E561210A. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
Boston Daily Advertiser, 10 December 1856, p. 2.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 318–319.
In a thick volume of nearly four hundred pages, Mrs. Browning has told a story in blank verse, in which the interest is kept unflagging from the beginning to the end. The reader may sometimes feel as if it were too long, but he finds it difficult to select any portion he would wish to have left out. It is the story of a life, a woman’s life. The author begins it in this way:
Of writing many books there is no end;
And I, who have written much in prose and verse
For others’ uses, will write now for mine,—
Will write my story for my better self,
As, when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.
The narrator tells of being born in Italy, the child of an Italian mother and an English father—the mother died when she was four years old, and her father when she was thirteen. She had been her father’s companion, scholar, (he had taught her the “tricks of Greek and Latin,”) friend; and his death was an overwhelming sorrow, from the stupor of which she was aroused by being carried to England, and placed under the care of her father’s sister, who could never forgive her for being the child of an Italian mother, and who had no sympathy for the love of poetry and art which the girl had inherited from her. Aurora, however, conformed in all things to the wishes of her stern aunt, taking her recreation in early morning walks, and devouring books, a store of which left by her father, she found in a friendly attic. Her best or rather her only friend at this time was her cousin Romney Leigh, a noble man, who pained with the suffering about him, had devoted himself to the relief of his fellow men, and had gone to the extreme reformatory measures for the relief of society. He sympathizes with his cousin, though he does not share her romantic enthusiasm for poetry; and when she is on the eve of twenty, he offers her his hand. She disdains to become a fellow worker in what she considers low and grovelling labor, and refuses him. It is not fair to lay bare the author’s plot farther than this, or tell in plain prose what she tells so much better in her charming verse, how the “nonsense was taken out” of these two excellent people and they came better to know themselves and each other. Mrs. Browning has great command of language, and it is long since a poem of so many beauties, and so few faults, has been written in our own language. It is full of beautiful passages expressing deep and true thought, which there is an irresistible temptation to read aloud—(a bad habit to be sure, especially if those who are required to listen are reading on their own account.) The scene of the first part of the story is laid in England, the latter part in France and Italy, and there are beautiful pictures of the outer world scattered through the book. But it is the deep knowledge of the heart and the striking experience of life that make the strongest impression on the reader of this poem. We greatly mistake if Aurora Leigh does not prove to be one of those poems which remain, are read over and over again, are committed to memory, and quoted from, and never forgotten. We give a few extracts, which are beautiful, but equally exquisite passages are strewed all through the volumes:
My mother was a Florentine
Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old; my life,
A poor spark snatched up from a falling lamp,
Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail,
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. pp. 2, 3.
The interview with her cousin in which she refuses him is very strikingly told. Her refusal of him was highly displeasing to her aunt, as their marriage was very eligible in a worldly view, and had been long ago planned by her father. But with her romantic views she felt herself in the right. The following is a description of the state of things at this time:—
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 every body 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,
Nor 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 pantings. 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. Neighbors who dropped in
On morning visits, feeling a joint wrong,
Smiled admonition, sat 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. [pp. 67, 68.
We might multiply extracts indefinitely, which would give pleasure to our readers, but we must refer them to the volume. We close with the following lines, which come in after Aurora has lived longer and grown wiser than when the story began:—
Be sure no earnest work
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak
Imperfect, ill adapted, fails so much,
It is not gathered as a grain of sand,
To enlarge the sum of human action used
For carrying out God’s end. No creature works
So ill, observe, that therefore he’s cashiered.
The honest, earnest man, must stand and work;
The woman also; otherwise she drops
At once below the dignity of man,
Accepting serfdom. Free men freely work;
Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease. [pp. 316.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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