E561129C. Aurora Leigh.
The Tablet (Dublin), 29 November 1856, pp. 762–763.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 301–303.
The advent of this new “Aurora” had been looked for with such interest that the moment it appeared above our horizon we hastened to greet it. We found it a substantial volume of four hundred pages, and read in the short preface of the author that it was “the most mature of her works,” and the one into which “her highest convictions upon life and art had entered.” Without going into the calculation which, in our cooler moments, we have since made, that four hundred pages, at thirty lines the page, make a sum total of twelve thousand lines, we read it through, and have now the painful duty of recording, in the mildest phrase at our command, the deep disappointment and repugnance with which it has inspired us. The book is inexcusable, for the many powerful passages and the many poetical beauties which it contains aggravate, instead of lessening, the offence which Mrs. Browning has committed. She has told us a story which reads like a translation into blank verse of a French novel by Frederic Soulié. The femme incomprise, the artist-workwoman, the high-souled female with “a mission,” is a terrible companion in a journey of twelve thousand lines, and ever since the genius of Thackeray introduced us to honest Miss Bunion, we chose her as the pink and flower of her class, and would admit no rivalry. But Miss Aurora Leigh is a bad specimen even of her very unattractive class. She tells us her own story in the first person singular, and though never woman thought more highly of herself, nor was at more pains to describe her own supereminent gifts, she is a very ridiculous person, and what is worse than ridiculous, she is intolerably tedious. The orphan child of an English father and a Florentine mother, she comes to England to the care of a prim maiden aunt when nine years old.
On the morning of her twentieth birthday her cousin, Romney Leigh, proposes, and is refused, for the excellently valid reason (for she loves him) that he does not sufficiently appreciate her mission, that he considers women are too subjective for great general purposes to be worked out by themselves, though he admits that—
Mere women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doating mothers and chaste wives,
Sublime Madonnas and enduring Saints.
He himself, for he is quite as mad as she, declares—
That his soul is grey
With pouring over the long sum of ill,
which, in all its items, he sees set down in figures on a page plain, silent, clear.
This he says is terrible—
For one who is not God, and cannot right
The wrong he looks on.
He has therefore vowed away his years, his means, his aims, among the helpers, if there’s any help in such a social strait.
The question is, will she be his helper, and she, for the reasons we have given, answers no.
The aunt dies, and Aurora discovers that her father’s marriage with a foreigner had caused all the estates of the Leighs to centre in Romney, and that their marriage had long been contemplated as a reparation for the will’s injustice. Romney, however, as she will not marry him, tries to cheat her into believing that her aunt had thirty thousand pounds (they were his gift), and that she has inherited them. She detects the generous fraud, and goes.
Next, she tells us, “I took a chamber up three flights of stairs;” there are a thousand lines in the poem precisely of that stamp—
And in a certain house at Kensington
Three years I lived and worked.
Her occupation during the time was writing poems. Meanwhile, Romney Leigh determines on marrying one Marian Erle, “a daughter of the people,” whom he had found in a workhouse.
A waggoner
Had found her in a ditch beneath the moon.
For she had run away from her brutal mother, who, having been badly beaten by her ruffian father, had wanted to sell her to a squire.
Romney Leigh, however, found her in a hospital, from which
He sent her to a famous sempstress house
Far off in London, there to live and hope.
Shortly after he proposes to her in the following phrase:—
“Dear Marian, of one clay God made us all,
And though men push and poke and paddle in’t
(As children play at fashioning dirt-pies)
And call their fancies by the name of facts,
Assuming difference, lordship, privilege,
When all’s plain dirt—they come back to it at last;
The first grave-digger proves it with a spade,
And pats all even. Need we wait for this,
You, Marian, and I, Romney?”
She, at that,
Looked blindly in his face, as when one looks
Through driving autumn-rains to find the sky.
He went on speaking.
“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!”
—(P. 139.)
Having got so far as this—
All the rest, he held her hand
In speaking, which confused the sense of much;
However, the upshot was:—
That they two, standing at the two extremes
Of social classes, had received one seal,
Been dedicate and drawn beyond themselves
To mercy and ministration—he, indeed,
Through what he knew, and she, through what she felt,
He, by man’s conscience, she, by woman’s heart,
Relinquishing their several ’vantage posts
Of wealthy ease and honourable toil,
To work with God at love. And, since God willed
That, putting out his hand to touch this ark,
He found a woman’s hand there, he’d accept
The sign, too, hold the tender fingers fast,
And say, “My fellow-worker, be my wife!”
