Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  I explained with the proper degree of dignity that ‘it was Greek wine, Cyprus wine, and of very great value.’

  He retorted with acrimony, that ‘it might be Greek, twice over; but that it was exceedingly beastly.’

  I resumed, with persuasive argument, that ‘it could scarcely be beastly, inasmuch as the taste reminded one of oranges and orange flower together, to say nothing of the honey of Mount Hymettus.’

  He took me up with stringent logic, ‘that any wine must positively be beastly, which, pretending to be wine, tasted sweet as honey, and that it was beastly on my own showing!’ I send you this report as an evidence of a curious opinion. But drinkers of port wine cannot be expected to judge of nectar — and I hold your ‘Cyprus’ to be pure nectar.

  I shall have pleasure in doing what you ask me to do — that is, I will — if you promise never to call me Miss Barrett again. You have often quite vexed me by it. There is Ba — Elizabeth — Elzbeth — Ellie — any modification of my name you may call me by — but I won’t be called Miss Barrett by you. Do you understand? Arabel means to carry your copy of my book to you. And I beg you not to fancy that I shall be impatient for you to read the two volumes through. If you ever read them through, it will be a sufficient compliment, and indeed I do not expect that you ever will.

  May God bless you, dearest Mr. Boyd.

  I remain,

  Your affectionate and grateful

  ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

  The date of this last letter marks, as nearly as need be, the date of publication of Miss Barrett’s volumes. The letters which follow deal mainly with their reception, first at the hand of friends, and then by the regular critics. The general verdict of the latter was extremely complimentary. Mr. Chorley, in the ‘Athenaeum,’ described the volumes as ‘extraordinary,’ adding that ‘between her [Miss Barrett’s] poems and the slighter lyrics of most of the sisterhood, there is all the difference which exists between the putting-on of “singing robes” for altar service, and the taking up lute or harp to enchant an indulgent circle of friends and kindred.’ In the ‘Examiner,’ John Forster declared that ‘Miss Barrett is an undoubted poetess of a high and fine order as regards the first requisites of her art — imagination and expression.... She is a most remarkable writer, and her volumes contain not a little which the lovers of poetry will never willingly let die,’ a phrase then not quite so hackneyed as it has since become. The ‘Atlas’ asserted that ‘the present volumes show extraordinary powers, and, abating the failings of which all the followers of Tennyson are guilty, extraordinary genius.’ More influential even than these, ‘Blackwood’ paid her the compliment of a whole article, criticising her faults frankly, but declaring that ‘her poetical merits infinitively outweigh her defects. Her genius is profound, unsullied, and without a flaw.’ All agreed in assigning her a high, or the highest, place among the poetesses of England; but, as Miss Barrett herself pointed out, this, in itself, was no great praise.

  With regard to individual poems, the critics did not take kindly to the ‘Drama of Exile,’ and ‘Blackwood’ in particular criticised it at considerable length, calling it ‘the least successful of her works.’ The subject, while half challenging comparison with Milton, lends itself only too readily to fancifulness and unreality, which were among the most besetting sins of Miss Barrett’s genius. The minor poems were incomparably more popular, and the favourite of all was that masterpiece of rhetorical sentimentality, ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.’ It must have been a little mortifying to the authoress to find this piece, a large part of which had been dashed off at a single heat in order to supply the printers’ needs, preferred to others on which she had employed all the labour of her deliberate art; but with the general tone of all the critics she had every reason to be as content as her letters show her to have been. Only two criticisms rankled: the one that she was a follower of Tennyson, the other that her rhymes were slovenly and careless. And these appeared, in varying shapes, in nearly all the reviews.

  The former of these allegations is of little weight. Whatever qualities Miss Barrett may have shared with Tennyson, her substantial independence is unquestionable. It is a case rather of coincidence than imitation; or if imitation, it is of a slight and unconscious kind. The second criticism deserves fuller notice, because it is constantly repeated to this day. The following letters show how strongly Miss Barrett protested against it. As she told Horne, with reference to this very subject:

  ‘If I fail ultimately before the public — that is, before the people — for an ephemeral popularity does not appear to me to be worth trying for — it will not be because I have shrunk from the amount of labour, where labour could do anything. I have worked at poetry; it has not been with me reverie, but art.’

