E561122C. Aurora Leigh.
The Press, 22 November 1856, pp. 1120–22.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 282–286.
Mrs. Browning writes with the conviction that she is one of the lights of the age. Into this book, she says, “my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” What those convictions are it is not very easy to tell from a perusal of the book itself. It declaims against conventionalism of all kinds; yet when the reader finishes the story he will admit that nothing more conventional was ever devised or penned. All modes of thought and feeling which are anti-conventional are shown to be impracticable; and no novel that ever issued from the press winds up in a more formal manner, with a happy wedding and with the possession of all the substantial and comfortable goods of life wherewith to commence housekeeping. All the sneers and tirades against the cold, heartless, formal world, sink to nothing when we come to the point. A good landed estate, with a well-secured rent-roll, are shown to be infinitely preferable to philansteries and socialism; and Romney Leigh is glad to accept a wife from his own station, and with breeding consonant to his rank, instead of a drab from the purlieus of St. Giles’s.
The highest convictions of Mrs. Browning, except in one point to be presently noticed, amount to no convictions at all. Her eloquence is all of a sceptical character, and how easy it is for a sceptic to be eloquent every one knows. She views the world as out of tune; but she pretends to no key or skill to set it right. A kind of dreamy pantheism pervades the book, with an evident leaning to that philosophy which regards our Lord and Saviour as the first sans-culotte. Her convictions are unconvictions, and many of her finest passages merely illustrate the negation of belief.
The one exception is her conviction that women are born for public, or at least for artistic, life. If the book has any purpose at all, it is to set forth this principle. Aurora Leigh is a poetess, and is so intent on establishing a place for herself in the world’s estimation, that she sacrifices to this desire the prospect of a happy union with the man whom (as it subsequently appears) she ardently loved. It is true that in this fiction her plan is made to answer; those lucky accidents which poets and novelists have always at their disposal to shape human destinies according to their will save her from the natural consequences of her own imprudence. But, [p. 1121→] after all, every one must feel that throughout she acted much like a fool, and that she did not deserve the good fortune which the author has reserved for her.
“Aurora Leigh” is not a poem, but a Browning revelation of what poetry ought to be. It is artificial and egotistical, both to an extreme degree. The book is no more a genuine poem than the antics of a master of the ceremonies are a ball. All is flourish and parade. We look for creative beauty—for that childlike impulse, vehemence, and simplicity, which constitute so large a part of all genuine poetry, and we find only “settled convictions about Nature and Art.” We never meet with a literary character exalted into a hero and heroine but we blush for our craft. In such characters we rarely find the versatility, the weakness, the foibles, and the liability to temptation which commonly mark literary genius. They are, on the contrary, rigid, pompous personages, very Satans for pride, and very gods for all other qualities. They are always conscious of the amazing sensation they are creating, and are separated from the rest of the world, not from their greater facileness and freedom, but from their spasmodic contortions, and their rude and impertinent speech. Like unpractised sculptors, attempting to mould the human form into godlike proportions, the supernatural merges into caricature.
That Mrs. Browning may the easier express her settled convictions of nature and art, she has written “Aurora Leigh” in blank verse—a form of poetic composition which we should gladly see limited to the drama. Mrs. Browning’s verse is much in the manner of that of Sheridan Knowles, being pieced out with such expletives as “You sir, you;” and often differing from prose only in being ranged ten syllables in a line. True poets do not grudge the pains required for their music. They love to sing, not pour such “bald, disjointed chat” as is here spun out by the yard. If the octo-syllable verse presents “fatal facility” to poets, what shall we say of such verse as this, supposed to be the conversation in church on the morning of a wedding?—
—“Yes, really, if we’ve need to wait in church,
We’ve need to talk there.”—“She? ’Tis Lady Ayr,
In blue—not purple! that’s the dowager.”
—“She looks as young.”—“She flirts as young, you mean!
Why if you had seen her upon Thursday night,
You’d call Miss Norris modest.”—“You again!
