[In the following essay, Paroissien examines the role Elizabeth Barrett Browning played in the writing of Horne's A New Spirit of the Age, arguing that evidence indicates her involvement was more extensive than Horne publicly acknowledged.]

When Richard Hengist Horne (1803-84) published a survey of contemporary writers in 1884 called A New Spirit of the Age, he referred in his Preface to the “valuable assistance and advice from several eminent hands.” That the hands were several¹ or even “eminent” remains a matter for conjecture since Horne was both unwilling to identify his assistants and rather evasive about the degree of help he received from his only identified “hand,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Even as late as 1877, when S. R. Townshend Mayer collaborated with Horne in editing his correspondence with Mrs. Browning sixteen years after her death,² the evidence clearly suggests that Horne was not anxious to reveal the truth about her role in the work. As Aletha Hayter observed, Horne and Townshend produced “so many confused dates, misquotations and general inaccuracies that it is difficult to disentangle what Horne contributed to A New Spirit of the Age and what Mrs. Browning did.”³

This tangled question of authorship is further complicated by the strict secrecy which Horne advised Mrs. Browning to maintain over her cooperation with the essays. Since she herself appeared in the volume, Horne argued, it would not be desirable for her to be associated with the criticism of other poets and novelists.⁴ That Mrs. Browning accepted this rather dubious argument may be deduced from her correspondence which is meticulously tactful on the question of her role in A New Spirit. Thus, from 1847 to the present day Horne's silence has been preserved.

Fortunately, a partial solution to this conspiracy will soon be at hand when a new edition of the Browning-Horne correspondence is published, for it is only by reading these letters in full that a better perspective on Mrs. Browning's role may be obtained.⁵ No attempt is made in this paper to identify the exact contributions of the two writers, but I shall attempt to illustrate that Mrs. Browning's part in A New Spirit, as revealed by the restored letters, is much greater than Horne himself had indicated in his “connecting narrative” of 1877.

Shortly after Horne had conceived the idea for writing a series of essays on his contemporaries, he realized that he would need some assistance with the project and Elizabeth Barrett was an obvious choice. Horne's friendship with Elizabeth Barrett had begun in 1839, and her subsequent contribution to his edition of The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (1840) had given Horne an opportunity to assess her merit as a literary partner. Thus, while plans for the new book were still in an early stage, Horne lost no time in securing Elizabeth Barrett's future assistance with “some fresh work” he was “‘chalking out.’” “Do not (you) if you have not already, engage upon any new work of moment for a week or so—in which time you shall hear from me” (July 3, 1843). Two months later, this hint developed into a definite proposal, and encouraged by Elizabeth Barrett's recent essay in the Athenaeum, he told her that he suddenly arrived “at a very high opinion of your critical powers when the subject suited you, in reading your remarks on Shakespeare, and on Beaumont and Fletcher, in the Athenaeum. Wherefore, Oh Friend in need, will you write me four or five pages on ‘William Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt’” (October 20, 1843).

Apart from the practical help that Mrs. Browning could provide by contributing an article on Wordsworth and Hunt, there is perhaps more to Horne's casual request than one might suspect at first. An analysis of Mrs. Browning's articles for the Athenaeum⁶ reveals similarities between her critical methods and the guide lines Horne drew up for A New Spirit. The resemblances, in fact, are so close that one may argue that the Athenaeum articles provided both the catalyst for Horne's own ideas and a paradigm for the essays of A New Spirit.

