Poems (Blagden)/Memoir
MEMOIR.
It is in obedience to the dictates of affection, and in compliance with the wishes of those who share that sentiment with me, that I have undertaken to edit the poems contained in this volume. Some of them have already appeared, at various dates, in 'All The Year Round,' 'Once A Week,' and the 'Athenæum,' whilst the first and longest, "The Story of Two Lives," was print in 'Fraser's Magazine' in 1864. I have to acknowledge the courtesy of the proprietors of those periodicals in permitting me to include them in th present collection.
The gifted a virtuous authoress, whose death last winter filled the widest circle of friends I have ever heard of one person possessing, with feelings of the deepest pain, was known to the public rather as a novelist than as a poet; 'The Cost of a Secret,' and 'Agnes Tremorne,' though by no means the first in merit of her stories, having secured on their appearance an exceptional an exceptional amount of attention. But neither the talents nor the tastes of Isa Blagden found their fitting field in the modern novel, which depends for its success either on skilfully-constructed plot, on highly-finished portraitures of character, or on a realistic rendering of the superficial aspects of society. When she wrote a novel, she wrote less for the purpose of amusing the public than, in a word, of liberating her own soul; and she discovered, as many others have done, that neither the vehicle employed, nor the audience addressed, easily lends itself to instruction. Her real genius and strength lay, I am persuaded, in poetical composition. Such, too, was her own conviction; and it is to be regretted that, whatever of her other moral qualities, she lacked toe solidity and continuity of purpose to devote herself wholly to the service of the Muses, irrespectively of that encouragement and applause with which only a few fortunate individuals, so employed, have ever been indulged in their lifetime. Still, like the fountain of Trevi, the sacred Hippocrene compels those who have once tasted of its refreshing waters to thirst for them evermore; and it must not be supposed that this little volume contains more than a selection from her poems. I can testify to her anxious desire that they should some day be given to the world in a collected and permanent form; nor do I doubt, had she lived, that she would have satisfactorily performed the task which is now necessarily executed with incompleteness. My office has been limited to selection, arrangement, and correction of proofs. I should not have felt justified in venturing upon any but indispensable alterations, even though I might have fancied that my friend would have concurred in my suggested emendations.
I hope it will not be esteemed impertinent, if I take upon myself to say that I think highly of many of these poems. Not only are they, in my opinion, sometimes faulty in form, and still more frequently wanting in finish—two qualities she professed not to take very highly—but, what is singular, they likewise occasionally lack melodiousness, upon which she laid great stress in estimating the work of others. But they have all the essentials of poetry. Poetry is thought completely fused in the crucible of feeling, and by one and the same operation wrought into metrical form. Now, what was most remarkable even in the ordinary conversation of Isa Blagden, and, I may add, what was exceedingly tantalising to the merely positive order of mind, was that she appeared incapable of thought apart from feeling. To me, as I believe to most of her acquaintances, it was her characteristic charm. Anybody less sentimental, in the depreciatory sense of that epithet, never existed; but she poured around the commonest matter an atmosphere of sentiment, or, more strictly speaking, of feeling, which appeared to set it in a fuller light, and to give it completeness, robbing it always of its naked hardness, and not unfrequently of its blunt injustice. It was a faculty which the judicious always envied her, even though it sometimes made her appear inconsistent, or, at least, inconsequent; a result at which we need not wonder, seeing how the reconciliation of things equally true, as of persons equally good, is in this world now and then an impossible task, even to that catholic charity of which her heart was a never-failing fountain. To all such charges of inconsistency or inconsequence she was merrily insensible, and would close an argument in which, from the mere syllogistic point of view, she had perhaps not emerged a victor, with two or three rapid nods of the head, and the exclamation, "Ah! well!" as though she were addressing her own breast, and appealing to a grandly illogical but truly celestial tribunal within. I remember well holding a controversy with her on one of those subjects that dip into the inner life, as we sat among the roses and the vines, a few days before our dear Florence held its sixth centenary of the birth of Dante. We differed; she failed to convince me, and I failed equally to shake her. Finally, she enunciated something I did not even understand, and I said so frankly. "Never mind," she replied, "you will understand it some day." And she was right. Alas! she can reprove us thus wisely and quietly—no more.
