E561129B. Aurora Leigh.
The Leader, 29 November 1856, pp. 1142–44; 6 December 1856, pp. 1169–70.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 296–301.
When, some weeks ago, we anticipated the delight of a new poem from Mrs. Browning, we never, in our keenest expectations, thought of receiving so fine a poem as Aurora Leigh, which surpasses in sustained strength and variety, anything English poetry has had since Childe Harold. It places Mrs. Browning beyond dispute at the head of all poetesses, ancient or modern, and although it will be judged diversely by diverse minds, no one, we fancy, will venture to claim for any other woman’s poem an equal rank.
Having, as justice demands, expressed emphatically our sense of the greatness of Aurora Leigh, without stint of phrase, and yet without precipitate or careless eulogy, we must also add that the poem has very many faults, some deeply-seated, some quite superficial and remediable, which faults, perhaps, will give the critics occupation, but will not in any appreciable degree affect the success of the work; for in Art, as in Life, success depends on what is positive, on excellence of some kind; and where this exists no amount of mistake, or incompleteness, can finally prevent recognition. Kean’s acting was fuller of faults than that of many a man who never rose above mediocrity; but Kean’s genius was of such positive and thrilling influence, that like a meteor he burnt his pathway before the wondering gaze of men, who might on reflection object to the “irregularity,” but could not, even in reflection, forget the splendour.
We cannot in our scanty limits pretend to criticize Aurora Leigh, but certain general points may here be touched, as if we chatted with the reader when the book was closed. And first as to its conception. It is a three-volume novel in verse. This of itself is something new. Scott and Byron told stories in verse; Tennyson in the Princess and in Maud has also tried his hand at story-telling, with very indifferent success as a story-teller; but no poet—at least we know of none—has represented modern life in such forms as it assumes in modern fiction, no one has sung the novel instead of writing it. Aurora Leigh has a story equal in incident, character, and scenery to almost any three-volume novel of the English type. In no respect does it differ from the novel except that it is sung. It sings of our actual life, embodying the schemes and struggles, the opinions and the social contrasts of our day. Alton Locke is not more immediately the product of our social condition, nor less idealized.
Whether the poet is right or wrong in thus swerving from the almost universal practice of seeking in distant climes and distant ages for the subject of song, we will not here inquire. Briefly we may suggest that the poet therein should please himself; let us have poems, and not trouble ourselves when they come. Æschylus, in writing the Persæ, never paused to consider whether contemporary events were fitted for ideal treatment; he treated them ideally, and was content. But when we waive that general question, it only brings us to a more direct consideration of the particular instance. We grant Mrs. Browning the utmost licence in her choice only to be more rigorous in our judgment of the subject chosen; and while thinking she was at perfect liberty to write a musical novel, we demand from her the writing of a novel which in itself is good. In proportion as she introduces the elements of ordinary fiction into her poem, she must be criticized by the standards of fiction. No one thinks of objecting to Childe Harold, or [p. 1143→] the Excursion, that the story, as a story, is poor, and not very natural; but everyone feels that the story of Orlando Furioso is a part of its enchantment, and was meant to be so; everyone will feel that the story of Aurora Leigh is something more than a vehicle for exquisite verse, and was meant to be so—meant to shadow forth truths of life and character. Now if we consider the story of Aurora Leigh—apart from its musical utterance—we must admit that, although it draws us onwards, filling the eyes with tears and the heart with sudden beatings of noble emotion, it does nevertheless in several particulars jar and distress the judgment, and, as a novel, is but second-rate. It wants invention. The conduct of the story is such as we have followed in hundreds of novels, not being a wit the truer for its commonplace; and were Aurora Leigh written in prose, or in verse less affluent, and musical, and tender, we should throw it aside with no more commendation than is bestowed on second-rate novels.
We propose in this article to tell the story; in a second article our criticism of the poem may be resumed. Aurora Leigh is the child of an Englishman of family, and an Italian girl of beauty, who died when Aurora was four years old:—
She could not bear the joy of giving life—
The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kiss
Had left a longer weight upon my lips,
It might have steadied the uneasy breath,
And reconciled and fraternized my soul
With the new order. 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 overjoyous, 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’s 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 license to be missed.
