E611000D. General Review Essay.
The Scottish Review, October 1861, pp. 289–298.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 356–359.
Mrs Barrett Browning
In an open space among ruins, surrounded with the massive but desolate and mouldering walls and towers of ancient Rome, is a lonely and romantic graveyard, pensively visited by many an English tourist. Beneath the daisies and violets, which, in the cool months of the year, gem its sward, lies the dust of John Keats and of Percy Bysshe Shelley. And now a third grave has been found for English genius beneath the blue Italian sky. On a June morning, last summer, half an hour after day-break, there died at Florence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
She was a great woman, a great, a wonderful poetess. In imagination, in intellect, she takes rank as perhaps the very mightiest of her sex. But the thought which dwells with us most fixedly concerning her is not of her greatness; it is of her purity. With the Greeks the type of imagination was the many-coloured iris that gleams upon the cloud or plays amid the foam. With its beauty they associated an idea of danger—a peril of enchantment, of intoxication, of lawless and criminal passion. Thinking of Burns and Byron, of Edgar Poe and Heinrich Heyne, we may be disposed to admit that we, too, have cause to believe imagination a dangerous gift; and if from men of genius we turn to women of genius, especially to gifted women of the Continent in the present day, we shall be still more deeply impressed with the truth of the old Greek opinion. In her sonnet to George Sand, Mrs Browning expressed the wish that the gifted Frenchwoman might add to her intellectual claims—
the angel’s grace
Of a pure genius sanctified from blame,
Till child and maiden pressed to her embrace,
To kiss upon her lips a stainless fame.
And now that the grave has closed upon Mrs Browning, we [p. 290→] cannot but reflect that the blessing she desired for another descended on herself; that her fame is indeed stainless; that no thought, no fancy, no allusion, ever escaped her pen which might not fall, like God’s sunlight, into the eye of child or virgin. Ancilla Domini; she was entrusted with pre-eminent genius, and she bore it as the hand-maid of the Lord. We think of her not as encircled with that wild radiance of imagination which the Greeks feared as they admired, which was beautiful as the iris, but wavering as the foam; we think of her as an angel of the dawn, painted by Angelico—clothed in white raiment, and with brow serene and cloudless, against the gold of heaven.
It is, therefore, chiefly at that life which was the background of her poetry, and in which every virtue magnified in her poetry was illustrated, that we would look, in order to gain a conception of what Mrs Barrett Browning was.
Born in London, in 1809, she appears, like all who have reached high excellence in poetry, to have ‘lisped in numbers.’ In the dedication of her poems to her father, in 1844, she speaks of ‘that time far off, when she was a child, and wrote verse to him who was her public and her critic,’ and in the exquisite lines on her ‘Pet-name’ she writes—
My father’s praise I did not miss,
When stooping down he cared to kiss
The poet at his knee.
In ‘Aurora Leigh,’ she enables us to form some idea how the ‘mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,’ which constitutes the metropolis of these realms, accorded with her young poetic sensibilities. The heroine of that poem sits down to work poetically in London, and in the feelings of Aurora we may confidently discover those of Elizabeth Barrett in similar circumstances. The sun, lurid through the morning mist, would ‘startle the slant roofs and chimney-pots with splashes of fierce colour;’ or ‘the great, tawny, weltering fog’ would involve the city; and spires, bridges, streets, and squares would perish in the seething mist, ‘like Pharaoh’s armament in the deep red sea.’
Your city poets see such things,
Not despicable. Mountains of the south,
When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,
They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,
Make fewer singers, haply.
It is remarkable that Keats and Turner, unsurpassed, the one among poets, the other among painters, in tender sensibililty to natural loveliness, were London boys. May it not have been, both in their case and in that of Elizabeth Barrett, that it was not what was seen in London, but the fact that nature was [p. 291→] hidden from the young eye by manifold ugliness, which inspired an insatiable love for her beauty when beheld? Green fields and blue hills were the dream of their early years, seen not at all, or only in occasional glimpses of ravishing loveliness; and when at last they dwelt in nature’s freedom and fairness, they looked upon the vision more eagerly, more earnestly, more rapturously than others.