This ever-present, ever-flowing feeling, which was the main charm of her conversation, seems to me to be strikingly noticeable—though I almost think in a slightly less degree, probably because we naturally expect to find it there—in her poetry. She is resolutely on the side of the angels. Yet she soars into no ethereal region. Her Muse walks the familiar world of human passion and suffering, illumining the journey with the light of a compassionate lantern lit at heavenly lamps. Her creed is the old one of the valley of tears that leads to the celestial mountain; yet she is far from being alien to joy. In the supreme and exhilarating beauty of the material world she revels like "the shrill cicale, people of the pine," the sound of whose light-hearted chirrup was so grateful to her ears. In no one I have ever known were joyousness, that special appanage of the ancient world, and melancholy, that heavy inheritance of modern times, so evenly and equitably blended. All that was most precious in Pagan feeling, and all that is most sacred in Christian sentiment, were absorbed and assimilated by her nature. She had a thoroughly sensuous soul; an eye, ear, heart, exquisitely alive to beauty of sound and scent, of sky, mountain, sea, city, or human face. She gloried in the gorgeous apparel of the external world, just as—many will remember—she delighted in bright textures and vivid colours for female adornment. Indeed, could her innate tastes have been thoroughly indulged, she would have striven to add to Greek beauty of form an oriental splendour of decoration. She exulted in all that could boast the vital power of loveliness. You never met her but she was full of some fresh subject of enthusiasm—a book, a countenance, or some natural prospect. I have heard more than one of her friends describe her as bird-like; and even a stranger would have found something apt in the comparison, by reason of her singularly small figure and sprightly manner. But I suspect that what really suggested the idea was the completeness of her accord with surrounding nature, and more especially with the scenery that girt her Tuscan home. She had, indeed, the wings of the bird; surely she had the voice; and truly may I add, she had the fond brooding breast.
This was the beautiful Pagan side of her, that found full space and scope in Italy, that second and greater Greece, and which sought expression in two especially of the poems in this collection—"The Invitation," and "Wild Flowers." But whilst she was conspicuously endowed with those light-seeking gifts and qualities which Christianity, and Protestant Christianity more especially, has shown itself rather too eager to put under a bushel, hers no less, and in a no less striking degree, were those virtues that do good by stealth, and which Christianity has so justly exalted; the gifts and fruits of the Spirit, as opposed to the Pagan gifts and fruits of the flesh,—love, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, and faith. Thus, while she had in no degree rejected the precious inheritance bequeathed to us by sub-Olympian times, but gave witness in a thousand ways that great Pan is not dead, she was pre-eminently the child, too, of the Christian era, and was thus, in very truth, the heir of all the ages. For she was a Christian in every sense of the word; by her adherence to its creed, though always, be it understood, in its most catholic and comprehensive form, but still more by her steady and cheerful exercise of the virtues it especially inculcates. Inexhaustible patience and resignation to her own sufferings, inexhaustible sympathy and help for the afflictions of others, boundless toleration for their weaknesses and boundless forgiveness for their sins,—these were the credentials which proved her a disciple of the divine teaching of the Galilean Lake. Many, indeed, of her intimate friends sat apart, in the terse language of Mr Tennyson, "holding no form of creed, but contemplating all." But so large was her own interpretation of doctrines which easily lend themselves to narrow and exclusive views, that her belief seemed almost to comprehend their inability and refusal to accept it; and, of a certainty, it never caused the faintest shadow of alienation or division to intervene between herself and any human being. For, after all, practical benevolence was her Religion. She united with the sensuous love of sounds that are quite independent of man's condition and fortunes, of the song of birds, of the ripple of streams, of the tumbling of torrents, of the roll of the sullen thunder, the finest moral ear for "the still sad music of humanity." She was attuned to every possible note of wail, and answered it with quick-throbbing sympathy. No matter what might be at the moment her own occupations, her own plans, or the demands of her own interest, she quitted them on the instant at the invitation of helplessness. She was always under arms at the call of compassion. She worked hard, and lived, in great measure, by the exercise of her pen; but neither absorption in the task, nor what others would have deemed the absolute necessity of not being interrupted till it was completed, delayed her step for a second when it was summoned to the bedside of suffering. I well remember how busy she was in the spring of 1865, yet with what alacrity she assisted me, weary after seven months even of the streets; of Florence, to bivouac in an unfurnished villa outside the Porta Romana, and not far from the Villa Giglione she herself then tenanted; lending or finding me linen, plate, and crockery, and pressing into the service the handsome barefooted daughters of the Podere that adjoined it, one of whom used to compute the length of time one's eggs for breakfast should be left in boiling water, by counting two hundred beats of her pulse. No sooner had she established me in this somewhat primitive mode of life, than she was summoned into the city to tend Theodosia Trollope in what proved to be the last days of her long but only too early decline; I quickly following, and taking up my abode in the Villino Trollope, in order to aid in distracting from his bereavement my valued friend, the well-known author of 'The History of the Commonwealth of Florence.' I cannot but think that it will be agreeable to Mr Browning, if I also record that she performed the same pious offices for his illustrious wife, England's, indeed the world's greatest poetess; and that she was bound to both of them by the ties of the warmest affection, admiration, and regard.