I waltzed with you three hours back. Up at six,
Up still at ten: scarce time to change one’s shoes.
I feel as white and sulky as a ghost,
So pray don’t speak to me, Lord Belcher.”—“No,
I’ll look at you instead, and its enough
While you have that face.” “In church, my lord! fie, fie!”
—“Adair, you stayed for the Division?”—“Lost
By one.” “The devil it is! I’m sorry for’t.
And if I had not promised Mistress Grove” ..
—“You might have kept your word to Liverpool.”
“Constituents must remember, after all,
We’re mortal.”—“We remind them of it.”—“Hark,
The bride comes! Here she comes in a stream of milk!”
—“There? Dear, you are asleep still; don’t you know
The five Miss Granvilles? always dressed in white
To show they’re ready to be married.”—“Lower!
The aunt is at your elbow.”—“Lady Maud,
Did Lady Waldemar tell you she had seen
This girl of Leigh’s?” “No,—wait! ’twas Mrs. Brookes,
Who told me Lady Waldemar told her—
No, ’twasn’t Mrs. Brookes.”—“She’s pretty.”—“Who?
Mrs. Brookes? Lady Waldemar?”—“How hot!
Pray is’t the law to day we’re not to breathe?
You’re treading on my shawl—I thank you, sir.”
There is much more to the same effect. As Mrs. Browning has had to fill four hundred pages of tolerably close print, she has not thought it necessary to be very particular as to quality.
Poems have commonly two aspects. The interest of the fable is one thing—the merit of the composition is another. A critic whose admiration of “Aurora Leigh” is so excessive that he can only express himself in tropes and similes, lets out the truth that it is a “three-volume novel” in poetic guise. Of the story we must judge as we would of the plot of a novel or drama; allowance must be made in modern romance for some exaggeration, but in what is meant for a representation of existing life we cannot afford to altogether dispense with truth and probability.
Aurora Leigh is the daughter of an English gentleman—a very matter-of-fact person till he went to Italy and was transformed in soul by the beauty of a Tuscan girl whom he first saw in a procession. This girl he weds, becomes a poet in heart, and dwells in Italy. His wife dies while Aurora is a child, and he does not long linger after his idol. This part of the story is, in our judgment, the best part of the book. But it occupies only a dozen pages. Aurora is taken to England to live under her aunt’s guardianship; and from this time the poetic character of the young lady rapidly develops itself. Her aunt is a formalist, and here is at once a specimen of the education Aurora received, and of the verse in which she records her early recollections:—
I learnt my complement of classic French
(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism),
And German also, since she liked a range
Of liberal education,—tongues, not books.
I learnt a little algebra, a little
Of the mathematics,—brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the sciences, because
She misliked women who are frivolous,
I learnt the royal genealogies
Of Oviedo, the internal laws
Of the Burmese empire, .. by how many feet
Mount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh,
What navigable river——
We spare the reader more of this verse. Mrs. Browning is especially fond of such expressions as,
brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the sciences.
Nothing assists her in a metaphysical argument like an illustration from a fashion-book. In due time, Aurora, in spite of her aunt’s vigilance, lights on the poets:—
As the earth
Plunges in fury when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat
The marts and temples, the triumphal gates
And towers of observation, clears herself
To elemental freedom—thus, my soul,
At poetry’s divine first finger-touch,
Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,
Convicted of the great eternities
Before two worlds.
* * * * *
While your common men
Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,
And dust the flaunty carpets of the world
For Kings to walk on, or our senators,
The poet suddenly will catch them up
With his voice like a thunder—“This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said in heaven,
Here’s God down on us! what are you about?”
This passage is merely characteristic of the style in which the authoress commonly expresses her “highest convictions upon Nature and Art.” As Lee’s tragedies were in fashion once, there is no reason why verse like the above should not have its day. When people are credulous, the boldest kind of imposture answers the best. From first to last our fair poetess, in the slang of the day, “goes the pace” with undoubting confidence.
