E561122D. Aurora Leigh.
The Spectator, 22 November 1856, pp. 1239–40.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 286–288.
There was always something of the Titaness about Mrs. Browning: her instincts were towards the vague, the vast, the indefinite, the unutterable; and the ideal world in which her imagination lived was a world of formless grandeur, of radiant mist, in which shapes of superhuman majesty moved and loomed dimly glorious. In her art she was a Pythoness struggling for utterance, too full of the god to do more than writhe her lips in convulsed agony; her speech was inarticulate, ofen because she meant so much; the note she sounded became a hollow noise, because it was so deep. In this state of mind she wrote lyrical dramas on the Fall of Man and the Crucifixion of Christ, which were little more than hysterical spasms; poured herself forth in improvisations which in one stanza stirred every heart and thrilled every soul, and in the next moved inextinguishable laughter, so strangely were strength and weakness mingled, grand thought [p. 1240→] and deep feeling with nonsense, affectation, and wilful puerility. Casa Guidi Windows was a great advance, though still there was much to do before she became mistress of her own powers—before she could guide the mettled coursers of her chariot with a light finger on the silken reins of art. Aurora Leigh is in point of execution another great step forward: if the steeds still toss their heads somewhat wildly for well-bred carriage-horses, still snuff the air as if the trackless desert were their native home, it is that their mistress prefers to drive with a loose rein, and would rather ride with Mazeppa than take a ticket by the Great Western or a canter round Rotten Row.
But the old anarchic nature of the Titaness is still discernible; still there is something of the old contempt for limitation and the littleness of completeness; still the conception vast and vague and only half-realized; rich elements of force and beauty in chaos and confusion, the waters heaving and boiling with life ere yet the demiurgic spirit has brooded over them and given to each thing its definite form and its separate place. The poem professes to be the autobiography of a woman of genius, who early in life refuses to marry a man she likes, because he, being a philanthropist, seems to her to seek her for his wife not so much as a woman whom he loves, and whose love he wants, as to be his helper in his social work. She is further offended by his slight estimate of art and literature, and by his disbelief in a woman’s ability to attain high excellence in either. So far as concerns herself, the record is one more of feelings than of facts, a history of mental growth and the development of character rather than of fortune and outward incidents. But there is no lack of incidents, and those of so startling a character that they might serve for the plot of a Victoria melodrama. Indeed, nothing can be more evident than that Mrs. Browning has not cared to throw an air of everyday probability over her story, or to propitiate in the least that sort of refinement which avoids almost with equal horror violent emotions and eccentric actions. The two principal characters in the book, besides the autobiographer Aurora Leigh, are her cousin Romney Leigh, whom she refuses to marry for the motives before assigned, and a girl of the lowest station, named Marian Erle, who is pure and good though abjectly poor and the child of brutal tramps. There are other characters incidentally introduced, one of whom, a fashionable young widow, Lady Waldemar, plays a leading part in the development of the story; but the three we have mentioned are the principal dramatis personæ, and it is in their mutual relations that the interest of the poem consists. Thus we have already two very distinct elements of poetic excitement in the growth of Aurora’s character,—in her experience as woman and artist, and in the strange fortunes of Romney Leigh and Marian Erle. But along with these, we have on the one hand, as appropriate enough to Aurora’s autobiography, frequent discursive reflections on art and life in general, sketches of people in society, the brilliant talk of London evening-parties, and all that might naturally enter into the journalizing of a literary woman mixing in the literary and fashionable society of London; and on the other, as Romney Leigh is a philanthropist to begin with, and loses his wife through an overstraining on the practical side of life and marriage, he too passes through the various phases of Socialistic opinion; and the book not only abounds in discussion and allusions to the various and conflicting theories and schemes for the regeneration of society, but its deepest object consists, we should say, in the contrast and final reconcilement of Aurora’s artistic cultivation of the individual, with Romney’s mechanical and materialistic plans for the improvement of the masses. It would require not perhaps more genius and intellect than Mrs. Browning has shown, to organize all this material, all these elements, into a poem of which each part should grow from the expanding life of the central idea, and be necessary to the completeness of the whole; but it would require a more patient endurance of intellectual toil, a more resolute hand upon the reins, more thought, more pains, less self-indulgence in composition, less wilfulness. She has succeeded in writing brilliantly and powerfully almost throughout this long poem of more than ten thousand lines of blank verse; she has touched social problems with the light of her penetrating intellect and the warmth of her passionate heart; has painted scenery with a free outline and a glowing colour; has sketched characters as a sensitive and observant woman can sketch them; above all, she has dramatized passion with a force and energy that recall the greatest masters of tragedy: but these various excellences, though they make a book interesting, and prove genius of a high order, do not make a great poem, and will never be held to do so by any persons who know and feel that a work of art is something different in kind from the finest discursive talk, or even from a collection of studies however masterly, and though they may be ingeniously patchworked into a cleverly-devised frame.