These two qualities which we have called respectively Pagan and Christian,—qualities which the unwise imagine to be conflicting, but which the understanding know to be the completion one of the other,—are reflected as fully in Isa Blagden's poems as they were in her life. If she had written only those seven exquisite sonnets, to be found at pages 93-97 of this volume, and which she entitled the "Seven Chords of the Lyre," such would have been equally the case, and I should equally have been able to claim for her the character and dignity of a true poet. Mark with what subtlety yet distinctness of touch she strikes the first chord! What is it? Aspiration: aspiration for a beneficent activity which shall have its guerdon on earth and in heaven, by spanning both with the arch of Fame. What is the second? Love: love that is described as transfiguring the whole being, making the arid to bloom, the dark places to shine, even as the moon does, when it arises, on the earth. What is the third? Joy: joy that treads the shore of the blest isles, and that holds love's lilies in its clasp. Can the notes of delight and exultation ascend higher? Alas! they have touched the topmost height; and here for a moment they pause, ere the decrescendo movement begins. The fourth sonnet—the fourth of the Seven Chords of the Lyre—is Doubt; doubt described as
That sears the glories of the summer sky,
And brings foul tempests where was golden calm!"
doubt that defeatureth the beauty of that soft domain, and "wars with love, till love itself depart." And now note with what exquisite accuracy of touch and estimation, with what penetration into the finer facts of life, with what fulfilment of the Pagan creed of delight by the new dispensation of Christian grief and patience, she balances and completes the chords of Aspiration, Love, and Joy, which hang on the sunny side of Doubt, with those of Sorrow, Endurance, and Faith, which compose and weigh down the other. Through Sorrow, which gives out perfume, even as does trampled grass—through Endurance, which would blush to be weaker than the lone star, which looks forth singly on a dark world—she attains the goal of Faith; and with this soft, yet confident cadence, she closes the strain:
Stronger than joy, stronger than grief, must be,
And-trample both, to reach, O God, to Thee!"
Apart from the literary merits of these sonnets—and they appear to me, more especially the sonnet "Endurance," to be not unworthy of Wordsworth—they are of special value to us as embodying her view of life, of the relations of God and man, of earth and heaven. They are the beautiful epitome of her Creed; and all she ever said, did, or wrote, buttress this central edifice of her soul. The same doctrine is inculcated in the remarkable poem on the interview which once took place between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Georges Sand, and which wrung from the former two memorable sonnets. We find it again in "The Angels of Life;" and it is writ small, and with a pretty quaint conceit, in the lines on "My Monogram:"
Barred by a cross of flame,
Unite, and divide, and measure,
The letters which form my name,
·····
To make duty my goal and my aim,
As the circles are held in the cross!
My life’s motto is writ in my name."
