Part 6

I must possess some great defects, but, like every body else, mine do not strike me. I am also ignorant of the existence of any quality or virtue in me. I much pondered over _truth_, and when one is so engaged the sentiment of _self_ vanishes more and more daily.

GEORGE SAND: _Letter to M. Louis Ulbach_, November, 1869, in ‘Letters of George Sand.’

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[Sidenote: Her life at Nohant.]

[Sidenote: Not silent in her own circle.]

M. Plauchut, a literary friend and a visitor at Nohant, during the last decade of her lifetime, gives a picture of the order of her day; it is simplicity itself. Nine o’clock, in summer and in winter alike, was her hour of waking. Letters and newspapers would occupy her until noon, when she came down to join the family _déjeûner_. Afterwards she would stroll for an hour in the garden and the wood, visiting and tending her favorite plants and flowers. At two o’clock she would come indoors to give a lesson to her grandchildren, in the library, or work there on her own account, undistracted by the romps around her. Dinner at six was followed by a short evening walk, after which she played with the children, or set them dancing indoors. She liked to sit at the piano, playing over to herself bits of music by her favorite Mozart, or old Spanish and Berrichon airs. After a game of dominoes or cards, she would still sit up so late, occupying herself with water-color painting or otherwise, that sometimes her son was obliged to take away the lights. These long evenings, the same writer bears witness, sometimes afforded rare opportunities of hearing Madame Sand talk of the events and the men of her time. In the absolute quiet of the country, among a small circle of responsive minds, she, so silent otherwise, became expansive. “Those who have never heard George Sand at such hours,” he concludes, “have never known her. She spoke well, with great elevation of ideas, charming eloquence, and a spirit of infinite indulgence.” When, at length, she retired, it was to write on until the morning hours, according to her old habit, only relinquished when her health made this imperative.

BERTHA THOMAS: ‘George Sand.’

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[Sidenote: Not brilliant in general conversation.]

[Sidenote: Her cigarette.]

George Sand had none of the brilliancy and repartee in general conversation one would have expected, and as the years went on she became more silent and reserved. Her greatest happiness was to sit in her arm-chair, smoking cigarettes. Often, when her friends thought she was absorbed in her own meditations, she would put in a word that proved she had been listening to everything. The word spoken, she would relapse again into silence.

[Sidenote: Manner of working.]

It was only when she sat down to her desk that she became eloquent, and the expressions that halted on her lips rushed abundantly from her pen. Her characters grew beneath her hand, and she went on writing, with that perfect style which is like the rhythmic cadence of a great river--“large, calm, and regular.” George Sand worked all night long, after all her guests were in bed, sometimes remaining up until five o’clock in the morning. She generally sat down to the old bureau in the hall at Nohant, with pen, ink, and foolscap paper sewn together, and began, without notes or a settled scheme of any kind.

---- ----: _George Sand_. ‘Temple Bar.’

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[Sidenote: Vigor at sixty-eight.]

To-day, _my sixty-eighth birthday_, I will write to you. My health is perfect, in spite of a whooping cough, which, however, does not longer disturb my rest, since I daily plunge myself in a foaming, icy-cold little torrent, winding its way among the pebbles, the flowers, and the grass, under a delightful shade.... I walk all the way to the river, and, quite hot with perspiration, plunge myself in the icy-cold water. The doctor says I am mad; I let him talk and cure myself, whilst his patients nurse themselves and _croak_. I am like the grass in the fields--water and sun are all I require.

GEORGE SAND: _Letter to M. Gustave Flaubert_, 5th July, 1872, in ‘Letters of George Sand.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Still later.]

I am still discharging the duties of assiduous and patient teacher, and I have little time left for _professional writing_, seeing that I spend the evening with my family, and can now no longer work after midnight; yet my being pinched for time acts like a stimulant upon me, and causes me to find much pleasure in hard work; it is to me like secretly relishing some forbidden fruit.

GEORGE SAND: _Letter to M. Gustave Flaubert_, December, 1875, in ‘Letters of George Sand.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: George Sand’s creed.]

There is for me but one creed and one refuge: faith in God and our own immortality. My secret is not new, but there is no other.

GEORGE SAND: _Letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie_, August, 1836, in ‘Letters of George Sand.’

