Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  The professional literary life is a drama in itself, — comedy, or tragedy, as may be, and usually a mixture of both. It ranges over wide areas of experience, from that of the author of “Richard Feverel,” who is said to have written that novel on a diet of oatmeal and cold water, to that of the luxurious author whose séances with the Muses are decorously conducted in irreproachable interiors, with much garnishing, old rose and ivory, ebony carvings, and inlaid desks, at which the marvelous being who now and then condescends to “dictate” a “best seller,” is apt to be surprised by a local photographer. But as a noted educator defined a University as “a log, — with Mark Hopkins sitting on the other end,” so the “real thing” in a literary career may not inaptly be typified by Louisa Alcott sitting on the back stairs, writing on an old atlas; and it was into actualities somewhat like these that Elizabeth Barrett desired to plunge. The question that she voiced in later years, in “Aurora Leigh,” —

  “My own best poets, am I one with you,

  That thus I love you, — or but one through love?

  Does all this smell of thyme about my feet

  Conclude my visit to your holy hill

  In personal presence, or but testify

  The rustling of your vesture through my dreams

  With influent odours?” —

  this question, in substance, stirred now in her life, and insisted upon reply. She must, like all real poets, proceed to “hang her verses in the wind,” and watch if perchance there are

  “... the five

  Which five hundred will survive.”

  Elizabeth Barrett was of a simplicity that had no affinities with the poseur in any respect, and she had an inimitable sense of humor that pervaded all her days. Wit and pathos are, indeed, so closely allied that it would be hardly possible that the author of the “De Profundis,” a poem that sounds the profoundest depths of the human soul, should not have the corresponding quality of the swiftest perception of the humorous. It was somewhere about this time that Poe sent to her a volume of his poems with an inscription on the fly-leaf that declared her to be “the noblest of her sex.”

  “And what could I say in reply,” she laughingly remarked, “but ‘Sir, you are the most discerning of yours!’”

  The first poem of hers that was offered in a purely professional way was “The Romaunt of Margret.” It appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, then edited by Bulwer, who was afterward known as the first Lord Lytton. At this time Richard Hengist Horne was basking in the fame of his “Orion,” and to him Miss Barrett applied, through a mutual friend, as to whether her enclosed poem had any title to that name, or whether it was mere verse. “As there could be no doubt in the mind of the recipient on that point,” said Mr. Horne, “the poem was forwarded to Bulwer, and duly appeared. The next one sent,” continues Mr. Horne, “started the poetess at once on her bright and noble career.” This “next one” appears to have been “The Poet’s Vow,” and a confirmation of this supposition is seen in a letter of hers at this date to Mr. Boyd, in which she explains her not having at hand a copy of the Athenæum that he had wished to see, and adds:

  “I can give you, from memory, the Athenæum’s review in that number. The critic says ‘It is rich in poetry ... including a fine, although too dreamy, ballad, The Poet’s Vow. We are almost tempted to pause and criticise the work of an artist of so much inspiration and promise as the author of this poem, and to exhort him to a greater clearness of expression, and less quaintness in the choice of his phraseology, but this is not the time or place for digression.’

  “You see my critic has condemned me with a very gracious countenance. Do put on yours.”

  Again, under date of October, 1836, she writes to Mr. Boyd:

  “... But what will you say to me when I confess that in the face of all your kind encouragement, my Drama of the Angels (The Seraphim) has not been touched until the last three days? It was not out of pure idleness on my part, nor of disregard to your admonition; but when my thoughts were distracted with other things, books just began enclosing me all around, a whole load of books upon my conscience, and I could not possibly rise to the gate of heaven and write about my angels. You know one can’t sometimes sit down to the sublunary occupation of even reading Greek, unless one feels free to it. And writing poetry requires a double liberty, and an inclination which comes only of itself....

  “... I have had another note from the editor — very flattering, and praying for farther supplies. The ‘Angels’ were not ready, and I was obliged to send something else.”

