The Complete Works of Mrs. E. B. Browning/Volume 1/Biographical Introduction
BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION.
It sets ours beating: this is living art."
—Aurora Leigh, v., 220.
When and where Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born were details of her life in dispute some time after her death. The uncertainty betokens the greater interest she attracted as a living personality, within an absorbing present environment of thought and action, than as a mere creature of antecedents. To this dwarfing of preceding facts, doubtless not concealed but simply lost sight of, the conditions of her life in Italy during its last rich fifteen years contributed. Each new day's brightness there outshone the first pale English dawn.
The date and birthplace given by Mrs. Ritchie in the Dictionary of National Biography, like those recorded in various earlier accounts, are incorrect. And one of the first of our poet's biographers, Mr. Ingram, although set right as to date by Robert Browning himself, clung with pertinacity to the idea that a notice, unearthed by him in a contemporaneous newspaper, of the birth of a daughter to Mr. Edward Moulton Barrett, at London, in 1809, must needs refer to Elizabeth, instead of to one of her sisters.
That Elizabeth, the oldest child, was born at Coxhoe Hall, five miles south of Durham, is now established, however, and Browning's testimony for 1806, instead of 1809, is substantiated by the discovery in the parish register of Kelloe Church, Durham county, of the following entry:
Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett, daughter and first child of Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, of Coxhoe Hall, native of St. James's, Jamaica, by Mary, late Clarke, native of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was born, March 6th, 1806, and baptized 10th of February, 1808.
Coxhoe Hall was the residence of Mr. Barrett's only brother, Samuel, at one time member of Parliament for Richmond, Mr. Barrett himself having married before he was twenty-one and not having established himself independently as yet in a land whereto he was not born.
England's New World colony of Jamaica, with its slave-holding customs and a measure of the affluence and command of opportunity belonging to landed proprietorship in tropical seas,—a commingled good and ill to a poet-soul,—lay in the immediate background of Elizabeth Barrett's family as also in that of Robert Browning's. He it is who tells how his wife's father, the heir to estates bequeathed from his grandfather, whose name of Barrett he added to his own, was brought to England on the early death of his father, as the ward of the late Chief Baron Lord Abinger, then Mr. Scarlett, whom the boy frequently accompanied in his post-chaise when on circuit, and by whom he was sent to Harrow, and at sixteen to Cambridge. Thence he went to Northumberland, where he married Miss Mary Graham-Clarke, of Fenham Hall, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Durham apparently counted for little in Elizabeth's life, since the family was living in London shortly after she was born, and early in 1809 her father bought the country-seat in Herefordshire called Hope End.
It is the "first holy poet-ground" of England, therefore, the beautiful Malvern Hills, the hills of Piers Plowman's Visions, the heights of Langland's early dream of an ideally humane and regenerated society, that may be associated happily and most fitly with the dewy impressions of the growing girl whose ethical fervor and large-minded political interests were destined to animate her poetic expression with a potency as peculiarly vital and exalted as that inherent in her lovely lyrical creative gift. She herself said that the hills which "loom a-row, keepers of Piers Plowman's Visions through the sunshine and the snow," always seemed to her to be her native earth, because, although she was born in Durham county, she came as an infant to the Malvern neighborhood and lived there till past twenty.
At eight and earlier she wrote verses, her susceptible fancy speedily turning into a will, and making poetry, as she puts it, "an object to read, think, and live for." Into the eager craving of her spirit to be and to see as an artist, from the first she poured in a concentrating stream all the random flowings of her sense-impressions.
During her child-life she was exuberantly well and active. The delights of a healthy and sensitive nature in the out-of-doors world; her congenital precocious hungering for books, books, books; and her daily family relationships—surely anything but meagre with one who rejoiced in two sisters and eight brothers—were all lavished upon the inner being. She became rather the resultant of such outside influences than their absorbed enjoyer. In her thoughts, she confesses, most of the events of her early life and nearlyall her intense pleasures took place.
