E561209A. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
New-York Daily Times, 9 December 1856, p. 2.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 313–318.
The present age has undergone a great change in its relations to literature. Though not so productive, perhaps, of works of genius as in the earlier portion of the century, it is far more genial and receptive in appreciating them when they do appear. If authors are less numerous, critics, at any rate, are more philosophical. Here, for instance, is a poem of many thousand lines in blank verse, which, placed alongside of its not altogether dissimilar fellow, the Excursion, would have been, thirty years ago, damned, almost as a matter of course, with that ill-received production of Wordsworth. The fatal necessity in having been thrown, unlike Milton, upon an age too soon, of hiding the remainder of his great heart-work in his portfolio, to leave it a legacy to his posterity—to avoid the odium and ignominy of his contemporaries for his expressing the gentlest and truest emotions in the purest of numbers—this injustice would be tolerated no longer. If the age is barren, let us be thankful that it is just. But it is not barren while it gives birth to such productions in popular literature as Jane Eyre, Pendennis, Little Dorrit and Aurora Leigh. There is a new atmosphere in these writings, which our fathers breathed not. Had a stray breath of it got into their drawing rooms, they would have incontinently closed the doors. How Aurora Leigh would have shocked their proprieties! Yet they were not altogether a very delicate or refined people, and every production which bears the impress of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is both delicate and refined. So, however, it is. Wordsworth was gravely rebuked for introducing into the lordly company of poetry and fiction so unromantic a hero as a Scotch peddler, a peddler who presumed to carry anything with him beside his pack—his soul for instance. As if a peddler could have a sentiment, a memory or an association. Mrs. Browning, acknowledged chief of the poetic female mind of England, of present days or of past—no rash bungler—no bold experimenter on the tolerance of the public, introduces one of her heroines to the best society of England and America in the person of a tramper’s daughter, of a parentage of vice and intemperance, herself the victim of unmeasured brutality—yet the fruitful stock of human and heavenly virtue. Will any critic feel himself called upon to revise the old conventionalisms and rule this heretofore “shocking—positively shocking” personage out of literature?
Aurora Leigh is a novel in verse, if you will, or a book of social philosophy if you prefer it, or a code of perceptions in literature and art.
As a novel, its incidents are subordinate to its reflections, yet it has action sufficient to keep the “general” reader— the “particular” will not nod at all—moderately awake through ten thousand lines, more or less, and more than less, of heroic blank verse. This medium is, of itself, a phenomenon. Pure, simple, lively, flexible, it is such verse as no living pen can command in greater perfection. We know of none which approaches it in easy grace. Roger’s lines ran smoothly, but we saw the tools lying about which had given the polish. Barry Cornwall has a flowing utterance in his dramatic writings. The Prelude has the purity and progress of one of its author’s pellucid mountain rivulets. Nothing can be more chaste, or delicate, or simple, in its natural strength than the same verse in the narrative pieces of Tennyson. But none of these authors guide Pegasus with a freer rein than the fair authoress of Aurora Leigh. How exquisitely the very name Aurora mounts and bears the line onward in its iambic movement! Leigh, by the way, is softened in the pronunciation, as if written Lee.
The story is briefly this: Aurora is the offspring of an English gentleman of wealth, who late in life falls in love with and marries a fair Italian girl, whom he first sees in a priestly procession in Florence. The mother dies in her daughter’s infancy, and a few years of fond intimacy in childhood with her father in a mountain home in Tuscany closes with his death. The proud, passionate, intellectual, sensitive child of the South, an orphan, passes to the pupilage of a maiden aunt in England, whose nose had been put out of joint by the marriage,—a character admirably drawn, not a caricature, but, though a cramped, gnarled growth of society, with allowances of human emotion. As one of several highly felicitous female portraitures sprinkled through the volume, and which bear marks like a sculptor’s ideals of a close intimacy with real originals, we may present the first outline of this portrait to the reader:
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 color,—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 country 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 the 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!
