E561129A. Aurora Leigh.
The Examiner, 29 November 1856, p. 756.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 294–296.
In the course of this poem Mrs Browning now and then suggests, and half, or more than half, accepts as a character of woman’s writing, that
we want string to tie our flowers,
So drop them as we walk, which serves to show
The way we went,
and it may seem to many readers that we are, in her own poem of Aurora Leigh, following a path carelessly and freely strewn with blossoms,—not standing to admire a garland dexterously twined. Perhaps it is so; and perhaps there may be some following the poet’s track who feel that even flowers make a litter on the path along which they have fallen, here too many, there too few, and who, being nervously alive to the disorder on the road, take little heed whither it leads them.
However she may have dealt with her flowers, no precisian can complain with justice that, as to the way she went, Mrs Browning has not persevered with an unswerving determination, walking straightly in the middle of the path towards the point kept from the first in view. The poem is a philosophical love story, the details of which we need not relate, since they are by this time known to the greater number of our readers; at the same time it is the direct and full expression of a single thought. Its doctrine sets out with the assertion that there are in life two kinds of effort to do good; one of them that of the philanthropist, or say the Christian socialist, who sees the material origin of many of the evils of society, and as a Christian, for the love of God, devotes all energy to the task of getting for his depressed neighbours better lodging, better food, clean skin, and the respect of kindred from the rich; the other kind of effort, that of the artist—say the poetess—who sees not the souls lost through degraded bodies, but the flesh abased by degradation of the soul,—she also, as a Christian, for the love of God, devotes all energy to the task of elevating those about her to a higher sense of life. Now, says the poem of Aurora Leigh, each of these anxious labourers errs in accepting only half a truth, and then again errs, over and above that, in being anxious. God is over all.
The story of Aurora Leigh begins then by establishing the relation between the two kinds of effort named, under the type of a pair of lovers, Romney Leigh, a Christian socialist and an Englishman, and Aurora Leigh, a poetess, Italian born. They belong to each other by God’s ordinance, cousins by blood, they are bound also by an indissoluble love from their first childhood, but in the days of their youth and inexperience they repel each other, hold that their paths diverge, and live apart, each working zealously to do that which is right. At last the lesson of life brings the truth home on each of them.
The truth which draws
Through all things upwards, that a twofold world
Must go to a perfect cosmos. Natural things
And spiritual,—who separates those two
In art, in morals, or the social drift,
Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,
Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,
Is wrong, in short, at all points. We divide
This apple of life, and cut it through the pips,—
The perfect round which fitted Venus’ hand
Has perished utterly as if we ate
Both halves. Without the spiritual, observe,
The natural’s impossible;—no form,
No motion! Without sensuous, spiritual
Is inappreciable;—no beauty or power!
And in this twofold sphere the twofold man
(And still the artist is intensely a man)
Holds firmly by the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it,—fixes still
The type with mortal vision, to pierce through,
With eyes immortal, to the antetype
Some call the ideal,—better called the real,
And certain to be called so presently
When things shall have their names.
And then there is the other error—the impatience with which the material reformer or the poet, or even the man who may be both in one—a perfect whole—is apt to strive for the redressing of all wrong, the vain despondence of the human worker when he finds how little is achieved. Thus Aurora makes confession of their common fault to Romney:
I who talked of art,
And you who grieved for all men’s griefs .. what then?
We surely made too small a part for God
In these things. What we are, imports us more
Than what we eat; and life, you’ve granted me,
Develops from within. But innermost
Of the inmost, most interior of the interne,
God claims his own. Divine humanity
Renewing nature,—or the piercingest verse,
Prest in by subtlest poet, still must keep
As much upon the outside of a man,
As the very bowl, in which he dips his beard.
—And then, .. the rest. I cannot surely speak.
Perhaps I doubt more than you doubted then,
If I the poet’s veritable charge
Have borne upon my forehead. If I have,
It might feel somewhat liker to a crown,
The foolish green one even.—Ah, I think,
And chiefly when the sun shines, that I’ve failed,
But what then, Romney? Though we fail indeed,
You .. I .. a score of such weak workers, .. He
Fails never. If He cannot work by us,
He will work over us. Does He want a man,
Much less a woman, think you? Every time
The star winks there, so many souls are born,
Who all shall work too. Let our own be calm:
We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars,
Impatient that we’re nothing.
