went to Northumberland.’ His wife was Miss Mary Graham-Clarke, daughter of J. Graham-Clarke, of Fenham Hall, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but of her nothing seems to be known, and her comparatively early death causes her to be little heard of in the record of her daughter’s life.

  Nothing is to be gained by trying to trace back the genealogy of the Barrett family, and it need merely be noted that it had been connected for some generations with the island of Jamaica, and owned considerable estates there. It is a curious coincidence that Robert Browning was likewise in part of West Indian descent, and so, too, was John Kenyon, the lifelong friend of both, by whose means the poet and poetess were first introduced to one another.

  The family of Mr. Edward Barrett was a fairly large one, consisting, besides Elizabeth, of two daughters, Henrietta and Arabel, and eight sons — Edward, whose tragic death at Torquay saddened so much of his sister’s life, Charles (the ‘Stormie’ of the letters), Samuel, George, Henry, Alfred, Septimus, and Octavius; Mr. Barrett’s inventiveness having apparently given out with the last two members of his family, reducing him to the primitive method of simple enumeration, an enumeration in which, it may be observed, the daughters counted for nothing. Not many of these, however, can have been born at Coxhoe; for while Elizabeth was still an infant — apparently about the beginning of the year 1809 — Mr. Barrett removed to his newly purchased estate of Hope End, in Herefordshire, among the Malvern hills, and only a few miles from Malvern itself. It is to Hope End that the admirers of Mrs. Browning must look as the real home of her childhood and youth. Here she spent her first twenty years of conscious life. Here is the scene of the childish reminiscences which are to be found among her earlier poems, of ‘Hector in the Garden,’ ‘The Lost Bower,’ and ‘The Deserted Garden.’ And here too her earliest verses were written, and the foundations laid of that omnivorous reading of literature of all sorts and kinds, which was so strong a characteristic of her tastes and leanings.

  On this subject she may be left to tell her own tale. In a letter written on October 5, 1843, to Mr. R.H. Horne, she furnishes him with the following biographical details for his study of her in ‘The New Spirit of the Age.’ They supply us with nearly all that we know of her early life and writings.

  ‘And then as to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder’s, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage would have as good a story, Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in my thoughts. I wrote verses — as I dare say many have done who never wrote any poems — very early; at eight years old and earlier. But, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained with me, and from that day to this, poetry has been a distinct object with me — an object to read, think, and live for. And I could make you laugh, although you could not make the public laugh, by the narrative of nascent odes, epics, and didactics crying aloud on obsolete muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and haunted me out of Pope’s Homer, until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony. And thus my great “epic” of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and called “The Battle of Marathon,” and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me — is Pope’s Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a curious production for a child, it gives evidence only of an imitative faculty and an ear, and a good deal of reading in a peculiar direction. The love of Pope’s Homer threw me into Pope on one side and into Greek on the other, and into Latin as a help to Greek — and the influence of all these tendencies is manifest so long afterwards as in my “Essay on Mind,” a didactic poem written when I was seventeen or eighteen, and long repented of as worthy of all repentance. The poem is imitative in its
form, yet is not without traces of an individual thinking and feeling — the bird pecks through the shell in it. With this it has a pertness and pedantry which did not even then belong to the character of the author, and which I regret now more than I do the literary defectiveness.

  ‘All this time, and indeed the greater part of my life, we lived at Hope End, a few miles from Malvern, in a retirement scarcely broken to me except by books and my own thoughts, and it is a beautiful country, and was a retirement happy in many ways, although the very peace of it troubles the heart as it looks back. There I had my fits of Pope, and Byron, and Coleridge, and read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the dramatists, and eat and drank Greek and made my head ache with it. Do you know the Malvern Hills? The hills of Piers Plowman’s Visions? They seem to me my native hills; for, although I was born in the county of Durham, I was an infant when I went first into their neighbourhood, and lived there until I had passed twenty by several years. Beautiful, beautiful hills they are! And yet, not for the whole world’s beauty would I stand in the sunshine and the shadow of them any more. It would be a mockery, like the taking back of a broken flower to its stalk.’

  So, while the young Robert Browning was enthusiastically declaiming passages of Pope’s Homer, and measuring out heroic couplets with his hand round the dining table in Camberwell, Elizabeth Barrett was drinking from the same fount of inspiration among the Malvern Hills, and was already turning it to account in the production of her first epic. The fifty copies of the ‘Battle of Marathon,’ which Mr. Barrett, proud of his daughter’s precocity, insisted on having printed, bear the date of 1819. Only five of them are now known to exist, and these are all in private hands; even the British Museum possesses only the reprint which the hero-worship of the present generation caused to be produced in 1891. Seven years later, when she had just reached the age of twenty, her first volume of verse was offered to the world in general. It was entitled ‘An Essay on Mind, and other Poems,’ and included, besides the didactic poem after the manner of Pope which formed the pièce de rèsistance, a number of shorter pieces, several of which, as she informed Horne, had been written when she was not more than thirteen.

  It was during the years at Hope End that Elizabeth Barrett was first attacked by serious illness. ‘At fifteen,’ she says in her autobiographical letter, already quoted in part, ‘I nearly died;’ and this may be connected with a statement by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, to the effect that ‘one day, when Elizabeth was about fifteen, the young girl, impatient for her ride, tried to saddle her pony alone, in a field, and fell with the saddle upon her, in some way injuring her spine so seriously that she was for years upon her back.’ The latter part of this statement cannot indeed be quite accurate; for her period of long confinement to a sick-room was of later date, and began, according to her own statement, from a different cause. Mr. R. Barrett Browning states that the injury to the spine was not discovered for some time, but was afterwards attributed, not to a fall, but to a strain whilst tightening her pony’s girths. No doubt this injury contributed towards the general weakness of health to which she was always subject.