Her father,
Whom love had unmade from a common man,
But not completed to an uncommon man
(how subtle that!), reared and educated her in solitude, till, when she was about thirteen, he died. The child was shipped to England, which thus appeared to her Italian eyes:—
Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs
Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home
Among those mean red houses through the fog?
And when I heard my father’s language first
From alien lips which had no kiss for mine,
I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,—
And some one near me said the child was mad
Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.
Was this my father’s England? the great isle?
The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship
Of verdure, field from field, as man from man;
The skies themselves looked low and positive,
As almost you could touch them with a hand,
And dared to do it, they were so far off
From God’s celestial crystals; all things, blurred
And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates
Absorb the light here?—not a hill or stone
With heart to strike a radiant colour up
Or active outline on the indifferent air!
I think I see my father’s sister stand
Upon the hall-step of her country-house
To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey
By frigid use of life (she was not old,
Although my father’s elder by a year);
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close, mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,
Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;
Eyes of no colour,—once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling; cheeks, in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom,
Past fading also,
She had lived, we’ll say,
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,
A quiet life, which was not life at all
(But that she had not lived enough to know),
Between the vicar and the county squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyreal, to assure their souls
Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,
The apothecary looked on once a year,
To prove their soundness of humility.
The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts
Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,
Because we are of one flesh after all
And need one flannel (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality),—and still
The book-club, guarded from your modern trick
Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,
Preserved her intellectual. She had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.
Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live
In thickets, and eat berries!
The humorous and satirical touches of this passage give indication that the music is not to be wholly in one key; here is another passage from the long and satirical account of her education under the care of this aunt:—
I drew .. costumes
From French engravings, nereids neatly draped,
With smirks of simmering godship,—I washed in
From nature, landscapes (rather say washed out).
I danced the polka and Cellarius,
Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,
Because she liked accomplishments in girls.
I read a score of books on womanhood
To prove, if women do not think at all,
They may teach thinking (to a maiden-aunt
Or else the author)—books demonstrating
Their right of comprehending husband’s talk
When not too deep, and even of answering
With pretty “may it please you,” or “so it is,”—
Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,
Particular worth and general missionariness,
As long as they keep quiet by the fire
And never say “no” when the world says “ay,”
For that is fatal,—their angelic reach
Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,
And fatten household sinners,—their, in brief,
Potential faculty in everything
Of abdicating power in it: she owned
She liked a woman to be womanly,
And English women, she thanked God and sighed
(Some people always sigh in thanking God),
Were models to the universe.
In spite of this, her young and eager soul finds out its proper nourishment; in secret she reads all the better books, and in secret begins to write poetry to which she feels the irresistible vocation. Her cousin Romney Leigh, heir to the Leigh estates, loves her, and she loves him, but when he tells her of his love, he does it with the arrogance and infelicity of youth, which stings her pride, and she refuses him. The fact is, he has given his soul to philanthropic schemes; to ameliorate the social condition of his age has become the dream and passion of his life, and although he loves his cousin, he lets her plainly see he wants her as a helper in his work, even more than as a wife. This is very subtly conceived. It is just the sort of pedantic error to which youth is liable. It is just the sort of error to offend a woman’s pride. But although we think the situation finely conceived, it is imperfectly presented; and the tone of the conversation on both sides is not like truth—we do not mean the literal truth of daily talk, but ideal truth of passion and poetry. The reader has a sense of the whole being, as in novels, a mere device of the writer to separate hero and heroine in order that the story may take its course; not as the inevitable utterance of two human souls. She rejects her cousin, and is resolved to dedicate her life to poetry. Her aunt is furious with her for such folly; but she is resolute; and the life she led in consequence is thus graphically hinted:—
The next week passed in silence, so the next,
And several after: Romney did not come,
Nor my aunt chide me. I lived on and on,
As if my heart were kept beneath a glass,
And everybody stood, all eyes and ears,
To see and hear it tick. I could not sit,
Nor walk, nor take a book, nor lay it down,
Not sew on steadily, nor drop a stitch
And a sigh with it, but I felt her looks
Still cleaving to me, like the sucking asp
To Cleopatra’s breast, persistently
Through the intermittent paintings. Being observed,
When observation is not sympathy,
Is just being tortured. If she said a word,
A “thank you,” or an “if it please you, dear,”
She meant a commination, or at best,
An exorcism against the devildom
Which plainly held me. So with all the house.