If she was an early singer, however, Mrs Browning did not speedily succeed in ‘beating her music out.’ An Essay on Mind, in the style of Pope’s Essay on Man, was published by her, in 1826, but was subsequently withdrawn from print. A translation of ‘Prometheus Bound,’ from Æschylus, published seven years later, was also a juvenile effort. ‘One early failure,’ she wrote in an advertisement to a second edition of her poems, in 1850, ‘a translation of the Prometheus of Æschylus, which, though happily free of the current of publication, may be remembered against me by a few of my personal friends, I have replaced by an entirely new version, made for them and my conscience, in expiation of a sin of my youth, with the sincerest application of my mature mind.’
She was still unknown to fame, though within a year or two of thirty, when Miss Mitford formed her acquaintance. At that time, ‘she was,’ says this authoress, ‘certainly one of the most interesting persons I had ever seen. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large, tender eyes, fringed with dark lashes, a smile like a sunbeam.’ Soon after, she fell into dangerous illness; a blood-vessel burst in the lungs, and she quitted London by medical order for Torquay, on the coast of Devon. She was accompanied by an elder brother, ‘a brother in heart and talent worthy of such a sister,’ and other relatives, and seems for about a year to have lived in great happiness. That brilliantly fanciful little poem, ‘The Sea-Mew,’ and the more thoughtful verses on ‘A Sea-side Walk,’ date probably from this period, as well as the following fine verse descriptive of Devonshire:—
No flowers our gardened England hath
Can match with those in bud and breath
Which from the world are hiding
In sunny Devon, moist with rills,
A nunnery of cloistered hills,
The elements presiding.
But the shadow of death fell suddenly over this peace and joy. ‘One fine summer morning,’ writes Miss Mitford, ‘her favourite brother, together with two other fine young men, his friends, embarked on board a small sailing vessel for a trip of a few hours. Excellent sailors all, and familiar with the coast, they sent back [p. 292→] the boatmen, and undertook themselves the management of their little craft. Danger was not dreamt of by any one—indeed, after the catastrophe, no one could divine the cause; but in a few minutes after their embarkation, and in sight of their very windows, and just as they were crossing the bar, the boat went down, and all who were in her perished. Even the bodies were never found. This tragedy nearly killed Miss Barrett; she was utterly prostrated by the horror and grief, and a natural but most unjust feeling that she had been in some sort the cause of this great misery. It was not until the following year that she could be removed in an invalid carriage, and by journeys of twenty miles a day, to her afflicted family and her London home.’ She now lived for many years in a darkened room, with no society except that of her own family, and a few devoted friends. Her genius suffered no eclipse. She continued to read her favourite Greek authors, and many of her most powerful and original conceptions rose before her imagination in those lonely and mournful years. Her deep religious faith also supported her, and though we know not the precise date of the following lines, we have confidence in assigning them to this period:—
Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet
From out the hallelujahs, sweet and low,
Lest I should fear and fall, and miss thee so,
Who art not missed by any that entreat.
Speak to me as to Mary at thy feet.
And if no precious gums my hands bestow,
Let my tears drop like amber, while I go
In reach of thy divinest voice complete
In humanest affection—thus, in sooth,
To lose the sense of losing!
It illustrates the power and concentration of her genius at this time, that she struck off the entire poem, ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,’ containing upwards of four hundred lines, at a single twelve-hours’ sitting. It is in parts harsh, in parts obscure, in parts fantastical, but contains magnificent thoughts, and has in passages a lavish and lustrous splendour, as of broad gleams of light floating over cloth of gold. The lines which follow may be quoted for their profound and noble truth, rebuking as they do that pride in mere material progress which sneers at abstract thought and spiritual advancement, and measures a man not by the stature of the soul but by the number of guineas he can amass in a year, or the number of miles he can ride in a railway carriage in an hour.
And her custom was to praise me when I said—“The age culls simples,
With a broad clown’s back turned broadly to the glory of the stars.
We are gods by our own reckoning, and may well shut up the temples,
And wield on, amid the incense-steam, the thunder of our cars. [p. 293→]
For we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring,
With, at every mile run faster, ‘O the wondrous, wondrous age!’
Little thinking if we work our souls as nobly as our iron,
Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage.
Why, what is this patient entrance into nature’s deep resources,
But the child’s most gradual learning to walk upright without bane?
When we drive out from the cloud of steam majestical white horses,
Are we greater than the first men who led black ones by the mane?