Save toward one, in her own house, she told Robert Browning long afterward, her sympathies were untrained, and only from the habit of self-consciousness and an intuitional experience backed by books, did she make her "great guesses" at human nature. That one in her own house toward whom she opened her emotions was her brother Edward, a close yoke-fellow in study and in play.
With him, of her own motion, and because she was drawn to Homer through Pope, she read Greek under Mr. MacSwiney, the tutor. He was putting Edward through the usual school allotment of the classics, and in writing of her share in this instruction to Mr. H, S. Boyd she says it was rather "guessing and stammering and tottering through parts of Homer and extracts from Xenophon than reading." She adds that she studied hard by herself afterwards, and that to no other is she so indebted as to Mr. Boyd for the Greek reading in which he assisted her at Malvern. This he did as a friend and Greek enthusiast, pleased with so disinterested an explorer of his specialty, and not professionally as a tutor, although in setting down her gratitude to him again, in a later letter, she accounts him as "in a sense" her "tutor," since no other ever taught her so much. She herself, she says, would have turned to the Greek dramatists, poets, and philosophers by "love and instinct," but the Greek Fathers would have stayed in their tombs for her without him. Such gratitude as this is sufficient sign of her unusual independence. Obviously, from her own and all other reports, her proficiency in Greek was both deeper and less exact in small external details—accents among these, be it admitted—than that of most Greek students. She was drawn to the language solely as a means to the contents and artistic stimulation of its literature. Her wide self-culture in other languages,—and Hebrew, German, French, Italian, followed the Greek in due time,—and also in other subjects,—philosophy, political history, above all, poetry and poetics,—was carried on by her at her own sweet will, with the same devouring eagerness to get at the marrow of the knowledge she desired and to leave its bones alone.
In such preoccupations with the past as she began to enjoy, even thus early, present domestic life, she acknowledged afterwards with some misgiving, "only seemed to buzz gently around like the bees." Warm-hearted records of this life of the hive remain, however, in the Juvenilia of 1826, in the verses "To my Brother," and "To my Father on his Birthday." Even these show how at home her heart was in poetry, how prone to make excursions into family incidents the occasion for trial flights of song.
She liked to ride Moses, her black pony, but he was less to her than the Agamemnon of her dreams. Greek gods and heroes clanged their spears, and echoed Homer's haughty phrases in her youngest poetic adventurings. Among these resounding odes and epics, "The Battle of Marathon," written at fourteen, and fifty copies of it printed by her proud father, is the only example of this epoch now extant. It probably best represents its forgotten fellows.
Even childish sports, like flower-bed making, assumed a shape heroic. The gigantic form of "Hector, son of Priam," sprawled visibly in the earth of the flower-bed which she modelled in his image, and bizarre enough is the contrast he makes with the prettiness and favor of the little girl's gamesome idea, and the dainty expression she gave it in the poem "Hector in the Garden":
Both his cheeks I weeded through,
********
"Eyes of gentianellas azure,
Staring, winking at the skies:
Nose of gilly-flowers and box;
Scented grasses put for locks,
Which a little breeze at pleasure
Set a-waving round his eyes:
With a glitter toward the light;
Purple violets for the mouth,
Breathing perfumes west and south;
And a sword of flashing lilies,
Holden ready for the fight.
********
"And who knows (I sometimes wondered)
If the disembodied soul
Of old Hector, once of Troy,
Might not take a dreary joy
Here to enter—if it thundered,
Rolling up the thunder roll?
********
"Who could know? I sometimes started
At a motion or a sound.
Did his mouth speak—naming Troy,
With an ὁτοτοτοτῖ?
Did the pulse of the Strong-hearted
Make the daisies tremble round?"
From the phase of fantasy into the moulds of verse were poured all warm and true the real wanderings of the poet-child, dowered with the freedom of a large country seat in a beautiful region, where she could busy herself with pleasures as leisurely as the day was long. "The Deserted Garden" expresses the joy she actually found in a nook where the trees were wildly enough interwoven "to keep both sheep and shepherd out," but not this happy child. She read minstrel stories there until "the breeze made sounds poetic in the trees," whereupon she did indeed "shut the book," but only in order to make of these sounds the mind stuff for a new book quite her own. Of this one she says:
I hear no more the wind athwart
Those trees, nor feel that childish heart
Delighting in delight."
