Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  This was the first intimation of Destiny, but the meeting was still to remain in the future. “Sordello” was published in 1840,— “a colossal derelict on the ocean of poetry,” as William Sharp terms it. The impenetrable nature of the intricacies of the work has been the theme of many anecdotes. Tennyson declared that there were only two lines in it — the opening and the closing ones — which he understood, and “they are both lies,” he feelingly added. Douglas Jerrold tackled it when he was just recovering from an illness, and despairingly set down his inability to comprehend it to the probability that his mind was impaired by disease; and thrusting the book into the hands of his wife he entreated her to read it at once. He watched her breathlessly, and when she exclaimed, “I don’t know what this means; it is gibberish,” Jerrold exclaimed, “Thank God, I am not an idiot.”

  Still another edifying testimony to the general inability to understand “Sordello” is given by a French critic, Odysse Barot, who quotes a passage where the poet says, “God gave man two faculties,” and adds, “I wish while He was about it (pendant qu’il était en train) God had supplied another — namely, the power of understanding Mr. Browning.”

  Mrs. Carlyle declared that she read “Sordello” attentively twice, but was unable to discover whether the title referred to “a man, a city, or a tree”; yet most readers of this poem will be able to recognize that Sordello was a singer of the thirteenth century, whose fame suddenly lures him from the safety of solitude to the perils of society in Mantua, after which “immersion in worldliness” he again seeks seclusion, and partially recovers himself. The motif of the poem recalls the truth expressed in the lines:

  “Who loves the music of the spheres

  And lives on earth, must close his ears

  To many voices that he hears.”

  Suddenly a dazzling political career opens before Sordello; he is discovered to be — not a nameless minstrel, but the son of the great Ghibelline chief, Salinguerra; more marvelous still, he is loved by Palma, in her youthful beauty and fascination; and the crucial question comes, as in some form it must come to every life, whether he shall choose all the kingdoms of power and glory, or that kingdom which is not of earth, and cometh not with observation.

  It is easy to realize how such a problem would appeal to Robert Browning. Notwithstanding the traditional “obscurity” of “Sordello,” it offers to the thoughtful reader a field of richest and most entrancing suggestion.

  To Alfred Domett, under date of May 22, 1842, Browning writes:

  “... I cannot well say nothing of my constant thoughts of you, most pleasant remembrances of you, earnest desires for you. I have a notion you will come back some bright morning a dozen years hence and find me just gone — to heaven, or Timbuctoo! I give way to this fancy, for it lets me write what, I dare say, I have written niggardly enough, of my real love for you, better love than I had supposed I was fit for.... I have read your poems; you can do anything, and I should think would do much. I will if I live. At present, if I stand on head or heels I don’t know; what men require I know as little; and of what they are in possession I know not.... With this I send you your ‘Sordello.’ I suppose, I am sure, indeed, that the translation from Dante, on the fly-leaf, is your own....”

  In another letter to Alfred Domett, Browning thus refers to Tennyson:

  “... But how good when good he is! That noble ‘Locksley Hall!’”

  Browning had already become enamored of Italy; and Mrs. Bridell-Fox, writing to William Sharp, speaks of meeting the poet after his return, and thus describes the impression he made upon her:

  “I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilizing the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola, on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced. My own passionate longing to see Venice dates from those delightful, well-remembered evenings of my childhood.”

  This visit of the young poet to Italy forged the link of that golden chain which was to unite all his future with that land of art and song which held for him such wonderful Sibylline leaves of the yet undreamed-of chapters of his life.

  CHAPTER IV. 1833-1841

  “O Life, O Beyond,

  Art thou fair, art thou sweet?”

  “How the world is made for each of us!

  How all we perceive and know in it

  Tends to some moment’s product thus,

  When a soul declares itself — to wit,

  By its fruit, the thing it does!”

  Elizabeth Barrett’s Love for the Greek Poets — Lyrical Work — Serious Entrance on Professional Literature — Noble Ideal of Poetry — London Life — Kenyon — First Knowledge of Robert Browning.

  Elizabeth Barrett was but twelve days in translating the “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus, and of the result of this swift achievement she herself declared, when laughingly discussing this work with Home in later years, that it ought to have been “thrown in the fire immediately afterward as the only means of giving it a little warmth.” Combined with a few of her other poems, however, it was published (anonymously) in 1832, and received from the Athenæum the edifying verdict that “those who adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation should touch any one rather than Æschylus, and they may take warning from the writer before us.”

  The quiet life at Sidmouth goes on, — goes on, in fact, for three years, — and the life is not an unmixed joy to Miss Barrett. “I like the greenness and the tranquillity and the sea,” she writes to a friend. “Sidmouth is a nest among elms; and the lulling of the sea and the shadow of the hills make it a peaceful one; but there are no majestic features in the country. The grandeur is concentrated upon the ocean without deigning to have anything to do with the earth....”