* * * * *

I see future and eternal life before me as a certainty; as a light in the glimmer of which every thing is only dimly seen; but that light is there, and that is all I wish for. I know full well that my Jeanne [her granddaughter] is not dead.... I know well that I shall meet her again, and that she will recognize me, even though she should not recollect or I either. She was part of my own self and that fact will always remain.

GEORGE SAND: _Letter to M. Edouard Charton_, February, 1855, in ‘Letters of George Sand.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Her last words.]

Up to her last hour she preserved consciousness and lucidity. The words, “_Ne touchez pas à la verdure_,” among the last that fell from her lips, were understood by her children, who knew her wish that the trees should be undisturbed under which, in the village cemetery, she was soon to find a resting-place.

BERTHA THOMAS: ‘George Sand.’

* * * * *

We have seen a photograph done of George Sand, shortly before she died. The face is massive, but lit up by the wonderful eyes, through which the soul still shines. An expression of tenderness and gentle philosophy hovers round the lips, and we feel almost as though they would break into a smile as we gaze. She became, latterly, like one of those grand old trees of her own “Vallée Noir,” lopped and maimed by the storms and struggles of life, but ever to the last putting forth tender shoots and expanding into fresh foliage, through which the soft winds of heaven whisper, making music in the ears of those weary wayfarers who pause to rest beneath their shade.

---- ----: ‘George Sand.’ _Temple Bar._

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Two notable opinions of George Sand’s works.]

Though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout (even ‘Consuelo,’ which is the best, or the best that I have read, appears to me to couple strange extravagance with wondrous excellence), yet she has a grasp of mind, which, if I cannot fully comprehend, I can very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound.... It is poetry, as I comprehend the word, which elevates that masculine George Sand, and makes out of something coarse, something godlike.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË: _Letters to G. H. Lewes_, 1848, in Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë’. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857.

* * * * *

George Sand is the greatest female genius the world ever saw--at least, since Sappho, who broke off a fragment of her soul to be guessed by, as creation did by its fossils. And George Sand, it is remarkable, precisely like her prototype, has suffered her senses to leaven her soul--to permeate it through and through, and make a sensual soul of it. She is a wonderful woman, and, I hope, rising into a purer atmosphere by the very strength of her wing.

ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R. H. Horne.’ New York: James Miller, 1877.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Dates of publication in book form; see Catalogue Général de la Librairie Française.

ELIZABETH BARRETT (BROWNING).

1809-1861.

ELIZABETH BARRETT (BROWNING).

Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, the daughter of a wealthy West India merchant, was born at Hope End, near Ledbury, in 1809. The delicate, precocious child began rhyming at eight years old, and was encouraged by her proud and indulgent father. In 1826, at seventeen, she published her _Essay on Mind_, an imitation of Pope. She was an omnivorous reader, and early became a hard student of Greek. When she was twenty-four or five her family removed from Hope End to Sidmouth; thence to London. In 1835 she published a translation from Æschylos, _Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems_. The _Prometheus_ was subsequently re-written.

In 1837, Miss Barrett’s health broke down. She was taken, by the advice of her physician, to Torquay. During her sojourn there her favorite brother was drowned; she had the horror of seeing his boat go down. She was utterly prostrated by this tragedy, and it was not until the following year that she could be removed to London.

A long period of invalidism ensued, during which, however, she continued her studies and literary work. The courage and noble cheerfulness displayed in her letters to Mr. Horne, written at this time, are most remarkable. In 1838 she published _The Seraphim, and Other Poems_; in 1839, _The Romaunt of the Page_, a volume of ballads. In 1842 she contributed to the London _Athenæum_ some essays on the Greek-Christian writers and the English poets. About 1841 she modernized portions of Chaucer’s poetry; Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Monckton Milnes, Horne and others engaging in the same work. Miss Barrett also wrote for Horne’s ‘New Spirit of the Age,’ part of the critique on Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, and nearly all of the paper on Walter Savage Landor. In 1844, her health having in the meantime gradually improved somewhat, she collected her poems, placing at the head a new composition called _A Drama of Exile_, the fruit of her diligent study of the Hebrew Bible.

In 1846, despite the opposition of her father--to whom “a marriage which was to lift his fragile daughter from the couch to which she had been bound as a picture to its frame, must have seemed a rash experiment,”--Elizabeth Barrett was married to Robert Browning. They went at once to Italy, where, the milder climate proving favorable to Mrs. Browning’s health, they continued to reside for fifteen years. They were in the habit of spending their summers in Florence, where their son, Robert Barrett Browning, was born, and their winters in Rome; and occasionally they visited England. Under favorable conditions, Mrs. Browning now produced her greatest works. CASA GUIDI WINDOWS was published in 1851, the SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE being included in the same volume. In 1856 AURORA LEIGH appeared.

