It is disappointing to the agitator to find the question dropping out of sight in later verse. In the Victorian period it comes most plainly to the surface in Browning, and while the exquisite praise of his
Lyric love, half angel and half bird,
reveals him a believer in at least sporadic female genius, his position on the question of championing the entire sex is at least equivocal. In The Two Poets of Croisic he deals with the eighteenth century in France, where the literary woman came so gloriously into her own. Browning represents a man writing under a feminine pseudonym and winning the admiration of the celebrities of the day—only to have his verse tossed aside as worthless as soon as his sex is revealed. Woman wins by her charm, seems to be the moral. A hopeful sign, however, is the fact that of late years one poet produced his best work under a feminine nom de plume, and found it no handicap in obtaining recognition. [Footnote: William Sharp, "Fiona McLeod.">[ If indifference is the attitude of the male poet, not so of the woman writer. She insists that her work shall redound, not to her own glory, merely, but to that of her entire sex as well. For the most worthy presentation of her case, we must turn to Mrs. Browning, though the radical feminist is not likely to approve of her attitude. "My secret profession of faith," she admitted to Robert Browning, "is—that there is a natural inferiority of mind in women—of the intellect—not by any means of the moral nature—and that the history of Art and of genius testifies to this fact openly." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, July 4, 1845.] Still, despite this private surrender to the enemy, Mrs. Browning defends her sex well.
In a short narrative poem, Mother and Poet, Mrs. Browning claims for her heroine the sterner virtues that have been denied her by the average critic, who assigns woman to sentimental verse as her proper sphere. Of course her most serious consideration of the problem is to be found in Aurora Leigh. She feels that making her imaginary poet a woman is a departure from tradition, and she strives to justify it. Much of the debasing adulation and petty criticism heaped upon Aurora must have been taken from Mrs. Browning's own experience. Ignoring insignificant antagonism to her, Aurora is seriously concerned with the charges that the social worker, Romney Leigh, brings against her sex. Romney declares,
Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,—and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.
Aurora is obliged to acknowledge to herself that Romney is right in charging women with inability to escape from personal considerations. She confesses,
We women are too apt to look to one,
Which proves a certain impotence in art.
But in the end, and after much struggling, Aurora wins for her poetry even Romney's reluctant admiration. Mrs. Browning's implication seems to be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus, Echoes; Olive Dargan, Ye Who are to Sing.]
Of only less vital concern to poets than the question of the poet's physical constitution is the problem of his environment. Where will the chains of mortality least hamper his aspiring spirit?
In answer, one is haunted by the line,