It may be that Mrs. Browning cares little for this distinction; and that she would tell us, that, provided the wine be good, the shape of the glass matters not—that she never aimed at writing a great poem in our sense of the word, but only at writing fine sense and deep feeling. Be it so, if she really is satisfied with that explanation. We do not understand an artist who ignores art, especially when the consciousness of high moral and artistic aims is evidently present, and only the patient effort, the resolute will to conquer difficulties, is wanting. For the rest, she has succeeded in saying a number of beautiful things in a free and natural manner, that loses little of its ease and lightness in the more prosaic parts of the poem, and gains in much larger proportion in the impassioned parts by being in verse. Here, for instance, is a passage on mother’s love, not easily to be surpassed.
As it was, indeed,
I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,—
As restless as a nest-deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away, though what
It knows not. I Aurora Leigh was born
To make my father sadder, and myself
Not over-joyous, truly. Women know
The way to rear up children, (to be just,)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack,
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles: children learn by such,
Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,
And get not over-early solemnized,
But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love Divine,
Which burns and hurts not—not a single bloom—
Become aware and unafraid of Love:
Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well,
—Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier brains,
And wills more consciously responsible,
And not as wisely, since less foolishly:
So mothers have God’s licence to be missed.
Here too is a shrewd criticism on “moral and intellectual systems.”
A fool will pass for such through one mistake,
While a philosopher will pass for such
Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross
And heaped up to a system.
Quotations are not easy to find that suit our space and do justice to the poem from which they are torn. Mrs. Browning takes full room for her powers. But here is a letter, in which Marian Erle, whom Romney Leigh in his Socialist enthusiasm was going to marry, announces to her bridegroom her flight on the morning that was to be the marriage morning.
Noble friend, dear saint,
Be patient with me. Never think me vile,
Who might tomorrow morning be your wife
But that I loved you more than such a name.
Farewell, my Romney. Let me write it once,—
My Romney.
’Tis so pretty a coupled word,
I have no heart to pluck it with a blot.
We say “my God“ sometimes upon our knees,
Who is not therefore vexed: so bear with it ..
And me. I know I’m foolish, weak, and vain;
Yet most of all I’m angry with myself
For losing your last footstep on the stair,
That last time of your coming,—yesterday!
The very first time I lost step of yours,
(Its sweetness comes the next to what you speak,)
But yesterday sobs took me by the throat,
And cut me off from music.
Mister Leigh,
You’ll set me down as wrong in many things.
You’ve praised me, sir, for truth,—and now you’ll learn
I had not courage to be rightly true.
I once began to tell you how she came,
The woman .. and you stared upon the floor
In one of your fixed thoughts .. which put me out
For that day. After, some one spoke of me
So wisely, and of you so tenderly,
Persuading me to silence for your sake …
Well, well! it seems this moment I was wrong
In keeping back from telling you the truth:
There might be truth betwixt us two, at least,
If nothing else. And yet ’twas dangerous.
Suppose a real angel came from heaven
To live with men and women! he’d go mad,
If no considerate hand should tie a blind
Across his piercing eyes. ’Tis thus with you:
You see us too much in your heavenly light;
I always thought so, angel,—and indeed
There’s danger that you beat yourself to death
Against the edges of this alien world,
In some divine and fluttering pity.
Yes,
It would be dreadful for a friend of yours
To see all England thrust you out of doors
And mock you from the windows. You might say,
Or think, (that’s worse,) “There’s some one in the house
I miss and love still.” Dreadful!