—(P. 140.)
A preposterous scene ensues. Romney Leigh must needs invite all St. Giles’ to meet all St. James’ to witness the marriage ceremony, and breakfast afterwards. This is the Muse’s description of one portion of the guests:—
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 despair,
Or sorrows petrifying to vices: not
A finger-touch of God left whole on them.
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.
—(P. 156.)
Romney is there and Aurora, but no bride. And the scene closes with a riot. We have come to a portion of the story which has filled us, and will fill every one who reads it, with deep regret that an English matron and a gifted woman, one whose powers are evinced even by the very pages we so utterly condemn, should have introduced into her poem characters and transactions such as have long ceased to figure in our literature. A Lady Waldemar is introduced frantically in love with Romney Leigh, avowing her passion to Aurora with brazenfaced effrontery, and endeavouring to break off the match that she may marry him. She persuades Marian to renounce the marriage for Romney’s sake, and sends her to Paris, where she is drugged and ruined.
Let us hasten to the end. Romney converts his father’s house into a phalanstery for the regeneration of mankind, and Lady Waldemar, with other ladies “whom her starry lead persuaded from their spheres,” have been there, “and milked the cows, and churned, and pressed the curd,” and stood at the washtub “elbow deep in suds,” to fall in with his views of social reformation. The end is, that his father’s house is burned down by the work of an incendiary, the tramp and poacher, Marian’s father. He loses his eyesight, and narrowly escapes death from a falling beam. Meanwhile, Aurora, on her road to Italy, has met Marian in Paris, and discovered the villany of Lady Waldemar. She summons Romney. He still offers to marry Marian, who refuses, upon which, after a weary voyage, we reach land at last. For, to bring the book to a close, and since even the “maturest” works, embodying “the highest convictions upon life and art,” must end at last, we end with what Erasmus long ago pointed out as the end of all reform, we end with a marriage between Romney and Aurora. Solvuntur risu tabulæ tu missus abibis. It is, indeed, a great blow to the dignity of woman, and a great fall for the high-souled, queenly artist, full of her mission, and of woman’s rights.
There are hundreds of honest, homely souls who, without any great maturing of their ideas, or without feeling that they had attained any very high convictions upon life and art, would have advised Miss Leigh, from the first, to marry the man she loved [p. 763→] when first he asked her, and so, by one step, reach her journey’s end. But that is a low view, and it would be unjust to Aurora to represent her as doing anything so commonplace.
For, though she marries Romney, it is not until he has become stone blind, until he has had his head broken and his house burned down, his schemes all routed, and his hand refused. He has been reduced to a proper sense of his own lowliness by this rather trying process, and, after all, Aurora does not accept him as her husband. She proposes to him. This, by the way, is a great feature in the works of modern literary ladies. They delight in reducing a man to the lowest depths of misfortune and misery, and, just when the poor object is about to seek the nearest ditch to drown himself, he is unexpectedly raised to the ninth heaven by the condescending fair one herself popping the question. Aurora does it in the following terms:—
“Farewell, Aurora.”
“But I love you, Sir;
And when a woman says she loves a man,
The man must hear her, though he love her not.”
We shall not dwell upon the raptures that follow; but it is announced to us (not clearly, for anything so crazily obscure was never penned,) that, in some perfectly insane manner, the great scheme of working for humanity is still to be carried out as a partnership concern.
Aurora is desired:—
Now press the clarion on thy woman’s lip,
And breathe the fine keen breath along the brass,
And blow all class-walls level as Jericho’s
Past Jordan; crying from the top of souls
To souls, that they assemble on earth’s flats
To get them to some purer eminence
Than any hitherto beheld for clouds.
The world’s old,
But the world waits the hour to be renewed.
We are promised new dynasties of the race of men:—
Developed whence shall grow spontaneously
New churches, new economies, new laws, &c.
It seems difficult to carry nonsense further, but, to reach the height of pure delirium, and cap the climax of absurdity, requires but one step more, and Mrs. Browning takes it:—
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;
The rest in order,....last, an amethyst.”
—(Pp. 402, 403.)
And so the poem ends.
We have sufficiently expressed our condemnation of the book. We have admitted that it contains many passages of great power and beauty; we regret to add that it is sullied by many gross thoughts, very coarsely uttered. We have preferred to dwell more on its absurdities than on its more objectionable features; but it is as saddening a specimen as we have ever seen of the taste, tone, and tendency of what, we fear, must be called a growing school.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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