ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

IT

T is a matter of regret that there is no adequate biography of one of the very few women who have achieved real eminence in literature. Mrs. Richmond Ritchie has indeed written an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, but this from the nature of things could not be much more than a record. In the series of Eminent Women, Mr. Ingram has attempted to supply the want, and after reading his book through more than once we are bound to say that we regret that he has been first in the field. However, as Mrs. Browning herself says, "we get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book."

When Horne in the New Spirit of the Age gave some biographical particulars about Miss Barrett to the public, she wrote to him as follows:-"My dear Mr. Horne, the public do not care for me enough to care at all for my biography. If you say anything of me (and I am not affected enough to pretend to wish you to be absolutely silent, if you see any occasion to

speak) it must be as a writer of rhymes, and not as the heroine of a biography. And then as to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage could have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in thoughts." And again later, when the paper had appeared :-"You are my friend I hope, but you do not on that account lose the faculty of judging me or the right of judging me frankly. I do loathe the whole system of personal compliment as a consequence of personal interest. . . . I set more price on your sincerity than on your praise, and consider it more closely connected with the quality called kindI want kindness, the rarest of all nearly-which is truth."

ness.

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Those are Mrs. Browning's own deliberate views, written it is true in early life, as to her own biography. That a biography need not be critical has been amply proved by Boswell; on the other hand, this only applies to a biography written by a contemporary friend, and even then it must be absolutely faithful. Boswell, it is true, admired too deeply to criticise. If he ever thought his subject ungenerous, ungenial, tyrannical, he does not say so; but at least he does not shrink from recording experiences which might suggest those qualities to readers who did not admire as he did. But any one who sits

down to trace the history of one with whom he had no personal acquaintance, when that life is closed by death and rounded by the past, is bound to make some effort to discriminate. In Mr. Ingram's book the quality of discrimination is conspicuously wanting. He has evidently

conceived an ideal and done his best to transmit it to others. That he has not altogether succeeded in disguising his heroine is no fault of his; as Miss Barrett complains in another sentence of the letter from which we have been quoting" he has rouged her up to the eyes."

We must only touch upon two or three of the most salient points of Mrs. Browning's biography. Her life was uneventful enough, as far as events go, and its outlines are sufficiently well known. The impression which it leaves upon a reader is strangely mixed. The intellect with which we are brought into contact is profoundly impressive; the spectacle of a life so vivid and untiring, so hopeful and ardent, lived under the pressure of constant physical suffering, and the still more marked presence of morbidity both of thought and feeling, is inspiring and moving. But there is a want of wholesomeness about a great deal of it; there is a sense of failure somewhere. This reveals itself in its concrete form perhaps most clearly in the fact that with all the presence of high and animating thoughts, with the resolve of self-dedication to the poetic office,

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with the assiduous and systematic labour to cultivate the art of expression, yet obscurity seems to haunt so many efforts, and the instinct of discrimination so frequently appears to slumber. Mrs. Browning as a letter-writer is disappointing; again and again there is a touch of true feeling, a noble thought, but with all this there is a want of incisiveness, a wearisome seriousness, which of all qualities is the one that ought not to obtrude itself, a strange lack of humour, a certain strain a scraping of the soul, as Tourgenieff has it. And this may, we think, be best expressed by the pathetic words that fall from her in the letter already quoted: her history was that of a bird in a cage. Not only from the physical fact that she was for many years of her life an invalid-but mentally and morally also she was caged, by imaginary social fictions, by certain ingrained habits of thought; and, last of all, as a passionate idealist, she saw with painful persistence and in horrible contrast the infinite possibilities of human nature and the limitations of low realities.

It is a curious fact which meets us at the very threshold of her life, that the author of "The Cry of the Children," the passionate partisan of the Abolitionist cause in America and of freedom in Italy, came from generations of slaveowners. In fact the Jamaica Emancipation Act cost her the loss of her Herefordshire home,

by resulting in a large decrease in her father's fortune. It seems indeed typical of her sentiment, typical of the limitations and impersonality of her feelings that, among all her bitter reveries and passionate revolts against human tyrannies, it never (so far as we can judge from her correspondence) seems to have occurred to her that the wealth and comfort with which she was surrounded, the very dower of books that made life possible, was actually wrung from generations of slave-labour, the forced toil of hundreds of impotent lives. No one would ask for, or even hint at expecting, even from the most fantastic idealist, a renunciation of luxury thus acquired; but it is strange that the idea seems never to have entered her head.

She spent a happy though precocious childhood, but by the age of fifteen was already condemned to that bitter isolation of invalid life which, when it falls on a strong and vivid personality, has, fortunately for human nature, a purifying and ennobling effect. Intellectual effort became first the anodyne of physical evil, then the earnest aim of her life.

She never seems to have doubted as to the form that her impulsive need for expression was to take. "You," she writes to her father in the dedication of her second volume of poems, "you are a witness how if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen