Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an author at an earlier date than her husband. As early as 1826 she published a poetical Essay on Mind, along with other pieces; but her first work of any note was The Seraphim (1838). Her introduction to Browning took place in 1846. She was prepared to admire him, for she already admired his work, and had expressed her opinion of it in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship. An accident in girlhood had made her a confirmed invalid; but in spite of this the two poets fell in love, and were married in the autumn of the year when they first met. They left England and settled at Florence for the sake of Mrs. Browning’s health; and there, in 1861, she died.
There are two points of special and peculiar interest in connexion with Mrs. Browning. She has only one possible rival, Christina Rossetti, for the honour of being the greatest poetess who has written in English; and her marriage with Browning formed a union without parallel in literature. Moreover, in relation to Mrs. Browning’s works, sex is not a mere accident. She is a woman in all her modes of thought and feeling, and she is so especially in her very finest work. Her greatest contribution to literature, Sonnets from the Portuguese, derives its unique interest from being the expression of the woman’s love; and A Child’s Grave at Florence could hardly have been written but by a woman and a mother.
Mrs. Browning’s influence upon her husband was remarkably slight; his influence upon her was of mixed effect, but good predominated. The questionable element is seen when we compare The Seraphim with poems like Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Aurora Leigh (1857). The Seraphim, a lyrical drama, though immature, is of high promise. It is, above all, right in tone and method; for the writer, Mrs. Browning, was not really a thinker; woman-like, she felt first, and the attempt to translate her feeling into thought was an error. She was by nature prone to this error, and Browning strengthened her innate ambition. But she never succeeds where thought is suffered to predominate. Casa Guidi Windows is sadly wanting in force and concentration; and the ambitious metrical romance of Aurora Leigh would be much improved by being compressed within half its bulk. It is moreover always the thought, the social discussions, the parts meant to be especially profound, that are wrong; the poetic feeling is sound and just, and its expression is often excellent. Minor influences of Browning may be traced in his wife’s rhymes and rhythms; but while his effects, though often grotesque and uncouth, are striking and memorable, hers are feeble and commonplace.
But if Browning inspired his wife with a false ideal, he, on the other hand, lifted the shadow from her life, and gave her courage and hope, and the measure of health without which her work could not have been accomplished. Her best poems are related to him directly, like the Sonnets from the Portuguese, or indirectly, like A Child’s Grave at Florence; for there her own child is an influence.
Beyond question, the Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) are Mrs. Browning’s most valuable contribution to literature. They are valuable even beyond their intrinsic merits. Good as they are, these sonnets have neither massiveness and subtlety of thought on the one hand, nor melody and charm on the other, sufficient to secure a place beside the greatest poetry. But they are the genuine utterance of a woman’s heart, at once humbled and exalted by love; and in this respect they are unique. The woman’s passion, from the woman’s point of view, has seldom found expression at all in literature, and this particular aspect of it never. Hence, while it would be absurd to say that these sonnets are, as pieces of poetry, equal to the sonnets of Wordsworth or of Milton, it is not so unreasonable to question whether their removal would not leave a more irreparable gap in literature.
Mrs. Browning is on the whole happiest as a sonnet-writer. The sonnet form restrained that tendency to diffuseness which was her besetting sin, and so the fetters proved, as they so often do, to be the means whereby she moved more freely. Her purpose however frequently required the use of other forms. Thus, she sometimes aimed at romantic effects. She did so with no great success in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, a kind of Lord of Burleigh from the other side, spoilt by excessive length. The Rhyme of the Duchess May is much better. The Romaunt of Margret altogether fails to catch the weird effect aimed at, while The Lay of the Brown Rosary succeeds. But apart from the Sonnets from the Portuguese and some of the miscellaneous sonnets, her truest note is pathos. Bertha in the Lane, a simple story, sentimental but not weak, is an example of one aspect of it; A Child’s Grave, already mentioned, of another; and, perhaps highest of all, The Cry of the Children of a third.
Mrs. Browning had a dangerous facility of composition, and much that she wrote is poor. Few poets gain more by selection. A small volume of pieces judiciously chosen would convince the reader that he was listening to the voice of a true and even a great poet; but his sense of this is lost in the flatness and weariness of the five superfluous volumes.
Edward FitzGerald
(1809-1883).
There remains one very remarkable poet, Edward FitzGerald, whom it is difficult to place. Formally, he ought to be classed merely as an interpreter of other men’s thoughts; but in reality he is an original poet of no mean rank, and his friendship with Tennyson, together with the strong intellectual quality of his principal work, gives him an affinity to the group now under discussion. His first noteworthy publication was a fine prose dialogue, Euphranor (1851), but his principal work was the translation of poetry. He translated six dramas of Calderon (1853), the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), Salámán and Absál (1856), and the Agamemnon of Æschylus, which, having been first privately printed, was published anonymously in 1876.
Probably no other translator ever showed equal originality. As a rule, the reader of a version of poetry, even if he be unacquainted with the original, feels a sense of loss. Pope’s Homer is ‘a pretty poem;’ but not only is it not Homer, we feel that it is not worthy of the great reputation of Homer; and there is not one of the numerous versions of Faust but falls far short of the force and suggestiveness of the original. It is not so with FitzGerald. To some extent in the case of all his poems, but eminently in the case of the Rubáiyát, we feel that we are in the presence of a man of native power; and some Persian scholars hold that in this instance the order of merit is reversed, and that FitzGerald is greater than Omar.