Mrs. Browning's articles in the Athenaeum were occasioned by Charles Wentworth Dilke who asked her to review The Book of the Poets (1841), an anthology of English verse from Chaucer to Beattie. The anthology itself received little attention, but it did provide a stepping stone for one of the most remarkable surveys of English poetry, from Langland to Burns, in the first half of the nineteenth century. One of the striking characteristics of Mrs. Browning's review is her synthetic approach to literary criticism in which she avoided intellectual analysis of a poet but concentrated on capturing the true feeling of works and authors. Her method is that of evocation in which she tries to conjure up a picture of past scenes and poets:

Our poetry has an heroic genealogy. It arose where the sun rises, in the far East. … It issued in its first breath from Georgia, wrapt in the gathering cry of Persian Odin: and passing from the orient of the sun to the antagonistic snows of Iceland, and oversweeping the black pines of Germany and the jutting shores of Scandinavia … so modified, multiplied resonant in a thousand Runic echoes, it rushed abroad like a blast into Britain. … And soon, when simpler minstrels had sate there long enough to tune the ear of the time,—when Layamon and his successors had hummed long enough, like wild bees, upon the lips of our infant poetry predestined to eloquence,—then Robert Langlande … walking … on the Malvern hills, took counsel with his holy “Plowman,” and sang of other visions than their highest ridge can show.

(Athenaeum, June 4, 1842, p. 498)

Similarly, when Mrs. Browning came to Chaucer, she avoided analyzing particular poems but concentrated on an attempt to recreate the personal genius of “the good omen of our poetry.” In her view, Chaucer is seen as “the early poet” who clearly deserves the metaphors of dawn and spring. “A morning-star, a lark's exaltation, cannot usher in a glory better.” From Chaucer, we move quickly through “the trance of English poetry” into the days of Spenser and Elizabeth I, “the milky way of poetry.” With metaphor piling on metaphor, we tour the galaxy of English poets, pausing for a moment over Sidney, “the true knight and fantastic poet,” Raleigh, “tender and strong,” and Herrick, “the Ariel of poets” (Athenaeum, June 11, 1842, p. 522).

Whatever the limitation of this type of subjective and unargued criticism, this was the approach which Horne admired; and Horne's “formula” for the essays, which he outlined by letter to Mrs. Browning, becomes almost a reduction of her Athenaeum essays. “The form of these articles,” wrote Horne, “is to be that of an essay—any biographical remarks that are true … will be good to introduce, if pleasant, worth telling, and not of a kind that should be kept private. The disquisition is to be synthetical chiefly—no necessity for an analysis of any particular work, nor for the mention of many of them. The nature of the genius is the first thing—then how far it is the product of the age, and the spirit of the time—what is its influence upon the age—with its ‘future prospects’” (October 20, 1843).

Apart from this possible influence of Elizabeth Barrett, there are, of course, other sources that may have influenced Horne's thinking. The very title of his work acknowledged his debt to William Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age (1825), and it is possible that Horne owes as much to Hazlitt, Lamb, and the prevailing critical ideas of the time as he does to Elizabeth Barrett. However, Horne's familiarity with Mrs. Browning's articles in the Athenaeum and the fact that he omitted any reference to them or to his request for her cooperation when he wrote the narrative for Townshend in 1877 suggest an attempt to disguise his debt to Mrs. Browning. For reasons known to himself, though easy to guess, Horne took care to exclude the evidence which admitted the extent of Mrs. Browning's collaboration. This is borne out when Horne's explanation in the Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne is compared with the details which he did not present for publication. It is true that Horne did expand his reference to the anonymous “eminent hands” of the 1844 Preface, and in 1877 named Mrs. Browning as “the principal and most valuable” of his co-adjutors. However, when faced with revealing what Mrs. Browning wrote for his book, he treated this issue with his accustomed reticence and allowed only half of the critiques of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt to be hers, besides the greater part of the review of W. S. Landor, which he admitted was one of the best. Thus, as there was no published evidence to contradict him, Horne presented the picture as he saw fit. But in doing so, he ignored his own letters to Mrs. Browning in which he asked for “opinions” on the following: Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Jameson, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Tennyson, Richard Monckton Milnes, Carlyle, and Henry Taylor. In addition to these specific requests, Mrs. Browning's involvement was further increased by her marginal comments on most if not all of the proofs which Horne sent her before the book went to press.