If we trod the depths of ocean, if we struck the stars in rising,
If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric breath,
’Twere but power within our tether, no new spirit-power comprising,
And in life we were not greater men, nor bolder men in death.
But it is not with Mrs Browning’s poetry that we are at present concerned, and our principal object in referring to ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ was to note the connection of the poem with the life of the poetess. Bertram, the lover of Lady Geraldine, is represented as speaking thus—
There, obedient to her praying, did I read aloud the poems
Made by Tuscan flutes, or instruments more various of our own;
Read the pastoral parts of Spenser, or the subtle interflowings
Found in Petrarch’s sonnets—here’s the book—the leaf is folded down!
Or at times a modern volume—Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted idyl,
Howitt’s ballad-dew, or Tennyson’s enchanted reverie—
Or from Browning some “pomegranate,” which, if cut deep down the middle,
Showed a heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity!
The last lines, it is said, attracted the attention of Mr Robert Browning, and he called to thank the writer. By the happy blunder of a domestic, he was admitted into her presence, and, before leaving, had obtained permission to renew his visit. Acquaintance ripened into love. Mrs Browning has given us, in her Sonnets, many a bright glimpse of this wooing of the poets. Love ‘took up the harp of life,’ and health returned at the joyous invocation. Mrs Browning’s future was to be different from her past—
My future will not copy fair my past.
I wrote that once; and thinking, at my side,
My ministering life-angel justified
The word by his appealing look up-cast
To the white throne of God, I turned at last,
And saw instead there, thee—not unallied
To angels in thy soul! Then, I, long-tried
By nature’s ills, received the comfort fast,
While, budding at thy sight, my pilgrim’s staff
Gave out green leaves, with morning dews impearled—
I seek no copy now of life’s first half!
Leave here the pages, with long musing curled,
And write me new my future’s epigraph,
New angel-muse, unhoped for in the world!
* * * * * *
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write,
And ever since it grew more clean and white,
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its—“Oh, list,”
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst [p. 294→]
I could not wear here plainer to my sight
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half-missed,
Half-falling on the hair. O, beyond meed,
That was the chrism of love, which love’s own crown,
With sanctifying sweetness, did precede!
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect purple state! since when, indeed,
I have been proud, and said, “My love, My own.”
In the autumn of 1846 she was married to Robert Browning. He conducted her to Italy, and there they resided, with slight interruptions, until her death. The ill fate which has usually attended the marriages of men and women of genius, has not befallen this union. It has been one of profound mental sympathy and entire felicity. A son, twelve years old, survives Mrs Browning. ‘It is a pleasant story,’ says one commemorating her death, ‘told of the street beggars that walk through Via Maggio, under the windows of Casa Guidi, that they always spoke of the woman who lived in that house, not by her well known English name, or by any soft Italian phrase, but simply, and touchingly, as “the mother of the beautiful child.”
It has been a striking characteristic of Mrs Browning, and one deeply illustrative of the soundness and strength of her nature, that, amid all influences of external beauty in the witching climate of the south, and though wooed to delicious musing and luxurious study by that ancient art which makes Italy what she has herself called it, a ‘land of souls,’ her sympathy has ever been most intense with living men and practical interests. Her devotion to the cause of Italy was ardent as that of a poet, and thoughtful as that of a statesman. She was of the party of Cavour rather than of Mazzini, and never permitted intensity in contemplating the idea of Italian unity to exclude consideration of means for its realisation. ‘When did Mazzini’s finger,’ she said, with perhaps undue severity, ‘ever touch Italy without a blot showing where?’ In Napoleon III., on the other hand, her faith was stronger than that of most of her countrymen. She believed that, in undertaking the Italian war, his motives were at heart worthy and magnanimous, and despite the disappointment of Villafranca, and the imperial vacillations which followed, she obstinately made allowance for the difficulties of his situation. In a letter to a friend in America, on occasion of the Prince Napoleon’s speech in the Senate, she expressed her belief that the comprehensively and decisively liberal policy of that remarkable oration was in fact the policy of Napoleon III., and that the Prince might be considered as saying what reasons of state forbade the Emperor to utter. We shall hope she was correct, though the circumstances of the last few weeks suggest a doubt. While the French [p. 295→] garrison is continued in Rome, and while indications are not wanting that the shabby but insignificant seizure of Nice and Savoy may be followed by the more serious appropriation of the Island of Sardinia, we must suspend our decision as to whether Napoleon III. has been the magnanimous deliverer of Italy, or the selfish and ambitious propagator of imperial influence in the Peninsula. It is pleasing to reflect that these grounds for suspicion could not have presented themselves to the mind of Mrs Browning. It was in the very week of her death that Napoleon III. formally recognised the kingdom of Italy. Dying half-an-hour after day broke over the Italian hills, she lived just long enough to see the dawn of Italian freedom, not long enough to be tormented with apprehensions that it might be overcast. She was not satisfied with the part which her own country played in relation to the Italian revolution. Great Britain, she felt, ought not to have left to Napoleon III. the noblest piece of work done these many years in European politics. Perhaps on this subject, also, a view of the whole state of the case, while reflecting no brilliant honour on England, might tend to show that British friendship for Italy, undoubtedly sincere as far as it went, had not been of slight avail.
