E561130A. Aurora Leigh.
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 30 November 1856, p. 8.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 303–307.
People who have been congratulating themselves that poetry is dead—it is a common prank to pull flowers to pieces, without the excuse of Margaret—or, at all events, that the age of long poems is past, will be somewhat shocked at seeing “Aurora Leigh,” a story containing twelve thousand lines without one single rhyme throughout. And, by the way, as for decay of poetry, poetry may be past, or present, precisely as every individual chooses for himself; and if anybody, judging from himself, asserts it to be past, why, as Johnson observed of Hawkins at the club, we shall certainly not quarrel with him for maintaining that he is inferior to ourselves.
Aurora Leigh is a story of the present day, and excepting that it is in blank verse, closely resembles the writings of Miss Bronté or Mrs Gaskell. That is, the conduct of the story is considerably influenced by the influence which the “great topics of the day” assume over the minds of the imaginary characters. What are called, in slang, “purpose novels;” but with which gentry addicted to such slang are invariably unacquainted. Tennyson, in “The Princess,” took up the subject of woman’s position in society, her intellect, &c. Mr. Kingsley, in “Yeast,” adopted the unnecessary hardships of the poor, and made a novel which Sir Benjamin Hall and Mr. Chadwick read with the avidity of a blue-book, but Mrs. Browning in “Aurora Leigh,” touches upon something very much like both of these subjects, with, moreover, the addition of essay-writing on Art all throughout. Therefore those who like reading for something beyond third-volume billing and cooing, who like sound reflection, and sound material for reflection, will find much to admire and much to question—and “to question” argues the very strongest claim to attention—much to move to delight or to despair, in the poem before us. To attempt any analysis of Mrs. Browning’s views on Art or on social questions would be as unnecessary as unfair. Five minutes’ prose to describe five years’ poetry would only end in a few flourishing epigrams which, on such a subject, would be perfectly valueless, for they would entirely miss the illustration and the feeling which give the subjects their charm and their truth. Such slight account of the story as will be necessary for the better comprehension of the extracts we shall present, will be doing greater justice to all parties, especially to that subject of our most immediate respect, the reader.
Aurora is the daughter of an austere Englishman, who, “doing” Florence for a month, becomes flooded with a passion unaware, and weds a Florentine of rare blue eyes, who is slain by the mother’s rapture, leaving Aurora scarcely four years ago. She was born to make her father sadder, and herself not overjoyous. But they live, in time, happily amongst the mountains, for the father is described as prosaic—
Prosaic men, who wear grief long,
Will get to wear it as a hat aside,
With a flower stuck in’t.
Aurora became inveterately learned at a very tender age. She learned classics from her father, and better things from herself. From her childhood, as Shelley from his youth, she must have been familiar with rocks and precipices, with mountains, caves, and seas. The three twin graces, Poetry, Painting, and Sculpture, could scarcely fail to come. She assimilated gentleness and grace from abundant flowers, as they had assimilated their splendid colours from the sun. From the sun in its pleasantest clime, a luxury, not an incumbrance. All this changes. Her father dies suddenly, and poor Aurora is compelled to seek Britannic shores, for the shelter of her father’s sister, her own maiden aunt. We quote her portrait, because it is exceedingly good, and of a style perfectly new to the authoress.
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!
Aurora, upon the whole, gets on tolerably well with the old lady; but the friendship is owing to her own forbearance rather than to any special merits of aunt. Aurora gives way in everything.
So it was,
I broke the copious curls upon my head
In braids, because she liked smooth-ordered hair.
I left off saying my sweet Tuscan words
Which still at any stirring of the heart
Came up to float across the English phrase,
As lilies (Bene . . or che ch’e) because
She liked my father’s child to speak his tongue.
I learnt the collects and the catechism,
The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice,
The Articles . . the Tracts against the times,
(By no means Buonaventure’s “Prick of Love,”)
And various popular synopses of
Inhuman doctrines never taught by John,
Because she liked instructed piety.
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 joins itself
To Lara, and what census of the year five
Was taken at Klagenfurt,—because she liked
A general insight into useful facts.
I learnt much music,—such as would have been
As quite impossible in Johnson’s day
As still it might be wished—fine sleights of hand
And unimagined fingering, shuffling off
The hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notes
To a noisy Tophet; and 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. And last
I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like
To see me wear the night with empty hands,
A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdess
Was something after all, (the pastoral saints
Be praised for’t) leaning lovelorn with pink eyes
To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;
Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat
So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell
Which slew the tragic poet.
By the way,
The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what! A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary—or a stool
To stumble over and vex you . . “curse that stool!”
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not,
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this . . that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps.
Flung upon her own resources, whenever solitude is possible, she reads everything that she can find, everything that her early training teaches her to admire. To the poetry of life succeeds the poetry of books, and this takes root or rather takes fire; and some grand passages descriptive of the emotions awakened by immortal verse follow, until the only piece of distinct every-day fact that remains is, that Aurora is herself a poetess.
At last, because the time was ripe,
I chanced upon 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.
What’s this, Aurora Leigh,
You write so of the poets, and not laugh?
Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,
Exaggerators of the sun and moon,
And soothsayers in a tea-cup!
I write so
Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow on a charnel-wall,
To find man’s veritable stature cut,
Erect, sublime,—the measure of a man,
And that’s the measure of an angel, says
This apostle. Ay, and 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!”
How all those workers start amid their work,
Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,
That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,
Is not the imperative labour after all.
My own best poets, am I one with you,
That thus I love you,—or but one through love?
Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
Impersonal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours! When my joy and pain,
My thought and aspiration, like the stops
Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb
If not melodious, do you play on me,
My pipers,—and if, sooth, you did not blow,
Would no sound come? or is the music mine,
As a man’s voice or breath is called his own,
Inbreathed by the Life-breather? There’s a doubt
For cloudy seasons!
Her cousin, Romney Leigh, loves her. There is no return. Their natures are opposite, and each firmly believes the other to be making a fatal mistake. Romney has attached himself to the “social wants” of the time, very much like Launcelot Smith at the conclusion of “Yeast.” Aurora is grandly full of Princess-like poetry and science, determined that woman’s intellect shall be asserted equally with that of man. She is by no means ready to become the simple soother and helpmate that Romney would have her. One side of modern humanity, which Romney sets down as a woman’s blunder, is finely sketched:—
“There it is!—
You play beside a death-bed like a child,
Yet measure to yourself a prophet’s place
To teach the living. None of all these things
Can women understand. You generalise
Oh, nothing!—not even grief. Your quick-breathed hearts,
So sympathetic to the personal pang,
Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up
A whole life at each wound; incapable
Of deepening, widening a large lap of life
To hold the world-full woe. The human race
To you means, such a child, or such a man,
You saw one morning waiting in the cold,
Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up
A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes
Will write of factories and of slaves, as if
Your father were a negro, and your son
A spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you,—
All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise
Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard
To general suffering. Here’s the world half blind
With intellectual light, half brutalised
With civilisation, having caught the plague
In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west
Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain
And sin too! . . does one woman of you all,
(You who weep easily) grow pale to see
This tiger shake his cage?—does one of you
Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls,
And pine and die, because of the great sum
Of universal anguish?—Show me a tear
Wet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours,
Because the world is mad! You cannot count,
That you should weep for this account, not you!
You weep for what you know. A red-haired child
Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,
Though but so little as with a finger-tip,
Will set you weeping; but a million sick . .
You could as soon weep for the rule of three,
Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world
Uncomprehended by you, must remain
Uninfluenced by you.—Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives,
Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,—and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.”
We will not destroy the reader’s interest by detailing the story. The aunt dies, and Aurora, left penniless, will not accept a halfpenny from Romney. She comes to London, adopts literature—writes for cyclopædias and magazines, and scarcely finds time to write a poem which pleases her. Yet they please the public, and she becomes famous. Romney, in the meantime, true to his principles of equality, insists on marrying a poor but very virtuous seamstress. Marian is the daughter of a couple of drunken savages, and she thus describes her escape from them. The poetry in the passage, the wild bounding words, so perfectly an echo of the sense, need not one word of comment or of commendation:—
One day, said Marian,—the sun shone that day—
Her mother had been badly beat, and felt
The bruises sore about her wretched soul,
(That must have been): she came in suddenly,
And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage,
Her daughter’s headgear comb, let down the hair
Upon her, like a sudden waterfall,
And drew her drenched and passive, by the arm,
Outside the hut they lived in. When the child
Could clear her blinded face from all that stream
Of tresses . . . there, a man stood, with beast’s eyes,
That seemed as they would swallow her alive,
Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,—
With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,
He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,
Saying hard between her teeth—“Why wench, why wench,
The squire speaks to you now—the squire’s too good;
He means to set you up, and comfort us.
Be mannerly at least.” The child turned round,
And looked up piteous in the mother’s face,
(Be sure that mother’s death-bed will not want
Another devil to damn, than such a look) . . .
‘Oh, mother!’ then, with a desperate glance to heaven,
‘God, free from my mother,’ she shrieked out,
‘These mothers are too dreadful.’ And, with force
As passionate as fear, she tore her hands
Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,
And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,
Away from both—away, if possible
As far as God,—away! They yelled at her,
As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell,
She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,
Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had cast
The voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fear
Was running in her feet and killing the ground;
The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,
The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back
To make room for her. Then her head grew vexed,
Trees, fields, turned on her, and ran after her;
She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,
Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,
Could run no more, yet, somehow, went as fast,—
The horizon, red ’twixt steeples in the east,
So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart
Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big
It seemed to fill her body; then it burst,
And overflowed the world and swamped the light,
‘And now I am dead and safe,’ thought Marian Erle—
She had dropped, she had fainted.
The marriage does not take place. Marian is speaking:—
“You feel?
You understand!—no, do not look at me,
But understand?—The blank, blind, weary way
Which led . . where’er it led . . away, at least;
The shifted ship . . to Sydney or to France
Still bound, wherever else, to another land;
The swooning sickness on the dismal sea,
The foreign shore, the shameful house, the night,
The feeble blood, the heavy-headed grief, . . .