  That her rhymes were inexact, especially in such poems as ‘The Dead Pan,’ she did not deny; but her defence was that the inexactness was due to a deliberate attempt to widen the artistic capabilities of the English language. Partly, perhaps, as a result of her acquaintance with Italian literature, she had a marked fondness for disyllabic rhymes; and since pure rhymes of this kind are not plentiful in English, she tried the experiment of using assonances instead. Hence such rhymes as silence and islands, vision and procession, panther and saunter, examples which could be indefinitely multiplied if need were. Now it may be that a writer with a very sensitive ear would not have attempted such an experiment, and it is a fact that public taste has not approved it; but the experiment itself is as legitimate as, say, the metrical experiments in hexameters and hendecasyllabics of Longfellow or Tennyson, and whether approved or not it should be criticised as an experiment, not as mere carelessness. That Mrs. Browning’s ear was quite-capable of discerning true rhymes is shown by the fact that she tacitly abandoned her experiment in assonances. Not only in the pure and high art of the ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese,’ but even in ‘Casa Guidi Windows,’ the rhetorical and sometimes colloquial tone of which might have been thought to lend itself to such devices, imperfect rhymes occur but rarely not exceeding the limits allowed to himself by every poet who has rhymed given and heaven; and the roll of those who have not done so must be small indeed.

  The point has seemed worth dwelling on, because it touches a commonplace of criticism as regards Mrs. Browning; but we may now make way for her own comments on her critics and friends.

  To H.S. Boyd

  Tuesday, August 13, 1844 [postmark].

  My very dear Friend, — I must thank you for the great kindness with which you have responded to a natural expression of feeling on my part, and for all the pleasure of finding you pleased with the inscription of ‘Cyprus Wine.’ Your note has given me much true pleasure. Yes; if my verses survive me, I should wish them to relate the fact of my being your debtor for many happy hours.

  And now I must explain to you that most of the ‘incorrectnesses’ you speak of may be ‘incorrectnesses,’ but are not negligences. I have a theory about double rhymes for which — I shall be attacked by the critics, but which I could justify perhaps on high authority, or at least analogy. In fact, these volumes of mine have more double rhymes than any two books of English poems that ever to my knowledge were printed; I mean of English poems not comic. Now, of double rhymes in use, which are perfect rhymes, you are aware how few there are, and yet you are also aware of what an admirable effect in making a rhythm various and vigorous, double rhyming is in English poetry. Therefore I have used a certain licence; and after much thoughtful study of the Elizabethan writers, have ventured it with the public. And do you tell me, you who object to the use of a different vowel in a double rhyme, why you rhyme (as everybody does, without blame from anybody) ‘given’ to ‘heaven,’ when you object to my rhyming ‘remember’ and ‘chamber’? The analogy surely is all on my side, and I believe that the spirit of the English language is also.

  I write all this because you will find many other sins of the sort, besides those in the ‘Cyprus Wine;’ and because I wish you to consider the subject as a p
oint for consideration seriously, and not to blame me as a writer of careless verses. If I deal too much in licences, it is not because I am idle, but because I am speculative for freedom’s sake. It is possible, you know, to be wrong conscientiously; and I stand up for my conscience only.

  I thank you earnestly for your candour hitherto, and I beseech you to be candid to the end.

  It is tawny as Rhea’s lion.

  I know (although you don’t say so) you object to that line. Yet consider its structure. Does not the final ‘y’ of ‘tawny’ suppose an apostrophe and apocope? Do you not run ‘tawny as’ into two syllables naturally? I want you to see my principle.

  With regard to blank verse, the great Fletcher admits sometimes seventeen syllables into his lines.

  I hope Miss Heard received her copy, and that you will not think me arrogant in writing freely to you.