Clearly then, there is considerable discrepancy between what Horne allowed in 1877 and what his own letters to Mrs. Browning reveal. Furthermore, the restored letters show how Mrs. Browning discussed her assignments and commented on the progress of various articles. On December 29, 1843, for instance, Mrs. Browning said in reply to Horne's request for something on Carlyle: “I cannot refuse the Carlyle subject and more especially as you do not require any systematic review, and as the filling up will rest with you.” It is typical of Horne's method that when he published this letter in 1877 he left out the reference to Carlyle and began her letter with the next sentence.⁷

A comparable tale of confusion surrounds the Tennyson article, another paper which Horne was anxious to ascribe solely to himself. Horne first requested a “page or two about Tennyson” on December 4, 1843, and on December 12, 1843, he wrote to Mrs. Browning acknowledging the arrival of her opinion. Characteristically, Horne did not explain this cooperation in 1877, but a brief reference to it by Mrs. Browning in one of her letters prompted him to add an ambiguous footnote, in which he tried to conceal her part by stating that he wrote the Tennyson paper and sent the proof sheets to Mrs. Browning to interpolate.⁸

In the case of the latter two essays, Mrs. Browning's contribution has been further substantiated by W. Robertson Nicoll and Thomas J. Wise⁹ who, by examining the manuscripts in Buxton Forman's library, were able to separate Mrs. Browning's opinion on Carlyle and Tennyson from Horne's. The absence of other originals or even proof sheets precludes an extension of Nicoll and Wise's investigation, though the restored letters certainly indicate the magnitude of Horne's dept to his helper. On one occasion, for example, Horne quotes almost verbatim a whole paragraph or more from one of Mrs. Browning's letters, as in the case of the paper on “Banin and the Irish Novelists.” On February 5, 1844, Horne casually asked Mrs. Browning if she knew anything about Samuel Lover and Charles James Lever. Shortly afterward (February 5 [?], 1884), Mrs. Browning replied: Lover “is a very powerful writer of Irish novels, and falls into the ranks after Banin—with less passion than the latter, but more picturesque vivacity. You probably know his ballads,—which have a happy occasional fancifulness. His novels, however, all of which I have not read, are the stuff whereof his fame is made—and they are highly vital, and of great value in the sense of commentary on the rational character.” Lever, however, Mrs. Browning was unable to read:

What the French call “material life” is the whole life he recognizes. That life is a jest and a very loud one, is his philosophy. The sense of beauty and love, he does not recognize at all, except in a gross and conventional sense. The Chapters, I have read of him, make my head ache as if I had been sitting in a room next to an orgy—not an orgy of fawns, Oh Orion … but of gentleman topers, with their low gentility, and “hip hip hurrahs,” and wine out of coolers.

No writer can render human nature itself fully, who does not render the inner and spiritual life, as well as the conventional and material exterior of life.

Both of these extracts appear in the text of A New Spirit of the Age with only minor alterations such as the absence of personal pronouns and the address to Horne (cf. A New Spirit, II, 149-151). Strangely, Horne included the letter from which these opinions were taken in the 1877 Letters; but when we note that he dated this letter as September 6, 1844 (six months after the first edition of A New Spirit of the Age), his action takes on a different aspect. We are forced to conclude that either Mrs. Browning plagiarized from his book and wrote Horne a nonsensical letter about Lover and Lever, or that Horne altered the date to suit his purpose.

More frequently, though, Horne chopped up Mrs. Browning's opinions and interspersed them with so much additional criticism that only the odd phrase and judgment are recognizable. This is very much the case with the essay on “Henry Taylor and the Author of ‘Festus.’” In response to a request for an opinion on Taylor and his “Philip von Artedale” on February 29, 1844, Mrs. Browning devoted a long letter to the subject the next day. In this instance, however, her verdict was unfavorable and Horne had little use for it. He quoted Mrs. Browning's statement that Taylor was “a dramatic poet without passion, contemplative without a system of ideals, a rhythmical writer who denies the distinct element of poetry” (February 20, 1844), but he rejected her dismissal of Taylor as an atheist who denied poetry's highest mysteries. Horne also did not adapt much of what Mrs. Browning said about Philip James Bailey, the author of “Festus,” except for her observation that the poem lacked originality and leaned too heavily on Goethe's Faust.

