Genius and Ink

by Virginia Woolf

Bedtime had come; and the day had been somehow disappointing.

  How could she mend matters? How could she save money so that Martin could buy the phaeton upon which his heart had been set ever since they were married? She might save on dress, for she did not mind what she wore; but alas! Martin was very particular still; he did not like her to dress in linen. So she must manage better in the house, and she was not formed to manage servants. Thus she began to dwell upon those happy days before she had gone to Tingmouth, before she had married, before she had nine servants and a phaeton and ever so many dogs. She began to brood over that still more distant time when she had first known the Burneys and they had sat ‘browsing over my little [fire] and eating good things out of the closet by the fire side’. Her thoughts turned to all those friends whom she had lost, to that ‘lovd society which I remember with the greatest pleasure’; and she could never forget in particular the paternal kindness of Dr. Burney. Oh, she sighed as she sat alone in Norfolk among the pheasants and the fields, how she wished that ‘none of my family had ever quitted his sheltering roof till placed under the protection of a worthy husband’. For her own marriage – but enough; they had been very much in love; they had been very happy; she must go and do her hair; she must try to please her Rishy. And so the obscure history of the Rishtons fades away, save what is preserved by the sprightly pen of Maria’s half-sister in the pages of Evelina. And yet – the reflection will occur – if Fanny had seen more of Maria and more of Mr. Crispen and even more of Miss Bowdler and the Tingmouth set, her later books, had they been less refined, might have been as amusing as her first.

  Aurora Leigh

  By one of those ironies of fashion that might have amused the Brownings themselves, it seems likely that they are now far better known in the flesh than they have ever been in the spirit. Passionate lovers, in curls and side whiskers, oppressed, defiant, eloping – in this guise thousands of people must know and love the Brownings who have never read a line of their poetry. They have become two of the most conspicuous figures in the bright and animated procession which, thanks to our modern habit of printing letters and writing memoirs and sitting to be photographed, keeps step with the paler, subtler, more obscure shades who, in times gone by, lived solely between the pages of their books. To such immortality the Brownings, of course, laid themselves peculiarly open. Their story appeals to all that is dramatic and romantic in our natures. He must be dull, blind and no better than a bookworm who does not unravel the story of their hearts with enthusiasm and pore with delight over the picture of tiny Miss Barrett issuing one September morning from the dark house in Wimpole-street with Flush under her arm and the maid Wilson following behind to meet Browning, Italy, health and freedom in the church round the corner.

  But it cannot be denied that the works of the Brownings have lost lustre even as much as their persons have gained it. ‘Sordello’, The Ring and the Book, Men and Women and the rest are said to have little significance and little resonance in modern ears. Is it worth while, people ask, to sort this tangle of untidy verbiage in order to find the rather dubious treasures of a hearty, cheerful middle-class mind concealed beneath? As for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her fate as a writer is far worse than her husband’s. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her poems, nobody troubles to put her in her place. One has only to compare her reputation with Christina Rossetti’s to trace her decline. Christina Rossetti mounts irresistibly to the first place among English women poets. Elizabeth, so much more loudly applauded during her lifetime, falls farther and farther behind. The primers dismiss her with contumely. Her importance, they say, ‘has now become merely historical. Neither education nor association with her husband ever succeeded in teaching her the value of words and a sense of form.’ In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters, where, in company with Mrs. Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold and Robert Montgomery she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.

