Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  It is well for thinkers of England to remember reverently, while, taking thought of her poetry, they stand among the gorse,—that if we may boast now of more honoured localities, of Shakespeare’s ‘rocky Avon,’ and Spenser’s ‘soft-streaming Thames,’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Rydal Mere,’ still our first holy poet-ground is there.

  After this glimpse of personal foundation myth, Elizabeth goes on to outline a pantheon built from a tripod of Geoffrey Chaucer (Dilke’s parameter), William Shakespeare (of course), and the currently unfashionable William Wordsworth. She mounts a spirited, ad hominem defence of the seventy-two-year-old, not yet Poet Laureate, whose masterpiece The Prelude will remain unknown until it is posthumously published eight years from now. Along the way she names Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning as coming men, arguing that too many poets:

  do not live by their truth, but hold back their full strength from Art because they do not reverence it fully; and all booksellers cry aloud […] that poetry will not sell; and certain critics utter melancholy frenzies, that poetry is worn out for ever […] In the meantime […] the Tennysons and the Brownings, and other high-gifted spirits, will work, wait on.

  By contrast, her vision of the ‘heroic life of poetic duty’, which she elides with the figure of Wordworth, has an almost Revivalist fervour:

  the long life’s work for its sake—the work of observation, of meditation, of reaching past models into nature, of reaching past nature unto God; and the early life’s loss for its sake—the loss of the popular cheer, of the critical assent, and of the ‘money in the purse’.

  Critical intelligence, however idealistic, needs to keep engaging. Elizabeth’s next piece for The Athenaeum, at the end of August, is a review of Wordsworth’s Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years. The book’s publisher is Edward Moxon, a driven, ambitious editor who’s also recently published Mary Shelley’s first posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (the swiftly withdrawn 1839 edition), Alfred Tennyson’s reputation-making Poems of 1842, and Robert Browning’s Sordello (1840), as well as a series of leading dramatists. He is, in short, the publisher of choice, and by the end of the year Elizabeth is proposing a volume of her own poems to him. Or rather, she sends her brother George to intercede on her behalf.

  The meeting doesn’t go well. ‘No—Moxon wont have my poems’, Elizabeth tells Miss Mitford. This is a rude awakening. She’d been planning to collect her ‘fugitive poetry to make a volume’ that might ensure a positive reception for the long poem she wants to work on next. But the business-like editor:

  ‘did protest’ like a bookseller, his ‘respect for Miss Barrett’s genius,’—the only drawback being that he preferred having nothing to do with her. He said that he happened to be personally connected with several poets, & from mere personal motives had been drawn in to publish their poems—that they did not sell .. […] that Mr Tennyson’s sold the best—indeed he might almost say that his last volume had succeeded—that Wordsworth’s were only beginning to sell.

  When Moxon changes his mind the following spring Elizabeth will be delighted, though it’s really only editorial common sense: her poetry is appearing regularly in all the right places. But his acceptance will arrive via John Kenyon, who had expressed surprise at the initial brush-off, suggesting that her old friend may have had once again to be her advocate.

  It also suggests that, however modern his literary tastes, Moxon is capable of old-fashioned gender prejudice. After all, it’s not just illness that stops Elizabeth going out and about to literary launches, opening nights, and dinners; from schmoozing, in short, like the other leading poets of what’s becoming her writing generation, Tennyson and Browning among them. It’s also that she’s a woman. She has to make her relationships on the page. In October 1842 the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, a new friend Miss Mitford has introduced by letter, lends Elizabeth his just-completed portrait of ‘Wordsworth on Helvellyn’. At just over three foot by four foot, the striking canvas is nearly life-size; it portrays the old man with arms crossed, deep in thought, a pose both heroic and reflective (though apparently the old man kept nodding off during the actual sitting). Small wonder: this is the painter’s homage to Wordsworth’s 1840 sonnet, ‘On a portrait of the Duke of Wellington on the Field of Waterloo, by Haydon’, which itself responds to Haydon’s 1839 canvas ‘Wellington musing on the Field of Waterloo’ in which the Duke takes up a not dissimilar stance, his back to us but craggy profile visible, gazing out over a dramatically lit landscape. Elizabeth, having herself already framed Wordsworth as a poet-hero in her Athenaeum essay, sends Haydon a sonnet of her own, ‘On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon’, on 17 October. It appears in The Athenauem less than a fortnight later.

