The life and personality of Elizabeth Barrett Browning seem to explain her poetry. It is a life "without a catastrophe," except perhaps to her devoted father. And it is to this father's devotion that some of Mrs. Browning's poetical sins are due; for by him she was so pampered and shielded from every outside touch, that all the woes common to humanity grew for her into awful tragedies. Her life was abnormal and unreal,--an unreality that passed more or less into everything she did. Indeed, her resuscitation after meeting Robert Browning would mount into a miracle, unless it were realized that nothing in her former life had been quite as woful as it seemed. That Mrs. Browning was "a woman of real genius," even Edward Fitzgerald allowed; and in speaking of Shelley, Walter Savage Landor said, "With the exception of Burns, he [Shelley] and Keats were inspired with a stronger spirit of poetry than any other poet since Milton. I sometimes fancy that Elizabeth Barrett Browning comes next." This is very high praise from very high authority, but none too high for Mrs. Browning, for her best work has the true lyric ring, that spontaneity of thought and expression which comes when the singer forgets himself in his song and becomes tuneful under the stress of the moment's inspiration. All of Mrs. Browning's work is buoyed up by her luxurious and overflowing imagination. With all its imperfections of technique, its lapses of taste and faults of expression, it always remains poetry, throbbing with passion and emotion and rich in color and sound. She wrote because she must. Her own assertions notwithstanding, one cannot think of Mrs. Browning as sitting down in cold blood to compose a poem according to fixed rules of art. This is the secret of her shortcomings, as it is also the source of her strength, and in her best work raises her high above those who, with more technical skill, have less of the true poet's divine fire and overflowing imagination.
So in the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese,' written at a time when her woman's nature was thrilled to its very depths by the love of her "most gracious singer of high poems," and put forth as translations from another writer and tongue--in these her imperfections drop away, and she soars to marvelous heights of song. Such a lyric outburst as this, which reveals with magnificent frankness the innermost secrets of an ardently loving woman's heart, is unequaled in literature. Here the woman-poet is strong and sane; here she is free from obscurity and mannerism, and from grotesque rhymes. She has stepped out from her life of visions and of morbid woes into a life of wholesome reality and of "sweet reasonableness." Their literary excellence is due also to the fact that in the sonnet Mrs. Browning was held to a rigid form, and was obliged to curb her imagination and restrain her tendency to diffuseness of expression. Mr. Saintsbury goes so far as to say that the sonnet beginning--
"If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only--"
does not fall far short of Shakespeare.
'Aurora Leigh' gives rise to the old question, Is it advisable to turn a three-volume novel into verse? Yet Landor wrote about it:--"I am reading a poem full of thought and fascinating with fancy--Mrs. Browning's (Aurora Leigh.) In many places there is the wild imagination of Shakespeare.... I am half drunk with it. Never did I think I should have a good draught of poetry again." Ruskin somewhere considered it the greatest poem of the nineteenth century, "with enough imagination to set up a dozen lesser poets"; and Stedman calls it "a representative and original creation: representative in a versatile, kaleidoscopic presentment of modern life and issues; original, because the most idiosyncratic of its author's poems. An audacious speculative freedom pervades it, which smacks of the New World rather than the Old.... 'Aurora Leigh' is a mirror of contemporary life, while its learned and beautiful illustrations make it almost a handbook of literature and the arts.... Although a most uneven production, full of ups and downs, of capricious or prosaic episodes, it nevertheless contains poetry as fine as its author has given us elsewhere, and enough spare inspiration to set up a dozen smaller poets. The flexible verse is noticeably her own, and often handled with as much spirit as freedom." Mrs. Browning herself declared it the most mature of her works, "and the one into which my highest convictions upon life and art have entered." Consider this:--
"For 'tis not in mere death that men die most:
And after our first girding of the loins
In youth's fine linen and fair broidery,
To run up-hill and meet the rising sun,
We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,
While others gird us with the violent bands
Of social figments, feints, and formalisms,
Reversing our straight nature, lifting up
Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,
Head downwards on the cross-sticks of the world.
Yet He can pluck us from that shameful cross.
God, set our feet low and our foreheads high,
And teach us how a man was made to walk!"
Or this:--
"I've waked and slept through many nights and days
Since then--but still that day will catch my breath
Like a nightmare. There are fatal days, indeed,
In which the fibrous years have taken root
So deeply, that they quiver to their tops
Whene'er you stir the dust of such a day."
Again:--
"Passion is
But something suffered after all--
. . . . . While Art
Sets action on the top of suffering."