In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is
A youth who as with toil and travel
Had grown quite weak and gray before his time.
[Footnote: Prince Athanase, a fragment.]
In Alastor, too, we see the hero wasting away until
His limbs were lean; his scattered hair,
Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,
Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within his withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone.
The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile.
Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast by Fate into the body of a woman?
As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of endeavor in the last century, it of course has left its traces in the realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be light,—in fact, it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most of the blows struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few efforts to parry them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, in verse concerned with specific woman poets, men have not failed to give them their due, or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall, Miriam.] and Sappho, [Footnote: Southey, Sappho; Freneau, Monument of Phaon; Kingsley, Sappho, Swinburne, On the Cliffs, Sapphics, Anactoria; Cale Young Rice, Sappho's Death Song; J. G. Percival, Sappho; Percy Mackaye, Sappho and Phaon; W. A. Percy, Sappho in Lenkos.] to the long list of nineteenth century female poets—Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: Browning, One Word More, Preface to The Ring and the Book; James Thomson, B. V., E. B. B.; Sidney Dobell, On the Death of Mrs. Browning.] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne, Ballad of Appeal to Christina Rossetti, New Year's Eve, Dedication to Christina Rossetti.] Emily Brontë, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, Emily Brontë.] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson, Sister Songs, On her Photograph, To a Poet Breaking Silence.] Felicia Hemans, [Footnote: L. E. Maclean, Felicia Hemans.] Adelaide Proctor, [Footnote: Edwin Arnold, Adelaide Anne Proctor.] Helen Hunt, [Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder, H. H.] Emma Lazarus [Footnote: Ibid., To E. Lazarus.]—one finds woman the subject of complimentary verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of here, we should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to their greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made it plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of her style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail her "manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne, On the Cliffs.] So the feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise.
As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing thecourage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See To the Author of "A Fatal Friendship."] and Tom Moore [Footnote: See To Mrs. Henry Tighe.] both deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play, The Blue Stocking, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: See The Catalogue. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is The Squinting Poetess.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See To a Poetess. More seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See To Write as Your Sweet Mother Does.] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical natures. Bulwer Lytton phrased the old-fashioned distinction between his hero and heroine,
In each lay poesy—for woman's heart
Nurses the stream, unsought and oft unseen;
And if it flow not through the tide of art,
Nor win the glittering daylight—you may ween
It slumbers, but not ceases, and if checked
The egress of rich words, it flows in thought,
And in its silent mirror doth reflect
Whate'er affection to its banks hath brought.
[Footnote: Milton.]
Yet the poetess has two of the strongest poets of the romantic period on her side. Wordsworth, in his many allusions to his sister Dorothy, appeared to feel her possibilities equal to his own, and in verses on an anthology, he offered praise of a more general nature to verse written by women. [Footnote: See To Lady Mary Lowther.] And beside the sober judgment of Wordsworth, one may place the unbounded enthusiasm of Shelley, who not only praises extravagantly the verse of an individual, Emilia Viviani, [Footnote: See the introduction to Epipsychidion.] but who also offers us an imaginary poetess of supreme powers,—Cythna, in The Revolt of Islam.