The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume I Part 1

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

by Frederic G. Kenyon.

VOL I.

PREFACE

The writer of any narrative of Mrs. Browning's life, or the editor of a collection of her letters, is met at the outset of his task by the knowledge that both Mrs. Browning herself and her husband more than, once expressed their strong dislike of any such publicity in regard to matters of a personal and private character affecting themselves. The fact that expressions to this effect are publicly extant is one which has to be faced or evaded; but if it could not be fairly faced, and the apparent difficulty removed, the present volumes would never have seen the light. It would be a poor qualification for the task of preparing a record of Mrs. Browning's life, to be willing therein to do violence to her own expressed wishes and those of her husband. But the expressions to which reference has been made are limited, either formally or by implication, to publications made during their own lifetime. They shrank, as any sensitive person must shrink, from seeing their private lives, their personal characteristics, above all, their sorrows and bereavements, offered to the inspection and criticism of the general public; and it was to such publications that their protests referred. They could not but be aware that the details of their lives would be of interest to the public which read and admired their works, and there is evidence that they recognised that the public has some claims with regard to writers who have appealed to, and partly lived by, its favour. They only claimed that during their own lifetime their feelings should be consulted first; when they should have pa.s.sed away, the rights of the public would begin.

It is in this spirit that the following collection of Mrs. Browning's letters has now been prepared, in the conviction that the lovers of English literature will be glad to make a closer and more intimate acquaintance with one--or, it may truthfully be said, with two--of the most interesting literary characters of the Victorian age. It is a selection from a large ma.s.s of letters, written at all periods in Mrs.

Browning's life, which Mr. Browning, after his wife's death, reclaimed from the friends to whom they had been written, or from their representatives. No doubt, Mr. Browning's primary object was to prevent publications which would have been excessively distressing to his feelings; but the letters, when once thus collected, were not destroyed (as was the case with many of his own letters), but carefully preserved, and so pa.s.sed into the possession of his son, Mr. R. Barrett Browning, with whose consent they are now published. In this collection are comprised the letters to Miss Browning (the poet's sister, whose consent has also been freely given to the publication), Mr. H.S. Boyd, Mrs. Martin, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Jameson, Mr. John Kenyon, Mr. Chorley, Miss Blagden, Miss Haworth, and Miss Thomson (Madame Emil Braun).[1] To these have been added a number of letters which have been kindly lent by their possessors for the purpose of the present volumes.

[Footnote 1: Mrs. Sutherland-Orr had access to these letters for her biography of Robert Browning, and quotes several pa.s.sages from them. With this exception, none of the letters have been published previously; and the published letters of Miss Barrett to Mr. R.H.

Horne have not been drawn upon, except for biographical information.]

The duties of the editor have been mainly those of selection and arrangement. With regard to the former task one word is necessary. It may be thought that the almost entire absence of bitterness (except on certain political topics), of controversy, of personal ill feeling of any kind, is due to editorial excisions. This is not the case.

The number of pa.s.sages that have been removed for fear of hurting the feelings of persons still living is almost infinitesimal; and in these the cause of offence is always something inherent in the facts recorded, not in the spirit in which they are mentioned. No person had less animosity than Mrs. Browning; it seems as though she could hardly bring herself to speak harshly of anyone. The omissions that have been made are almost wholly of pa.s.sages containing little or nothing of interest, or repet.i.tions of what has been said elsewhere; and they have been made with the object of diminis.h.i.+ng the bulk and concentrating the interest of the collection, never with the purpose of modifying the representation of the writer's character.

The task of arranging the letters has been more arduous owing to Mrs.

Browning's unfortunate habit of prefixing no date's, or incomplete ones, to her letters. Many of them are dated merely by the day of the week or month, and can only be a.s.signed to their proper place in the series on internal evidence. In some cases, however, the envelopes have been preserved, and the date is then often provided by the postmarks. These supply fixed points by which the others can be tested; and ultimately all have fallen into line in chronological order, and with at least approximate dates to each letter.

The correspondence, thus arranged in chronological order, forms an almost continuous record of Mrs. Browning's life, from the early days in Herefords.h.i.+re to her death in Italy in 1861; but in order to complete the record, it has been thought well to add connecting links of narrative, which should serve to bind the whole together into the unity of a biography. It is a chronicle, rather than a biography in the artistic sense of the term; a chronicle of the events of a life in which there were but few external events of importance, and in which the subject of the picture is, for the most part, left to paint her own portrait, and that, moreover, unconsciously. Still, this is a method which may be held to have its advantages, in that it can hardly be affected by the feelings or prejudices of the biographer; and if it does not present a finished portrait to the reader, it provides him with the materials from which he can form a portrait for himself. The external events are placed upon record, either in the letters or in the connecting links of narrative; the character and opinions of Mrs.