Susannah could not stand and twist my hair,
Without such glancing at the looking-glass
To see my face there, that she missed the plait:
And John,—I never sent my plate for soup,
Or did not send it, but the foolish John
Resolved the problem, ’twixt his napkined thumbs,
Of what was signified by taking soup
Or choosing mackerel. Neighbours, who dropped in
On morning visits, feeling a joint wrong,
Smiled admonition, sate uneasily,
And talked with measured, emphasised reserve,
Of parish news, like doctors to the sick,
When not called in,—as if, with leave to speak,
They might say something. Nay, the very dog
Would watch me from his sun-patch on the floor,
In alternation with the large black fly
Not yet in reach of snapping. So I lived.
And one morning, some weeks after:—
Then, suddenly, a single ghastly shriek
Tore upwards from the bottom of the house.
Like one who wakens in a grave and shrieks, [p. 1144→]
The still house seemed to shriek itself alive,
And shudder through its passages and stairs
With slam of doors and clash of bells.—I sprang,
I stood up in the middle of the room,
And there confronted at my chamber-door,
A white face,—shivering, ineffectual lips.
“Come, come,” they tried to utter, and I went;
As if a ghost had drawn me at the point
Of a fiery finger through the uneven dark,
I went with reeling footsteps down the stair,
Nor asked a question.
There she sate, my aunt,—
Bolt upright in the chair beside her bed,
Whose pillow had no dint! she had used no bed
For that night’s sleeping .. yet slept well. My God,
The dumb derision of that grey, peaked face
Concluded something grave against the sun,
Which filled the chamber with its July burst
When Susan drew the curtains, ignorant
Of who sate open-eyed behind her. There,
She sate .. it sate .. we said “she” yesterday ..
And held a letter with unbroken seal,
As Susan gave it to her hand last night:
All night she had held it. If its news referred
To duchies or to dunghills, not an inch
She’d budge, ’twas obvious, for such worthless odds:
Nor, though the stars were suns, and overburned
Their spheric limitations, swallowing up
Like wax the azure spaces, could they force
Those open eyes to wink once. What last sight
Had left them blank and flat so,—drawing out
The faculty of vision from the roots,
As nothing more, worth seeing, remained behind?
Were those the eyes that watched me, worried me?
That dogged me up and down the hours and days,
A beaten, breathless, miserable soul?
And did I pray, a half-hour back, but so,
To escape the burden of those eyes .. those eyes?
“Sleep late” I said.—
Why now, indeed, they sleep.
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in’t. Every wish
Is like a prayer .. with God.
I had my wish,—
To read and meditate the thing I would,
To fashion all my life upon my thought,
And marry, or not marry. Henceforth, none
Could disapprove me, vex me, hamper me.
Full ground-room, in this desert newly made,
For Babylon or Balbec,—when the breath,
Just choked with sand, returns, for building towns!
The letter held unopened in the hand of the corpse was a gift from Romney Leigh of thirty thousand pounds—given of course that it might be inherited by Aurora who was a beggar. But she refuses to accept the gift. The scene between them is so unnatural in tone, though true enough in conception, that should these lines meet Mrs. Browning’s eye, we urgently beg her to reconsider the scene, with a view to expression only, and see if she cannot remove the levities, irrelevancies, and unrealities, which produce an impression on us precisely similar to that produced by scenes in unreal novels. Aurora may refuse the gift, but not in those terms, and preserve our sympathy.