Very kind,
I pray you mark, was Lady Waldemar.
She came to see me nine times, rather ten—
So beautiful, she hurts me like the day
Let suddenly on sick eyes.
Most kind of all,
Your cousin!—ah, most like you! Ere you came
She kissed me mouth to mouth: I felt her soul
Dip through her serious lips in holy fire,
God help me, but it made me arrogant;
I almost told her that you would not lose
By taking me to wife: though, ever since,
I’ve pondered much a certain thing she asked ..
“He loves you, Marian?” .. in a sort of mild
Derisive sadness .. as a mother asks
Her babe, “You’ll touch that star, you think?”
Farewell!
I know I never touched it.
This is worse:
Babes grow, and lose the hope of things above;
A silver threepence sets them leaping high—
But no more stars! mark that.
I’ve writ all night,
And told you nothing. God, if I could die,
And let this letter break off innocent
Just here! But no—for your sake ..
Here’s the last:
I never could be happy as your wife,
I never could be harmless as your friend;
I never will look more into your face,
Till God says, “Look!” I charge you, seek me not,
Nor vex yourself with lamentable thoughts
That peradventure I have come to grief:
Be sure I’m well, I’m merry, I’m at ease,
But such a long way, long way, long way off,
I think you’ll find me sooner in my grave,—
And that’s my choice, observe. For what remains,
An over-generous friend will care for me,
And keep me happy .. happier ..
There’s a blot!
This ink runs thick .. we light girls lightly weep. ..
And keep me happier .. was the thing to say, ..
Than as your wife I could be!—O, my star,
My saint, my soul! for surely you’re my soul,
Through whom God touched me! I am not so lost
I cannot thank you for the good you did,
The tears you stopped, which fell down bitterly,
Like these—the times you made me weep for joy
At hoping I should learn to write your notes,
And save the tiring of your eyes at night;
And most for that sweet thrice you kissed my lips
And said “Dear Marian.”
Twould be hard to read
This letter, for a reader half as learn’d;
But you’ll be sure to master it, in spite
Of ups and downs. My hand shakes, I am blind;
I’m poor at writing, at the best,—and yet
I tried to make my gs the way you showed.
Farewell—Christ love you.—Say “Poor Marian” now.
The essential fault of this book is that the plan is too large and complex for the mental power brought to bear upon it; that the characters do not sufficiently act upon each other, and are too stationary in their own development. They neither grow from mutual influence nor from the expansion of their own individuality. Aurora is much the same person at thirty as at twenty; the accident which finally brings about the denouement would have brought it at any period in her mental growth. Marian Erle is a statue of heroic goodness, out of whom circumstances bring the varying expressions of that goodness, but who can scarcely be said to change, to learn anything, to develop powers or virtues though she manifests them. And Romney Leigh is a somewhat vaguely-conceived type of a particular kind of self-sacrifice and intellectual narrowness, invested with the outward form and circumstances of an English gentleman. All this comes of not conceiving the work as a whole, but looking mainly to the separate effect of particular passages and scenes. The characters have no true continuity and development of life in the book, because the writer never conceived them from beginning to end of their careers in one coherent effort of imagination.
We do not know whether Mrs. Browning has ever read “Clarissa Harlowe,” Mrs. Gaskell’s “Ruth,” and Miss Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”; but in the story of Marian Erle she has joined together the central incident of Clarissa Harlowe with the leading sentiment of Ruth—that healing and reconciling influence of the maternal passion for a child whose birth is, according to common worldly feeling, the mother’s disgrace. The combination is striking and original, not to say courageous in a lady. We mention it to disavow any feeling of repugnance to the moral, though we certainly do question the propriety and good taste of introducing the Clarissa Harlowe calamity under any amount of reserve, or for any emotional effect, in poem or novel. The bar of the Old Bailey is the only place where we wish to hear of such things. The same objection does not of course apply to the incident borrowed from Jane Eyre. But it is disagreeable to be so forcibly reminded of a recent and popular work, when a small expenditure of ingenuity would have avoided the resemblance; which is enhanced by the fact that the incident proves in each case the solution of the story’s knot.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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