It is interesting to see Elizabeth Barrett eager over the dead
languages. In her own living language she was modern in her day, more
modern than any contemporary except the poet whom, nearly twenty years
after this letter was written and the controversy closed, she married.
It was modern to write poetry as she wrote, with an emphatic use of
modern prose words; unlike Wordsworth’s, not at all childlike as were
his. Robert Browning and Elizabeth have a peculiar tone of defiance in
their nineteenth-century English; in the most gentle Elizabeth’s verse
it is nearly swaggering, certainly swashing and martial. Nothing could
be more sharply cut off from the eighteenth century, and the
seventeenth, and the sixteenth than the vocabulary of _Aurora Leigh_,
and, English apart, nothing could be more separated from Antiquity than
the style that was most characteristically hers. In her quieter moments,
when she is not marching, in doublet and hose, the march of her blank
verse, but pacing softly in the strictest measure of the bonds that all
true poets so love—the bonds of numbers, stress, quantity, rhyme, and
final shape—the great beauty of her sonnets proves her delight in that
order, and in these the diction is inconspicuous. It is in the romantic
poems, those that deal with the lady and the knight, that the modernism
is again evident. Where, in her language, is any trace of her reading of
the older English? Where in her style is any sign of her Latin and
Greek? In her most characteristic work she does not sow with her hand;
she tosses out the basketful, with a gesture generous but wilful. In one
respect—the point on which there was no question of deference to
Antiquity—she shows none to her English masters. Thence her rhymes:
“children” and “bewildering,” “islands” and “silence,” and the rest. She
had the right to make these experiments, and it is as evident a sign of
her resolute novelty as her husband’s different and less tolerable
rhymes were of his. But we may take such rhymes not only as
demonstrations of a new independence; they may have been in part due to
her peculiar position as the most secluded of poets. Elizabeth Barrett
saw and spoke to very few. She cannot have gathered much of the
pronunciation of English that was then usual. The friend to whom as a
girl she wrote this and other letters on the art of metre was so old as
to be numbered among eighteenth-century authors; he was not of her time.
If she had the habit of dropping her final g’s, for instance, there
might be none to correct it. It is noticeable that she writes of the
word “patriotism” as generally pronounced in five syllables. The
accepted way is to sound it as only three—crowded ones, it is true, but
only three, and any other way would seem to us provincial. Especially
would an educated ear resent the pronouncing of the last three letters
in “patriotism” in two syllables.
Elizabeth Barrett’s comments on a few of Milton’s lines leave her reader
at liberty to accept them or depart from them. No authority except that
of Milton’s shade will ever decide a question as to one of his lines
(page 10): whether we should begin it with two rather strained iambic
feet (which would be my scansion) or with a strained long syllable
followed by a dactyl (which is hers). It is remarkable, by the way, that
she never uses the word “stress” in writing of English prosody. It seems
to me to be the only safe word; “accent” being alien and ambiguous, and
“quantity” a valuable but nearly lawless part of our metre—present in
every poet’s intention in his line, but perhaps best unnamed.
“Her glories shall never fade,” wrote Browning of his wedded poet (in
regard, by the way, to a poem in which she rhymed “common” with
“human”), and they never shall. She is within English literature for
ever and ever. Coventry Patmore held poetry to be the gravest among the
undertakings of man, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—child, maid, and
wife—took her vocation with gravity, passion, and delight. In this
controversy on “accents” ancient and modern, she withstands her old
friend, literally foot to foot. She might even, but that she was humbly
obstinate and courteous and sweet, have lost her temper over a matter so
exciting. And what is so exciting to poets as these questions of their
technique? If I had ever had a fierce passage of arms with Francis
Thompson (but I never had) it would have been on the question of
trochaic endings, and whether one might pause on them before carrying on
the weak syllable to the next line. The girl who so passionately cared
for her Greek was, in time, the great woman who wrote memorable English
passionately. The slightness of the connexion between two such beloved
studies seems an incident in her life not easily understood; but she was
for poetry first and last.