  Of her earliest letters, belonging to the Hope End period, very few have been preserved, and most of those which remain are of little interest. The first to be printed here belongs to the period of her mother’s last illness, which ended in her death on October 1, 1828. It is addressed to Mrs. James Martin, a lifelong friend, whose name will appear frequently in these pages. At the time when it was written she was living near Tewkesbury, within visiting distance of the Barretts.

  To Mrs. Martin

  Hope End: Thursday, [about September 1828].

  My dear Mrs. Martin, — I am happy to be able to tell you that Mr. Garden was here two days ago, and that he has not thought it necessary to adopt any violent measure with regard to our beloved invalid. He seems entirely to rely, for her ultimate restoration, upon a discipline as to diet, and a course of strengthening medicine. This is most satisfactory to us; and her spirits have been soothed and tranquillised by his visit. She has slept quietly for the last few nights, and reports herself to be brisker and stronger, and to be comparatively free from pain. This account is, perhaps, too favorable, and will appear so to you when you see her, as I am afraid you will, not looking much better, much more cheerful, than when you paid us your last visit. But when we are very willing to hope, we are apt to be too ready to hope: though really, without being too sanguine, we may consider quiet nights and diminished pain to be satisfactory signs of amendment. I know you will be glad to hear of them, and I hope you will witness them very soon, in spite of this repulsive snow. It will do mama good, and I am sure it will give us all pleasure, to benefit by some of your charitable pilgrimages over the hill.

  With our best regards, and sincerest thanks for your kind interest

  Believe me, dear Mrs. Martin, most truly yours,

  E.B. BARRETT.

  To Miss Commeline

  Hope End: Monday, [October 1828].

  My dear Miss Commeline, — Thank you for the sympathy and interest which you have extended towards us in our heavy affliction. Even you cannot know all that we have lost; but God knows, and it has pleased Him to take away the blessing that He gave. And all must be right since He doeth all! Indeed we did not foresee this great grief! If we had we could not have felt it less; but I should not then have been denied the consolation of being with her at the last.

  It is idle to speak now of such thoughts, and circumstances have unquestionably been rightly and mercifully ordered. We are all well and composed — poor papa supporting us by his own surpassing fortitude. It is an inexpressible comfort to me to witness his calmness.

  I cannot say that we shall not be glad to see you, but the weather is dreary and the distance long: and if you were to come, we might not be able to meet you and to speak to you with calmness. In that case you would receive a melancholy impression which I should like to spare you. Perhaps it would be better for you and less selfish in us, if we were to defer this meeting a little while longer — but do what you prefer doing! I can never forget the regard and esteem entertained for you by one whose tenderness and watchfulness I have felt every day and hour since she gave me that life which her loss embitters — whose memory is more precious to me than any earthly blessing left behind; I have written what is ungrateful, and what I ought not to have written, and what I ought not to feel, and do not always feel, but I did not just then remember that I had so much left to love.

  To Mrs. Boyd

  Hope End: Saturday morning, [1828-1832].

  My dear Mrs. Boyd, — You were quite wrong in supposing that papa was likely to complain about ‘the number of letters from Malvern;’ and as to my doing so, why did you suggest that? To fill up a sentence, or to conjure up some kind of limping excuse for idle people? Among idle people, perhaps you have written me down. But the reason of my silence was far more reasonable than yours. I have been engaged in alternately wishing in earnest and wishing in vain for the power of saying when I could go to Malvern — and in being unwell besides. For the last week I have not been at all well, and indeed was obliged yesterday to go to bed after breakfast instead of after tea, where I contrived to abstract myself out of a good deal of pain into Lord Byron’s Life by Moore. To-day this abstraction is not necessary; I am much better; and, indeed, little remains of the indisposition but the vulgar fractions of a cough and cold. I dare say (and Occyta agrees with me) cold was at the bottom of it all, for I was so very wise as to lie down upon the grass last Monday, when the sun was shining deceitfully, though the snow was staring at me from the hedges, with an expression anything but dog-daysical!

  Henrietta’s face-ache is quite well, and I don’t mean to give any more bulletins to-day. I hope your ‘tolerably well’ is turned into ‘quite well’ too by this time.

  In reply to your query, I will mention that the existence actually extended until Thursday without the visit here
— a phenomenon in physics and metaphysics. I was desired by a note a short time previously, ‘to embrace all my circle with the utmost tenderness,’ as proxy. Considering the extent of the said circle, this was a very comprehensive request, and a very unreasonable one to offer to anyone less than the hundred-armed Indian god Baly. I am glad that your alternative of a house is so near to the right side of the turnpike — in which case, a miss is certainly not as bad as a mile. May Place is to be vacated in May, though its present inhabitants do not leave Malvern. I mention this to you, but pray don’t re-mention it to anybody. The rent is 15£. Mr. Boyd will not be angry with me for not going to see him sooner than I can. At least, I am sure he ought not. Though you are all kind enough to wish me to go, I always think and know (which is consolatory to everything but my vanity) that no one can wish it half as much as I myself do.

  Believe me, dear Mrs. Boyd, affectionately yours,

  E.B. BARRETT.

  The fear 1832 brought a great change in the fortunes of the Barrett family, and may be said to mark the end of the purely formative period in Elizabeth Barrett’s life. Hitherto she had been living in the home and among the surroundings of her childhood, absorbing literature rather than producing it; or if producing it, still mainly for her own amusement and instruction, rather than with any view of appealing to the general public. But in 1832 this home was broken up by the sale, of Hope End, and with the removal thence we seem to find her embarking definitely on literature as the avowed pursuit and occupation of her life. Sidmouth in Devonshire was the place to which the Barrett family now removed, and the letters begin henceforth to be longer and more frequent, and to tell a more connected tale.