  A discussion arises in the family regarding the taking of a house in Wimpole Street, and Elizabeth remarks that for her part she would rather go on inhabiting castles in the air than to live in that particular house, “whose walls look so much like Newgate’s turned inside out.” She continues, however, that if it is decided upon, she has little doubt she will wake and sleep very much as she would anywhere else. With a strong will, and an intense, resistless kind of energy in holding any conviction, and an independence of character only equalled by its preeminent justice and generous magnanimity, she was singularly free from any tenacious insistence upon the matters of external life. She had her preferences; but she always accommodated herself to the decision or the necessity of the hour, and there was an end of it. She had that rare power of instantaneous mental adjustment; and if a given thing were right and best, or if it were not best but was still inevitable, she accepted it and did not make life a burden to every one concerned by endless discussion.

  London itself did not captivate her fancy. “Did Dr. Johnson in his paradise in Fleet Street love the pavements and the walls?” she questioned. “I doubt that,” she added; “the place, the privileges, don’t mix in one’s love as is done by the hills and the seaside.”

  The privileges, however, became more and more interesting to her. One of these was when she met Wordsworth, whom she describes as being “very kind,” and that he “let her hear his conversation.”

  This conversation she did not find “prominent,” for she saw at the same time Landor, “the brilliant Landor,” she notes, and felt the difference “between great genius and eminent talent.” But there was a day on which she went to Chiswick with Wordsworth and Miss Mitford, and all the way she thought she must be dreaming. It was Landor, though, who captivated her fancy at once, as he already had that of her future poet-lover and husband, who was yet unrevealed to her. Landor, “in whose hands the ashes of antiquity burn again,” she writes, gave her two Greek epigrams he had recently written. All this time she is reading everything, — Sheridan Knowles’s play of “The Wreckers,” which Forrest had rejected, “rather for its unfitness to his own personal talent than for its abstract demerit,” she concludes; and “Ion,” which she finds beautiful morally rather than intellectually, and thinks that, as dramatic poetry, it lacks power, passion, and condensation. Reading Combe’s “Phrenology,” she refers to his theory that slowness of the pulse is a sign of the poetical impulse. If this be true, she fears she has no hope of being a poet, “for my pulse is in a continual flutter,” she notes; and she explains to Mr. Boyd that the line

  “One making one in strong compass”

  in “The Poet’s Vow,” which he found incomprehensible, really means that “the oneness of God, ‘in Whom are all things,’ produces a oneness, or sympathy, with all things. The unity of God preserves a unity in man.”

  All in all, Miss Barrett is coming to enjoy her London life. There was the Royal Academy, “and real live poets, with their heads full of the trees and birds, and sunshine of Paradise”; and she has “stood face to face with Wordsworth and Landor”; Miss Mitford has become a dear friend, but she visits London only at intervals, as she lives — shades of benighted days! — thirty miles from London. A twentieth century residence across the continent could hardly seem more remote.

  The removal to Wimpole Street was decided upon, and to that house (No. 50), gloomy or the reverse, the Barretts migrated. Miss Barrett’s new b
ook, under the title of “The Seraphim and Other Poems,” was published, marking her first professional appearance before the public over her own name. “I feel very nervous about it,” she said; “far more than I did when my ‘Prometheus’ crept out of the Greek.”

  Mr. Kenyon was about to go to Rydal Mount on a visit to Wordsworth, and Miss Barrett begs him to ask, as for himself, two garden cuttings of myrtle or geranium, and send to her — two, that she may be sure of saving one.

  Autographs had value in those days, and in a note to Mr. Bray Miss Barrett alludes to one of Shakespeare’s that had been sold for a hundred pounds and asks if he feels sure of the authenticity of his own Shakespearean autograph.