Thus upon the inward-drawn page, made tributary to the fresh writing, was the real eventfulness continually written.
Another such poetic matrix of her impressional youth was formed, she tells us, on an incident that happened in the wood just beyond their garden. "The Lost Bower" keeps the dint of the hot heart and intrepid soul that were native to her. Veils of invalidism later cloaked and almost masked her natural vehemence that chorded in so richly with her delicate lyrical sensitiveness, but never could they stifle it. Robert Browning found it out later within the veils, and rightly called her "Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun." And here in like fashion, albeit in childish guise, her character appears in this poem which tells how the "fair walk and far survey" toward the Malvern hill range, considered the charm of the Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/26 Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/27 Everybody prominently associates illness now with her, but it properly should seem to be no essential part of her real self, and it was not ushered in until she was fifteen. It came with a violence of which she nearly died, yet it was a slow foe afterwards, as if reluctant to crush so bright and dauntless a soul. According to all accounts it was traceable to an over-strain connected in some dim way with an impatient attempt she made to saddle her pony in the field herself. Her son, Mr. R. Barrett Browning, says that the injury she then received was not due to a fall, as the story of it goes, related by Mrs. Ritchie, but to a strain sustained in tightening the saddle-girths. Wherever the root of the difficulty lay, "the strong leaping of the stag-like heart awake," which, in "The Lost Bower," she herself tells us was apt to find the pale too low "for keeping in the road it ought to take," was disciplined now into a cruel quiet. It was held in leash henceforth by a gradual weakening of lungs and nervous force which never entirely released its grasp. The volume of 1826 followed the illness, however, and showed no pause in the leading and the light her constant mind held in view.
With the death of her mother, Oct. 1, 1828, the Malvern period of her life drew near its close, sadly, and four years later it was cut short by the sale of Hope End.
The diminution in the household scale of living indicated by this sale, and the removal in 1830 to a temporary home by the sea in Sidmouth, Devonshire, was probably a result of the agitation of the bill for the abolition of slavery in the colonies. Two references to it in Elizabeth's letters to Mrs. Martin, a Malvern neighbor and family friend, make it about certain. The fact is comparatively unimportant, and it was apparently not so overwhelming to the finances of the numerous and doubtless expensive Barrett family as the head of it feared it would be; but it is of interest to know what the young poet's point of view concerning it was. Did the mature poet of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," wherein she condemned American slavery so forcibly in the Boston Liberty Bell of 1848, now, in her young womanhood, with some prospect of a personal pinch ahead, look upon Jamaican slavery as more excusable?
Her first mention of it in a letter of May 27, 1833, is in relation to her father's uncertainty as to their future abode. If they did leave Sidmouth, her correspondent knew as well as she whither it would be. If the bill passed, the West Indians were "irreparably ruined," and she quotes her father as saying that, in case it passed, nobody in his senses would think of planting sugar, and the administration might as well sink Jamaica into the sea at once; but she adds, for her own score, that she is more sorry for poor Lord Grey "who is going to ruin us, than for our poor selves who are going to be ruined." Evidently she appreciated the difficulties involved in a good measure having trying consequences. Again, early in September, she writes that the late bill has ruined the West Indians. It is settled, and the consternation here is very great, nevertheless she is glad, and "always shall be," that "the negroes are—virtually—free!"
