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 Aeschylus, 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 _Athenaeum_ the edifying verdict that "those who
adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation should touch any
one rather than Aeschylus, 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:
"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[3] 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 passion 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.
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 _seances_ 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 _Athenaeum_ that he had wished to see, and
adds:
"I can give you, from memory, the _Athenaeum'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
book, 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 Athenaeum_ 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[4] 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'ame 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 of 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 Condamne_, 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!"
In relation to some strictures on Carlyle, Miss Barrett vivaciously
replies that his object is to discover the sun, not to specify the
landscape, and that it would be a strange reproach to bring against the
morning star that it does not shine in the evening.
The idea of a lyrical drama, "Psyche Apocalypte," was entertained by Mr.
Horne and Miss Barrett, but, fortunately, no fragment of it was
materialized into public light. There was a voluminous correspondence
between them concerning this possible venture. Meanwhile Miss Barrett's
poems won success past her "expectation or hope. _Blackwood's_ high help
was much," she writes, "and I continue to have the kindest letters from
unknown readers.... The American publisher has printed fifteen hundred
copies. If I am a means of ultimate loss to him, I shall sit in
sackcloth."
In another of her letters to Mr. Horne we read that Wordsworth is in a
fever because of a projected railroad through the Lake Country, and that
Carlyle calls Harriet Martineau "quite mad," because of her belief in
Mesmerism. "For my own part," adds Miss Barrett, "I am not afraid to say
that I almost believe in Mesmerism, and quite believe in Harriet
Martineau." She is delighted that Horne's "Orion" is to be published in
New York. "I love the Americans," she asserts, "a noble and cordial
people."
Miss Barrett remained for three years in Torquay, the climate being
regarded as better for her health. But the tragedy of her life took place
there in the drowning of her brother Edward, who went out one day with two
friends in a boat and never returned. Three days later the boat was found
floating, overturned, and the bodies of the three young men were
recovered. This sad event occurred in the August of 1840, and it was more
than a year before she was able to resume her literary work and her
correspondence. In the September of 1841 she returned to London, and in a
letter to Mr. Boyd soon after she replied to his references to Gregory as
a poet, saying she has not much admiration even for his grand _De
Virginitate_, and chiefly regards him as one who is only poetical in
prose.
Miss Barrett's delicacy of health through all these years has been so
universally recorded (and, according to her own words, so exaggerated)
that it needs no more than passing allusion here. So far as possible she
herself ignored it, and while it was always a factor to be reckoned with,
yet her boundless mental energy tided her over illness and weakness to a
far greater degree than has usually been realized. "My time goes to the
best music when I read or write," she says, "and whatever money I can
spend upon my own pleasures flows away in books."
Elizabeth Barrett was the most sympathetic and affectionate of friends,
and her devotion to literature resulted in no mere academic and abnormal
life. Her letters are filled with all the little inquiries and interests
of household affection and sweetness of sympathy with the personal matters
of relatives and friends, and if those are not here represented, it is
simply that they are in their nature colloquial, and to be taken for
granted rather than repeated for reading, when so long separated by time
from the conditions and circumstances that called them forth. She was glad
to return from Torquay to her family again. "Papa's domestic comfort is
broken up by the separation," she said, "and the associations of Torquay
lie upon me, struggle against them as I may, like a nightmare.... Part of
me is worn out; but the poetical part--that is, the love of poetry--is
growing in me as freshly every day. Did anybody ever love poetry and stop
in the middle? I wonder if any one ever could?... besides, I am becoming
better. Dear Mr. Boyd," she entreats, "do not write another word about my
illness either to me or to others. I am sure you would not willingly
disturb me. I can't let ... prescribe anything for me except her own
affection." These words illustrate the spirit in which Miss Barrett
referred to her own health. No one could be more remote from a morbid
invalidism too often associated with her.
One of her first efforts after her return from Torquay was to send to the
_Athenaeum_ some Greek translations, which, to her surprise, were accepted,
and she writes to Mr. Boyd that she would enclose to him the editor's
letter "if it were legible to anybody except people used to learn reading
from the Pyramids." It must have been due to a suggestion from the editor
of the _Athenaeum_ at this time that she wrote her noble and affluent essay
on "The Greek Christian Poets," which is perhaps her finest work in prose.
Something in the courteous editorial note suggested this to her, and she
discusses the idea with Mr. Boyd.
Mr. Dilke was then the editor of the _Athenaeum_. He quite entered into the
idea of this essay, only begging Miss Barrett to keep away from theology.
Mr. Dilke also suggests that she write a review of English poetical
literature, from Chaucer to contemporary times, and this initiated her
essay called "The Book of the Poets." For her Greek review she desired a
copy of the _Poetae Christiani_, but found the price (fourteen guineas)
ruinous. But whether she had all the needful data or not, the first paper
was a signal success, and she fancied that some _bona avis_, as good as a
nightingale, had shaken its wings over her. Of the three Greek tragedians,
Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, Elizabeth Barrett had read every line.
Plato she loved and read exhaustively; of Aristotle at this time she had
read his Ethics, Poetics, and his work on Rhetoric, and of Aristophanes a
few, only, of his plays. But Miss Barrett was also a great novel-reader,
keeping her "pillows stuffed with novels," as she playfully declared. Her
room, in the upper part of the house, revealed the haunt of the scholar.
Upon a bracket the bust of Homer looked down; her bookcase showed one
entire shelf occupied by the Greek poets; another relegated wholly to the
English poets; and philosophy, ethics, science, and criticism were
liberally represented. A bust of Chaucer companioned that of Homer. By her
sofa nestled Flush, her dog, Miss Mitford's gift.
It was in this year of 1841 that there penetrated into her atmosphere and
consciousness the first intimation of Robert Browning. "Pippa Passes" had
just been published, and John Kenyon, ever alert to bring any happiness
into the lives of his friends (Kenyon, "the joy-giver," as he was well
termed), suggested introducing the young poet to her, but on the plea of
her ill-health she declined. A little later, in a letter to Mr. Boyd, she
mentions one or two comments made on her essay, "The Greek Christian
Poets,"--that Mr. Horne, and also "Mr. Browning, the poet," had both, as
she was told, expressed approval. "Mr. Browning is said to be learned in
Greek," she adds, "especially the dramatists." So already the air begins
to stir and tremble with the coming of him of whom in later days she
wrote:
"I yield the grave for thy sake, and resign
My near sweet view of heaven for earth with thee."
The entrancing thrill of that wonderful Wagner music that ushers in the
first appearance of the knight in the music-drama of "Lohengrin" is
typical of the vibrations that thrill the air in some etherial
announcement of experiences that are on the very threshold, and which are
recognized by a nature as sensitive and impressionable as was that of
Elizabeth Barrett. A new element with its transfiguring power awaited her,
and some undefined prescience of that
"... most gracious singer of high poems"
whose music was to fall at her door
"... in folds of golden fulness"
haunted her like "an odor from Dreamland sent."
She pondered on
"... how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,"
but she dared not dream that the "mystic Shape" that drew her backward,
and whose voice spoke "in mastery," had come to lead her,--not to Death,
but Love.