(1809-1861)
It is interesting to step back sixty years into the lives of Miss
Mitford and her "dear young friend Miss Barrett," when the _-esses_ of
"authoresses" and "poetesses" and "editresses" and "hermitesses" make
the pages sibilant; when 'Books of Beauty,' and 'Keepsakes,' and the
extraordinary methods of "Finden's Tableaux" make us wonder that
literature survived; when Mr. Kenyon, taking Miss Mitford "to the
giraffes and the Diorama," called for "Miss Barrett, a hermitess in
Gloucester Place, who reads Greek as I do French, who has published some
translations from Æschylus, and some most striking poems,"--"Our sweet
Miss Barrett! to think of virtue and genius is to think of her." Of her
own life Mrs. Browning writes:--"As to stories, my story amounts to the
knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage
would have as good a story; most of my events and nearly all my intense
pleasure have passed in my thoughts."
[Illustration: Mrs. Browning]
She was born at Burn Hall, Durham, on March 6th, 1809, and passed a
happy childhood and youth in her father's country house at Hope End,
Herefordshire. She was remarkably precocious, reading Homer in the
original at eight years of age. She said that in those days "the Greeks
were her demigods. She dreamed more of Agamemnon than of Moses, her
black pony." "I wrote verses very early, at eight years old and earlier.
But what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and
remained with me." At seventeen years of age she published the 'Essay on
Mind,' and translated the 'Prometheus' of Æschylus. Some years later the
family removed to London, and here Elizabeth, on account of her
continued delicate health, was kept in her room for months at a time.
The shock following on the death of her brother, who was drowned before
her eyes in Torquay, whither she had gone for rest, completely shattered
her physically. Now her life of seclusion in her London home began. For
years she lay upon a couch in a large, comfortably darkened room, seeing
only the immediate members of her family and a few privileged friends,
and spending her days in writing and study, "reading," Miss Mitford
says, "almost every book worth reading in almost every language." Here
Robert Browning met her. They were married in 1846, against the will of
her father. Going abroad immediately, they finally settled in Florence
at the Casa Guidi, made famous by her poem bearing the same name. Their
home became the centre of attraction to visitors in Florence, and many
of the finest minds in the literary and artistic world were among their
friends. Hawthorne, who visited them, describes Mrs. Browning as "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. 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, and her black ringlets
cluster down in her neck and make her face look whiter." She died in
Florence on the 30th of June, 1861, and the citizens of Florence placed
a tablet to her memory on the walls of Casa Guidi.
The life and personality of Elizabeth Barrett Browning seem to explain
her poetry. It is a life "without a catastrophe," except perhaps to her
devoted father. And it is to this father's devotion that some of Mrs.
Browning's poetical sins are due; for by him she was so pampered and
shielded from every outside touch, that all the woes common to humanity
grew for her into awful tragedies. Her life was abnormal and unreal,--an
unreality that passed more or less into everything she did. Indeed, her
resuscitation after meeting Robert Browning would mount into a miracle,
unless it were realized that nothing in her former life had been quite
as woful as it seemed. That Mrs. Browning was "a woman of real genius,"
even Edward Fitzgerald allowed; and in speaking of Shelley, Walter
Savage Landor said, "With the exception of Burns, he [Shelley] and Keats
were inspired with a stronger spirit of poetry than any other poet since
Milton. I sometimes fancy that Elizabeth Barrett Browning comes next."
This is very high praise from very high authority, but none too high for
Mrs. Browning, for her best work has the true lyric ring, that
spontaneity of thought and expression which comes when the singer
forgets himself in his song and becomes tuneful under the stress of the
moment's inspiration. All of Mrs. Browning's work is buoyed up by her
luxurious and overflowing imagination. With all its imperfections of
technique, its lapses of taste and faults of expression, it always
remains poetry, throbbing with passion and emotion and rich in color and
sound. She wrote because she must. Her own assertions notwithstanding,
one cannot think of Mrs. Browning as sitting down in cold blood to
compose a poem according to fixed rules of art. This is the secret of
her shortcomings, as it is also the source of her strength, and in her
best work raises her high above those who, with more technical skill,
have less of the true poet's divine fire and overflowing imagination.
So in the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese,' written at a time when her
woman's nature was thrilled to its very depths by the love of her "most
gracious singer of high poems," and put forth as translations from
another writer and tongue--in these her imperfections drop away, and she
soars to marvelous heights of song. Such a lyric outburst as this, which
reveals with magnificent frankness the innermost secrets of an ardently
loving woman's heart, is unequaled in literature. Here the woman-poet is
strong and sane; here she is free from obscurity and mannerism, and from
grotesque rhymes. She has stepped out from her life of visions and of
morbid woes into a life of wholesome reality and of "sweet
reasonableness." Their literary excellence is due also to the fact that
in the sonnet Mrs. Browning was held to a rigid form, and was obliged to
curb her imagination and restrain her tendency to diffuseness of
expression. Mr. Saintsbury goes so far as to say that the sonnet
beginning--
"If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only--"
does not fall far short of Shakespeare.
'Aurora Leigh' gives rise to the old question, Is it advisable to turn a
three-volume novel into verse? Yet Landor wrote about it:--"I am
reading a poem full of thought and fascinating with fancy--Mrs.
Browning's (Aurora Leigh.) In many places there is the wild imagination
of Shakespeare.... I am half drunk with it. Never did I think I should
have a good draught of poetry again." Ruskin somewhere considered it the
greatest poem of the nineteenth century, "with enough imagination to set
up a dozen lesser poets"; and Stedman calls it "a representative and
original creation: representative in a versatile, kaleidoscopic
presentment of modern life and issues; original, because the most
idiosyncratic of its author's poems. An audacious speculative freedom
pervades it, which smacks of the New World rather than the Old....
'Aurora Leigh' is a mirror of contemporary life, while its learned and
beautiful illustrations make it almost a handbook of literature and the
arts.... Although a most uneven production, full of ups and downs, of
capricious or prosaic episodes, it nevertheless contains poetry as fine
as its author has given us elsewhere, and enough spare inspiration to
set up a dozen smaller poets. The flexible verse is noticeably her own,
and often handled with as much spirit as freedom." Mrs. Browning
herself declared it the most mature of her works, "and the one into
which my highest convictions upon life and art have entered."
Consider this:--
"For 'tis not in mere death that men die most:
And after our first girding of the loins
In youth's fine linen and fair broidery,
To run up-hill and meet the rising sun,
We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,
While others gird us with the violent bands
Of social figments, feints, and formalisms,
Reversing our straight nature, lifting up
Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,
Head downwards on the cross-sticks of the world.
Yet He can pluck us from that shameful cross.
God, set our feet low and our foreheads high,
And teach us how a man was made to walk!"