Keenly sympathizing with the progress of Italian liberty, Mrs Browning’s sympathy was equally fervent with the advance of principles of justice and freedom in America. We find something grand in the sense of kinship she preserved with the Anglo-Saxon vanguard of the West. Of late years, there has been creeping over English society a chill, heartless, conceited and essentially shallow spirit of alienation from the American people. It is doubtless true that Americans have themselves partly to blame for this. The taste of Englishmen has been offended by the braggadocio rant of certain Yankee prints, and the recruiting squabble at the time of the Russian war testified in the prevalence in the States of an ungenerous and peevish disposition towards Great Britain. But in a country so great as ours, there might have been magnanimity found to overlook things like these, or, at least, to prevent their blinding us to what remained of great and good in America. The contemptuous mode of reference to the Anglo-Saxons of the Western Continent, which Saturday reviewing has made fashionable amongst us, is altogether unworthy of Great Britain. To such feelings Mrs Browning was superior. While continuing English—as her last great poem, Aurora Leigh, demonstrated—in heart and soul, she was yet led by her residence abroad into a more nobly cosmopolitan sympathy with human advancement, than she could easily have attained in England. With the party of abolition and free-labour in the States she was [p. 296→] not only a sympathizer but a co-operator. Entering cordially into their aims, appreciating exactly their position and difficulties, she hailed the election of President Lincoln with all the enthusiasm of an American, and perused his inaugural address at the opening of Congress with an interest as intelligent as it was eager. She contributed the finest of her recent poetry to the columns of the New York Independent. It is probable that she has left no one behind her embracing in so wide a sweep of sympathy the whole family of mankind, and, in particular, all branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. It was a true, as well as a sublime, saying of Milton’s, that the heroic poet must be himself heroic; but how seldom is it that, turning from published poetry to the heart of the poet, we find it a harp vibrating yet more strongly and tenderly to the ‘still sad music of humanity.’ So it was in the case of Mrs Browning; and while sincerely believing that such strains as she has left us are surpassed by very few in the English language, we are no less sincere in expressing an admiration deeper still, for the yet more melodious poem of her life.
Mrs Browning’s power as a poetess was of the highest, and, but for certain faults of mannerism, would have rendered her extensively popular. Truth, nobleness, passion, the misery that is to be alleviated, the good that is to be done—these were her themes. In the ‘Drama of Exile,’ the ‘Seraphim,’ and several other poems, she sung of the spiritual relations of man, his sin, sorrow, and redemption by a Redeemer. The subject of the ‘Drama of Exile’ is the loss of Eden through the fall, and the defeat of Satan and restoration of mankind by Christ. The conception of Eve in this poem ‘has been pronounced,’ says a writer in The Dial, ‘by Mr Ruskin, than whom there is no higher living authority, incomparably superior to that of Milton.’ The poem, as a whole, is beyond question the highest effort in religious poetry since the days of Milton. Not only is the conception it presents of the mother of mankind nobler than that of ‘Paradise Lost;’ but it has an advantage over the Miltonic poem in dispensing with all that material imagery of shields, spears, helms, and gunpowder, by introducing which into his angelic contests Milton has left it a moot-point with critics whether his description is sublime or ridiculous. The ‘countless angel-faces, still and stern,’ pressing out upon Lucifer from heaven, the pure radiance dazzling him like lightning, are far more grandly imagined than Milton’s warrior spirits. It is exceedingly to be regretted that in treating the terrestial part of her theme, Mrs Browning accumulated an imagery of her own, which, if not inappropriate, is complicated and bewildering. She was very learned, and her learning was not always kept in its due [p. 297→] place as the mere handmaid of genius. Often, both in the ‘Drama of Exile’ and in her other poems, the force of that magical and indescribable touch by which genius opens the fountains of joy or sorrow, of laughter or tears, is impeded by interposition of some tinselly bit of erudition. Her imagination, also, sometimes played tricks upon her heart, hanging over the stream of feeling a fantastic, mist-like pageantry, and giving an air of artificiality to what, in respect of thought or emotion, was clear, simple, and true. This remark will apply, more or less, to almost all her poems, but it is most pertinent in regard to those on sacred subjects. The ‘Cry of the Children,’ ‘Cowper’s Grave,’ ‘The Sleep,’ and a few other pieces, can alone be pronounced entirely free from erudite or fantastic mannerism. The universal favour with which the first of these has been received shows how completely Mrs Browning might have become a singer for the people if she had not despised popularity.
