INTRODUCTION

It is interesting to see Elizabeth Barrett eager over the dead languages. In her own living language she was modern in her day, more modern than any contemporary except the poet whom, nearly twenty years after this letter was written and the controversy closed, she married. It was modern to write poetry as she wrote, with an emphatic use of modern prose words; unlike Wordsworth’s, not at all childlike as were his. Robert Browning and Elizabeth have a peculiar tone of defiance in their nineteenth-century English; in the most gentle Elizabeth’s verse it is nearly swaggering, certainly swashing and martial. Nothing could be more sharply cut off from the eighteenth century, and the seventeenth, and the sixteenth than the vocabulary of Aurora Leigh, and, English apart, nothing could be more separated from Antiquity than the style that was most characteristically hers. In her quieter moments, when she is not marching, in doublet and hose, the march of her blank verse, but pacing softly in the strictest measure of the bonds that all true poets so love—the bonds of numbers, stress, quantity, rhyme, and final shape—the great beauty of her sonnets proves her delight in that order, and in these the diction is inconspicuous. It is in the romantic poems, those that deal with the lady and the knight, that the modernism is again evident. Where, in her language, is any trace of her reading of the older English? Where in her style is any sign of her Latin and Greek? In her most characteristic work she does not sow with her hand; she tosses out the basketful, with a gesture generous but wilful. In one respect—the point on which viiithere was no question of deference to Antiquity—she shows none to her English masters. Thence her rhymes: “children” and “bewildering,” “islands” and “silence,” and the rest. She had the right to make these experiments, and it is as evident a sign of her resolute novelty as her husband’s different and less tolerable rhymes were of his. But we may take such rhymes not only as demonstrations of a new independence; they may have been in part due to her peculiar position as the most secluded of poets. Elizabeth Barrett saw and spoke to very few. She cannot have gathered much of the pronunciation of English that was then usual. The friend to whom as a girl she wrote this and other letters on the art of metre was so old as to be numbered among eighteenth-century authors; he was not of her time. If she had the habit of dropping her final g’s, for instance, there might be none to correct it. It is noticeable that she writes of the word “patriotism” as generally pronounced in five syllables. The accepted way is to sound it as only three—crowded ones, it is true, but only three, and any other way would seem to us provincial. Especially would an educated ear resent the pronouncing of the last three letters in “patriotism” in two syllables.

Elizabeth Barrett’s comments on a few of Milton’s lines leave her reader at liberty to accept them or depart from them. No authority except that of Milton’s shade will ever decide a question as to one of his lines (page 10): whether we should begin it with two rather strained iambic feet (which would be my scansion) or with a strained long syllable followed by a dactyl (which is hers). It is remarkable, by the way, that she never uses the word “stress” in writing of English prosody. It seems to me to be the only safe word; “accent” being alien and ambiguous, ixand “quantity” a valuable but nearly lawless part of our metre—present in every poet’s intention in his line, but perhaps best unnamed.

“Her glories shall never fade,” wrote Browning of his wedded poet (in regard, by the way, to a poem in which she rhymed “common” with “human”), and they never shall. She is within English literature for ever and ever. Coventry Patmore held poetry to be the gravest among the undertakings of man, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—child, maid, and wife—took her vocation with gravity, passion, and delight. In this controversy on “accents” ancient and modern, she withstands her old friend, literally foot to foot. She might even, but that she was humbly obstinate and courteous and sweet, have lost her temper over a matter so exciting. And what is so exciting to poets as these questions of their technique? If I had ever had a fierce passage of arms with Francis Thompson (but I never had) it would have been on the question of trochaic endings, and whether one might pause on them before carrying on the weak syllable to the next line. The girl who so passionately cared for her Greek was, in time, the great woman who wrote memorable English passionately. The slightness of the connexion between two such beloved studies seems an incident in her life not easily understood; but she was for poetry first and last.

ALICE MEYNELL.

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