Essays

It is a curious fact which meets us at the very threshold of her life, that the author of "The Cry of the Children," the passionate partisan of the Abolitionist cause in America and of freedom in Italy, came from generations of slave-owners. In fact the Jamaica Emancipation Act cost her the loss of her Herefordshire home, by resulting in a large decrease in her father's fortune. It seems indeed typical of her sentiment, typical of the limitations and impersonality of her feelings that, among all her bitter reveries and passionate revolts against human tyrannies, it never (so far as we can judge from her correspondence) seems to have occurred to her that the wealth and comfort with which she was surrounded, the very dower of books that made life possible, was actually wrung from generations of slave-labour, the forced toil of hundreds of impotent lives. No one would ask for, or even hint at expecting, even from the most fantastic idealist, a renunciation of luxury thus acquired; but it is strange that the idea seems never to have entered her head.

She spent a happy though precocious childhood, but by the age of fifteen was already condemned to that bitter isolation of invalid life which, when it falls on a strong and vivid personality, has, fortunately for human nature, a purifying and ennobling effect. Intellectual effort became first the anodyne of physical evil, then the earnest aim of her life.

She never seems to have doubted as to the form that her impulsive need for expression was to take. "You," she writes to her father in the dedication of her second volume of poems, "you are a witness how if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day." And again in the preface: "Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself, and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work – not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being – but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain."

There is something very impressive about the earnestness of this. Its fault is perhaps that it is a little too outspoken: and, from a human point of view, we cannot help regretting that she did not a little more fall into that error which she so indignantly repudiates: if she had mistaken pleasure a little more, not perhaps for the final cause, but for one of the primary causes of poetry, we cannot help feeling that she might have done, if not such earnest, at least more artistic work.

One of the things that one expects to find in the biography of a poet is a detailed account of methods of composition. It is interesting to know whether morning or evening hours were devoted to writing; whether the act of composition was slow or quick; whether the poem was worked out in the mind before it was transmitted to paper; what proportion finished compositions bear to unfinished; whether incomplete work was ever resumed; whether the observation of language was systematised in any way. All these things one is particularly anxious to hear in the case of a poetess whose work bears at once traces of hasty and elaborate workmanship, whose vocabulary is so extraordinarily eclectic, whose rhymes are so peculiar, and often – may we say? – so unsatisfactory. Mr. Ingram's biography, abounding as it does in details of what we may call the interviewer's type, is almost entirely silent on these points. We hear indeed incidentally that the solid morning hours were Mrs. Browning's habitual hours of work; and a curious correspondence has been made public between herself and Horne, which shows that her rhymes, according to herself, were deliberately and painfully selected, principally in the case of dissyllabic rhymes (even, we fear, such pairs as Goethe and duty, Bettine and between ye) because she held that English composers, though the language was rich in these rhythmical combinations, had been instinctively slow in applying them to serious poetry. If Elizabeth Browning's, or indeed Robert Browning's, dissyllabic rhymes are the best defence that can be urged for this position, we must affirm that the general instinct on the whole has been right: such rhymes give a sense of fantastic elaborateness, and tend to concentrate the reader's attention too closely upon the technique of the composition. This is, however, a minor point. But it is interesting to observe that this very detail, which constitutes a blemish in the eyes of even indulgent critics, was a subject upon which Mrs. Browning had not only definite ideas, but enthusiastic convictions.

One other thing may be noted. It is alleged, though without certainty, that "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a poem consisting of over four hundred lines, was actually composed within twelve consecutive hours. If that is so, it is a marvellous tour de force. The poem is one which, in spite of obvious faults, has an immense outburst of lyrical power and magnificent feeling; it contains many lines which linger in the memory; and every one who has had any experience of composition will recognise at once that, if this tradition about its origin be true, it is easy to understand why the poem was allowed to remain as it does. Besides the repugnance which most writers (and especially, we are inclined to think, Mrs. Browning) have felt for the limæ labor, the painful excision and chiselling of a work of any kind, there is a special distaste for meddling with a work which springs to life as it were in a moment; such work grows to have, even in the course of a few hours, a sentient individuality of its own which almost defies mutilation.