  In the summer of 1835 the Barretts left Sidmouth for London, locating at first in Gloucester Place (No. 74) where they remained for three years. Hugh Stuart Boyd had, in the meantime, removed to St. John’s Wood; Mr. Kenyon and Miss Mitford became frequent visitors. Miss Barrett’s literary activity was stimulated by London life, and she began contributing to a number of periodicals, and her letter-writing grew more and more voluminous. To Mr. Boyd she wrote soon after their arrival in London:

  “As George is going to do what I am afraid I shall not be able to do to-day, — to visit you, — he must take with him a few lines from me, to say how glad I am to feel myself again only at a short distance from you; and gladder I shall be when the same room holds both of us. But I cannot open the window and fly.... How much you will have to say to me about the Greeks, unless you begin first to abuse me about the Romans. If you begin that, the peroration will be a very pathetic one, in my being turned out of your doors. Such is my prophecy.

  “Papa has been telling me of your abusing my stanzas on Mrs. Hemans’s death. I had a presentiment that you would....”

  If the classic lore and ponderous scholarship unfitted Mr. Boyd to feel the loveliness of this lyric, those who enter into its pathos may find some compensation for not being great classicists. It is in this poem that the lines occur, —

  “Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning:

  Would she have lost the poet’s fire, for anguish of the burning?

  ··········

  Albeit softly in our ears her silver song was ringing,

  The foot-fall of her parting soul is softer than her singing.”

  Miss Barrett’s fugitive poems of this time tell much of the story of her days. She sees Haydon’s portrait of Wordsworth, and it suggests the sonnet beginning:r />
  “Wordsworth upon Helvellyn!...”

  The poems written previously to “A Drama of Exile” do not at all indicate the power and beauty and the depth of significance for which all her subsequent work is so remarkable. “The Seraphim,” “Isobel’s Child,” “The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus,” however much they may contain occasional glimpses of poetic fire, would never have established her rank. Yet “The Sleep” belongs to this period, and that poem of exquisite pathos, “Cowper’s Grave.” Anticipating a little, there came that poem which awakened England and the modern world, indeed, to a sense of the suffering of children in factory life, “The Cry of the Children,” which appeared almost simultaneously with Lord Shaftesbury’s great speech in Parliament on child labor. The poem and the statesman and philanthropist together aroused England.

  A poem called “Confessions” is full of a mysterious power that haunts the reader in a series of pictures:

  “Face to face in my chamber, my silent chamber, I saw her:

  God and she and I only, there I sate down to draw her

  Soul through the clefts of confession— ‘Speak, I am holding thee fast,

  As the angel of resurrection shall do at the last.’”

  And what touching significance is in these lines:

  “The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day and by night;

  Their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through me, if ever so light.”

  There were the “Crowned and Wedded” that celebrated the marriage of England’s beloved queen; “Bertha in the Lane,” which has been one of the most universal favorites of any of her lyrics; still later, “The Dead Pan,” which essentially embodies her highest convictions regarding the poetic art: that Poetry must be real, and, above all, true.

  “O brave poets, keep back nothing,

  Nor mix falsehood with the whole!

  ······

  Hold, in high poetic duty,

  Truest Truth the fairest Beauty!”

  In such lines as these she expressed her deepest feeling.

  Then appeared “Comfort,” “Futurity,” and “An Apprehension”; the dainty little picture of her childish days in “Hector in the Garden”; the sonnets to George Sand, on which the French biographer of Mrs. Browning, in recent years, has commented, translating the first line, —

  “Vrai genie, mais vraie femme!”

  and adding that these words, addressed to George Sand, are illustrated by her own life.

  The sonnet “Insufficiency,” of this period, closes with the lines,

  “And what we best conceive we fail to speak.

  Wait, soul, until thine ashen garments fall,

  And then resume thy broken strains, and seek

  Fit peroration without let or thrall.”

  In all this work that deep religious note, that exaltation of spirituality which so completely characterized Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is felt by the reader. Religion was always to her a life, not a litany. The Divine Love was as the breath of life to her, wherein she lived and moved, and on which she relied for her very being.

  The poem called “A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress,” though not often noted by the critical writers on Mrs. Browning, is one full of impressive lines, with that haunting refrain of every stanza, —

  “O Life, O Beyond,

  Thou art strange, thou art sweet!”

  Albeit, a candid view must also recognize that this poem reveals those early faults, the redundancy, the almost recklessness of color and rhythm, that are much less frequently encountered in the poems of Mrs. Browning than they were in those of Miss Barrett. For poetic work is an art as well as a gift, and while “Poets are born, not made,” yet, being born, the poet must proceed also to make himself. In this “Rhapsody” occur the lines that are said to have thrown cultured Bostonians into a bewilderment exceptional; a baffled and despairing state not to be duplicated in all history, unless by that of the Greeks before the Eleusinian mysteries; the lines running, —

  “Let us sit on the thrones

  In a purple sublimity,

  And grind down men’s bones

  To a pale unanimity.”

