Robert Browning - The Complete Works of Robert Browning - Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition

Browning is made very happy by her words, and he feels that his poor praise “was nearly as felicitously brought out as a certain tribute to Tasso, which amused me in Rome some weeks ago,” he says. “In a neat penciling on the wall by his tomb at Sant’ Onofrio—‘ Alla cara memoria—di—Torquato Tasso—il Dottore Bernardini—offriva—il sequente Carme—tu ’—and no more; the good man, it would seem, breaking down with the over-load of love here! But my ‘ O tu ’ was breathed out most sincerely, and now you have taken it in gracious part, the rest will come after.” And then he must repeat (to himself) that her poetry must be infinitely more to him than his could be to her, “for you do what I have only hoped to do.” And he hopes she will nevermore talk of “the honor” of his acquaintance, but he will joyfully wait for the delight of her friendship. And to his fear that she may hate letter-writing she replies suggesting that nobody likes writing to everybody, but it would be strange and contradictory if she were not always delighted to hear from and to write to him; and she can read any manuscript except the writing on the pyramids, and if he will only treat her en bon camarade “without reference to the conventionalities of ‘ladies and gentlemen’”; taking no thought for his sentences (or hers), “nor for your badd speling nor for mine,” she is ready to sign and seal the contract of correspondence. And while she throws off the ceremony, she holds faster to the kindness. She is overjoyed with this cordial sympathy. “Is it true,” she asks, “that I know so little of you? And is it true that the productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature? It is not true to my mind,—and therefore it is not true that I know little of you, except in so far as it is true that your greatest works are to come.... I think—if I may dare name myself with you in the poetic relation—that we both have high views of the Art we follow and steadfast purpose in the pursuit of it.... And that neither of us would be likely to be thrown from the course by the casting of any Atalanta ball of speedy popularity.

“And after all that has been said and mused upon the anxiety experienced by the true artist,—is not the good immeasurably greater than the evil? For my part I sometimes wonder how, without such an object and purpose of life, people contrive to live at all.”

And her idea of happiness “lies deep in poetry and its associations.” And he replies that what he has printed “gives no knowledge of me,” and that he has never begun what he hopes he was born to begin and end—“R. B. a poem.”

“Do you know Tennyson?” she asks, “that is, with a face to face knowledge? I have great admiration for him,” she continues. “In execution he is exquisite,—and in music a most subtle weigher out to the ear of fine airs.” And she asks if he knows what it is to covet his neighbor’s poetry,—not his fame, but his poetry. It delights her to hear of his garden full of roses and his soul full of comforts. She finds the conception of his Pippa “most exquisite, and altogether original.”

In one of Miss Barrett’s letters a few weeks later there seems discernible a forecast of “Aurora Leigh,” when she writes that her chief intention is the writing “of a sort of novel-poem,” and one “as completely modern as ‘Geraldine’s Courtship,’ running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like ‘where angels fear to tread’; and so meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth, as I conceive of it, out plainly.” She is waiting for a story; she will not take one, because she likes to make her own. Here is without doubt the first conception of “Aurora Leigh.”

Touching on Life in another letter, she records her feeling that “the brightest place in the house is the leaning out of the window.”

Browning replies: “And pray you not to lean out of the window when my own foot is only on the stair.”...

“But I did not mean to strike a tragic chord,” she replies; “indeed I did not. As to ‘escaping with my life,’ it was just a phrase ... for the rest I am essentially better ... and feel as if it were intended for me to live and not to die.” And referring to a passage relating to Prometheus she asks: “And tell me, if Æschylus is not the divinest of all the divine Greek souls?” She continues:

“But to go back to the view of Life with the blind Hopes; you are not to think—whatever I may have written or implied—that I lean either to the philosophy or affectation which beholds the world through darkness instead of light ... and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion I come out with two lessons learned—the wisdom of cheerfulness and the duty of social intercourse. Anguish has instructed me in joy, and solitude in society.... What we call life is a condition of the soul, and the soul must improve in happiness and wisdom, except by its own fault.... And I do like to hear testimonies like yours, to happiness, and I feel it to be a testimony of a higher sort than the obvious one.... Remember, that as you owe your unscathed joy to God, you should pay it back to His world. I thank you for some of it already.”

And she feels how kind he is,—how gently and kindly he speaks to her. In his next letter he alludes with much feeling to her idea of the poem-novel:

“The Poem you propose to make; the fresh, fearless, living work you describe, is the only Poem to be undertaken now by you or any one who is a poet at all; the only reality, only effective piece of service to be rendered God or man; it is what I have been all my life intending to do, and now shall be much nearer doing since you will be along with me. And you can do it, I know and am sure,—so sure that I could find it in my heart to be jealous of your stopping on the way even to translate the Prometheus....”

The lovers, for such they already are, however unconsciously to both, fall into a long discussion of Prometheus, and the Greek drama in general, and in another letter, with allusion to his begging her to take her own good time in writing, she half playfully proffers that it is her own bad time to which she must submit. “This implacable weather!” she writes; “this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and the moon!... There will be a May and June if we live to see such things,” and then she speaks of seeing him besides, and while she recognizes it is morbid to shrink and grow pale in the spirit, yet not all her fine philosophy about social duties quite carries her through. But “if he thinks she shall not like to see him, he is wrong, for all his learning.” What pathos of revelation of this brave, celestial spirit, tenanting the most fragile of bodies, is read in the ensuing passage:

“What you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts of your life and mine. You seem to have drunken of the cup of life full with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly, or with sorrow for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, known more, of society, than I, who am hardly to be called young now. I grew up in the country, had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries.... Books and dreams were what I lived in—and domestic life seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass.... Why, if I live on and escape this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labor under signal disadvantages, that I am, in a manner, a blind poet?... I have had much of the inner life ... but how willingly would I exchange some of this ponderous, helpless knowledge of books for some experience of life.... But grumbling is a vile thing, and we should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them enough.... Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write—it is life for me. Why, what is it to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe,—but to feel the life in you down all the fibers of being, passionately and joyfully....