  A new poetic era had dawned about the time that “The Seraphim” appeared. Tennyson had written “Audley Court,” and was beginning to be known in America, owing this first introduction to Emerson, who visited Landor in Florence and made some sojourn afterward in England. The Boston publishing house of C. C. Little and Company (now Little, Brown, and Company) had written to Tennyson (under date of April 27, 1838) regarding a republishing of his volume, as the future laureate was already recognized for the musical quality and perfection of art in his work. Browning had published only “Pauline,” “Paracelsus,” and “Strafford.” Shelley and Keats were dead, their mortal remains reposing in the beautiful English cemetery in Rome, under the shadow of the tall cypresses, by the colossal pyramid of Caius Cestus. Byron and Scott and Coleridge had also died. There were Landor and Southey, Rogers and Campbell; but with Miss Barrett there came upon the scene a new minstrelsy that compelled its own recognition. Some of her shorter poems had caught the popular ear; notably, her “Cowper’s Grave,” which remains, to-day, one of her most appealing and exquisite lyrics.

  “It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart’s decaying;

  It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying.”

  The touching pathos of the line,

  “O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!”

  moves every reader. And what music and touching appeal in the succeeding stanza:

  “And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,

  How discord on the music fell and darkness on the glory,

  And how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,

  He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted.”

  In seeing, “on Cowper’s grave,... his rapture in a vision,” Miss Barrett pictured his strength —

  “... to sanctify the poet’s high vocation.”

  Her reverence for poetic art finds expression in almost every poem that she has written.

  Among other shorter poems included with “The Seraphim” were “The Poet’s Vow,” “Isobel’s Child,” and others, including, also, “The Romaunt of Margret.” The Athenæum pronounced the collection an “extraordinary volume, — especially welcome as an evidence of female genius and accomplishment, — but hardly less disappointing than extraordinary. Miss Barrett’s genius is of a high order,” the critic conceded; but he found her language “wanting in simplicity.” One reviewer castigated her for presuming to take such a theme as “The Seraphim” “from which Milton would have shrank!” All the critics agree in giving her credit for genius of no ordinary quality; but the general consensus of opinion was that this genius manifested itself unevenly, that she was sometimes led into errors of taste. That she was ever intentionally obscure, she denied. “Unfortunately obscure” she admitted that she might be, but “willingly so, — never.”

  Of the personal friends of Elizabeth Barrett one of the nearest was Mary Russell Mitford, who was nineteen years her senior. Miss Mitford describes her at the time of their meeting as having “such a look of youthfulness that she had some difficulty in persuading a friend that Miss Barrett was old enough to be introduced into society.” Miss Mitford added that she was “certainly one of the most interesting persons” she had ever seen; “of a slight, delicate figure,... large, tender eyes, and a smile like a sunbeam.”

  Mr. Kenyon brought Andrew Crosse, a noted electrician of the day, to see Miss Barrett; and in some reminiscences written by Mrs. Andrew Crosse there is a chapter on “John Kenyon and his Friends” that offers the best comprehension, perhaps, of this man who was so charming and beloved a figure in London society, — a universal favorite. Born in 1784 in Jamaica, the son of a wealthy land-owner, he was sent to England as a lad, educated there, and in 1815 he set out for a tour of the continent. In 1817, in Paris, he met and became intimate with Professor George Ticknor of Harvard University, the Spanish historian; and through this friendship Mr. Kenyon came to know many of the distinguished Americans of the day, including Emerson, Longfellow, and Willis. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and Landor were among Kenyon’s most intimate circle; and there is a record of one of his dinners at which the guests were Daniel Webster, Professor and Mrs. Ticknor, Dickens, Montalembert, and Lady Mary Shepherd. In 1823 Kenyon married Miss Curteis, and they lived for some years in Devonshire Place, with frequent interludes of travel on the continent. Mrs. Kenyon died in 1835, but when the Barretts came up to London Kenyon had resumed his delightful hospitalities, of which he made fairly a fine art. Professor Ticknor has left an allusion to another dinner at Kenyon’s where he met Miss Barrett. In the autumn of 1839 Miss Barrett, accompanied by her brother Edward, went to Torquay, for the warmer climate, and Mr. Kenyon also had gone there for the winter. Around him were gathered a group of notable friends, with whom Miss Barrett, his cousin (with one remove), was constantly associated, — Landor, Andrew Crosse, Theodosia Garrow (afterwards the wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope), and Bezzi, an accomplished Italian, who was afterward associated with Seymour Kirkup in discovering Dante’s portrait concealed under the whitewash applied to the walls of the Bargello in Florence. Miss Barrett was at this time entering into that notable correspondence with Richard Hengist Horne, many of these letters containing passages of interest. For instance, of poetry we find her saying:

  “If poetry under any form be exhaustible, Nature is; and if Nature is, we are near a blasphemy, and I, for one, could not believe in the immortality of the soul.