  Polite circles in Boston pondered unavailingly upon this medley, and were apparently reduced to the same mental condition as was Mrs. Carlyle when she read “Sordello.” Unfortunately for Jane Carlyle there were in her day no Browning societies, with their all-embracing knowledge, to which Browning himself conveniently referred all persons who questioned him as to the meaning of certain passages. One Boston woman, not unknown to fame, recalls even now that she walked the Common, revolving these cryptic lines in her mind, and meeting Dr. Holmes, asked if he understood them, to which the Autocrat replied, “God forbid!”

  This very affluence of feeling, however, or even recklessness of imagery, was not without its place as a chastened and subdued factor in the power of Miss Barrett later on. From her earliest childhood she had the scholar’s instinct and love of learning; she read fluently French, German, and Italian; she was well grounded in Latin, and for the Greek she had that impassioned love that made its literature to her an assimilation rather than an acquirement. Its rich intellectual treasure entered into her inmost life. She also read Hebrew, and all her life kept with her a little Hebrew Bible, as well as a Greek Testament, the margins of both of which are filled with her notes and commentaries in her clear, microscopic handwriting. Miss Barrett’s earliest work, published anonymously, at her father’s expense, rather to gratify himself and a few friends than to make any appeal to the public, had no special claim to literary immortality, whatever its promise; but once in London, something in the very atmosphere seemed to act as a solvent to precipitate her nebulous dreams and crystallize them into definite and earnest aims. Poetry had always been to her “its own exceeding great reward,” but she was now conscious of a desire to enter into the stress and storm of the professional writer, who must sink or swim, accept the verdict of success or failure, and launch forth on that career whose very hardships and uncertainties are a part of its fascination. To Elizabeth Barrett, secure in her father’s home, there was little possibility of the hardships and privations on the material side not unfrequently incidental to the pursuit of letters, but to every serious worker life prefigures itself as something not unlike the Norse heaven with its seven floors, each of which must be conquered.

  “Here a star, and there a star,

  Some lose their way, —

  Here a mist, and there a mist,

  Afterwards ... day!”

  Miss Barrett finds London “wrapped up like a mummy, in a yellow mist,” but she tries to like it, and “looks forward to seeing those here whom we might see nowhere else.” Her brother George, who had recently graduated from the University of Glasgow, was now a barrister student at the Inner Temple. Henrietta and Arabel, the two sisters, found interest and delight in the new surroundings.

  Retrospectively viewed, Mrs. Browning’s life falls easily into three periods, which seem to name themselves as a prelude, an interlude, and a realization. She was just past her twenty-ninth birthday when the family came up to London, and up to that time she had, indeed, lived with dreams and visions for her company. These years were but the prelude, the preparatory period. She then entered on the experimental phase, the testing of her powers, the interlude that lay between early promise and later fulfillment. In her forty-first year came her marriage to Robert Browning and the beginning of those nearly fifteen years of marvelous achievement, during which the incomparable “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and “Aurora Leigh” were written, — the period of realization.

  Before the beginning of the London period Miss Barrett’s literary work had been largely that of the amateur, though in the true meaning of that somewhat misused term, as the lover, rather than as merely the more or less crude experimenter. For Poetry to Elizabeth Barrett was a divine commission no less than an inborn gift. Under any circumstances, she would have poured her life “with pa
ssion into music,” and with the utmost sincerity could she have said, with George Eliot’s “Armgart,”

  “I am not glad with that mean vanity

  Which knows no good beyond its appetite

  Full feasting upon praise! I am only glad,

  Being praised for what I know is worth the praise;

  Glad of the proof that I myself have part

  In what I worship!”

  As is revealed and attested in many expressions of her maturer years, Poetry was to her the most serious, as well as the most enthralling, of pursuits, while she was also a very accomplished scholar. A special gift, and a facility for the acquirement of scholarly knowledge in the academic sense, do not invariably go together; often is the young artist so bewitched with his gift, so entranced with the glory and the splendor of a dream, that the text-book, by contrast, is a dull page, to which he cannot persuade himself to turn. To him the air is peopled with visions and voices that fascinate his attention. In the college days of James Russell Lowell is seen an illustration of this truth, the young student being temporarily suspended, and sent — not to Coventry, but to Concord. Perhaps the banishment of a Harvard student for the high crime and misdemeanor of being addicted to rhyme rather than mathematics, and his penalty in the form of exile to Concord, the haunt of Emerson and the Muses, may have made Pan laugh. But, at all events, Miss Barrett was as naturally a scholar, in the fullest significance of the term, as she was a poet. This splendid equipment was a tremendous factor in that splendor of achievement, and in that universally recognized success, that has made the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning immortal in all ages, as the greatest woman poet the world has ever known.