The first impression of life is that it was made for joy. That is the impression of the child. The second impression is, that it was made for joy, through love. That is the impression of youth, which some fortunate natures retain through early manhood. Then comes the terrible discovery that joy, even if found, and so found, is not permanent. Then the road of life which we all traverse thus far together, divides into two branches, one of which tempts with its cynical simulations of real happiness, and the other of which is plainly marked "sorrow and duty," but which holds out the promise of a celestial bourne of eternal calm. It is narrow and long, this last; and few there are that find it. It was found, and resolutely travelled to the end, by the impassioned but pious authoress of these poems, wherein the solemn journey is faithfully mirrored. Let us devoutly hope that she was not moving on footsore to a mirage; yet even were that so, I cannot doubt that she chose the better part. But it should never be forgotten that such a choice, though comparatively easy to the compounds of clay and locomotive power, whom we call men and women, is superlatively arduous to the exceptional few with whom Love is a consuming passion, and Genius an unquenchable torch. The subject of this memoir had a joy-loving frame, a throbbing soul, and a soaring mind. She combined in herself the qualities both of Martha and of Mary, and she superadded to these the prodigal tenderness of Magdalen without her errors. This is the supremest praise that can be given to a woman; but those who knew Isa Blagden know that I do not exaggerate.
She first settled in Florence in 1849, and that fairest and fullest spot of Earth was her adopted home till the day of her death. Nay, she resides there still, under the spiral cypress-shadow which stretches athwart the tombs of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Theodosia Trollope. Thus she was present at the entombment of Italy's hopes of liberty and unity at the close of one decade, and at their glorious and final resurrection towards the close of the next. She even lived to see Rome delivered, and raised to its proper dignity as the capital of the new Kingdom. As her poems testify, she took the warmest interest in the fortunes of the beautiful and now prosperous land. But there was one drop of bitterness reserved for her share in the political exultation so many of us have felt. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose sentiments are recorded in the 'Poems Before Congress,' she entertained an enthusiastic admiration for Napoléon III, which many friends of Italy shared but in marked moderation, and some did not share at all. In the days of that monarch's prosperity, it was all very well for us to turn her portrait of him with his face to the wall, as the best mode of notifying to her that we had called at the Villa Giglione or the Villa Castellani—she moved to the latter in 1868—and had not found her at home. But when the famous points now's began to show themselves on the imperial horizon, it became necessary to treat the subject with gravity; and when, finally, the Second Empire disappeared amid the smoke and surrender of Sedan, it had to be avoided altogether. I grieve to think that so loving and generous a soul should have experienced real grief from what I cannot but regard as a well-merited catastrophe. That it caused her suffering deep and long, I know; and it is certainly remarkable that her own death, almost a sudden one, should have occurred immediately after the announcement of that of the ex-Emperor. The last lines she ever wrote were on that event; and they are omitted from this volume, not only because the poem was left incomplete, but because I have found much of it, even as far as it goes, quite undecipherable.
Though Italy was the land of her adoption, she entertained so warm a love for her English friends, that she visited this country as often as she could afford to do so. But, as she used to say, it took her three years to get her finances in order again, after such an indulgence, But even whilst here, her heart was at Bellosguardo; and, as Byron makes Dante say in his exile she That waft her where the Apennine looks down
On Arno."
One year when she visited us, she brought with her her Italian maid, Irene, a handsome wild creature, who spent the days in singing Tuscan stornelli, and munching yet unripe apples in our Kentish orchard. The two little poems, already alluded to, of "Wild Flowers" and "The Invitation," express even with scarcely sufficient ardour the feeling of exultation and delight with which her face was ever turned from the Northern Sea to
Lithe green reeds with lifted spear,
Purple grapes 'mid ripening grain."