This gray interlude of life, while her household was experiencing the "Pleasures of Doubt," as she says, following upon the sorrows of her illness, her mother's death, and the removal from the old home, was brightened for her by her joy in the sea at green and bowery Sidmouth, and the return to health it brought her, and also by the appearance of her third book, the first version of the "Prometheus Bound" of Æschylus. It was struck into too rapid English at Sidmouth in twelve days, as she afterwards told Mr. Horne, "and should have been thrown into the fire afterwards, the only way to give it a little warmth." With it were published the miscellaneous poems appearing in the present edition under the title, "Poems, 1833."[1]
The needs and conveniences of her brothers' future careers dictated a removal to 74 Gloucester Place, London, in the summer of 1835. She tells Mrs. Martin, gayly and pluckily as usual, how she is trying, while longing for the sea, to change her taste and her senses enough to appreciate the town, wrapped up like a mummy in yellow mist. Town life launched her now into physical discomfort, and turned her incipient difficulties into acknowledged invalidism; still, it also lent a more favorable wind to the development of her mind and heart. Her first poetic work to be ventured in the ordinary professional grooves, "The Romaunt of Margret," was now submitted through a friend to the critical judgment of Mr. R. H. Home, who thence became her friend, co-worker, and correspondent. Passing muster beneath the eyes of the editor, the "Romaunt" appeared in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine for July, 1836. It was the entering wedge cleaving a way for "The Poet's Vow" in the October number; for distinctive praise and an open door in The Athenæum; for contributions to Miss Mitford's annual; and for the appearance of "The Seraphim and Other Poems," in 1838, justly regarded by its author as actually "more of a trial of strength" than either of her preceding volumes.
Whenever London seemed particularly disagreeable, she reminded herself, she said, of its many advantages, reckoning highest among these, as an offset to sooty leaves and sparrows, real live poets with heads full of the trees and birds and sunshine of paradise, and she tells her Malvern correspondent how she has stood face to face with Wordsworth and Landor and has come to count Miss Mitford as a dear friend.
Miss Mitford's various descriptions of Miss Barrett as she looked in 1836 show unmistakably that the pallor and frailty belonging to her in later years had not yet effaced her native vividness:
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The words of her own poem, "He Giveth His Beloved Sleep," were spoken by her husband over her open grave in Florence. Although, upon her husband's death and his burial in Westminster Abbey, it was proposed to lay her body there, beside his, this was not done, and at Florence, in a sarcophagus designed by Sir Frederick Leighton, hers still rests.
On the walls of Casa Guidi the town of Florence placed a marble slab inscribed by Tommaseo, the Italian poet, thus:
ELISABETTA BARRETT BROWNING
CHE IN CUORE DI DONNA CONCILIAVA
SCIENZA DI DOTTO E SPIRITO DI POETA
E FECE DEL SUO VERSO AUREO ANELLO
FRA ITALIA E INGHILTERRA.
PONE QUESTA LAPIDE
FIRENZE GRATA
1861.
Alluding to this rare gold ring of verse linking Italy and England, Robert Browning added the crowning memorial in 1868-1869 when he dedicated "The Ring and the Book" to his "Lyric Love," praying that his ring of verse might render hers duty and lie outside hers in guardianship.
- ↑ To this Sidmouth interval, or earlier still, belongs, if it belongs anywhere, a time spent in France, according to Mr. Ingram, where, he says, she pursued her studies and "contracted at least one strong friendship." But apart from a conjecture, also of Mr. Ingram's, that the verses in the volume of 1833 addressed "To Victoire on her Marriage" refer to a French girl she met in Paris, there is no evidence of such a sojourn in France, and there is some evidence against it in a letter she wrote in 1838 to Mr. John Kenyon. She speaks in it of a friend (Miss Thomson), who has been in Paris, and then, with lively metaphor, she compares England's barbaric pride in its old-time conventions, its nose rings and tattooing, with the thinner rind and livelier sap she attributes to life on the continent. "That," she says, she can see "in the books and the traditions," and hence can understand people who like living in France and Germany: and she believes she should like it herself. It is not easy to believe that a discrimination so alert as hers would not have added more direct observations if she had had any such even small chance, as Mr. Ingram asserts, to make any at first-hand. Again writing, in 1845, to Robert Browning of the signal disadvantages she labored under in her art through her seclusion in the country and ignorance of aught but books, she calls herself a "blind poet," since her "brothers and sisters of the earth were names" to her, and she "had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing, in fact." Travel, even across the channel, then, seems unlikely; and as for "Victoire," may she not have been known through either Miss Thomson or Mrs. Martin, both of them friends whose travels she could make something of by proxy?