Browning reveal themselves in her correspondence; and her genius is enshrined in her poetry. And these three elements make up all that may be known of her personality, all with which a biographer has to deal.

It is essentially her character, not her genius, that is presented to the reader of these letters. There are some letter-writers whose genius is so closely allied with their daily life that it s.h.i.+nes through into their familiar correspondence with their friends, and their letters become literature. Such, in their very different ways, with very different types of genius and very different habits of daily life, are Gray, Cowper, Lamb, perhaps Fitzgerald. But letter-writers such as these are few. More often the correspondence of men and women of letters is valuable for the light it throws upon the character and opinions of those whose character and opinions we are led to regard with admiration or respect, or at least interest, on account of their other writings. In these cases it may be held that the publication is justifiable or not, according as the character which it reveals is affected favourably or the reverse. Not all truth, even about famous men, is useful for publication, but only such as enables us to appreciate better the works which have made them famous. Their highest selves are expressed in their literary work; and it is a poor service to truth to insist on bringing to light the fact that they also had lower selves--common, dull, it may be vicious. What ill.u.s.trates their genius and enhances our respect for their character, may rightly be made known; but what shakes our belief and mars our enjoyment in them, is simply better left in obscurity.

With regard to Mrs. Browning, however, there is no room for doubt upon these points. These letters, familiarly written to her private friends, without the smallest idea of publication, treating of the thoughts that came uppermost in the ordinary language of conversation, can lay no claim to make a new revelation of her genius. On the other hand, perhaps because the circ.u.mstances of Mrs. Browning's life cut her off to an unusual extent from personal intercourse with her friends, and threw her back upon letter-writing as her princ.i.p.al means of communication with them, they contain an unusually full revelation of her character. And this is not wholly unconnected with her literary genius, since her personal convictions, her moral character, entered more fully than is often the case into the composition of her poetry.

Her best poetry is that which is most full of her personal emotions.

The 'Sonnets from the Portuguese,' the 'Cry of the Children,'

'Cowper's Grave,' the 'Dead Pan,' 'Aurora Leigh,' and all the Italian poems, owe their value to the pure and earnest character, the strong love of truth and right, the enthusiasm on behalf of what is oppressed and the indignation against all kinds of oppression and wrong, which were prominent elements in a personality of exceptional worth and beauty.

An editor can generally serve his readers best by remaining in the background; but he is allowed one moment for the expression of his personal feelings, when he thanks those who have a.s.sisted him in his work. In the present case there are many to whom it is a pleasure to offer such thanks. In the first place, I have to thank Mr. R. Barrett Browning and Miss Browning most cordially for having accepted the proposal of the publishers (Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., to whom likewise my grat.i.tude is due) to put so pleasant and congenial a task into my hands. Mr. Browning has also contributed a number of suggestions and corrections while the sheets have been pa.s.sing through the press. I have also to thank those who have been kind enough to offer letters in their possession for inclusion in these volumes: Lady Alwyne Compton for the letters to Mr. Westwood; Mrs. Arthur Severn for the letters to Mr. Ruskin; Mr. G.L. Craik for the letters to Miss Mulock; Mrs. Commeline for the letters to Miss Commeline; Mr. T.J.

Wise for the letters to Mr. Cornelius Mathews; Mr. C. Aldrich for the letter to Mrs. Kinney; Col. T.W. Higginson for a letter to Miss Channing; and the Rev. G. Bainton for a letter to Mr. Kenyon. It has not been possible to print all the letters which have been thus offered; but this does not diminish the kindness of the lenders, nor the grat.i.tude of the editor.

Finally, I should wish to offer my sincere thanks to Lady Edmond Fitzmaurice for much a.s.sistance and advice in the selection and revision of the letters; a labour which her friends.h.i.+p with Mr.

Browning towards the close of his life has prompted her to bestow most freely and fully upon this memorial of his wife.

F.G.K.

_July 1897_.

CHAPTER I

1806-1835

Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, still better known to the world as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was born on March 6, 1806, the eldest child of Edward and Mary Moulton Barrett. I Both the date and place of her birth have been matters of uncertainty and dispute, and even so trustworthy an authority as the 'Dictionary of National Biography' is inaccurate with respect to them. All doubt has, however, been set at rest by the discovery of the entry of her birth in the parish register of Kelloe Church, in the county of Durham.[2] She was born at c.o.xhoe Hall, the residence of Mr. Barrett's only brother, Samuel, about five miles south of the city of Durham. Her father, whose name was originally Edward Barrett Moulton, had a.s.sumed the additional surname of Barrett on the death of his maternal grandfather, to whose estates in Jamaica he was the heir. Of Mr. Barrett it is recorded by Mr.