Mrs. Browning's best lyrical work was all done before her marriage; but the stirring of the truest depths of her emotional nature took voice in the collection of sonnets entitled "From the Portuguese" – strung, in Omar's words, like pearls upon the string of circumstance. In these sonnets (which it is hardly necessary to say are not translations) she speaks the universal language; to her other graces had now been added that which she had somewhat lacked before, the grace of content; and for these probably she will be longest and most gratefully admired. Any one who steps for the first time through the door into which he has seen so many enter, and finds that poets and lovers and married folk, in their well-worn commonplaces, have exaggerated nothing, will love these sonnets as one of the sweetest and most natural records of a thing which will never lose its absorbing fascination for humanity. To those that are without, except for the sustained melody of expression, the poetess almost seems to have passed on to a lower level, to have lost originality – like the celebrated lady whose friends said that till she wrote to announce her engagement she had never written a commonplace letter. Their fervour indeed rises from the resolute virginity of a heart to whom love had been scarcely a dream, never a hope. We must think of the isolation, sublime it may have been, but yet desolate, from which her marriage was to rescue her – coming not as only the satisfaction of imperious human needs, but to meet and crown her whole nature with a fulness of which few can dream. As she was afterwards to write:

How dreary 'tis for women to sit stillOn winter nights by solitary firesAnd hear the nations praising them far off.

And again:

To sit aloneAnd think, for comfort, how that very nightAffianced lovers, leaning face to face,With sweet half-listenings for each other's breathAre reading haply from some page of oursTo pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touchedWhen such a stanza level to their moodSeems floating their own thoughts out – "So I feelFor thee" – "And I for thee: this poet knowsWhat everlasting love is."To have our booksAppraised by love, associated with loveWhile we sit loveless.

Such a heart deserved all the love it could get.

The latter years of Mrs. Browning's life have a certain shadowiness for English readers. The "Casa Guidi," if we were not painfully haunted by the English in which interviewers have given their impressions of it, is a memory to linger over. The high dusty passage that gave access to the tall, gloomy house; the huge cool rooms, with little Pennini, so called in contrast to the colossal statue Apennino, "slender, fragile, spirit-like" flitting about from stair to stair: the faint sounds of music breathing about the huge corridors; the scent, the stillness, – such a home as only two poets could create, and two lovers inhabit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne gives, among some rather affected writing about a visit of his there, a few characteristic touches. "Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room – a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice. Really I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world." "The boy," he says elsewhere, "was born in Florence, and prides himself upon being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were a native of another planet."

This touch perhaps will explain why it is that we rather lose hold of Mrs. Browning after her marriage; England was connected in her mind with all the old trials of life which seemed to have fallen away with her new existence; ill-health, and mental struggle, bereavement and pain – even though it was pain triumphed over. With marriage and Italy a new life began. It became her adopted country —

And now I come, my Italy,My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills,How I burn to you?  Do you feel to-nightThe urgency and yearning of my soul.

And there the English reader is at fault. He cannot call Italy his own in any genuine sense; much as his yearnings may go out towards her, in days when his own ungenial climate is wrapping the hedge-rows and hill-farms in mist and driving sleet, much as he may long for a moment after her sun and warmth, her transparent skies and sleepy seas, yet he knows his home is here. Even when he finds himself among her vines, when the lizards dart powdered with green jewels from stone to stone, and the dust puffs up white in the road beside the bay, he finds himself murmuring in his heart Mr. Browning's own words.

Oh! to be in England now that April's there,And whoever wakes in England sees some morning unaware,That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheafRound the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough —In England now!

That is what he really feels; and however much he loves to think as a picture of the poet and poetess transplanted into the warm lands, his heart does not go out to them, as it would have done had they stayed at home. And so it comes to pass that some of the lines into which Mrs. Browning threw her most passionate emphasis, "Casa Guidi Windows," the words that burn with an alien patriotism – alien, but sunk so deep, that her disappointed hopes made havoc of her life – reach him like murmuring music over water, sweet but fantastic – touching the ear a little and the heart a little, but bringing neither glow nor tears.

They say that the Treaty of Villa Franca snapped the cord; that the bitter disappointment of what had become a passion rather than a dream broke the struggling spirit. It may be so – "With her golden verse linking Italy to England," wrote the grateful Florentines upon her monument. But England to Italy? No – "Italy," she wrote herself, "is one thing, England one." We feel that she passed into a strange land, and in its sweetness somewhat forgot her own: the heart is more with her when she writes:

I sawFog only, the great tawny weltering fogInvolve the passive city, strangle itAlive, and draw it off into the void,Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a spongeHad wiped out London.

Or:

A ripple of land: such little hills, the skyCan stoop to tenderly, and the wheatfields climb.Such nooks of valleys lined by orchises,Fed full of noises by invisible streamsAnd open pastures, where you scarcely tellWhite daisies from white dew – at intervalsThe mythic oaks and elm trees standing outSelf-poised upon their prodigy of shade;I thought my father's land was worthy tooOf being Shakespeare's.II

"Mr. Kenyon," wrote Miss Barrett, "was with me yesterday… he accused me of writing a certain paper in the Athenæum, and convicted me against my will; and when I could no longer deny and began to explain and pique myself upon my diplomacy, he threw himself back in his chair and laughed me to scorn as the least diplomatic of his acquaintance, 'You diplomatic!'"

