The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
galloped on Moses, her black pony, through the Herefordshire lanes, and offered pagan sacrifices to some imaginary Athene, “with a bundle of sticks from the kitchen fire and a match begged from an indulgent housemaid.” In a letter to Richard Hengist Home, under date of October 5, 1843, in reply to a request of his for data for a biographical sketch of her for “The New Spirit of the Age,” she wrote:
“... And then as to stories, mine 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 passed in my thoughts. I wrote verses—as I dare say many have done who never wrote any poems—very early, at eight years of age, 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.”
When she was eleven or twelve, she amused herself by writing a great epic in four books, called “The Battle of Marathon,” which possessed her fancy. Her father took great pride in this, and, “bent upon spoiling me,” she laughingly said in later years, had fifty copies of this childish achievement printed, and there is one in the British Museum library to-day. No creator of prose romance could invent more curious coincidences than those of the similar trend of fancy that is seen between the childhood of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Her “Battle of Marathon” revealed how the Greek stories enchanted her fancy, and how sensitive was her ear in the imitation of the rhythm caught from Pope. This led her to the delighted study of Greek, that she might read its records at first hand; and Greek drew her into Latin, and from this atmosphere of classic lore, which, after all, is just as interesting to the average child as is the (too usual) juvenile pabulum, she drew her interest in thought and dream. The idyllic solitude in which she lived fostered all these mental excursions. “I had my fits of Pope and Byron and Coleridge,” she has related, “and read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the dramatists, and ate and drank Greek.... Do you know the Malvern Hills? The Hills of Piers Plowman’s Visions? They seem to me my native hills. Beautiful, beautiful they were, and I lived among them till I had passed twenty by several years.”
Mr. Moulton-Barrett was one of the earliest of social reformers. So much has been said, and, alas! with too much justice, it must be conceded, of his eccentric tyranny, his monomania,—for it amounted to that, in relation to the marriage of any of his children regarding which his refusal was insanely irrational,—that it is pleasant to study him for a moment in his more normal life. In Ledbury, the nearest village, he would hold meetings for the untaught people, read and pray with them, and this at a period when for a man of wealth to concern himself in social betterment was almost unknown. He was truly “the friend of the unfriended poor,” and by his side, with wondering, upturned, childish eyes, was the little Elizabeth, an ardent and sympathetic companion. Until quite recently there were still living those who remembered Mr. Barrett as this intelligent and active helper; and in the parish church is a monument to him, by the side of a gloriously decorated tomb of the fourteenth century, with an inscription to his memory that vividly recalls the work of one who strove to revive the simple faith in God that has always, in all nations and in all centuries, met every real need of life.
Mrs. Barrett, a sweet and gentle woman, without special force of character, died when Elizabeth was but twenty years of age; and it was some five years before her mother’s death that Elizabeth met with the accident, from the fall from her saddle when trying to mount her pony, that caused her life-long delicacy of health. Her natural buoyancy of spirits, however, never failed, and she was endowed with a certain resistless energy which is quite at variance with the legendary traditions that she was a nervous invalid.
Hardly less than Browning in his earliest youth, was Elizabeth Barrett “full of an intensest life.” Her Italian master one day told her that there was an unpronounceable English word that expressed her exactly, but which, as he could not give in English, he would express in his own tongue,—testa lunga. Relating this to Mr. Browning in one of her letters, she says: “Of course the signor meant headlong!—and now I have had enough to tame me, and might be expected to stand still in my stall. But you see I do not. Headlong I was at first, and headlong I continue,—precipitately rushing forward through all manner of nettles and briers instead of keeping the path; guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary,—tearing open letters, and never untying a string,—and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning.”
Impetuous, vivacious, with an inimitable sense of humor, full of impassioned vitality,—this was the real Elizabeth Barrett, whose characteristics were in no wise changed during her entire life. Always was she
“A creature of impetuous breath,”
full of vivacious surprises, and witty repartee.
Hope End was in the near vicinity of Eastnor Castle, a country seat of the Somersets; it is to-day one of the present homes of Lady Henry Somerset, and there are family records of long, sunny days that the young girl-poet passed at the castle, walking on the terraces that lead down to the still water, or lying idly in the boat as the ripples of the little lake lapped against the reeds and rushes that grew on the banks. In the castle library is preserved to-day an autograph copy of the first volume of Elizabeth Barrett’s poems, published when she was twenty, and containing that didactic “Essay on Mind” written when she was but seventeen, and of which she afterward said that it had “a pertness and a pedantry which did not even then belong to the character of the author,” and which she regretted, she went on to say, “even more than the literary defectiveness.” This volume was presented by her to a member of the Somerset family whose name is inscribed over that of her own signature.
During these years Hugh Stuart Boyd, the blind scholar, was living in Great Malvern, and one of Miss Barrett’s greatest pleasures was to visit and read Greek with him. He was never her “tutor,” in the literal sense, as has so widely been asserted, for her study of Greek was made with her brother Edward, under his tutor, a Mr. MacSweeney; but she read and talked of Greek literature (especially of the Christian poets) with him, and she loved to record her indebtedness to him “for many happy hours.” She wrote of him as one “enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and one of the most simple and upright of human beings.” The memory of her discussions with him is embalmed in her poem, “Wine of Cyprus,” which was addressed to him:
“And I think of those long mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio’s turnings,
Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek.”
Elizabeth Barrett was more than a student, however scholarly, of Greek. She had a temperamental affinity for the Greek poets, and such translations as hers of “Prometheus Bound” and Bion’s “Lament for Adonis,” identify her with the very life itself of Æschylus and Bion. In her essay on “The Greek Christian Poets” we find her saying: “We want the touch of Christ’s hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things ... Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets,... religious poets of whom the universal church and the world’s literature would gladly embrace more names than can be counted to either.”
All her work of these early years is in that same delicate microscopic handwriting of her later life. She laughingly professed a theory that “an immense amount of physical energy must go to the making of those immense, sweeping hand-writings achieved by some persons.” She instanced that of Landor, “who writes as if he had the sky for a copy-book and dotted his i’s in proportion.”
Poetry as a serious art was the most earnest object in the life of Elizabeth Barrett. To her poetry meant “life in life.”
“Art’s a service,—mark.”
The poetic vocation could hardly be said to be so much a conscious and definite choice with her as a predetermined destiny, and still it was both. The possibility of not being a poet could never have occurred to her. There could have been as little question of Beethoven’s