  ‘Si l’âme est immortelle,

  L’amour ne l’est-il-pas?’

  Extending l’amour into all love of the ideal, and attendant power of idealizing.... I don’t believe in mute, inglorious Miltons, and far less in mute, inglorious Shakespeares.”

  Referring to some correspondence with Miss Martineau, Miss Barrett characterizes her as “the noblest female intelligence between the seas,” and of Tennyson, in relation to some mention of him, she wrote that “if anything were to happen to Tennyson, the whole world should go into mourning.”

  A project (said to have originated with Wordsworth) was launched to “modernize” Chaucer, in which Miss Barrett, Leigh Hunt, Monckton Milnes, Mr. Horne, and one or two others enthusiastically united, the only dissenter being Landor, who characteristically observed that any one who was fit to read Chaucer at all could read him in the original. Later on the co-operation of Browning, Tennyson, Talfourd, Bulwer, Mary Howitt, and the Cowden Clarkes was solicited and in part obtained. But Landor held firm, and of his beloved Chaucer he said: “I will have no hand in breaking his dun, but rich-painted glass, to put in thinner (if clearer) panes.” A great deal of correspondence ensued in connection with this Herculean labor, most of which is of less interest to the general reader than it might well be to the literary antiquarian.

  The next special literary enthusiasm of Mr. Horne and Miss Barrett was the projection of a work of criticism, to be issued anonymously, and entitled “The New Spirit of the Age.” They collaborated on the critique on Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, and for the one on Landor Miss Barrett was mainly responsible, in which she says he “writes poetry for poets, and criticism for critics;... and as if poetry were not, in English, a sufficiently unpopular dead language, he has had recourse to writing poetry in Latin.” She speaks o
f his “Pericles and Aspasia” and his “Pentameron” as “books for the world and for all time, complete in beauty of sentiment and subtlety of criticism.” Two of Landor’s works, very little known, the “Poems from the Arabic and Persian” and “A Satire upon Satirists,” are here noted. “It will be delightful to me to praise Tennyson, — although, by Saint Eloy, I never imitated him,” she writes to Mr. Horne; “and I take that oath because the Quarterly was sure that if it had not been for him I should have hung a lady’s hair ‘blackly’ instead of ‘very blackly.’” Miss Mitford was somewhat concerned with this hazardous venture, but she had no desire to discuss Dickens, as she “could not admire his love of low life!” Miss Barrett’s appreciation of Tennyson is much on record. She finds him “a divine poet.” Monckton Milnes, whose first work she liked extremely, seemed to her in his later poems as wanting in fire and imagination, and as being too didactic. Barry Cornwall’s lyrics impressed her “like embodied music.” Mr. Horne finally wrote the critique on Dickens, and of it Miss Barrett said: “I think the only omission of importance in your admirable essay is the omission of the influence of the French school of imaginative literature upon the mind of Dickens, which is manifest and undeniable.... Did you ever read the powerful Trois Jours d’un Condamné, and will you confront that with the tragic saliences of ‘Oliver Twist’?... We have no such romance writer as Victor Hugo ... George Sand is the greatest female genius of the world, at least since Sappho.” (At this time George Eliot had not appeared.) Miss Barrett appreciatively alludes to Sir Henry Taylor (the author of “Philip van Artevelde”) as “an infidel in poetry,” and to the author of “Festus” as “a man of great thoughts.” She finds part of the poem “weak,” but, “when all is said,” she continues, “what poet-stuff remains! what power! what fire of imagination, worth the stealing of Prometheus!”