The poetical province in which Mrs Browning stands alone and unapproached is the delineation of the passion of love in its various phases, as felt in the breast of woman. Whether it is the rapture of the maiden’s first love, or the devotion of the wife, or the tenderness of the mother, she describes it with an intensity of expression and a glow of colour altogether unequalled. In ‘Isabel’s [sic] Child,’ and in ‘Aurora Leigh,’ it is chiefly the motherly affection that is portrayed; and whether we hear Isabel saying of her boy—
His little body, which is dead,
And hidden in the turfy fold,
Doth make the whole warm earth a-cold;
or whether we watch Marian Erle as she hangs in unutterable ecstasies over her living treasure, we cannot but feel that mother’s love was never so marvellously delineated. In ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,’ the ‘Romaunt of the Page,’ and the ‘Duchess May,’ the passion of maidenly and wifely devotion is depicted. What is peculiar in these poems is this, that while the fervour of the emotion is transcendent, the delineating hand is unmistakably that of a woman, exquisite in delicacy, perfect in modesty and in tenderness. ‘Mrs Browning,’ it has been remarked, in reference to these and similar poems, ‘has given us the counterpart to all the poetry of chivalry. Troubadour and minstrel sang for ages in homage to woman; knights and monarchs waited upon the smile of beauty; the imagination of Europe exhausted itself in devising heroic adventures, in which, penetrating through dark woods, crossing tempestuous seas, fighting giants and monsters, breaking enchantments and prison walls, the bold soldier forced his way to his ladye-love. But the counterpart in [p. 298→] this picture, the devotion of the woman to him she loves, was wanting; and we stand in unfeigned astonishment as Mrs Browning reveals to us what a woman’s passion means. Here she had the field almost to herself. We feel her words to be true: they come to us with the authoritative emphasis of nature, coined in the mint of the heart, and accepted by the heart at once. Yet none but a woman would have had a right to assert, that passion so intense and self-annihilating could be inspired by man in the heart of woman. Ties of relationship, worldly station, riches, life, are cast into the crucible; they are instantly, not only melted, but dissolved and cast aloft as impalpable vapour. All this takes place, and the crucible is still itself firm; the heart is yet unbroken: until the passion is unrequited, until the flame is left to eat the heart itself, and then it, too, dissolves in ashes and death.’
In the ‘Romaunt of the Page,’ love is unreturned, and the heart, still true to the loved one, breaks; in ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,’ love burns its way through social fictions and conventions, attaining victory and triumph; in the ‘Duchess May,’ love is still victorious, but victorious in death, the wife leaping into the grave with a smile, in the arms of her husband. The lady of the last poem is, we think, the finest female character introduced into literature since the time of Shakspere. Soft and tender as the summer cloud; vivid, fiery, keen-flashing, as the lightning that lurks in its folds; queenly in haughtiness, dauntless in courage, unbending in resolution, when love is to be vindicated; gentle as fawn led by maiden in a silken band when love has been accepted, and the loved one speaks; the Duchess May stands alone among female characters in recent poetry, and to find her equal we must turn to the Desdemonas and Juliets of our great dramatist.
Reviewed:
General Review Essay (EBB).
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