IT is a matter of regret that there is no adequate biography of one of
the very few women who have achieved real eminence in literature. Mrs.
Richmond Ritchie has indeed written an article in the _Dictionary of
National Biography_, but this from the nature of things could not be
much more than a record. In the series of _Eminent Women_, Mr. Ingram
has attempted to supply the want, and after reading his book through
more than once we are bound to say that we regret that he has been first
in the field. However, as Mrs. Browning herself says, "we get no good by
being ungenerous, even to a book."
When Horne in the _New Spirit of the Age_ gave some biographical
particulars about Miss Barrett to the public, she wrote to him as
follows:--"My dear Mr. Horne, the public do not care for me enough to
care at all for my biography. If you say anything of me (and I am not
affected enough to pretend to wish you to be absolutely silent, if you
see any occasion to speak) it must be as a writer of rhymes, and not as
the heroine of a biography. 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_ could have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my
intense pleasures, have passed in thoughts." And again later, when the
paper had appeared:--"You are my friend I hope, but you do not on that
account lose the faculty of judging me or the right of judging me
frankly. I do loathe the whole system of personal compliment as a
consequence of personal interest.... I set more price on your sincerity
than on your praise, and consider it more closely connected with the
quality called kindness.... I want kindness, the rarest of all
nearly--which is truth."
Those are Mrs. Browning's own deliberate views, written it is true in
early life, as to her own biography. That a biography need not be
critical has been amply proved by Boswell; on the other hand, this only
applies to a biography written by a contemporary friend, and even then
it must be absolutely faithful. Boswell, it is true, admired too deeply
to criticise. If he ever thought his subject ungenerous, ungenial,
tyrannical, he does not say so; but at least he does not shrink from
recording experiences which might suggest those qualities to readers who
did not admire as he did. But any one who sits down to trace the
history of one with whom he had no personal acquaintance, when that life
is closed by death and rounded by the past, is bound to make some effort
to discriminate. In Mr. Ingram's book the quality of discrimination is
conspicuously wanting. He has evidently conceived an ideal and done his
best to transmit it to others. That he has not altogether succeeded in
disguising his heroine is no fault of his; as Miss Barrett complains in
another sentence of the letter from which we have been quoting--"he has
rouged her up to the eyes."
We must only touch upon two or three of the most salient points of Mrs.
Browning's biography. Her life was uneventful enough, as far as events
go, and its outlines are sufficiently well known. The impression which
it leaves upon a reader is strangely mixed. The intellect with which we
are brought into contact is profoundly impressive; the spectacle of a
life so vivid and untiring, so hopeful and ardent, lived under the
pressure of constant physical suffering, and the still more marked
presence of morbidity both of thought and feeling, is inspiring and
moving. But there is a want of wholesomeness about a great deal of it;
there is a sense of failure somewhere. This reveals itself in its
concrete form perhaps most clearly in the fact that with all the
presence of high and animating thoughts, with the resolve of
self-dedication to the poetic office, with the assiduous and systematic
labour to cultivate the art of expression, yet obscurity seems to haunt
so many efforts, and the instinct of discrimination so frequently
appears to slumber. Mrs. Browning as a letter-writer is disappointing;
again and again there is a touch of true feeling, a noble thought, but
with all this there is a want of incisiveness, a wearisome seriousness,
which of all qualities is the one that ought not to obtrude itself, a
strange lack of humour, a certain strain--a _scraping_ of the soul, as
Tourgenieff has it. And this may, we think, be best expressed by the
pathetic words that fall from her in the letter already quoted: her
history was that of _a bird in a cage_. Not only from the physical fact
that she was for many years of her life an invalid--but mentally and
morally also she was caged, by imaginary social fictions, by certain
ingrained habits of thought; and, last of all, as a passionate idealist,
she saw with painful persistence and in horrible contrast the infinite
possibilities of human nature and the limitations of low realities.
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 _limae 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 still
On winter nights by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off.
And again:
To sit alone
And think, for comfort, how that very night
Affianced lovers, leaning face to face,
With sweet half-listenings for each other's breath
Are reading haply from some page of ours
To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched
When such a stanza level to their mood
Seems floating their own thoughts out--"So I feel
For thee"--"And I for thee: this poet knows
What everlasting love is."
To have our books
Appraised by love, associated with love
While 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-night
The 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 sheaf
Round 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 saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog
Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void,
Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge
Had wiped out London.
Or:
A ripple of land: such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly, and the wheatfields climb.
Such nooks of valleys lined by orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams
And open pastures, where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew--at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade;
I thought my father's land was worthy too
Of being Shakespeare's.