Her own abode in the Villa Castellani, modest as it comparatively was, invariably filled one with admiration and envy, whether by reason of its commodiousness, the beauty and retirement of its pretty garden, the excellence of its site, or the unequalled glory of its prospect. On one side was Florence itself, that dream in marble; on the other, the broad middle valley of the Arno, every rood of it visible to the eye even to where it narrows into the defile of La Golfina, fat with centuries of industrious yet beautiful cultivation, and studded with fair campanili and villas,
Vermene germogliar suole e rampolli;"
a plain, which "to look on is to love." There she wrote her poems, and cultivated her anemones and tulips tall, her sweet verbenas, her roses, and against the walls her vines; imprisoning the sunshine in the long oval muscat-flavoured grapes, and loving to garner the huge bunches till some friend from England arrived to be cured of the vulgar notion that hothouse grapes are finer or more luscious than any grown in the open air between the Alps and the sea. How well I remember climbing a ladder, she the while steadying it—for it was monstrously rickety, as such things are apt to be in Italy—bringing down from the rafters of an outhouse the bunches she had stored so long, and helping her to bear them in triumph to some sceptical Britons. For nothing delighted her so much as hospitality, and she exercised it with a constant but ever unpretentious liberality. So large and comprehensive was her own humanity, that she would sometimes make the mistake of bringing fire and water together, and yet expecting them to fuse. Yet she herself possessed some secret charm, which enabled her to fuse equally well with either. She was a living disproof of Gay's aphorism, that a favourite has no friends. She was a universal favourite; and no firmer band of friends ever surrounded man or woman. Though she had all the gifts which we usually associate with a recluse, she was entirely without the moroseness or exclusiveness which often accompanies that character. She was remarkably fond of society, and there was not a house in Florence or its neighbourhood where she was not the most welcome of guests. I had the happiness of first making her acquaintance in a ball-room in that city, though she had then for some time ceased to be among the dancers. She had that "non so ché" which attracted everybody to her, high and low, young and old, distinguished and obscure, ambitious and meek, alike. It was rarely that any one of consequence in the world of letters or of art paid ever so short a visit to Florence without making her acquaintance;and whether English, French, Germans, or Americans touched her threshold, the same genial "salve" greeted them. She never seemed to suffer from either of those two disastrous diseases of modern social life—ennui or boredom; and her patience with stupid people made one ashamed. But with truly congenial spirits her wit was delightful, her sprightliness irresistible, her conversational fervour inexhaustible. The news, "Isa is coming," invariably filled with an almost childlike delight a certain Florence circle, whose members are now, alas! scattered to the four cold winds. She never departed without leaving a blank.
Nor was the tenderness of her heart limited to her own species. I might say that she turned her house into a hospital for dogs, were it not that none of them were, in any sense of the word, invalids. But they had been dogs in distress at some period or other, and their misery had caused her first acquaintance with, and final adoption of them. I remember her writing to me in 1866, after a visit she had paid to Venice, and in the letter she described how she had rescued a poor poodle from the clutches of some boys, who, after shaving it till it resembled a white rat, were about to drown it in the Grand Canal. She took it back to Florence with her, and christened it after the Queen of the Adriatic; "and thus," she added, "I hear Venezia, Venezia, all day long." Another member of the canine saved, a truly friendly fellow, was christened "Keeley, or the low comedian," from his singularly unaristocratic, not to say comic appearance. A highly unpopular member of her dog community was "Teddie," who snapped at the whole world except its dear mistress, and seemed to be of Conrad's opinion when addressing Medora, "I cease to love thee, when I love mankind." One year when she spent the hot summer months at the Bagni di Lucca, she made the entire journey at considerable expense, by vetturino, because the "Livorno-Empoli-Firenze" railway line would not allow her to have her dogs in the railway carriage with her; and her description of the journey in a private letter, written at the time, was humorously descriptive of the intelligent companionship she had chosen. It was her wish that, whenever she died, her dogs should be saved by an easy euthanasia from the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," which she felt sure would befall them in less considerate keeping.
Her habitual cheerfulness, that finest and most beneficent form of social charity, and which invariably beamed out from her at the sight of a human being, doubtless screened from the world at large, as it was only meet it should, the cloud of heavenly melancholy which, as any one who reads her poems attentively will perceive, largely veiled her life. Her spirits were too finely touched for her existence to be altogether a happy one; yet she was far too noble to seem to be unhappy. She turned out a silver lining on the night, though pain and oftentimes gloom shrouded her soul within. "Life," she said to a friend, when she was in England last year, "is one long disappointment." No doubt the words were uttered in a mood of exceptional depression, but on the whole they expressed the speaker's mind. I record them with no hesitation or scruple, for they need not trouble those who knew Isa Blagden. She did not, like some people, insist on her right to be happy, or accuse the Divine Government when the claim was not allowed. As she understood life and its conditions, pain, sorrow, and disappointment necessarily play an important part in it. She relished joy as few can ever have relished it; but when the wings were not permitted to exult, the breast was resigned, and she usually found in ministering to the wounds of others a more than partial forgetfulness of her own. Chateaubriand has observed that sorrow is the strongest pledge of our immortality; and in Isa Blagden's heart the two things were steadily associated. But I know that she wished much to survive, spiritually also, on this side of the dark line; and I cherish the hope that there may lurk something in this little volume which will perpetuate and gratify her yearning.
ALFRED AUSTIN.