Afterwards the same view is thus yet more forcibly expressed by Romney:
We want more quiet in our works,
More knowledge of the bounds in which we work;
More knowledge that each individual man
Remains an Adam in the general race,
Constrained to see, like Adam, that he keep
His personal state’s condition honestly,
Or vain all thoughts of his to help the world,
Which still must be developed from its one,
If bettered in its many. We, indeed,
Who think to lay it out new like a park,
We take a work on us which is not man’s;
For God alone sits far enough above,
To speculate so largely.
Finally, the gist of the whole lesson is mastered, and it is this: “The bounds in which we work,” are those of individual home life, in which the duty to the neighbour is not overlooked, and of which Love is the highest guide; first God’s love, next the love of wedded souls. The cousins had met first in the morning of life, and they had repelled each other in the morning hours of day. Night had come to them both, and it was during a summer night under the moon and stars which testify to the Divine overruling power, fresh from an incident which proved the quiet working for good of God’s laws on earth, that Romney and Aurora fully understood each other.
And then calm, equal, smooth with weights of joy,
His voice rose, as some chief musician’s song
Amid the old Jewish temple’s Selah-pause,
And bade me mark how we two met at last
Upon this moon-bathed promontory of earth,
To give up much on each side, then take all.
“Beloved,” it sang, “we must be here to work;
And men who work, can only work for men,
And, not to work in vain, must comprehend
Humanity, and, so, work humanly,
And raise men’s bodies still by raising souls,
As God did, first.”
“But stand upon the earth,”
I said, “to raise them,—(this is human too;
There’s nothing high which has not first been low;
My humbleness, said One, has made me great!)
As God did, last.”
“And work all silently,
And simply,” he returned, “as God does all;
Distort our nature never, for our work,
Nor count our right hands stronger for being hoofs.
The man most man, with tenderest human hands,
Works best for men,—as God in Nazareth.”
He paused upon the word, and then resumed;
“Fewer programmes; we who have no prescience.
Fewer systems; we who are held, and do not hold.
Less mapping out of masses, to be saved,
By nations or by sexes. Fourier’s void,
And Comte is dwarfed, and Cabet, puerile.
Subsists no law of life outside of life;
No perfect manners, without Christian souls;
The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless He had given the life, too, with the law.”
I echoed thoughtfully—“The man, most man,
Works best for men: and, if most man indeed,
He gets his manhood plainest from his soul:
While, obviously, this stringent soul itself
Obeys our old rules of development;
The Spirit ever witnessing in ours,
And Love, the soul of soul, within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely. First, God’s love.”
“And next,” he smiled, “the love of wedded souls,
Which still presents that mystery’s counterpart.
Sweet shadow-rose, upon the water of life,
Of such a mystic substance, Sharon gave
A name to! human, vital, fructuous rose,
Whose calyx holds the multitude of leaves,—
Loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbour-loves,
And civic, .. all fair petals, all good scents,
All reddened, sweetened from one central Heart!”
We spoke of the quiet working of a Divine law on earth; that is the thing typified by the mother-love of Marian Erle. Romney and Aurora would have made great sacrifices for her sake, they were not needed. He who put love into the hearts of mothers, had in His own way, by the quiet path of a domestic love, achieved what they would have broken both their hearts in labouring to compass but imperfectly.
We could dwell more minutely on the purport of this poem, and show more clearly for what reason Mrs Browning speaks of it in her dedication as “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” Thus remembering what is typified by each of the lovers, we may detect an obvious purpose in at last presenting Romney as the husband of Aurora, blind and dependent upon her eyes for his perceptions. The book needs, in truth, to be read twice. it is inevitable that the reader who begins the poem ignorant of what he is to find, and from the enjoyment of a love story as varied as a novel in its incident, passes only when the book has been half read into a clear perception of a great truth living and expanding in the verse, has left behind him unobserved a hundred thoughts that will acquire new life when the book is read a second time. Of the striking beauty to be found in isolated thoughts on almost every page of Aurora Leigh we need say nothing, for this character is not likely to be overlooked by any reader.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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