Aurora then becomes a poetess, lives in London, and is celebrated. Romney turns more resolutely to social schemes; founds a phalanstery, and to signalize before the world his disapproval of all social distinctions, is about to marry a “distressed needlewoman” whom he found at the hospital, and has since befriended. We pass over the episode of Marian’s life—wonderfully told—but uncommonly like what we have often read before—and arrive at the wedding:—
Half St. Giles in frieze
Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold,
And, after contract at the altar, pass
To eat a marriage-feast on Hampstead Heath.
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: you’d suppose
A finished generation, dead of plague,
Swept outward from their graves into the sun,
The moil of death upon them. What a sight!
A holiday of miserable men
Is sadder than a burial-day of kings.
They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church
In a dark, slow stream, like blood. To see that sight,
The noble ladies stood up in their pews,
Some pale for fear, a few as red for hate,
Some simply curious, some just insolent,
And some in wondering scorn,—“What next? what next?”
These crushed their delicate rose-lips from the smile
That misbecame them in a holy place,
With broidered hems of perfumed handkerchiefs;
Those passed the salts with confidence of eyes
And simultaneous shiver of moiré silk;
While all the aisles, alive and black with heads,
Crawled slowly toward the altar from the street,
As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole
With shuddering involutions, swaying slow
From right to left, and then from left to right,
In pants and pauses. What an ugly crest
Of faces rose upon you everywhere
From that crammed mass! you did not usually
See faces like them in the open day:
They hide in cellars, not to make you mad
As Romney Leigh is.—Faces!—O my God,
We call those, faces? Men’s and women’s .. ay,
And children’s;—babies, hanging like a rag
Forgotten on their mother’s neck,—poor mouths,
Wiped clean of mother’s milk by mother’s blow,
Before they are taught her cursing. Faces! .. phew,
We’ll call them vices festering to despairs,
Or sorrows petrifying to vices; not
A finger-touch of God left whole on them;
All ruined, lost—the countenance worn out
As the garments, the will dissolute as the acts,
The passions loose and draggling in the dirt
To trip the foot up at the first free step!—
Those, faces! ’twas as if you had stirred up hell
To heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost
In fiery swirls of slime,—such strangled fronts,
Such obdurate jaws were thrown up constantly,
To twit you with your race, corrupt your blood,
And grind to devilish colours all your dreams
Henceforth, .. though, haply, you should drop asleep
By clink of silver waters, in a muse
On Raffael’s mild Madonna of the Bird.
But the bride never comes. The machinations of a lovely devil—Lady Waldemar—have frustrated this match—Marian disappears. Time passes. Aurora grows more and more famous, and is to be met in London drawingrooms:—
It always makes me sad to go abroad;
And now I’m sadder that I went to-night
Among the lights and talkers at Lord Howe’s.
His wife is gracious, with her glossy braids,
And even voice, and gorgeous eyeballs, calm
As her other jewels. If she’s somewhat cold,
Who wonders, when her blood has stood so long
In the ducal reservoir she calls her line
By no means arrogantly? she’s not proud;
Not prouder than the swan is of the lake
He has always swum in;—’tis her element,
And so she takes it with a natural grace,
Ignoring tadpoles. She just knows, perhaps,
There are men, move on without outriders,
Which isn’t her fault. Ah, to watch her face,
When good Lord Howe expounds his theories
Of social justice and equality—
’Tis curious, what a tender, tolerant bend
Her neck takes: for she loves him, likes his talk,
“Such clever talk—that dear, odd Algernon!”
She listens on, exactly as if he talked
Some Scandinavian myth of Lemures,
Too pretty to dispute, and too absurd.
What novelist has better sketched an English beauty, one not overwise? Again:—
How lovely One I loved not, looked to-night!
She’s very pretty, Lady Waldemar.
Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil
Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich
Bronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a grey hair,
A single one,—I saw it; otherwise
The woman looked immortal. How they told
Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,
On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk,
Were lost, excepting for the ruby-clasp!