  Believe me, I write only freely and not arrogantly; and I am impressed with the conviction that my work abounds with far more faults than you in your kindness will discover, notwithstanding your acumen.

  Always your affectionate and grateful

  ELIBET.

  To H.S. Boyd

  Wednesday, August 14, 1844 [postmark].

  My dearest Mr. Boyd, — I must thank you for the great great pleasure with which I have this moment read your note, the more welcome, as (without hypocrisy) I had worked myself up into a nervous apprehension, from your former one, that I should seem so ‘rudis atque incomposita’ to you, in consequence of certain licences, as to end by being intolerable. I know what an ear you have, and how you can hear the dust on the wheel as it goes on. Well, I wrote to you yesterday, to beg you to be patient and considerate.

  But you are always given to surprise me with abundant kindness — with supererogatory kindness. I believe in that, certainly.

  I am very very glad that you think me stronger and more perspicuous. For the perspicuity, I have struggled hard....

  Your affectionate and grateful

  ELZBETH.

  To Mr. Westwood

  50 Wimpole Street: August 22, 1844.

  ... Thank you for your welcome letter, so kind in its candour, I angry that you should prefer ‘The Seraphim’! Angry? No indeed, indeed, I am grateful for ‘The Seraphim,’ and not exacting for the ‘Drama,’ and all the more because of a secret obstinate persuasion that the ‘Drama’ will have a majority of friends in the end, and perhaps deserve to have them. Nay, why should I throw perhapses over my own impressions, and be insincere to you who have honoured me by being sincere? Why should I dissemble my own belief that the ‘Drama’ is worth two or three ‘Seraphims’ — my own belief, you know, which is worth nothing, writers knowing themselves so superficially, and having such a natural leaning to their last work. Still, I may say honestly to you, that I have a far more modest value for ‘The Seraphim’ than your kindness suggests, and that I have seemed to myself to have a clear insight into the fact that that poem was only borne up by the minor poems published with it, from immediate destruction. There is a want of unity in it which vexes me to think of, and the other faults magnify themselves day by day, more and more, in my eyes. Therefore it is not that I care more for the ‘Drama,’ but I care less for ‘The Seraphim.’ Both poems fall short of my aspiration and desire, but the ‘Drama’ seems to me fuller, freer and stronger, and worth the other three times over. If it has anything new, I think it must be something new into which I have lived, for certainly I wrote it sincerely and from an inner impulse. In fact, I never wrote any poem with so much sense of pleasure in the composition, and so rapidly, with continuous flow — from fifty to a hundred lines a day, and quite in a glow of pleasure and impulse all through. Still, you have not been used to see me in blank verse, and there may be something in that. That the poem is full of faults and imperfections I do not in the least doubt. I have vibrated between exultations and despondencies in the correcting and printing of it, though the composition went smoothly to an end, and I am prepared to receive the bastinado to the critical degree, I do assure you. The few opinions I have yet had are all to the effect that my advance on the former publication is very great and obvious, but then I am aware that people who thought exactly the contrary would be naturally backward in giving me their opinion.... Indeed, I thank you most earnestly. Truth and kindness, how rarely do they come together! I am very grateful to you. It is curious that ‘Duchess May’ is not a favorite of mine, and that I have sighed one or two secret wishes towards its extirpation, but other writers besides yourself have singled it out for praise in private letters to me. There has been no printed review yet, I believe; and when I think of them, I try to think of something else, for with no private friends among the critical body (not that I should desire to owe security in such a matter to private friendship) it is awful enough, this looking forward to be reviewed. Never mind, the ultimate prosperity of the book lies far above the critics, and can neither be mended nor made nor unmade by them.

  To John Kenyan

  Wednesday morning [August 1844].