  If, therefore, we take Aurora Leigh from the shelf it is not so much in order to read it as to muse with kindly condescension over this token of bygone fashion, as we toy with the fringes of our grandmothers’ mantles and muse over alabaster models of the Taj Mahal which once adorned their drawing-room tables. But to the Victorians, undoubtedly, the book was very dear. Thirteen editions of Aurora Leigh had been demanded by the year 1873. And, to judge from the dedication, Mrs. Browning herself was not afraid to say that she set great store by it – ‘the most mature of my works’, she calls it, ‘and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered’. Her letters show that she had had the book in mind for many years. She was brooding over it when she first met Browning, and her intention with regard to it forms almost the first of those confidences about their work which the lovers delighted to share. ‘… my chief intention’, she wrote, ‘just now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem … 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 of it out plainly. That is my intention.’ But for reasons which later become clear, she hoarded her intention throughout the ten astonishing years of escape and happiness; and when at last the book appeared in 1856 she might well feel that she had poured into it the best that she had to give. Perhaps the hoarding and the saturation which resulted have something to do with the surprise that awaits us. At any rate we cannot read the first twenty pages of Aurora Leigh without becoming aware that the Ancient Mariner who lingers, for unknown reasons, at the porch of one book and not of another has us by the hand, and makes us listen like a three years child while Mrs. Browning pours out in nine volumes of blank verse the story of Aurora Leigh. Speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence – these are the qualities that hold us enthralled. Floated off our feet by them we learn how Aurora was the child of an Italian mother ‘whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing her when she was scarcely four years old’. Her father was ‘an austere Englishman, Who, after a dry life-time spent at home In college-learning, law and parish talk, Was flooded with a passion unaware’, but died, too, and the child was sent back to England to be brought up by an aunt. The aunt, of the well-known family of the Leighs, stood upon the hall step of her country house dressed in black to welcome her. Her somewhat narrow forehead was braided tight with brown hair pricked with grey; she had a close, mild mouth; eyes of no colour; and cheeks like roses pressed in books, ‘Kept more for ruth than pleasure, – if past bloom, Past fading also’. The lady had lived a quiet life, exercising her Christian gifts upon knitting stockings, and stitching petticoats ‘because we are of one flesh, after all, and need one flannel’. At her hand Aurora suffered the education that was thought proper for women. She learnt a little French, a little algebra; the internal laws of the Burmese empire; what navigable river joins itself to Lara; what census of the year five was taken at Klagenfurt; also how to draw nereids neatly draped, to spin glass, stuff birds, and model flowers in wax. For the aunt liked a woman to be womanly. Of an evening she did cross stitch and owing to some mistake in her choice of silk, once embroidered a shepherdess with pink eyes. Under this torture of women’s education the passionate Aurora exclaimed, certain women have died; others pine; a few who have, as Aurora had, ‘relations with the unseen’, survive, and walk demurely, and are civil to their cousins and listen to the vicar and pour out tea. Aurora herself was blessed with a little room. It was green papered, had a green carpet and there were green curtains to the bed, as if to match the insipid greenery of the English countryside. There she retired; there she read. ‘I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name, Piled high, packed large, where, creeping in and out … like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of mastodon’ she read and read. The mouse indeed (it is the way of Mrs. Browning’s mice) took wings
and plunged for ‘It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth – ’Tis then we get the right good from a book’. And so she read and read; until her cousin Romney called to walk with her, or the painter Vincent Carrington ‘whom men judge hardly as bee-bonneted Because he holds that paint a body well you paint a soul by implication’, tapped on the window.

  This hasty abstract of the first volume of Aurora Leigh does it of course no sort of justice; but having gulped down the original much as Aurora herself advises, soul-forward, headlong, we find ourselves in a state where some attempt at the ordering of our multitudinous impressions becomes imperative. The first of these impressions and the most pervasive is the sense of the writer’s presence. Through the voice of Aurora the character, the circumstances, the idiosyncrasies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning ring in our ears. Mrs. Browning could no more conceal herself than she could control herself, a sign no doubt of imperfection in an artist, but a sign also that life has impinged upon art more than life should. Again and again in the pages we have read, Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. The idea of the poem, we must remember, came to her in the early forties when the relation between a woman’s art and a woman’s life was unnaturally close, so that it is impossible for the most austere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his eyes should be fixed upon the page. And as everybody knows, the life of Elizabeth Barrett was of a nature to affect the most authentic and individual of gifts. Her mother had died when she was a child; she had read profusely and privately; her favourite brother was drowned; her health broke down; she had been immured by the tyranny of her father in almost conventual seclusion in a bedroom in Wimpole-street. But instead of rehearsing the well-known facts, it is better to read in her own words her own account of the effect they had upon her.

  I have lived only inwardly [she wrote] 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, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country – I had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped to the ground like an untrained honeysuckle … It was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it … Books and dream were what I lived in – and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass. And so time passed and passed – and afterwards, when my illness came … and no prospect (as appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness … that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave – that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact … And do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? Why, if I live on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under signal disadvantages – that I am, in a manner, as a blind poet? Certainly, there is compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main. But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some …

  She breaks off with three little dots, and we may take advantage of her pause, to turn once more to Aurora Leigh.

  What damage had her life done her as a poet? A great one, we cannot deny. For it is clear as we turn the pages of Aurora Leigh, or of the Letters – one often echoes the other – that the mind which found its natural expression in this swift and chaotic poem about real men and women was not the mind to profit by solitude. A lyrical, a scholarly, a fastidious mind might have used seclusion and solitude to perfect its powers. Tennyson asked no better than to live with books in the heart of the country. But the mind of Elizabeth Barrett was lively and secular and satirical. She was no scholar. Books were to her not an end in themselves but a substitute for living. She raced through folios because she was forbidden to scamper on the grass. She wrestled with Aeschylus and Plato because it was out of the question that she should argue about politics with live men and women. Her favourite reading as an invalid was Balzac and George Sand and other ‘immortal improprieties’ because ‘they kept the colour in my life to some degree’. Nothing is more striking when at last she broke the prison bars than the fervour with which she flung herself into the life of the moment. She loved to sit in a café and watch people passing; she loved the arguments and politics and strife of the modern world. The past and its ruins, even the past of Italy and Italian ruins, interested her much less than the theories of Mr. Hume the medium, or the politics of Napoleon, Emperor of the French. Italian pictures, Greek poetry roused in her a clumsy and conventional enthusiasm in strange contrast with the original independence of her mind when it applied itself to actual facts.