They split the amaranth velvet bodice down
To the waist, or nearly, with the audacious press
Of full-breathed beauty. If the heart within
Were half as white!—but, if it were, perhaps
The breast were closer covered, and the sight
Less aspectable, by half, too.
Our limits are already exceeded; we must therefore merely add, in a sentence or so, that Aurora hearing a rumour of Romney’s intended marriage with Lady Waldemar, quits England for Italy. In Paris she meets with Marian—and very beautiful is the story Marian tells, and the emotions she expresses—but we cannot linger over them. The two women go to Italy, with Marian’s child, Romney comes there too, blind, dispirited, having had Leigh Hall burnt to the ground by the very wretches he was sacrificing himself to benefit, and now with full consciousness of his failure as a social reformer, hears from Aurora that she too is conscious of failure, since with all her success in Art, she has failed in life, he is not happy. The two lovers then finally understand each other, and “live happy all the rest of their days.”
Next week we shall resume our notice.
[Continued in the issue of 6 December 1856.] [p. 1169→]
Last week we considered Aurora Leigh solely as a novel, which to many will have seemed a very severe test, and one applicable to no other poem. Could we now speak of the poem with requisite detail we should occupy many columns, and extract many pages. The poem itself, however, will surely be in the hands of all poetical readers ere long, and we may content ourselves with indicating a few points only, and extracting a few passages.
Every one will be struck in Aurora Leigh with the affluence and effluence of mind, the exquisite and easy utterance of a spirit penetrating, reflective, and high-thoughted. The rich experience of a life is garnered up in these verses. Instead of presenting us with a mere play of fancy, the idle combinations of images, Mrs. Browning gives us her meditations and her feelings, expressed in imagery and musical phrase, but not sacrificed to these ornaments. Various, also, are the chords she strikes: beauty and wisdom, humour and satire, description and pathos, by turns delight us; and throughout there is felt the constant presence of a noble nature uttering its thoughts. The song is the song of a mind one feels to be purer and larger than that of ordinary men, or even more than ordinary poets. And the influence of the poem sinks deep into your mind, making you feel stronger and better.
Had we the privilege of knowing Mrs. Browning, and had she suffered us to see the proof-sheets of her poem, we should have begged her to remove one blemish, the iteration of which is particularly offensive—we mean the prodigality with which she employs the name of God, and the jarring introduction of Christ. The poets of the ‘Spasmodic School’ make fireworks of the stars, and drag the name of God into every dozen lines, because it is easy to produce effects by such means, and they only think of effects. In a poet every way so superior as Mrs. Browning, we are distressed to see this trick of iteration. It is not weakness in her, but mannerism.
Another and more deeply-seated fault is the occasional lapse into what we should call ‘approximative writing.’ After pages of concrete, picturesque, direct verse, such as only poets ever write, we are suffered to toil through pages without concreteness or picture of any kind; reflective without distinctness; mere vague preluding, and, to use a physiological illustration, organizable lymph in lieu of organized tissue. More than two-thirds of the poetry of the present day is of this merorganic nature. You get scarcely any of it in Tennyson or Browning: the first because he elaborates, the second because he thinks concretely whatever he thinks. Mrs. Browning is so genuine a poetess, and so prodigal in power, that the fault we speak of is the more surprising. It is as if a great writer wrote on when his brain was weary.
Here ends our fault-finding. To substantiate our praises we must send our readers to the book itself, or even to the extracts given last week. Long passages display the beauties best, for they exhibit the largo of her style, which is not broken up into unattached effects, but swells with organ-breathing roll, and exquisite modulations. There are lines and phrases which sparkle like jewels on the robe; but the grace of the robe is not caught from them. Thus fancy itself borrows some deep expression, as when, yearning for Italy, Aurora asks the hills if they are conscious of her yearning:—
Do you feel to-night
The urgency and yearning of my soul,
As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe
And smile?