Browning, in the notes prefixed by him to the collected edition of his wife's poems, that 'on the early death of his father he was brought from Jamaica to England when a very young child, as a ward of the late Chief Baron Lord Abinger, then Mr. Scarlett, whom he frequently accompanied in his post-chaise when on circuit. He was sent to Harrow, but received there so savage a punishment for a supposed offence (burning the toast)'--which, indeed, has been a 'supposed offence' at other schools than Harrow--'by the youth whose f.a.g he had become, that he was withdrawn from the school by his mother, and the delinquent was expelled. At the age of sixteen he was sent by Mr. Scarlett to Cambridge, and thence, for an early marriage, went to Northumberland.'

His wife was Miss Mary Graham-Clarke, daughter of J. Graham-Clarke, of Fenham Hall, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but of her nothing seems to be known, and her comparatively early death causes her to be little heard of in the record of her daughter's life.

[Footnote 2: See _Notes and Queries_ for July 20, 1889, supplemented by a note from Mr. Browning himself in the same paper on August 24.]

Nothing is to be gained by trying to trace back the genealogy of the Barrett family, and it need merely be noted that it had been connected for some generations with the island of Jamaica, and owned considerable estates there.[3] It is a curious coincidence that Robert Browning was likewise in part of West Indian descent, and so, too, was John Kenyon, the lifelong friend of both, by whose means the poet and poetess were first introduced to one another.

[Footnote 3: These estates still remain in the family, and Mr. Charles Barrett, the eldest surviving brother of Mrs. Browning, now lives there.]

The family of Mr. Edward Barrett was a fairly large one, consisting, besides Elizabeth, of two daughters, Henrietta and Arabel, and eight sons--Edward, whose tragic death at Torquay saddened so much of his sister's life, Charles (the 'Stormie' of the letters), Samuel, George, Henry, Alfred, Septimus, and Octavius; Mr. Barrett's inventiveness having apparently given out with the last two members of his family, reducing him to the primitive method of simple enumeration, an enumeration in which, it may be observed, the daughters counted for nothing. Not many of these, however, can have been born at c.o.xhoe; for while Elizabeth was still an infant--apparently about the beginning of the year 1809--Mr. Barrett removed to his newly purchased estate of Hope End, in Herefords.h.i.+re, among the Malvern hills, and only a few miles from Malvern itself. It is to Hope End that the admirers of Mrs.

Browning must look as the real home of her childhood and youth. Here she spent her first twenty years of conscious life. Here is the scene of the childish reminiscences which are to be found among her earlier poems, of 'Hector in the Garden,' 'The Lost Bower,' and 'The Deserted Garden.' And here too her earliest verses were written, and the foundations laid of that omnivorous reading of literature of all sorts and kinds, which was so strong a characteristic of her tastes and leanings.

On this subject she may be left to tell her own tale. In a letter written on October 5, 1843, to Mr. R.H. Horne, she furnishes him with the following biographical details for his study of her in 'The New Spirit of the Age.' They supply us with nearly all that we know of her early life and writings.

'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 would have as good a story, Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have pa.s.sed in my _thoughts_. I wrote verses--as I dare say many have done who never wrote any poems--very early; at eight years old and earlier.

But, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained with me, and from that day to this, poetry has been a distinct object with me--an object to read, think, and live for. And I could make you laugh, although you could not make the public laugh, by the narrative of nascent odes, epics, and didactics crying aloud on obsolete muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-G.o.ds, and haunted me out of Pope's Homer, until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony. And thus my great "epic" of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and called "The Battle of Marathon," and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me--is Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a curious production for a child, it gives evidence only of an imitative faculty and an ear, and a good deal of reading in a peculiar direction. The love of Pope's Homer threw me into Pope on one side and into Greek on the other, and into Latin as a help to Greek--and the influence of all these tendencies is manifest so long afterwards as in my "Essay on Mind," a didactic poem written when I was seventeen or eighteen, and long repented of as worthy of all repentance. The poem is imitative in its form, yet is not without traces of an individual thinking and feeling--the bird pecks through the sh.e.l.l in it. With this it has a pertness and pedantry which did not even then belong to the character of the author, and which I regret now more than I do the literary defectiveness.