Aurora soon begins to write, and, as her mind gains freedom, her frame gains strength. She loves to wander abroad with her cousin, Romney Leigh. One fine morning early he discovers her secret through finding a volume of her verse. As he meets her to restore it she has just placed a wreath of ivy round her head; whereupon a long philosophical conversation takes place between them, not very easy to follow. He thinks versifying will bring headaches, and that to clamber for ivy is not good for
Clean white morning dresses.
She answers him with due solemnity:—
Learn this:—I would rather take my part
With God’s dead, who afford to walk in white
Yet spread His glory, than keep quiet here
And gather up my feet from even a step,
For fear to soil my gown in so much dust.
I choose to walk at all risks.
Soon the conversation turns on the manner in which the world can be best benefited. The world can only be regenerated by poetry, persists Aurora. Romney demurs,—first, poetry is not woman’s main business in life; next, social ills can only be remedied by socialist schemes. The future disciple of Fourier and Compte “looms out” in such sentences as these:—
I, I sympathise with man, not God,
I think I was a man for chiefly this;
And when I stand beside a dying bed,
It’s death to me.
Aurora is indignant that he should rate socialism above poetry, and that he should beseech her to join with him in his cause, slighting her poetic gifts. He asks for love—for “life in fellowship through bitter duties.” She replies grandly:—
“Now,” I said, “may God
Be witness ’twixt us two!” and with the word,
Meseemed I floated into a sudden light
Above his stature,—“am I proved too weak
To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear
Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,
Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?
Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,
Yet competent to love like him?”
I paused:
Perhaps I darkened as the light-house will
That turns upon the sea. “It’s always so!
Anything does for a wife.”
“Aurora, dear,
And dearly honoured” .. he pressed in at once
With eager utterance,—“you translate me ill.
I do not contradict my thought of you
Which is most reverent, with another thought
Found less so. If your sex is weak for art,
(And I who said so, did but honour you
By using truth in courtship) it is strong
For life and duty. Place your fecund heart
In mine, and let us blossom for the world
That wants love’s colour in the grey of time.
This conversation is a key to the rest of the story. Rejected by Aurora, Romney devotes himself more resolutely to his socialist duties. Aurora’s father has excluded her from the succession to his inheritance by his foreign marriage. Romney takes her place. When her aunt dies she is destitute, but grandly refuses thirty thousand pounds he endeavours to trick her into accepting. She goes to London to commence poetess, and he patronises socialism on a grand scale. To give the world an example of social equality he determines to marry Marian Erle, the beautiful daughter of a drunken country tramp. Aurora hearing of the intended marriage, visits the girl. The following passage may be taken as a sample of the mode in which real life is depicted:—
Two hours afterward,
Within St. Margaret’s Court I stood alone,
Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit,
Whose wasted right hand gambled ’gainst his left
With an old brass button, in a blot of sun,
Jeered weakly at me as I passed across
The uneven pavement; while a woman, rouged
Upon the angular cheek-bones, kerchief torn,
Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth,
Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out,
By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,—
“Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dog
You’ll be to morrow. What, we pick our way,
Fine madam, with those damnable small feet!
We cover up our face from doing good,
As if it were our purse! What brings you here,
My lady? is’t to find my gentleman
Who visits his tame pigeons in the caves?
Our cholera catch you with its cramps and spasms,
And tumble up your good clothes, veil and all,
And turn your whiteness dead blue.” I looked up;
I think I could have walked through hell that day,
And never flinched. “The dear Christ comfort you,”
I said, “you must have been most miserable
To be so cruel,”—and I emptied out
My purse upon the stones: when, as I had cast
The last charm in the cauldron, the whole court
Went boiling, bubbling up, from all its doors
And windows, with a hideous wail of laughs
And roar of oaths, and blows perhaps.