  Such being her natural bent it is not surprising that even in the depths of her sick room her mind turned to modern life as a subject for poetry. She waited, wisely, until her escape had given her some measure of knowledge and proportion. But it cannot be doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her irreparable damage as an artist. She had lived shut off, guessing at what was outside, and inevitably magnifying what was within. The loss of Flush, the spaniel, affected her as the loss of a child might have affected another woman. The tap of ivy on the pane became the thrash of trees in a gale. Every sound was enlarged, every incident exaggerated, for the silence of the sick room was profound and the monotony of Wimpole-street was intense. When at last she was able to ‘rush into drawing-rooms and the like and meet face to face without mask the Humanity of the age and speak the truth of it out plainly’, she was too weak to stand the shock. Ordinary daylight, current gossip, the usual traffic of human beings left her exhausted, ecstatic and dazzled into a state where she saw so much and felt so much that she did not altogether know what she felt or what she saw.

  Aurora Leigh, the novel-poem, is not, therefore, the masterpiece that it might have been. Rather it is a masterpiece in embryo; a work whose genius floats diffused and fluctuating in some pre-natal stage waiting the final stroke of creative power to bring it into being. Stimulating and boring, ungainly and eloquent, monstrous and exquisite, all by turns, it overwhelms and bewilders; but, nevertheless, it still commands our interest and inspires our respect. For it becomes clear as we read that, whatever Mrs. Browning’s faults, she was one of those rare writers who risk themselves adventurously and disinterestedly in an imaginative life which is independent of their private lives and demands to be considered apart from personalities. Her ‘intention’ survives; the interest of her theory redeems much that is faulty in her practice. Abridged and simplified from Aurora’s argument in the fifth book, that theory runs something like this. The sole work of poets, she said, is to present their own age, not Charlemagne’s. More passion takes place in drawing-rooms than at Roncesvalles with Roland and his knights. ‘To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, Cry out for togas and the picturesque, Is fatal – foolish too.’ For living art presents and records real life, and the only life we can truly know is our own. But what form, she asks, can a poem on modern life take? The drama is impossible, for only servile and docile plays have any chance of success. Moreover, what we (in 1846) have to say about life is not fit for ‘boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume; our stage is now the soul itself’. What then can she do? The problem is difficult, performance is bound to fall short of endeavour; but she has at least wrung her life-blood on to every page of her book, and, for the rest, ‘Let me think of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit … Keep up the fire and leave the generous flames to shape themselves.’ And so the fire blazed and the flames leapt high.

  The desire to d
eal with modern life in poetry was not confined to Miss Barrett. Robert Browning said that he had had the same ambition all his life. Coventry Patmore’s ‘Angel in the House’ and Clough’s ‘Bothie’ were both attempts of the same kind and preceded Aurora Leigh by some years. It was natural enough. The novelists were dealing triumphantly with modern life in prose. Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Cranford, The Warden, Scenes from Clerical Life, Richard Feverel all trod fast on each other’s heels between the years 1847 and 1860. The poets may well have felt, with Aurora Leigh, that modern life had an intensity and a meaning of its own. Why should these spoils fall solely into the laps of the prose writers? Why should the poet be forced back to the remoteness of Charlemagne and Roland, to the toga and the picturesque, when the humours and tragedies of village life, drawing-room life, club life, and street life all cried aloud for celebration? It was true that the old form in which poetry had dealt with life – the drama – was obsolete; but was there none other that could take its place? Mrs. Browning, convinced of the divinity of poetry, pondered, seized as much as she could of actual experience, and then at last threw down her challenge to the Brontës and the Thackerays in nine books of blank verse. It was in blank verse that she sang of Shoreditch and Kensington; of my aunt and the vicar, of Romney Leigh and Vincent Carrington, of Marian Erle and Lord Howe, of fashionable weddings and drab suburban streets, and bonnets and whiskers and railway trains. The poet can treat of these things, she exclaimed, as well as of knights and dames, moats and drawbridges and castle courts. But can they? Let us see what happens to a poet when he poaches upon a novelist’s preserves and gives us not an epic or a lyric but the story of many lives that move and change and are inspired by the interests and passions that are ours in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria.