# The Complete Works of Mrs. E. B. Browning/Volume 1/Critical Introduction

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION.
"How proud we are, in daring to look down upon ourselves!" cries Aurora Leigh, when she is rejecting her past work. Such pride spoke in Miss Barrett's opposition, as early as 1844, to the reissue of any of her Juvenilia. It was the pride of the glowing aim and growing power that made all her young accomplishment look not merely immature and weak, but also imitative beside the dim outline of work peculiarly her own and yet to be.
In those upon whom the mass of her later work now looms imposingly, carrying the delighted eye up to many a sudden peak of skiey rapture, the pride of looking back and down upon the early poems collected in the first volume of this edition will be a pride of another kind. It will be the pride of affectionate interest in tracing out in the lowly plains and pasturelands of the Juvenilia the roots of the mountains that soar against the sun.
Justice to the unequivocal self-criticism of the poet demands, however, that the eyes resting upon this work so nearly forbidden to the public regard it with affection and without servility.
A blushless imitation belongs to page after page of "The Battle of Marathon," re-echoing the Homeric echoes of Pope; but bold and spiritedly well done it undeniably is.
​Is it dreary comfort that it is "a book of surface pictures the worse done," as Aurora says again, "for being not ill done?" Then take the spirit and dash animating the boldness, the skill in the tool's true play so early manifest in the little aping hand busied in shaping out the pygmy epic, and the dreary comfort has in it a heart of cheer. It is clear, none the less, that in metrical form, poetic diction, material, and structure there is not in it that "true expression of a mind" without which, our poet herself said, she disesteemed "everything bearing the shape of a book." In it she "went away among the buried ages," and laid the pulses of her heart beneath the touch of a borrowed minstrelsy.
Disesteem of it on this account, however, implies the trying of this poet in her teens by a higher standard than that by which many a mature one is praised. It is the standard of originality in genius which "The Battle of Marathon" does not satisfy. It is the vigor and success of the workmanship which leads the attentive reader to look at the next production for a plainer indication of the individuality behind those qualities.
The "Essay on Mind" is even more thoroughly book-begotten. It is "pedantic and in some things pert," says the author's best critic—the author herself—in a letter to Robert Browning, "such as, to do myself justice, I was not in my whole life."
It follows Pope's lead again in theme and manner both, but it carries in its catholic embrace a library far beyond his easy-going classic ruts. The comprehensive grasp gives a sense of thorough-going power; the incisive criticisms convey conviction not only of alert intelligence but of rapidly unfolding independence. It is not surprising, therefore, that towards the close ​of the poem, beginning distinctly with line 1133, "I love my own dear land," etc., that there is an outbreak of individual poetic expression. The line of thought is no longer limited to the verse, or to the couplet, but overflows the Popian measure, and breathes and pants with the impetus of a sustained personal idea throbbing towards a form of expression more nearly its own.
It is ill differing from the saints in religion or the poets in poetry, Joubert well cautions, and our poet's criticism of herself as well as of other poets is so acute that it may be dangerous not to follow her when she declares that "The Seraphim," despite its shortcomings and obscurities, is "the first utterance of my own individuality." So, as an unfettered whole, it is, doubtless; yet here, on the edge of her "Essay on Mind," is, seemingly, her very first start aside from leading-strings in pursuit of the starry beckonings of her own poetic personality. The life and light and heat of it can be felt at once, stirring brightlier within the ties of the established metre of the piece up to the end.
Among the miscellaneous poems following the "Essay," "Song," "The Dream," "The Vision of Fame," and, among the poems included in the discarded "Prometheus" volume, "The Tempest," and "The Vision of Life and Death" give out fugitive gleams of that contagious ardor mixed with a subtile exaltation of pure spirit, which characterize Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a poet.
Those who take pride in her genius may descry here, in the lowly pasture-lands of the three early volumes she dared to look down upon, the bulge of the ground where the blind roots of the mountains are feeling their way toward the glittering summits.
​In the closing passage of the "Essay on Mind" there may be seen inside the more noticeable change of verse-effect the appeal to a more mystical conception of the theme. The verse-change is but the outward sign of it. Each thought she dwells upon, now, is inhabited, as it were, by a suggestive light. Her love for her own dear land, into which she flings herself with an unaffected personal realism reflected instantly upon the artificial verse, is deepened with the advance of her thought towards a wider patriotism for Græcia, as her "other country, the country of my soul." And in the flaming torch of a passage that follows, she imparts vaguely to the storied Greek enthusiasm for liberty a far wider-wheeling influence, sweeping minds of unknown countries and days yet to come within its unitary flow. Byron, whose death for Greece she next celebrates, is a link in this golden chain of dauntless souls with which she would wind about in brotherhood the times and lands she sings. Finally, she glorifies in the human mind capable of the unrewarding deeds of history and feats of intellectual or artistic accomplishment, a continuing life, in face of earthly death, "on mind's lone shore." Famous graves, and names, and words, she concludes in her last paragraph, are but the footprints of this mystical body of mind.
It is beyond her poetic powers, as yet, to make her pathway light with the light irresistible. It is to be followed feelingly. But there is no groping or fumbling, no mistaking the fact that this girl-sprite is flitting guidingly through the woods of contemplative idealism, and beckoning with airy fingers that promise the highest potency of poetic insight.
The "Song," before singled out, is but a lyric ​trifle, not to be made too much of for its frailty's sake, although conspicuously happy in spontaneity and the fitness of its parts; but the balance of "sorrow" in the first two stanzas with the twin-pair following devoted to "joy" makes it not merely a tiny cameo of artistic cut, but a little living thing with movement in it and a shining glance toward an eye of inward meaning. These qualities do not belong to the merely imitative lyrist.
"The Dream," "The Tempest," and "The Vision of Death" are kindred pieces touching, like the conclusion of the "Essay," upon the meaning of death to the soul not only of the single life of a human being, but to the soul of the historic or the cosmos-girt life of social humanity. In them are to be seen the breadth and fire of a lyrical brain getting hold of gifts of sight and poetic modes peculiar to itself.
Like "The Vision of Life and Death," the "Vision of Fame" is couched in the free ballad form which belongs to many of the popular poems of the succeeding volumes. They mark the cut adrift from pseudo-classicism and the swing into a current more congenial with her essentially modern trend of thought. The "Vision of Fame" reveals something of the quaint image-finding faculty and the siren music with which she renders her mystical meanings alluring; but it is especially interesting as a sort of understudy for a riper poem, "A Vision of Poets," one of the shining shafts bringing fame to her feet, later, in London.
The air of "The Seraphim" is rare, almost too lofty for mortal breath. The subject was a daring one, as this wise young poet knew and said better than any of her critics,—a subject almost beyond human ​Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/52 ​Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/53 ​Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/54 ​soul is knit with every other in a unity, God-sanctioned.
The story is unfolded in a narrative ballad-form curiously reminiscent of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," yet free of it, following a more varied strophe with richer internal rhyme-effects. It belongs to the totally modern class of symbolic ballads, of which "The Ancient Mariner" is one of the first but not of the purest of types.
These two original mystical pieces, opening the volume of 1838, which our poet would like her public to reckon as her first serious independent work, are happily, as it seems to us, included in the first volume of this edition, because they combine with the Juvenilia to show the wide range of her early poetic tastes and sympathies.
Greek and Gothic culture alike fed the sources of her imagination, and in the early work and in "The Seraphim" and "The Poet's Vow" these twin fountain-heads appear. The Hellenic fire and glory of the will to live among men, to be free and nobly active, nourished the political interests that are the core of substance in her work. The Christian essence, sweetening and controlling aspiration to a loving human service patiently waiting upon incompletion, animated her subtle lyrical symbolism.
These two streams flowing out of the life of the past to yield her genius tribute are blent more perfectly in her later work. There they are poured forth in a new poetic wine distinguished for body and bouquet both.
Charlotte Porter. Helen A. Clarke.
Layout 2