How distinctly this frozen lady is painted, as marked in her frigid atmosphere as Hogarth’s prude in his Winter print of Morning.
It is evident that the warm Italian nature of Aurora will be sadly congealed by this northern iceberg. Her youth is of course in danger of being sacrificed to the conventionalisms and so-called propriety of the ordinary English,—and for that matter American—dwarfing routine of female education. But nature had got the start of the ologies, and the girl was wayward to save some part of that life for herself. She has a lover, too, the hero of the book, Romney Leigh—who is, by the way, not a very attractive sort of hero—a benevolent man, but a calculating moralist, a kind of softened Gradgrind, a utilitarian philanthropist, the goodness in him starched into a stiff formalism of behavior—beneficial but unpleasant. A little spontaneity at the outset would have saved this man much misery through life. The better he sought to protect himself and his schemes, the worse they were protected. His first misfortune was losing the hand of the fair Aurora; his cool didactic philosophies of the superiority of his sex not suiting her ardent impulses. His head is too much for his heart. The lady, it must be admitted, is a little exacting—since she has all along a half-conscious affection for her cousin. She rejects him to the dismay of the aunt, who suddenly quitting this earthly scene shortly after, a wide separation of parties ensues.
The death of the aunt is a powerful sketch of tragic emotion, recalling to us somewhat, in its incident and the accompanying reflections the terrific exit of Hawthorne’s Judge Pyncheon in the House of the Seven Gables.
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 gray, 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?
The letter in her hand is a generous device of Cousin Romney to secure a fortune to Aurora. It is a deed of gift to the aunt of thirty thousand pounds, to be inherited under the residuary clause of her will by the niece. The latter scents and exposes the contrivance, and, proudly shaking off the dust of the ancestral acres, of which she was disinherited by her semi-foreign parentage, departs for London, entering upon the great metropolis in the character of an author by profession.
This portion of the work is an animated sketch of the literary life of a productive writer, and pairs off with the brilliant portraits by Thackeray, of the other sex. A few minutes with the lady in her boudoir, looking over the letters of the day, will admit the reader to many of the secrets of modern criticism. Any one acquainted with the characteristics of the writings of Mrs. Browning, will see that the labors of the reviewing tribe are rather comprehensively forestalled in this lively enumeration:
Blanche Ord, the writer in the “Lady’s Fan,”
Requests my judgment .. that, afterwards,
Kate Ward desires the model of my cloak,
And signs, “Elisha to you.” Pringle Sharpe
Presents his work on “Social Conduct,” .. craves
A little money for his pressing debts ..
From me, who scarce have money for my needs,—
Art’s fiery chariot which we journey in
Being apt to singe our singing-robes to holes,
Although you ask me for my cloak, Kate Ward!
Here’s Rudgely knows it,—editor and scribe—
He’s “forced to marry where his heart is not,
Because the purse lacks where he lost his heart.”
Ah,——lost it because no one picked it up!
That’s really loss! (and passable impudence.)
My critic Hammond flatters prettily,
And wants another volume like the last.
My critic Belfair wants another book
Entirely different, which will sell, (and live?)
A striking book, yet not a startling book.
The public blames originalities,
(You must not pump spring-water unawares
Upon a gracious public, full of nerves—)
Good things, not subtle, new yet orthodox,
As easy reading as the dog-eared page
That’s fingered by said public, fifty years,
Since first taught spelling by its grandmother,
And yet a revelation in some sort:
That’s hard, my critic Belfair! So—what next?
My critic Stokes objects to abstract thoughts;
“Call a man, John, a woman, Joan,” says he,
“And do not prate so of humanities:”
Whereat I call my critic, simply Stokes.
My critic Jobson recommends more mirth,
Because cheerful genius suits the times,
And all true poets laugh unquenchably
Like Shakspeare and the gods. That’s very hard.