  Elizabeth tells the artist, ‘You have brought me Wordsworth & Helvellyn into this dark & solitary room.’ Yet she refuses to meet him, remaining to his frustration, ‘My dear Invisible Friend […] always to correspond & […] never to descend to the Vulgarity of speaking.’ She’s still exasperatingly susceptible to a self-harming shyness. But everything’s different on paper, a world she can control. Perhaps that’s one reason that she’s so interested in America, still a place almost entirely of the imagination for most Britons. (Another reason may well be that the Barretts are among the few for whom family life also goes on across the Atlantic.) When the New-York Daily Tribune and the New-York Weekly Tribune reprint her Haydon sonnet, it jump-starts her reputation there. She begins to appear repeatedly in The Boston Miscellany and The United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

  North America still has an exaggerated postcolonial respect for British writers. But Elizabeth is also repeatedly published by Graham’s Magazine, which is edited by Cornelius Mathews, a young New York-based activist for a home-grown literature. In 1845 Mathews will explicitly align himself with anti-aristocratic Young America politics, named in part after the Young Italy movement (of which Elizabeth will herself become a passionate advocate, even a kind of celebrity supporter). Young America, based largely in the cities of the north, will be pro-immigration and in favour of rights for all, free trade, and international republicanism; making it a more radical version of the British Whig thought espoused by the Barretts.

  But in 1842 Mathews is still working with colleagues to create the North American literary culture that will enable the careers of George Bancroft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and others. Elizabeth’s poetry is welcomed in these circles, despite her nationality, because she shares their political and poetic ideas. To American peers her writing is fresh and modern. And Elizabeth, ever the idealist, responds to both political appeal and personal friendship. Mathews, eleven years her junior, is perhaps her ideal correspondent, safely on the other side of the Atlantic and unlikely to drop in unannounced. She praises his writing’s ‘vital sinewy vigour’ in print; and tells James Russell Lowell, another member of his circle, ‘I love the Americans & America for the sake of national brotherhood & a common literature & I honor them for the sake of liberty & noble aspiration—& I am grateful to them, .. very grateful, .. for their kindness to me personally as a poet.’

  For despite her growing international reputation, as 1844 opens Elizabeth is feeling isolated in the ‘dark and solitary room’ where her most frequent companion is her maid: she claims a ‘ “fine madness” for turning servants into friends’. Traces remain of depressive guilt about Bro’s death, that ‘Bitter anguish of bestowing evil, unmitigated evil, where you wd only cause good’. She’s also suffering from chronic pain, and has begun corresponding with fellow-Northumbrian Harriet Martineau, the distinguished feminist social theorist who in the same year publishes her autobiographical collection of essays, Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid. Also housebound, and suffering from what’s believed to be an incurable uterine tumour, Martineau is one of the few able to understand how Elizabeth feels physically:

  How entirely I agree with you about severe pain!—about its lowering & perverting influences! Nobody who ever was familiar with very se
vere pain cd say the good of it that one sees said in books. How it does baffle one’s will! […] Your picture of yourself looks cheerful & pretty; but I am not one to be deceived by your religious cheerfulness into an oversight of the suffering wh. lies beneath.

  The women, who moreover share a free-thinking religious Nonconformism, discuss a topic of absorbing interest to them both: mesmerism – hypnotherapy – and its possible use as a cure for physical illness. In November, Martineau, apparently miraculously cured of years of suffering, will publish a controversial series of letters in The Athenaeum advocating it as a cure. Though Elizabeth experiences no such radical improvement, she remains longingly enthusiastic about this and all things supernatural, and will support her friend in the face of widespread public scepticism.