If Mrs. Browning's opinions on her contemporaries had survived intact, it might be possible to reassess her role as literary critic. As Nicoll and Wise remarked, Horne's two volumes of essays are “a perfect treasure-house of high criticism from the hand [of Mrs. Browning] … if only we knew exactly where to light upon her thoughts” (Literary Anecdotes, II, 105). Unlike Horne, however, she appears to have been content with “the single talent well employ'd,” and there is no evidence that Mrs. Browning resented Horne's tendency to appropriate her opinions and disguise them as his own. When Horne wrote Mrs. Browning shortly after the publication of A New Spirit he asked, perhaps with some misgivings, if he “would be forgiven for a very inadequate notice of you in our work” (March 1, 1884), she was quick to assure him that “whatever may be said or unsaid about me and mine in your work, do not give a second thought to any imagination of discontent as applicable to me. I shall know you meant the kindest” (March 4, 1844).

Perhaps it was this generosity and modesty that attracted Horne to Mrs. Browning in the first place, for in addition to her “finely suitable intellect” Horne obtained a loyal and willing partner who managed to counter the curiosity of even her friends. In an answer to Mary Russell Mitford's query in November 1842 about Horne's literary activities she explained that he was busy on a two-volume work that was to be finished “by the middle of next month.” But, she added, “unless he does it by machinery, or by a flash of lightening [sic], the possibility of this rapidity I can scarcely, understand.”¹⁰ Had Miss Mitford known of Horne's request for papers on Hunt, Wordsworth, Mrs. Jameson, and Harriet Martineau prior to her inquiry she might have guessed what Mrs. Browning chose to conceal: that her co-operation, if not “the flash of lightening,” was undoubtedly part of the “machinery” which manufactured an essential part of A New Spirit of the Age.

Notes

1. Thomas Powell (1809-1887) and Robert Bell (1800-1867) are the only two other figures identified with the writing of A New Spirit. For Powell's role see Eric J. Shumaker, A Concise Bibliography of the Complete Works of Richard (Hengist) Horne (Granville, 1943), p. 4; and for Bell's role see W. Robertson Nicoll and Thomas J. Wise, eds., Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1895-96), I, 240; also see Walter Jerold, introd. to A New Spirit of the Age (London, 1907), p. x, and DNB.

2. S. R. Townshend Mayer, Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, 2 vols. (London, 1877).

3. Aletha Hayter, Mrs. Browning: A Poet's Work and its Setting (London, 1962), p. 17. Cf. also Gardner B. Taplin, The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New Haven, 1957), p. 117.

4. Horne, letter to Elizabeth Barrett, October 17, 1843, Morgan Collection.

5. Ronald E. Freeman is working on a new and complete edition of the correspondence of Mrs. Browning and Horne. The present writer wishes to acknowledge his gratitude to Professor Freeman for allowing him to use his typescript copy of the unpublished letters as the basis for this note. All references to these letters appear in the text with the date as worked out and verified by Professor Freeman.

6. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets,” Athenaeum (February 26, 1842), pp. 189-190; (March 5), pp. 210-212; (March 12), pp. 229-231; (March 19), pp. 249-252; “The Book of the Poets,” Athenaeum (June 4, 1842), pp. 497-499; (June 11), pp. 520-523; (June 25), pp. 558-560; (August 6), pp. 706-708; (August 13), pp. 728-729. Future references to these articles will be found in the text.

7. Mayer, II, 145.

8. Mayer, I, 191.

9. For Tennyson, see “An Opinion on Tennyson, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, I, 35-41; and for Carlyle, see “Carlyle: A Disentangled Essay by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” II, 105-119.

10. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, letter to Miss Mitford, Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, ed. Betty Miller (London, 1954), p. 205.