No need to bring their damnable drugged cup,
And yet they brought it! Hell’s so prodigal
Of devil’s gifts . . hunts liberally in packs,
Will kill no poor small creature of the wilds
But fifty red wide throats must smoke at it,—
As his at me . . when waking up at last . .
I told you that I waked up in the grave.
“Enough so?—it is plain enough so. True,
We wretches cannot tell out all our wrong,
Without offence to decent happy folk,
I know that we must scrupulously hint
With half-words, delicate reserves, the thing
Which no one scrupled we should feel in full.
Let pass the rest, then; only leave my oath
Upon this sleeping child,—man’s violence,
Not man’s seduction, made me what I am,
As lost as . . I told him I should be lost;
When mothers fail us, can we help ourselves?
That’s fatal!—And you call it being lost,
That down came next day’s noon and caught me there
Half gibbering and half raving on the floor,
And wondering what had happened up in heaven,
That suns should dare to shine when God himself
Was certainly abolished.
“I was mad,—
How many weeks, I know not,—many weeks.
I think they let me go, when I was mad,
They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys might
A mad dog which they had tortured. Up and down
I went by road and village, over tracts
Of open foreign country, large and strange,
Crossed everywhere by long thin poplar-lines
Like fingers of some ghastly skeleton hand
Through sunlight and through moonlight evermore
Pushed out from hell itself to pluck me back,
And resolute to get me, slow and sure;
While every roadside Christ upon his cross
Hung reddening through his gory wounds at me,
And shook his nails in anger, and came down
To follow a mile after, wading up
The low vines and green wheat, crying ‘Take the girl!
‘She’s none of mine from henceforth.’ Then, I knew,
(But this is somewhat dimmer than the rest)
The charitable peasants gave me bread
And leave to sleep in straw: and twine they tied,
At parting, Mary’s image round my neck—
How heavy it seemed! as heavy as a stone;
A woman has been strangled with less weight:
I threw it in a ditch to keep it clean
And ease my breath a little, when none looked;
I did not need such safeguards:—brutal men
Stopped short, Miss Leigh, in insult, when they had seen
My face,—I must have had an awful look.
And so I lived: the weeks passed on,—I lived.
’Twas living my old tramp-life o’er again,
But, this time, in a dream, and hunted round
By some prodigious dream-fear at my back
Which ended, yet: my brain cleared presently,
And there I sate, one evening, by the road,
I, Marian Erle, myself, alone, undone,
Facing a sunset low upon the flats,
As if it were the finish of all time,—
The great red stone upon my sepulchre,
Which angels were too weak to roll away.
We do not often find scenes like that in ladies’ books. In any books, in fact. It is perfectly impossible to say how far such grand poetic thoughts and images would spring up in the soul of such a victim, but it reminds us that in such cases simplicity is strength. The reader of “Clarissa Harlowe”—if there be one—will not fail to remember the terrible effect produced by the every-day language of letter writing, in the scene of Lovelace’s triumph: the harrowing, withering effect of horror, with no gloss thrown over it. Its very poetry consists in its want of poetic expression. But Richardson, who doubtless understood all that clearly enough, will never be appreciated. His fault may be choice of subject, although very squeamish readers do not object to very similar books with very dissimilar treatment. And the complaint of its “sick-chamber literature” is at once answered by the impossibility of so wretched a story containing a field or a flower.
But to Aurora Leigh. The conclusion is somewhat peculiar. Aurora meets the deserted Marian and her child, and they live together at Florence. It is explained that Marian has been enticed away by the machinations of a Lady Waldemar, who wishes to preserve Romney for herself. Romney comes to Florence—would marry Marian, who consents and then declines. There is then a Leap year termination. It is suddenly discovered that Romney is quite blind (suffering under a deprivation of sight, as the Post puts it of a lord), an accident which has happened to him through the medium of Marian’s father, whom he was in the act of reforming; and this, as in “Jane Eyre,” immediately lets Aurora into the true state of her heart. She makes honourable proposals, and becomes “the happiest man living,” as usual. Romney, negligent of his trousseau, names an early day.
But it should not be forgotten that Aurora and Romney aver that, in their great aims, they themselves have been wrong, and that the others have been right. Here, fortunately, the book is considered long enough; or, we might reasonably expect another volume, as hero and heroine are again diametrically opposed in opinion. Romney sees that cleansing fever courts is not all the reform necessary; Aurora sees that women will not benefit considerably by many of them writing poetry. Well, we leave them both with all thanks and pleasure, agreeing with them both—our own opinion being, that there will be very little permanent reform until people get the material of poetry into them.
We have marked fifty more passages in the book, which we have no space to quote. But we would make one or two notes. The mere length of the poem is a serious objection, and many of its passages are quite unsuited to its form. The conversations at the ball, and the gossip at the church, read most ludicrously—most unlike the calm and easy conversation of Great British ladies and gentlemen. It would have been a splendid, possibly triumphant, experiment to have flung those chapters into prose.
We trust that these few lines of explanation, and of admiration, are not too hurried to effect the desired object—that of getting the reader and the book immediately together. And, if it should be thought that they are too hurried, believe that it is simply because we are impatient to read the book a second time.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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