_Poems before Congress_ were put forth in 1860. Her last poems, written in 1860 and ’61, were collected after her death, which took place at Florence on the 29th of June, 1861.

A strange and beautiful life--with its cloistered maidenhood, its pathetic wavering between Death and Love, to fall at last into Love’s most gracious hands, its sequel of perfect wifehood. “She was like the insect that weaves itself a shroud, yet by some inward force, after a season, is impelled to break through its covering, and come out a winged tiger-moth, emblem of spirituality in its birth, and of passion in the splendor of its tawny dyes.”[4]

Browning’s ‘By the Fireside’ undoubtedly contains a sketch of her own fireside; we recognize at once the tiny figure of the woman

“Reading by firelight--that great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it.”

No line other than loving has ever been written of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But from all that friends and appreciative critics can say we must ever turn for the last touch to the “One Word More” of him who knew the “silent silver lights and darks undreamed-of” of his own “moon of poets.”

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Her education and development described by herself.]

As to stories, my story amounts to the Knife-grinder’s, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage would have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in my thoughts. I wrote verses--as I dare say many have done who never wrote any poems--very early; at eight years old and earlier. But, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained with me, and from that day to this, poetry has been a distinct object with me--an object to read, think, and live for. And I could make you laugh, although you could not make the public laugh, by the narrative of nascent odes, epics, and didactics crying aloud on obsolete Muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and haunted me out of Pope’s Homer until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony. And thus my great “epic” of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and called _The Battle of Marathon_, and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me--is Pope’s Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a curious production for a child, it gives evidence only of an imitative faculty and an ear, and a good deal of reading in a peculiar direction. The love of Pope’s Homer threw me into Pope on one side and into Greek on the other, and into Latin as a help to Greek--and the influence of all these tendencies is manifest so long afterwards, as in my ‘Essay on Mind,’ a didactic poem written when I was seventeen or eighteen, and long repented as worthy of all repentance. The poem is imitative in its form, yet is not without traces of an individual thinking and feeling--the bird pecks through the shell in it. With this, it has a pertness and pedantry, which did not even then belong to the character of the author, and which I regret now more than I do the literary defectiveness.

All this time, and indeed the greater part of my life, we lived at Hope End, a few miles from Malvern, in a retirement scarcely broken to me, except by books and my own thoughts; and it is a beautiful country, and was a retirement happy in many ways, although the very peace of it troubles the heart as it looks back. There I had my fits of Pope, and Byron, and Coleridge, and read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the dramatists, and ate and drank Greek, and made my head ache with it. Do you know the Malvern Hills? The hills of Piers Plowman’s Vision? They seem to me my native hills; for, although I was born in the county of Durham, I was an infant when I went first into their neighborhood, and lived there until I had passed twenty by several years. Beautiful, beautiful hills, they are! And yet, not for the whole world’s beauty, would I stand in the sunshine and the shadow of them any more. It would be a mockery, like the taking back of a broken flower to its stalk.

From thence we went to Sidmouth for two years; and there I published my translation of Æschylus, which was written in twelve days, and should have been thrown into the fire afterwards--the only means of giving it a little warmth. The next removal was to London.... And then came the failure in my health, which never had been strong (at fifteen I nearly died), and the publication of _The Seraphim_, the only work I care to acknowledge, and then the enforced exile to Torquay, with prophecy in the fear, and grief, and reluctance of it--a dreadful dream of an exile, which gave a nightmare to my life forever, and robbed it of more than I can speak of here; do not speak of that anywhere. _Do not speak of that_, dear Mr. Horne; and for the rest, you see that there is nothing to say. It is “a blank, my lord.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT: _Letter to R. H. Horne_, 1843. ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, addressed to Richard Hengist Horne.’ New York: James Miller, 1877.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Early friendship with Hugh Stuart Boyd.]

Among her friends at this time [1826] and for years afterward--in fact, until his death in 1848--was Hugh Stuart Boyd, favorably known by his translations from the Greek.... They read their favorite authors together, or, rather, the young student read to her old master, for he was blind. A reminiscence of the happy hours they passed together, communing with the mighty minds of old, may be found in Mrs. Browning’s beautiful poem, ‘Wine of Cyprus,’ dedicated to Mr. Boyd, to whom she was indebted for her knowledge of that dainty vintage.