The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiled
With such a needy heart on two pale lips,
We cry, “Weep rather, Dante.” Poems are
Men, if true poems: and who dares exclaim
At any man’s door, “Here, ’tis probable
The thunder fell last week, and killed a wife,
And scared a sickly husband—what of that?
Get up, be merry, shout, and clap your hands,
Because a cheerful genius suits the times—”?
None says so to the man,—and why indeed
Should any to the poem?
Another important actor now appears upon the stage, a bold, adventurous, spoilt widow, Lady Waldemar, who, setting her cap for the wealthy, social philanthropist, is bent upon defeating a quixotic match he has upon the tapis with a daughter of the people whom he has fallen in with upon his errands of benevolence. The latter character, Marian Erle, is powerfully delineated, though her suffering is such an overwhelming act of fate, as to limit her actions in the world to a narrow sphere. Romney, who has a touch of vain glory in his beneficence, is to marry the lady at a fashionable West-end church, and Mayfair and St. Giles meet for the ceremony. The chat and dialogue here of both classes is in a very spirited, natural vein, in execution worthy of the gossiping party in Theocritus. Would the reader hear a little of this patter?
—“Yes, really, if we’ve need to wait in church,
We’ve need to talk there.”—“She? ’Tis Lady Ayr,
In blue—not purple! that’s the dowager.”
—“She looks as young.”—“She flirts as young, you mean!
Why if you had seen her upon Thursday night,
You’d call Miss Norris modest.”—“You again!
I waltzed with you three hours back. Up at six,
Up still at ten; scarce time to change one’s shoes.
I feel white and sulky as a ghost.
So pray don’t speak to me, Lord Belcher.”—“No,
I’ll look at you instead, and it’s enough
While you have that face.” “In church, my lord! fie, fie!”
—“Adair, you stayed for the Division?”—“Lost
By one.” “The devil it is! I’m sorry for’t.
And if I had not promised Mistress Grove” ..
—“You might have kept your word to Liverpool.”
“Constituents must remember, after all,
We’re mortal.’—‘We remind them of it.”—“Hark,
The bride comes! Here she comes, in a stream of milk!”
—“There? Dear, you are asleep still; don’t you know
The five Miss Granvilles? always dressed in white
To show they’re ready to be married.”—“Lower!
The aunt is at your elbow.”—“Lady Maud,
Did Lady Waldemar tell you she had seen
This girl of Leigh’s?” “No,—wait! ’twas Mrs. Brookes,
Who told me Lady Waldemar told her—
No, ’twasn’t Mrs. Brookes.”—“She’s pretty?’—“Who?
Mrs. Brookes? Lady Waldemar?”—“How hot!
Pray is’t the law to-day we’re not to breathe?
You’re treading on my shawl—I thank you, Sir.”
—“They say the bride’s a mere child, who can’t read,
But knows the things she shouldn’t, with wide-awake
Great eyes. I’d go through fire to look at her.”
If this is light reading, not so a passage in immediate connection. The faces of the poor:
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 colors 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.
Mark the sudden relief of sunshine in the beautiful close of the passage—a trait frequent with Mrs. Browning.
Lady Waldemar does prevent the marriage. She induces Marian to depart with an attendant of her own choosing. The victim falls a prey to violence, and is next met with in Paris, a mother living only in her child. Shall this injured woman be an outcast? Society answers such questions with a fearfully unanimous affirmative. It is the noble privilege of an honored mother of England,—an intellectual exponent of her sex for the world,—a lady whose simple, truthful life, unimpeachable, seeks no empty glory of the reformer, who justifies religion and every home morality, a voice unquestionable—to reply in the tenderness of a woman’s heart, with the inspired eloquence of the singer, No! The Muse covers this sorrow for all coming time under the wings of her protection. A blessing on thee, gentle lady and poetess, from the aggrieved of the world, whose uninvited innocent degradation becomes their exaltation.