  At times, she even seems to float into a psychological twilight. In her room, drawn blinds and insomnia blur the difference between dreamlike days and nights, and colour her imagination: ‘I dare to perceive or imagine the grandeur of spiritual subjects—spirits & angels—spreading their faint shadowless glories over a vast surface.’ She’s still taking opium, ostensibly for difficulty sleeping – it’s likely the dose was increased in Torquay – and admits to Martineau that it produces ‘fairy visions’. Since her return home there’s been a distinctly opiate flavour to her at times near-daily correspondence with Miss Mitford, with its disinhibited self-disclosure and obsessional working over of details. Besides, not all her visions are ‘fairy’. Fretting over John Kenyon – who for weeks exchanges visits with the rest of the family while somehow failing to make it to her own room – Elizabeth worries about possible scandal in his private life, and is yet more concerned by his plan to buy a villa in Torquay, which she depicts as locked in a grotesque danse macabre:

  There is not such a dancing, fiddling cardplaying gossipping place in all the rest of England as Torquay is—there is not such a dissipated place, in the strongest sense. And it’s a ghastly merriment. Almost every family has a member either threatened with illness or ill. Whoever is merry, is so in a hospital. They carry away the dead, to take in benches for the company. […] [T]he ghastliness of the collision there between life & death, merriment & wailing […] has made my flesh creep sometimes. […] A woman in the last agony in one house—a corpse laid out in another—& the whole of surviving Torquay dancing intermediately!

  Since her return to Wimpole Street, an odd mixture of superstition and religious mysticism, ‘Mr Haydon’s mystical way of talking of the “poetry of dark”’, has started to overtake the appeal of transcendence:

  I have recognized again & again the charm of the mystical which is in fact the voice of our own souls calling to us thro’ the dark of our ignorance […] listening to those rustling sounds of what may be verities, beyond the shell of the body.

  This highly active imagination is badly in need of an outlet. Elizabeth starts to contemplate a long narrative poem. Yet here too her mind turns first to Napoleon but then to Joan of Arc and, ‘I turn myself wistfully towards Joan. Perhaps my original sin of mysticism is struggling towards her visions’, she tells Miss Mitford, ‘My belief is that she was true.’ She goes on, ‘Did you ever hear of Stilling, the German’s, book upon Pneumatology? […] you & I—believe everything—and Heinrich Stilling wants us to believe more than everything—.’ For some weeks she fixates on this work arguing for the existence of a spirit world, Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling’s Theory of Pneumatology, loaning her own copy first to Miss Mitford, and then to Miss Mitford’s friend Mrs Niven.

  Not surprisingly, the poems she’s currently writing increasingly explore this new territory. In ‘Rhapsody of Life’s Progress’,

  We are borne into life—it is sweet, it is strange.

  We lie still on the knee of a mild Mystery.

  Despite all this, Elizabeth’s actual poetic voice is becoming steadily clearer and fresher. Gone are the contorted pseudo-Greek metrics, replaced in poems like ‘Wine of Cyprus’ and ‘A Lay of the Early Rose’ by newly fashionable ballad and song forms familiar from popular culture. More modern still is her use of her female narrators. Of course, women as protagonists in verse – from Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey to Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century ‘The Wife of Bath’ or, two centuries later, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – are nothing new. But the female lyric voice is a radical departure. Lyric poetry’s persona is necessarily both personal and universal: when I read a poem, I step into that poem’s ‘I’. Creating an illusion of plunging into intimacy with the female psyche, Elizabeth’s new narrative poems are ‘spoken’ by women characters, like the lover of the great sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões (‘Catarina to Camoens’) or the eponymous ‘Bertha in the Lane’, whose stories highlight the female identity of their ‘voice’, and of the poet’s voice too: after all, they aren’t being ventriloquised by male poets. And of course sometimes she also simply writes in the female first person without ‘dressing up’ in character.

  In the twenty-first-century none of this is new. We’ve seen the female lyric I be prayerful with Emily Dickinson, self-flagellating with Sylvia Plath, witness to history with Anna Akhmatova. But radical writers change their own zeitgeist, not ours. Or rather: they already changed ours, back when they changed their own. In the 1840s, when none of these poets has yet started work, Elizabeth’s voice is radical and exciting. And without the changes she’s effecting, none of their poetry might have been written.