“I think of those long mornings Which my thought goes far to seek, When, betwixt the folio’s turnings, Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek. Past the pane the mountain spreading Swept the sheep-bell’s tinkling noise, While a girlish voice was reading, Somewhat low for ai’s and oi’s.”

R. H. STODDARD: _Prefatory Memoir_ to ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning addressed to Richard H. Horne.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Her learning.]

I have her ‘Essay on Mind,’ ... which, and the notes to it, contain allusions to books, as if known by everybody, which Henry Cary declared to me no young man of his day at Oxford had ever looked into.

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to Rev. Mr. Harness_.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Her shyness.]

She is a delightful young creature; shy and timid and modest.... She is so sweet and gentle, and so pretty, that one looks at her as if she were some bright flower.

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to her Father_, May, 1836. L’Estrange’s ‘Life of M. R. Mitford.’ London: R. Bentley & Sons, 1870.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Her personal appearance in 1836.]

My first acquaintance with Elizabeth Barrett commenced about fifteen years ago.[5] She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same; so that it is not merely the impression of my partiality or my enthusiasm. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes richly fringed by dark eye-lashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to Chiswick, that the translatress of the Prometheus of Æschylus, the authoress of the ‘Essay on Mind,’ was old enough to be introduced into company, in technical language was _out_. Through the kindness of another invaluable friend, ... I saw much of her during my stay in town. We met so constantly and so familiarly that in spite of the difference of age, intimacy ripened into friendship, and after my return into the country, we corresponded freely and frequently, her letters being just what letters ought to be--her own talk put upon paper.

[Sidenote: Her illness.]

[Sidenote: The tragedy at Torquay.]

The next year was a painful one to herself and to all who loved her. She broke a blood-vessel in the lungs, which did not heal.... After attending her for above a twelve-month at her father’s house in Wimpole Street, Dr. Chambers, on the approach of winter, ordered her to a milder climate. Her eldest brother, a brother in heart and in talent worthy of such a sister, together with other devoted relatives, accompanied her to Torquay, and there occurred the fatal event which saddened her bloom of youth, and gave a deeper hue of thought and feeling, especially of devotional feeling, to her poetry.... Nearly a twelve-month had passed and the invalid, still attended by her affectionate companions, had derived much benefit from the mild sea-breezes of Devonshire. One fine summer morning her favorite brother, together with two other fine young men, his friends, embarked on board a small sailing-vessel, for a trip of a few hours. Excellent sailors all, and familiar with the coast, they sent back the boatmen and undertook themselves the management of the little craft. Danger was not dreamt of by any one; after the catastrophe, no one could divine the cause, but in a few minutes after their embarkation, and in sight of their very windows, just as they were crossing the bar, the boat went down, and all who were in her perished. Even the bodies were never found.

This tragedy nearly killed Elizabeth Barrett. She was utterly prostrated by the horror and the grief, and by a natural but a most unjust feeling, that she had been in some sort the cause of this great misery. It was not until the following year that she could be removed in an invalid carriage, and by journeys of twenty miles a day, to her afflicted family and her London home.

The house that she occupied at Torquay had been chosen as one of the most sheltered in the place. It stood at the bottom of the cliffs, almost close to the sea; and she told me herself that during that whole winter the sound of the waves rang in her ears like the moans of one dying.

[Sidenote: Anecdote of her reading.]

Still she clung to literature and to Greek; in all probability she would have died without that wholesome diversion to her thoughts. Her medical attendant did not always understand this. To prevent the remonstrances of her friendly physician she caused a small edition of Plato to be so bound as to resemble a novel. He did not know ... that to her such books were not an arduous and painful study, but a consolation and a delight.

[Sidenote: Her monotonous life.]

Returned to London, she began the life which she continued for so many years, confined to one large and commodious, but darkened, chamber, admitting only her own affectionate family and a few devoted friends (I, myself, have often joyfully travelled five-and-forty miles to see her, and returned the same evening, without entering another house); reading almost every book worth reading in almost every language, and giving herself, heart and soul, to that poetry of which she seemed born to be the priestess.

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: ‘Recollections of a Literary Life.’ New York: Harper & Bros., 1852.

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[Sidenote: Omnivorous reading.]