Mr. Kenyon, without perhaps intending it, gave expression to a feeling which rises again and again half unconsciously in the mind even of the most sympathetic reader of Mrs. Browning's poetry: there is no diplomacy about it. The diplomatist achieves his successes not only by saying what he has to say in the most lucid possible manner – that is not enough – but by a discreet reticence, by implying possibilities rather than stating them, by guarded admissions, by suggestive silence.

There is a well-known rhetorical device, upon which Mrs. Browning in her classical studies must have not unfrequently stumbled, called the Aposiopesis – in plain English, the art of breaking-off. Classical writers are often hastily accused by young learners of having framed their writings with a view to introducing perplexing forms and intolerable constructions, so as unnecessarily to obscure the sense. But it is a matter of regret that Mrs. Browning did not employ this particular construction with greater frequency, – to use a colloquial expression – that she did not let you off a good deal. Many of her poems are weighted with a dragging moral; many of them fly with a broken wing, stopping and rising again, dispersing and returning with a kind of purposeless persistency, as if they were incapable of deciding where to have done. Poems with passage after passage of extraordinary depth of thought and amazing felicity of expression, every now and then droop and crawl like the rain on a November day, which will not fall in a drenching shower nor quite desist, but keeps dropping, dropping from the sky out of mere weakness or idleness.

To secure an audience a poet must be diplomatic; he must know whose ear he intends to catch. It is mere cant to say that the best poetry cannot be popular; that it should be read is its first requisite. When Gray wrote φωνἁντα συνετοἱσιν on his Odes he meant that there would be many people to whom they would not appeal; but it is ridiculous to say that the merit of poetry is in proportion to the paucity of its admirers. If Mrs. Browning aimed at any particular class it was perhaps at intellectual sentimentalists. As the two characteristics are rarely found united, in fact are liable to exclude one another, it may perhaps be the reason why she is so little appreciated in her entirety: she is perhaps too learned for women and too emotional for men.

Let us consider for a moment where her intellectual training came from. Roughly speaking, the basis of it was Greek from first to last; at nine years old she measured her life by the years of the siege of Troy, and carved a figure out of the turf in her garden to represent a recumbent warrior, naming it Hector. Then came her version of the "Prometheus Vinctus"; her long studious mornings over Plato and Theocritus with the blind scholar, Mr. Boyd, whom she commemorates in "Wine of Cyprus," when she read, as she writes, "the Greek poets, with Plato, from end to end"; her dolorous excursion with the Fathers; and at last, in the Casa Guidi, the little row of miniature classics, annotated in her own hand, standing within easy reach of her couch. Of course she was an omnivorous reader besides. She speaks of reading the Hebrew Bible, "from Genesis to Malachi, – never stopped by the Chaldean, – and the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas." But it was evidently in Greek, in the philosophical poetry of Euripides and the poetical philosophy of Plato, that she found her deepest satisfaction.

At the same time she was not in the true sense learned, though possessing learning far greater than commonly falls to a woman's lot to possess. Her education in Greek must have been unsystematic and unscholarly; her classical allusions, which fall so thick in letters and poems have seldom quite the genuine ring; we do not mean that she did not get nearer the heart of the Greek writers and appreciate their spirit more intimately than many a far more erudite scholar; that was to be expected, for she brought enthusiasm and insight and genius to the task; but her learning is not an animated part of her; it is sometimes almost an incubus. The character of her allusions too is often remote and fanciful. They fall, it is true, from a teeming brain, but they are not the simple direct comparisons which would occur to a man who had made Greek literature his own, but rather the unexpected, modern turns which so often surprise a student, like the red bunches of valerian which thrust out of the sand-stone frieze of a Sicilian temple – such comparisons, for instance, as the celebrated one in Aurora Leigh of the peasant who might have been gathering brushwood in the ear of a colossus had Xerxes carried out his design of carving Athos into the likeness of a man. Her characterization of the classical poets in "The Poet's Vow" will also illustrate this; now so extraordinarily felicitous and clear-sighted, as for instance in the case of Shakespeare and Ossian, and now so alien to the true spirit of the men described.

SophoclesWith that king's-look which down the treesFollowed the dark effigiesOf the lost Theban. Hesiod old,Who, somewhat blind and deaf and cold,Cared most for gods and bulls.