It is noticeable enough that this demonstration should come not from the stronger sex, from a social reformer or a State moralist, from the pulpit or Parliament, but from a delicate, fragile woman. But her true delicacy is her true strength. Let Nature generously bestow one faculty with hearty good will, and its complement will not be wanting. It is artifice only which is limited in capacity to its one trick.
The sequel of the story may be readily anticipated—Lady Waldemar is in the end exposed, and the exposure brings about an understanding between the original lovers, the cousins. Both have learnt much in the interim; the too pragmatical philosopher, that a little more nature and less restraint would have produced better practical results; while the lady has studied in the school of experience, has found life superior to literature, and its true oracle, and, woman of genius as she is, acquiesces in the attainable results.
There is a remarkable similarity, by the way, in Aurora Leigh to an incident in Jane Eyre—in the blindness of Romney. The reader will recall the same disaster—happening in each case too at the conflagration of the owner’s dwelling—to Mr. Rochester, and its corresponding appeal to the sympathies of Currer Bell’s heroine.
In this glance at a portion of the outline of a large volume, we have but feebly indicated its pervading interest, which is that of thoughtful, profound reflection on the problems of society and individual life. In these Mrs. Browning is no visionary, nor is she that terrible thing, a didactic professor in petticoats. She has much to say—says it at times with a fullness which requires some patience on the part of the reader anxious to get on with the narrative; but the whole is couched in so pure and elegant an expression, is relieved by so frequent playfulness and pathos—by such vivid touches of the imagination—that it will attract again and again.
It would be doing the reader injustice not to present a few of the numerous exquisite detachable passages in the book. Here is a bit of charming feminine gracefulness, in a sentiment too delicate for a masculine pen—Motherhood in its charge of Infancy:
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 singing 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.
Another, not wholly unlike—A Girl’s Blush:
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame,
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow:
They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,
And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?
Who’s sorry for a gnat—or girl?
I blushed.
I feel the brand upon my forehead now
Strike hot, sear deep, as guiltless men may feel
The felon’s iron, say, and scorn the mark
Of what they are not. Most illogical,
Irrational nature of our womanhood,
That blushes one way, feels another way,
And prays, perhaps, another! After all,
We cannot be the equal of the male,
Who rules his blood a little.
There are many descriptions of scenery, rare glimpses of England, France and Italy. This of a London fog strikes us as eminently forcible and original:
Or I saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog,
Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void.
Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge
Had wiped out London,—or as noon and night
Had clapped together and utterly struck out
The intermediate time, undoing themselves
In the act. Your city poets see such things,
Not despicable. Mountains of the South,
When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,
They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,
Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,
Descending Sinai; on Parnassus mount,
You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,
Except in fable and figure: forests chant
Their anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.
But sit in London, at the day’s decline,
And view the city perish in the mist,
Like Pharaoh’s armaments in the deep Red Sea,
The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,
Sucked down and choked to silence—then, surprised
By a sudden sense of vision and of tune,
You feel as conquerors, though you did not fight,
And you and Israel’s other singing girls,
Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.
There is nothing in Cowper or Wordsworth more touching than this picture of a hospital, with the reflections of its inmate, Marian, of the tale:
She stirred—the place seemed new and strange as death.
The white strait bed, with others strait and white,
Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,
And quiet people walking in and out
With wonderful low voices and soft steps,
And apparitional equal care for each,
Astonished her with order, silence, law:
And when a gentle hand held out a cup,
She took it, as you do at sacrament,
Half awed, half melted,—not being used, indeed,
To so much love as makes the form of love
And courtesy of manners. Delicate drinks
And rare white bread, to which some dying eyes
Were turned in observation. O my God,
How sick we must be, ere we make men just!
I think it frets the saints in heaven to see
How many desolate creatures on the earth
Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship
And social comfort, in a hospital,
As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,
And wished, at intervals of growing sense,
She might be sicker yet, if sickness made
The world so marvelous kind, the air so hushed,
And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;
For now she understood, (as such things were,)
How sickness ended very oft in heaven,
Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick,
And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,
And, folding up her hands as flowers at night,
Would lose no moment of the blessed time.
