CHAPTER VIII. CRI MRS. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. RITICALLY to approach the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is to test once for all the question whether, throughout the literature of the whole world, there is any evidence to show that woman can equal man in the sustained expression of poetical ideas. With regard to the inferior verse-writers of her sex, the world has indeed been chivalrous enough to discount their failures and enhance their achievements by gallantries of criticism which often said simply, "This is very good," when in reality a mental reservation lurked in the judgment: “This is very good—for a woman." The talents exhibited by Mrs. Barrett Browning demanded the employment of a sterner criticism. When her poems first began to be talked of, she had already acquired a vague reputation as a student of the Greek dramatists, and one versed in Hebrew as well as Patristic lore. Ere much of her writing had been commented upon, she gave the world to understand that she fully believed in her own powers, and had resolved to dedicate herself as a missionary of the Muses, for whom, as for Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, the business of life would be the teaching of beautiful thoughts in beautiful words. There was no amateurish modesty or feminine affectation evinced in her claims to notice. Her conviction of inspiration was deep. That this conviction was wrongly founded, she was willing to be taught if need be, but the conviction itself she did not conceal. It is a perilous thing to proclaim of one's self that one is going to be a poet; it is proclaiming that one is a genius. And when the critics learnt that these bold tones came from a fragile woman, nursing faint life within herself on a bed of sickness where any moment might be her last, the earnestness of this woman's soul proved itself such as must have commanded admiration even had her productions been less remarkable. From the period of her middle life until lately, the majority of voices has yielded to her claims completely, giving her a place among the few great writers possessed of that consummate genius which has been declared to be without sex. Coleridge, as has been remarked already on another page, asserted that in the face of every man of genius you can detect something of the woman; so it might be said that in the work of Mrs. Browning, with its universality of sympathies, its political passions, its sense of social wrongs and its dramatic vigour, there was much of the man. In order that she might be allowed to rank herself with the first halfdozen male poets of our literature, it would be by no means necessary that she should show herself in all things as masculine as they are. It is surely conceivable that there are high subjects of which a woman could make more than It is the conceivableness of this fact that has made the dearth of great poetry among the female writers so often remarked upon. That in this and that poem Mrs. Browning a man. has shown herself "As gentle as a woman, and as manly as a man,” may at once be admitted. But it remains for us to inquire whether in attempting the highest subjects and the highest forms, she has placed herself abreast of the masculine minds with which alone her own mind felt community She attempted Miltonic subjects. How does she compare with Milton? She attempted themes distinctly suggesting competition with Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Has she matched the work of these? Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born at Hope End, a few miles from Malvern, in 1809. Details of her life have never been vouchsafed to us by her friends, but we know that, like most literary women, she was early a writer of verses. One of her own letters records that these poetical exercises were begun before she was eight years old, and that at that premature age poetry had become a distinct object in her life. The Greeks were even then her best friends, and haunted her out of Pope's "Homer " until she "dreamed more of Agamemnon than of Moses, the black pony." At the age of eleven she wrote an epic in four books called "The Battle of Marathon," of which her indulgent father had fifty copies printed. Next to Pope and the Greek dramatists, she brought herself up upon Byron and Coleridge, not forgetting to apprentice herself to the teaching of nature among the beautiful Malvern hills. In her seventeenth year she published "An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems." There is a passage in "Aurora Leigh which evidently bears an autobiographical reference to this and other juvenile efforts : : "And so like most young poets, in the flush Of individual life, I poured myself Along the veins of others, and achieved Mere lifeless imitations of live verse, And made a living answer for the dead, The Barrett family removed from the Malvern district to Sidmouth for two years, and there the poetess produced "Prometheus Bound, and Miscellaneous Poems (1833)." Of the "Prometheus" (in its present form, partly re-written) R the translator herself was wont afterwards to speak with some derision. There are undoubtedly fine passages in it, but the principles of translation little bind her in the task she set herself. Many and many a line occurs in this translation for which the Greek poet is not in the least responsible. The next removal was to London, and at 74, Gloucester Place, the delicate girl began to enter into that strange valley of death in which philosophy and song were almost all that preserved her being to her. "The world does with with birds: it darkens poets," says Jean Paul, as we do their cages until they have learnt what they are to sing." Up to this time Miss Barrett had apparently had no intellectual companionship of any sort save that of her family, and one old friend, blind Mr. Boyd. It was Mr. Boyd who drilled her through the Greek dramatists and the early fathers. When he had taught her Greek he had taught her all he knew. One cannot help suspecting, from what one learns about him, that he was somewhat of a pedant, who would have narrowed and even disgusted a less earnest mind than that which he found in his marvellous pupil. He seems to have been more like an Alexandrian scholiast than an interpreter of Greek poetry. However, to Miss Barrett he was the one source of inspiration besides her own imagination; and in her "Wine of Cyprus" she draws such a picture of their intercourse as one cannot forget:- And I think of those long mornings Which my thought goes far to seek, Somewhat low for aus and ois. A visionary fragile girl, and a blind scholar with silver hair, wandering hand in hand through the fateful sublimities of the Greek tragic poets, and the mystic wilderness of the early fathers these two led such a life together as rivals in picturesque effect the memory of sightless Milton surrounded by his daughters. But it was the subservient girl who was here the poet, and good Mr. Boyd with all his scholarship possibly recognised his companion's romantic genius as little as old George Dyer could enter into the spirit of his friend Charles Lamb. Whether Elizabeth Barrett's brothers or sisters were capable of intellectually |