  Led by description and story, the newly narrative verse that she and fellow poets like Tennyson and Browning are writing is freshly founded in the lived world of interpersonal experience. These innovative Victorian fables in verse aren’t only more emotionally and intellectually accessible than Romantic poetry, they’re also a great deal more respectable. Lord Byron’s narrative epics, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, turned him into an international literary celebrity in the early decades of the century; but neither is exactly suitable matter for the new domestic habits that see reading aloud become family entertainment. Elizabeth’s mid-century generation are making poetry accessible to a society being rapidly reshaped by the ‘family values’ the new queen has brought to public life since her accession in 1837. And so, as Moxon publishes Elizabeth’s Poems (1844), and she returns to planning the verse novel that will become Aurora Leigh, she specifically envisages a cleaned-up Don Juan to ‘touch this real everyday life of our age, & hold it with my two hands’:

  I want to write a poem of a new class, in a measure—a Don Juan, without the mockery & impurity […]—& admitting of as much philosophical dreaming & digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.

  Being ‘characteristic of the age’ is a form of social responsibility. Reading is no longer a hobby only of the elite. Literacy is slowly increasing as primary-level education for all gradually turns into first a church and then a state concern. In April of this year, at a private prayer meeting on Grays Inn Road, four ordinary Londoners create the Ragged School Union which, chaired by the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, will found more than two hundred schools for destitute children over the next eight years – including some that Arabella will dedicate herself to. And so, although what Richard Hoggart a century from now will call the ‘massification’ of (pulp, tabloid) reading matter that shapes working-class culture is still in the future, fiction and poetry are beginning to find mass audiences. Charles Dickens, for example, though six years younger than Elizabeth, is already enjoying huge popular success and royal approval.

  Writing for this emerging readership doesn’t mean dumbing down. But it works best when mainstream values are genuinely shared. Elizabeth and her poetic peers are thoroughgoing Victorians in turning their back on the Romantic vision of poets as prophetic exceptions, Shelley’s ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Instead, they view poetry as speaking to the special, quasi-spiritual, part of every individual, ‘reaching past nature unto God’, as Elizabeth put it in The Athenaeum. Poetry is still exceptional, b
ut it plays its special part within each life. The democratising, flattening effect of this has more than a little in common with the congregational, Nonconformist Christianity that the Barretts by now thoroughly espouse.

  As a result, Elizabeth and the poets like her are explicitly trying to give their everyman and everywoman reader a taste of beauty. (There are some striking parallels with how, at the ‘other end’ of the religious revival, Victorian High Anglicanism is using liturgical ‘smells and bells’, or extravagantly ornamented new builds by Gothic Revivalist prodigy Augustus Pugin, to draw in worshippers.) In both verse and prose, this is the era of the adjective. Poetry flirts with glamorously evocative settings, some orientalising, others historical. Elizabeth draws all these vibrating strings simultaneously tight in poems like ‘The Lay of the Brown Rosary’ where – in a perfect storm of symbolism and purple prosody – the haunted bride Onora fatally embraces her groom in a ruined chapel somewhere that’s both foreign and Roman Catholic; ethics having got muddled up with the old Barrett anti-Catholicism:

  The grey owl on the ruined wall shut both his eyes to hide thee,

  And ever he flapped his heavy wing all brokenly and weak,

  And the long grass waved against the sky, around his gasping beak.

  I sate beside thee all the night, while the moonlight lay forlorn

  Strewn round us like a dead world’s shroud in ghastly fragments torn.

  Elsewhere, the new poetry preaches an explicitly social morality, licensing such fantasies by tying up scenes of sensual bliss with moral closure. Until its austere conclusion that, ‘KNOWLEDGE BY SUFFERING ENTERETH, / AND LIFE IS PERFECTED BY DEATH’, Elizabeth’s own ‘A Vision of Poets’ is vividly sensual as it pictures the archetypal living poet. Sometimes, though, the moral is ‘slant’. As raw economic ‘progress’ is slowly recognised as a source of social ills, romantic nostalgic – whether it’s in Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ or in Elizabeth’s ‘The Romaunt of the Page’ – offers a comforting counter-fantasy. Precisely through its quaint mediaevalisms and far-flung settings, such poetry turns towards the changing society it serves, as even Elizabeth, writing among her plaster busts of the dead greats, is aware. After all, she is herself a daughter of the new mercantile class. And while there’s nothing like London life for keeping you in the literary swim, there’s also nothing like London for reminding you of the wider society on your doorstep.