The fact was that she read the Greeks as a woman of genius was sure to do; she passed by their majestic grace, amazed at their solemn profundity, and yet unaware that she was projecting into them a feeling, a sentimental outlook which they did not possess, attributing directly to them a deliberate power which was merely the effect of their unconscious, antique, and limited vision upon the emotional child of a later age.

The strangest thing is that a woman of such complex and sensitive faculties should have given in her allegiance to such models. Never was there a writer in whom the best characteristics of the Greeks were more conspicuously absent. Their balance, their solidity, their calm, their gloomy acquiescence in the bitter side of life, have surely little in common with the passionate spirit that beat so wildly against the bars, and asked the stars and hills so eagerly for their secrets. Such a passage as the following, grand as is the central idea, is surely enough to show the utter incompatibility which existed between them: "I thought that had Æschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any pity, – from the faded white flower of a Titanic brow to the withered grass of a heart trampled on by its own beloved – from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the Taster of death for every man: from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to his more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love." … It was characteristic of a woman to bring the two personalities together, to dwell on what might have been; but this is not Greek.

The two poems which are the best instances of the classical mood, are the two of which Pan, the spirit of the solitary country, half beast, half god, is the hero. In these Mrs. Browning appears in her strength and in her weakness. In "The Dead Pan," in spite of its solemn refrain, the lengthy disordered mode of thought is seen to the worst advantage: the progression of ideas is obscure, the workmanship is not hurried, but deliberately distressing; the rhymes, owing to that unfortunate fancy for double rhyming, being positively terrific; the brief fury of the lyric mood passing into the utterances of a digressive moralist. But when we turn to the other, "A Musical Instrument," what a relief we experience. "What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" The splendid shock of the rhythm, like the solid plunge of a cataract into a mountain-pool, captivates, for all its roughness, the metrical ear. There is not a word or a thought too much: the scene shapes itself, striking straight out into the thought; the waste and horror that encircle the birth of the poet in the man; the brutish elements out of which such divinity is compounded – these are flung down in simple, delicate outlines: such a lyric is an eternal possession of the English language.

As a natural result of a certain discursiveness of mind, there is hardly any kind of writing unrepresented in Mrs. Browning's poems. She had at one time a fancy for pure romantic writing, since developed to such perfection by Rossetti. There is a peculiar charm about such composition. In such works we seem to breathe a freer air, separated as we are from special limitations of time and place; the play of passion is more simple and direct, and the passion itself is of a less complex and restrained character. Besides, there is a certain element of horror and mystery, which the modern spirit excludes, while it still hungers for it, but is not unnatural when mediævalized. Nothing in Mrs. Browning can bear comparison with "Sister Helen" or "The Beryl Stone"; but "The Romaunt of the Page" and the "Rhyme of the Duchess May" stand among her most successful pieces.

The latter opens with a simple solemnity:

To the belfry, one by one, went the ringers from the sun,Toll slowly.And the oldest ringer said, "Ours is music for the dead,When the rebecks are all done."Six abeles i' the churchyard grow on the north side in a row,Toll slowly.And the shadow of their tops rock across the little slopesOf the grassy graves below.On the south side and the west a small river runs in haste,Toll slowly.And between the river flowing and the fair green trees agrowing,Do the dead lie at their rest.On the east I sat that day, up against a willow grey:Toll slowly.Through the rain of willow-branches I could see the low hill ranges,And the river on its way.

This is like the direct opening notes of the overture of a dirge. Whatever may be said about such writing we feel at once that it comes from a master's hand. So the poem opens, but alas for the close! Some chord seems to snap; it is no longer the spirit of the ancient rhymer, but Miss Mitford's friend who catches up the lyre and will have her last word. The poem passes, still in the same metre, out of the definite materialism, the ghastly excitements of the story into a species of pious churchyard meditation; and the pity of it is that we cannot say that this is not characteristic.

Then closely connected with the last comes a class of poems, of so-called modern life, of which "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" shall stand for an example. This is a poem of nineteenth-century adventure, which is as impossible in design and as fantastic in detail as a poem may well be. The reader does not know whether to be most amazed at the fire and glow of the whole story, or at the hopeless ignorance of the world betrayed by it. The impossible Earls with their immeasurable pride and intolerable pomposities; the fashionable ladies with their delicate exteriors and callous hearts, – these are like the creations of Charlotte Brontë, and recall Blanche and Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park. And at the same time, when we have said all this, we read the poem and we can forgive all or nearly all – the spirit is so high, the passion is so fierce and glowing, the poetry that bursts out, stanza after stanza, contrives to involve even these dolorous mistakes in such a glamour, that we can only admire the genius that could contend against such visionary errors.