  I return Mr. Chorley’s note, my dear cousin, with thankful thoughts of him — as of you. I wish I could persuade you of the rightness of my view about ‘Essays on Mind’ and such things, and how the difference between them and my present poems is not merely the difference between two schools, as you seemed to intimate yesterday, nor even the difference between immaturity and maturity; but that it is the difference between the dead and the living, between a copy and an individuality, between what is myself and what is not myself. To you who have a personal interest and — may I say? affection for me, the girl’s exercise assumes a factitious value, but to the public the matter is otherwise and ought to be otherwise. And for the ‘psychological’ side of the question, do observe that I have not reputation enough to suggest a curiosity about my legends. Instead of your ‘legendary lore,’ it would be just a legendary bore. Now you understand what I mean. I do not underrate Pope nor his school, but I do disesteem everything which, bearing the shape of a book, is not the true expression of a mind, and I know and feel (and so do you) that a girl’s exercise written when all the experience lay in books, and the mind was suited rather for intelligence than production, lying like an infant’s face with an undeveloped expression, must be valueless in itself, and if offered to the public directly or indirectly as a work of mine, highly injurious to me. Why, of the ‘Prometheus’ volume, even, you know what I think and desire. ‘The Seraphim,’ with all its feebleness and shortcomings and obscurities, yet is the first utterance of my own individuality, and therefore the only volume except the last which is not a disadvantage to me to have thought of, and happily for me, the early books, never having been advertised, nor reviewed, except by accident, once or twice, are as safe from the public as manuscript.

  Oh, I shudder to think of the lines which might have been ‘nicked in,’ and all through Mr. Chorley’s good nature. As if I had not sins enough to ruin me in the new poems, without reviving juvenile ones, sinned when I knew no better. Perhaps you would like to have the series of epic poems which I wrote from nine years old to eleven. They might illustrate some doctrine of innate ideas, and enrich (to that end) the myths of metaphysicians.

  And also agree with me in reverencing that wonderful genius Keats, who, rising as a grand exception from among the vulgar herd of juvenile versifiers, was an individual man from the beginning, and spoke with his own voice, though surrounded by the yet unfamiliar murmur of antique echoes. Leigh Hunt calls him ‘the young poet’ very rightly. Most affectionately and gratefully yours,

  E.B.B.

  Do thank Mr. Chorley for me, will you?

  To Mrs. Martin

  Thursday, August 1844.

  Thank you, my dearest Mrs. Martin, for your most kind letter, a reply to which should certainly, as you desired, have met you at Colwall; only, right or wrong, I have been flurried, agitated, put out of the way altogether, by Stormie’s and Henry’s plan of going to Egypt. Ah, now you are surprised. Now you think me exc
usable for being silent two days beyond my time — yes, and they have gone, it is no vague speculation. You know, or perhaps you don’t know, that, a little time back, papa bought a ship, put a captain and crew of his own in it, and began to employ it in his favourite ‘Via Lactea’ of speculations. It has been once to Odessa with wool, I think; and now it has gone to Alexandria with coals. Stormie was wild to go to both places; and with regard to the last, papa has yielded. And Henry goes too. This was all arranged weeks ago, but nothing was said of it until last Monday to me; and when I heard it, I was a good deal moved of course, and although resigned now to their having their way in it, and their pleasure, which is better than their way, still I feel I have entered a new anxiety, and shall not be quite at ease again till they return....

  And now to thank you, my ever-dearest Mrs. Martin, for your kind and welcome letter from the Lakes. I knew quite at the first page, and long before you said a word specifically, that dear Mr. Martin was better, and think that such a scene, even from under an umbrella, must have done good to the soul and body of both of you. I wish I could have looked through your eyes for once. But I suppose that neither through yours, nor through my own, am I ever likely to behold that sight. In the meantime it is with considerable satisfaction that I hear of your failure of Wordsworth, which was my salvation in a very awful sense. Why, if you had done such a thing, you would have put me to the shame of too much honor. The speculation consoles me entirely for your loss in respect to Rydal Hall and its poet. By the way, I heard the other day that Rogers, who was intending to visit him, said, ‘It is a bad time of year for it. The god is on his pedestal; and can only give gestures to his worshippers, and no conversation to his friends.’ ...