The Brownings Part 5

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: G.o.d 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 pa.s.sages. 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, "G.o.d 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 impa.s.sioned love that made its literature to her an a.s.similation 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 hards.h.i.+ps and uncertainties are a part of its fascination. To Elizabeth Barrett, secure in her father's home, there was little possibility of the hards.h.i.+ps 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 circ.u.mstances, she would have poured her life "with pa.s.sion 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 appet.i.te 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 wors.h.i.+p!"

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 ill.u.s.tration 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 garnis.h.i.+ng, 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 n.o.blest of her s.e.x."

"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 t.i.tle 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 n.o.ble 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,"