We shall cull a nosegay from this garden, and leave the reader to enjoy the fragrance:—
I could not sleep last night, and, tired
Of turning on my pillow and harder thoughts,
Went out at early morning, when the air
Is delicate with some last starry touch,
To wander through the Market-place of Flowers.
* * * * * *
“It’s the way
With these light women of a thrifty vice,
My Marian,—always hard upon the rent
In any sister’s virtue! while they keep
Their chastity so darned with perfidy,
That, though a rag itself, it looks as well
Across a street, in balcony or coach,
As any stronger stuff might. For my part,
I’d rather take the wind-side of the stews
Than touch such women with my finger-end!
They top the poor street-walker by their lie,
And look the better for being so much worse:
The devil’s most devilish when respectable.”
* * * * * *
How sure it is,
That, if we say a true word, instantly
We feel ’tis God’s, not ours, and pass it on
As bread at sacrament, we taste and pass
Nor handle for a moment, as indeed
We dared to set up any claim to such!
* * * * * *
“A man may love a woman perfectly,
And yet by no means ignorantly maintain
A thousand women have not larger eyes:
Enough that she alone has looked at him
With eyes that, large or small, have won his soul.”
* * * * * *
“That makes libertines:
That slurs our cruel streets from end to end
With eighty thousand women in one smile,
Who only smile at night beneath the gas:
The body’s satisfaction and no more,
Being used for argument against the soul’s.”
* * * * * *
“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.”
* * * * * *
“There’s too much abstract willing, purposing,
In this poor world. We talk by aggregates,
And think by systems; and, being used to face
Our evils in statistics, are inclined
To cap them with unreal remedies
Drawn out in haste on the other side the slate.”
* * * * * *
“A woman cannot do the thing she ought,
Which means whatever perfect thing she can,
In life, in art, in science, but she fears
To let the perfect action take her part
And rest there; she must prove what she can do
Before she does it,—prate of woman’s rights,
Of woman’s mission, woman’s function, till
The men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry,
‘A woman’s function plainly is . . to talk.’
Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
They cannot hear each other speak.”
“And you,
As artist, judge so?”
“I, an artist,—yes,
Because, precisely, I’m an artist, sir,
And woman,—if another sate in sight,
I’d whisper,—Soft, my sister! not a word!
By speaking we prove only we can speak;
Which he, the man here, never doubted. What
He doubts, is whether we can do the thing
With decent grace, we’ve not yet done at all:
Now, do it; bring your statue,—you have room!
He’ll see it even by the starlight here;
And if ’tis e’er so little like the god [p. 1170→]
Who looks out from the marble silently
Along the track of his own shining dart
Through the dusk of ages,—there’s no need to speak;
The universe shall henceforth speak for you,
And witness, ‘She who did this thing, was born
To do it,—claims her license in her work.’
—And so with more works. Whoso cures the plague,
Though twice a woman, shall be called a leech:
Who rights a land’s finances, is excused
For touching coppers, though her hands be white,—
But we, we talk!”
* * * * * *
“I am not sad:
Not sadder than is good for what I am.
My vain phalanstery dissolved itself;
My men and women of disordered lives,
I brought in orderly to dine and sleep,
Broke up those waxen masks I made them wear.
With fierce contortions of the natural face;
And cursed me for my tyrannous constraint
In forcing crooked creatures to live straight;
And set the country hounds upon my back
To bite and tear me for my wicked deed
Of trying to do good without the church
Or even the squires, Aurora. Do you mind
Your ancient neighbours? The great book-club teems
With ‘sketches,’ ‘summaries,’ and ‘last tracts’ but twelve,
On socialistic troublers of close hands
Betwixt the generous rich and grateful poor.
The vicar preached from ‘Revelations’ (till
The doctor woke), and found me with ‘the frogs’
On three successive Sundays; ay, and stopped
To weep a little (for he’s getting old)
That such perdition should o’ertake a man
Of such fair acres,—in the parish, too!
He printed his discourses ‘by request.’ ”
These extracts, chosen for their variety, will delight the reader, but they very faintly indicate the wealth and beauty of Aurora Leigh.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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