She finds Marian (a girl of ineffable sweetness) in a top attic of this court, and hears from her lips the offer Romney had made to her:—
Marian, I being born
What men call noble, and you, issued from
The noble people,—though the tyrannous sword
Which pierced Christ’s heart, has cleft the world in twain
’Twixt class and class, opposing rich to poor,—
Shall we keep parted? Not so. Let us lean
And strain together rather, each to each,
Compress the red lips of this gaping wound,
As far as two souls can,—ay, lean and league,
I, from my superabundance,—from your want,
You, joining in a protest ’gainst the wrong
On both sides!—
Aurora approves, yet is uneasy. She determines to attend the wedding, where for once
St. Giles in frieze
Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold.
The church is thronged by curious crowds; and no wonder—Romney has promised a marriage feast on Hampstead-heath to all the ragamuffins of the metropolis:—
Of course the people came in uncompelled,
Lame, blind, and worse—sick, sorrowful, and worse,
The humours of the peccant social wound
All pressed out, poured out upon Pimlico,
Exasperating the unaccustomed air
With hideous interfusion.
Romney’s friends and acquaintances gather round the altar. We have already extracted from their conversation. The whole multitude is expectant, but the bride does not come. At last a letter is put into Romney’s hand. She has fled, because she believes he does not love her. Romney is obliged to [p. 1122→] address the crowd. Here is another of Mrs. Browning’s scenes from life:—
Then spoke a man,
“Now, look to it, coves, that all the beef and drink
Be not filched from us like the other fun;
For beer’s spilt easier than a woman is!
This gentry is not honest with the poor;
They bring us up, to trick us,”—“Go it, Jim,”
A woman screamed back,—“I’m a tender soul;
I never banged a child at two years old
And drew blood from him, but I sobbed for it
Next moment,—and I’ve had a plague of seven.
I’m tender; I’ve no stomach even for beef,
Until I know about the girl that’s lost,
That’s killed, mayhap. I did misdoubt, at first,
The fine lord meant no good by her, or us.
He, maybe, got the upper hand of her
By holding up a wedding-ring, and then ..
A choking finger on her throat, last night,
And just a clever tale to keep us still,
As she is, poor lost innocent. ‘Disappear!’
Who ever disappears except a ghost?
I ask you,—would a girl go off, instead
Of staying to be married? a fine tale!
A wicked man, I say, a wicked man!
For my part I would rather starve on gin
Than make my dinner on his beef and beer,”—
At which a cry rose up—“We’ll have our rights.
We’ll have the girl, the girl! Your ladies there
Are married safely and smoothly every day,
And she shall not drop through into a trap
Because she’s poor and of the people: shame!
We’ll have no tricks played off by gentlefolks;
We’ll see her righted.”
There is a dreadful riot, quelled by the police. But what has become of Marian? Aurora suspects a certain Lady Waldemar, who had confided to Aurora her passionate love for Romney. Like all the other characters of the book, this Lady Waldemar, a fine, fashionable lady, speaks the Browning language:—
Of a truth, Miss Leigh,
I have not, without a struggle, come to this.
I took a master in the German tongue,
I gained a little, went to Paris twice;
But after all this love! You eat of love,
And do as vile a thing as if you ate
Of garlic—which, whatever else you eat,
Tastes uniformly acrid, till your peach
Reminds you of your onion.
* * * * *
I came home
Uncured, convicted rather to myself
Of being in—love. That’s coarse, you’ll say;
I’m talking garlic.
Aurora, after the disappointment of poor Romney, feels wretched. She determines on a visit to Italy—sells her books, places her last poem in a publisher’s hands, and sets off. In Paris she discovers Marian. The girl had been induced to fly by the arts of Lady Waldemar. Moreover, she has been ruined, when she was unconscious, and she has an infant. In due time the sad story is learnt by Romney. He comes to Marian, and again proffers his hand. The story has attained its crisis. What will now be done? Will all the fine professions and exalted sentiment of the book be carried out? Will convention be scorned in practice, as it is scorned in theory? While the issue is in suspense there is much godlike feeling and angelic rapture. Marian is the deity who cuts the knot at length. She exclaims with enthusiasm:—
Oh it does me good,
It wipes me clean and sweet from devil’s dirt
That Romney Leigh should think me worthy still
Of being his true and honourable wife.
