Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The delightful new edition of Mrs. Browning's "Casa Guidi Windows" which
Mr. John Lane has just issued ought certainly to serve as an opportunity
for the serious criticism and inevitable admiration to which a great
poet is entitled. For Mrs. Browning was a great poet, and not, as is
idly and vulgarly supposed, only a great poetess. The word poetess is
bad English, and it conveys a particularly bad compliment. Nothing is
more remarkable about Mrs. Browning's work than the absence of that
trite and namby-pamby elegance which the last two centuries demanded
from lady writers. Wherever her verse is bad it is bad from some
extravagance of imagery, some violence of comparison, some kind of
debauch of cleverness. Her nonsense never arises from weakness, but from
a confusion of powers. If the phrase explain itself, she is far more a
great poet than she is a good one.

Mrs. Browning often appears more luscious and sentimental than many
other literary women, but this was because she was stronger. It requires
a certain amount of internal force to break down. A complete
self-humiliation requires enormous strength, more strength than most of
us possess. When she was writing the poetry of self-abandonment she
really abandoned herself with the valour and decision of an anchorite
abandoning the world. Such a couplet as:

"Our Euripides, the human,
With his dropping of warm tears,"

gives to most of us a sickly and nauseous sensation. Nothing can be well
conceived more ridiculous than Euripides going about dropping tears with
a loud splash, and Mrs. Browning coming after him with a thermometer.
But the one emphatic point about this idiotic couplet is that Mrs.
Hemans would never have written it. She would have written something
perfectly dignified, perfectly harmless, perfectly inconsiderable. Mrs.
Browning was in a great and serious difficulty. She really meant
something. She aimed at a vivid and curious image, and she missed it.
She had that catastrophic and public failure which is, as much as a
medal or a testimonial, the badge of the brave.

In spite of the tiresome half-truth that art is unmoral, the arts
require a certain considerable number of moral qualities, and more
especially all the arts require courage. The art of drawing, for
example, requires even a kind of physical courage. Anyone who has tried
to draw a straight line and failed knows that he fails chiefly in nerve,
as he might fail to jump off a cliff. And similarly all great literary
art involves the element of risk, and the greatest literary artists have
commonly been those who have run the greatest risk of talking nonsense.
Almost all great poets rant, from Shakespeare downwards. Mrs. Browning
was Elizabethan in her