'All this time, and indeed the greater part of my life, we lived at Hope End, a few miles from Malvern, in a retirement scarcely broken to me except by books and my own thoughts, and it is a beautiful country, and was a retirement happy in many ways, although the very peace of it troubles the heart as it looks back. There I had my fits of Pope, and Byron, and Coleridge, and read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the dramatists, and eat and drank Greek and made my head ache with it. Do you know the Malvern Hills? The hills of Piers Plowman's Visions? They seem to me my native hills; for, although I was born in the county of Durham, I was an infant when I went first into their neighbourhood, and lived there until I had pa.s.sed twenty by several years. Beautiful, beautiful hills they are! And yet, not for the whole world's beauty would I stand in the suns.h.i.+ne and the shadow of them any more. It would be a mockery, like the taking back of a broken flower to its stalk.'[4]

[Footnote 4: R.H. Horne, _Letters of E.B. Browning_, i. 158-161.]

So, while the young Robert Browning was enthusiastically declaiming pa.s.sages of Pope's Homer, and measuring out heroic couplets with his hand round the dining table in Camberwell, Elizabeth Barrett was drinking from the same fount of inspiration among the Malvern Hills, and was already turning it to account in the production of her first epic. The fifty copies of the 'Battle of Marathon,' which Mr. Barrett, proud of his daughter's precocity, insisted on having printed, bear the date of 1819. Only five of them are now known to exist, and these are all in private hands; even the British Museum possesses only the reprint which the hero-wors.h.i.+p of the present generation caused to be produced in 1891. Seven years later, when she had just reached the age of twenty, her first volume of verse was offered to the world in general. It was ent.i.tled 'An Essay on Mind, and other Poems,' and included, besides the didactic poem after the manner of Pope which formed the _piece de resistance_, a number of shorter pieces, several of which, as she informed Horne,[5] had been written when she was not more than thirteen.

[Footnote 5: R.H. Horne, _Letters of E.B. Browning_, i. 164.]

It was during the years at Hope End that Elizabeth Barrett was first attacked by serious illness. 'At fifteen,' she says in her autobiographical letter, already quoted in part, 'I nearly died;' and this may be connected with a statement by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, to the effect that 'one day, when Elizabeth was about fifteen, the young girl, impatient for her ride, tried to saddle her pony alone, in a field, and fell with the saddle upon her, in some way injuring her spine so seriously that she was for years upon her back.'[6] The latter part of this statement cannot indeed be quite accurate; for her period of long confinement to a sick-room was of later date, and began, according to her own statement, from a different cause. Mr.

R. Barrett Browning states that the injury to the spine was not discovered for some time, but was afterwards attributed, not to a fall, but to a strain whilst tightening her pony's girths. No doubt this injury contributed towards the general weakness of health to which she was always subject.

[Footnote 6: _Dict. of Nat. Biography_, vii. 78.]

Of her earliest letters, belonging to the Hope End period, very few have been preserved, and most of those which remain are of little interest. The first to be printed here belongs to the period of her mother's last illness, which ended in her death on October 1, 1828. It is addressed to Mrs. James Martin, a lifelong friend, whose name will appear frequently in these pages. At the time when it was written she was living near Tewkesbury, within visiting distance of the Barretts.

_To Mrs. Martin_ Hope End: Thursday, [about September 1828].

My dear Mrs. Martin,--I am happy to be able to tell you that Mr.

Garden was here two days ago, and that he has not thought it necessary to adopt any violent measure with regard to our beloved invalid.

He seems entirely to rely, for her ultimate restoration, upon a discipline as to diet, and a course of strengthening medicine. This is most satisfactory to us; and her spirits have been soothed and tranquillised by his visit. She has slept quietly for the last few nights, and reports herself to be _brisker_ and stronger, and to be comparatively free from pain. This account is, perhaps, too favorable,[7] and will appear so to you when you see her, as I am afraid you will, not looking much better, _much_ more cheerful, than when you paid us your last visit. But when we are very _willing_ to hope, we are apt to be too _ready_ to hope: though really, without being _too_ sanguine, we may consider quiet nights and diminished pain to be satisfactory signs of amendment. I know you will be glad to hear of them, and I hope you will _witness_ them very soon, in spite of this repulsive snow. It will do mama good, and I am sure it will give us all pleasure, to benefit by some of your charitable pilgrimages over the hill.

With our best regards, and sincerest thanks for your kind interest

Believe me, dear Mrs. Martin, most truly yours,

E.B. BARRETT.

[Footnote 7: Mrs. Browning usually spells such words as 'favour,'

'honour,' and the like, without the _u_, after the fas.h.i.+on which one is accustomed to regard as American.]