Tennyson belonged undoubtedly to a period from which we are divided; the period in which men had queer ideas of the antagonism of science and religion; the period in which the Missing Link was really missing.  But his hold upon the old realities of existence never wavered; he was the apostle of the sanctity of laws, of the sanctity of customs; above all, like every poet, he was the apostle of the sanctity of words.

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.