But—and the but settles everything:—
I shall tell the truth,
Which is I do not love you Romney Leigh,
I do not love you.
She only worships him; her love is for her child. She knows where Romney has set his heart, and plainly indicating Aurora, she vanishes to appear on the scene no more.
Previously Aurora and Romney have exchanged confidences. All his socialist schemes have failed. His philanstery has deplorably broken down, and the mob have burnt Leigh-hall to mark their sense of his reforming spirit. Aurora has something also to tell him:—
“Stay,” I answered him;
“I’ve something for your hearing, also. I
Have failed too.”
“You!” he said, “you’re very great;
The sadness of your greatness fits you well;
As if the plume upon a hero’s casque
Should nod a shadow upon his victor face;”
I took him up austerely,—“You have read
My book, but not my heart; for recollect,
’Tis writ in Sanscrit, which you bungle at.”
After Marian’s disappearance, there is no more concealment, but great agitation. Romney is about to bid Aurora farewell, when she interrupts him:—
A moment! Heavenly Christ!
A moment. Speak once Romney. ’Tis not true.
I hold your hands, I look into your face—
You see me.
Presently Romney’s “divine Aurora” is more explicit:—
But I love you, sir,
And when a woman says she loves a man
The man must hear her, though he love her not.
Aurora has all the while adored him without knowing it. For some years past they have been playing at cross purposes. Now they are united, Aurora being still triumphant, as Romney acknowledges her intellectual superiority. He bids her work for two, and he will love for two:—
Come thou, my compensation, my dear sight,
My morning-star, my morning! rise and shine,
And touch my hills with radiance not their own;
Shine out for two, Aurora, and fulfil
My falling-short that must be! work for two,
As I, though thus restrained, for two, shall love!
Gaze on, with inscient vision toward the sun,
And, from his visceral heat, pluck out the roots
Of light beyond him.
If this be not fine writing, we know not what fine writing is. The conclusion is in the loftiest style of incomprehensibility:—
My Romney!—Lifting up my hand in his,
As wheeled by seeing spirits toward the east,
He turned instinctively,—where, faint and fair,
Along the tingling desert of the sky,
Beyond the circle of the conscious hills,
Were laid in jasper-stone as clear as glass
The first foundations of that new, near day
Which should be builded out of heaven, to God.
He stood a moment with erected brows,
In silence, as a creature might, who gazed:
Stood calm, and fed his blind, majestic eyes
Upon the thought of perfect noon. And when
I saw his soul saw,—“Jasper first,” I said,
“And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony;
To rest in order, .. last, an amethyst.”
Is this really a story to aid the regeneration of the world? Does it fulfil that ideal of nature and art promised in the lady’s dedication? How, in a dramatic tale of this kind, can we afford to dispense entirely with truth? The mawkish, extravagant substitute for it which Mrs. Browning has provided never can exercise a healthy influence. The stomach of our sense has not been so nauseated for many a day as by this outrageous fiction.
The extracts we have given sufficiently show what is the composition of the poem. It contains many beautiful and some shrewd passages, but, on the whole, we cannot bring ourselves to assign to it a much higher rank than is due to the tragedies of Mad Lee. The fashion of fustian changes, but the fustian subsists. A great part of the poem is rank unmitigated rant.
There is something well-nigh sublime in the authoress’s presumption. She is satisfied, no doubt, that she has produced the greatest poem of the age. We are extremely sorry to say anything that may appear severe of a lady who has manifested rare poetic gifts, and who shows, even in this volume, that they have not yet deserted her. But neither should we be dealing honestly with the public nor with her, if we did not frankly express our opinion that she must of late have been dwelling within that confined mental atmosphere which becomes poisoned through being too often breathed. Poets should sing from themselves, not of themselves. It fares badly with them when they seek their world within, not without, and when they substitute the fantasies of a heated brain, and a close and clouded atmosphere, for God’s creation and the free breath of Nature.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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