We might extend these passages freely and add those of a different character—our copy is abundantly pencilled for the purpose. But we forbear. Aurora Leigh is a prominent book of the season, and is worthy of universal acceptation. The exquisitely-toned music in this author, the elevation and pathos, the joy and sorrow of this richly-gifted nature:—it is no mean spirit by which they are worthily accepted.
Aurora Leigh has an autobiographic interest, not in its adventures, but in its sentiment. It is in a great measure “the history of an individual mind.” Indeed the author calls attention to this phase of the work in the dedication to her accomplished “cousin and friend,” the poet John Kenyon, when she writes of the poem as “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” There are portions of it which apparently reflect with accuracy personal experiences of the author in her early life, as her later residence at Florence supplies numerous local traits of feeling and description. Not that Mrs. Browning has incurred the trials in the world of her Aurora or Marian. These are but the machinery of passion. The soul is common to us all, with its heritage of the woes and joys of all the race. The biographic arrangement of the puppets is of secondary importance. Aurora’s history we have seen; Mrs. Browning’s is simple, perhaps hardly less remarkable. Born in London of a wealthy family, her early development was extraordinary in sensibility and poetic cultivation and learned application. She began writing, we are told, at ten, and at fifteen her powers were acknowledged by her friends. Oxford has turned out few better Grecians, at least in the heart of the matter, than was Elizabeth Barrett. Her first published volume, An Essay on Mind, with other Poems, is dated 1826. Probably the writer was then about seventeen, the author of a metaphysical poem which might be valued higher if the author had not herself so greatly elevated the standard by which to measure her own productions. The few poems added give early evidence of that charm of enthusiasm, delicacy and pathos, the essential spirits of Love, which have never deserted the pen of the author. “Weep,” she sings:
Weep, as if you thought of laughter!
Smile, as tears were coming after!
Marry your pleasures to your woes:
And think life’s green well worth its rose.
Then came, in 1833, Prometheus Bound, translated from the Greek of Æschylus, and Miscellaneous poems, by the Translator. The translation has since been supplanted in her “Works” by a new one. If the poems have not been gathered in her writings, they are such as “the world will not willingly let die.”
For ever, since my childish looks
Could rest on Nature’s pictured books;
For ever, since my childish tongue
Could name the themes our bards have sung;
So long, the sweetness of their singing
Hath been to me a rapture bringing!—
Yet ask me not the reason why
I have delight in minstrelsy.
Five years later appeared The Seraphim, and other Poems, a great advance on the previous excellence. There was the inspiration of the Sybil in the tranced utterance of spirituality. “Cowper’s Grave” in this volume, proved, too, a firmer tread on the solid earth. It was about this time that the authoress suffered from the breaking of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the disaster doomed her to years of solitary confinement, if that may be said of one to whom all the great minds of the world were present. The death of a brother, with two of his companions, lost in the upsetting of a boat at a watering-place where she had gone for her health, was an additional blow which darkened the naturally grave temperament of the young poetess. The spirituality of her writings was deepened. In 1844 the fruits of her retirement appeared in two new volumes of Poems. The chief was entitled “A Drama of Exile,” an exquisite lyric version of a theme where not to fail was to succeed—and it was a success. “The Cry of the Children,” “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” and other universally recognized poems, accompanied the “Drama.” The next event of the poet’s life was her marriage to the poet Browning, a happy event for both, if we may judge from the new triumphs they have since severally gained in literature. Browning’s last book is his best, and Mrs. Browning has acquired a larger scope in her Italian poem—a consummate picture of the late revolutionary movement, Casa Guidi Windows, or scenes from her chamber window in Florence. Aurora Leigh is a still advancing growth—true to the first impulses of the young writer, abounding in the classical tastes of her first love, infused with the pathos of her second period, broadening into the spirit of the age and the prophecy of the future. Nature, learning and life work harmoniously in the product.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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