E561213A. Aurora Leigh.
The Atlas, 13 December 1856, pp. 794–795; 10 January 1857, p. 31.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 319–322.
A writer of genius spends months or years in putting the intuitions and experiences of a life into a single volume which comes before the critic, who, according to the cant of his trade, is a person of absolute wisdom, and so far above the heights, and below the depths which any author can soar or sound, that he is able offhand to pronounce sentence of approval or condemnation; declare at once whether the newest views or subtlest thoughts are true or false; and decide instanter upon every relation which multifarious parts bear to a carefully concocted whole. Happily for authors, and also for its readers, the literary staff of the Atlas is not composed of these infinite intelligences; but of writers and thinkers who believe that the function of genius is to teach, while that of both critics and public is to learn. Acting upon this theory, we have never hesitated to attack quack reputations like that of Barnum Macaulay, or to expose the folly of the spasmodic school of poets; but when we have had to speak of works of a higher order, we have been careful not to condemn at first sight things which further acquaintance or reflection might teach us to praise. In reviewing Robert Browning’s Men and Women we felt the necessity of exercising this care, and although Mrs. Browning does not write in the arrowheaded character which her husband employs, her style is so peculiar, and in many respects so different from that which we most admire, that we found the necessity of devoting an unusual amount of attention to Aurora Leigh before we felt competent to speak upon it. Soon after opening the volume we came upon passages of rare merit; but must confess that we never remember to have had so little satisfaction in the first reading of a work displaying such profound wisdom and such signal merit. Much must, however, depend upon the frame of mind in which Aurora Leigh is taken up—if the reader is impatient, or not in a humour to go step by step through the details of an analysis of the growth of characters, all of them out of the common way, he will infallibly pronounce Mrs. Browning’s poem to be very tiresome, notwithstanding his enjoyment of occasional beauties. More patience and greater willingness to study mental development in all its finer shades and nicer gradations will change the decision, and page after page that at first appeared only capable of being got through by the aid of plentiful skipping will be found accessory, if not essential, to the complete result which the authoress sought to achieve. From these remarks it will be seen that Aurora Leigh is not a poem for the many but for the few, and this to some extent we must call a fault, and a serious one. The appeal which the most popular of the great old writers make to the rarer intellect and finer emotions of the highest class of readers, is not less profound because they supply very much that strikes those ordinary faculties of humanity which the multitudes possess; and although Mrs. Browning has dealt with some of the subtlest elements of character, we cannot but feel that the same subject might have been treated so as to impress a far wider circle without the sacrifice of a single lineament of delicacy or truth. The thinkers of our age are too much infected with the disease of introspection, and Mrs. Browning is one of the sick whom we want a Bethesda Pool to heal. The story of “Aurora Leigh” cannot be told shortly, so as to be told intelligibly, because its interest depends upon successive stages of growth and the internal incidents are nothing in comparison with the external conditions which it is its main business to depict. Aurora is the daughter of an English gentleman and an Italian mother. The latter dies when her child is four years old, and at thirteen the death of the former consigns Aurora to the care of a maiden aunt in this country. Her arrival in England is thus described:—
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 long 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 [p. 795→]
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!
I, alas,
A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage.
And she was there to meet me. Very kind.
Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.
She stood upon the steps to welcome me,
Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck, …
Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool
To draw the new light closer, catch and cling
Less blindly. In my ears, my father’s words
Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,
“Love, love, my child.” She, black there with my grief,
Might feel my love—she was his sister once—
I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,
Kissed me with her cold lips, suffered me to cling,
And drew me feebly through the hall, into
The room she sate in.
There, with some strange spasm
Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands
Imperiously, and held me at arm’s length,
And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes
Searched through my face—aye, stabbed it through and through,
Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find
A wicked murderer in my innocent face,
If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,
She struggled for her ordinary calm,
And missed it rather,—told me not to shrink,
As if she had told me not to lie or swear,—
“She loved my father, and would love me too
As long as I deserved it.” Very kind.
The aunt had no sympathy with the marriage of Aurora’s father, which she looked upon as a sort of treason against the family of the Leighs; but, notwithstanding her hatred of the mother, she determined to do her duty to the daughter, in the most correct and approved style. Accordingly, she has her crammed with everything that a young lady of fashion ought to know, and does her best to crush with cold proprieties the sunny inner life which she has a dim notion the strange foreign child cherishes. The description of this part of Aurora’s life is faultlessly worked up; but we cannot stop to analyze it. The head of the family is Romney Leigh, and Aurora has no claim upon the estates, because a clause in the settlement prevented any portion from descending to children who might be born of a foreign marriage. To avoid excluding Aurora, Romney’s father had proposed to his brother that their children should be betrothed, and Romney is willing to carry out this scheme. He and Aurora are thrown much together, and a friendship grows up between them. The man, with cold clear intellect, is absorbed in the actual and positive—while the girl lives in the ideal. He thinks only of mending society by external remedies, while she feels the first duty is to live a true individual life, and develop the talent for the poet’s art which she fancies herself to possess. One birth-day morning she goes into the wood and weaves herself an ivy crown, when Romney comes up, laughs at her idealism, which he tries to put out with his actualism, and in this mood, and needing a help for his own benevolent plans, invites her to be his wife. A dialogue ensues, too long to quote entire, but of exquisite beauty. Aurora tells him—
“What you love,
Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause:
You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,
A wife to help your ends .. in her no end,
Your cause is noble, your ends excellent,
But I, being most unworthy of these and that,
Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.”
“Farewell, Aurora? you reject me thus?”
He said
“Why, sir, you were married long ago.
You have a wife already whom you love,
Your social theory. Bless you both, I say.
For my part, I am scarcely meek enough
To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse.
Do I look a Hagar, think you?”
* * * * * *
You forget too much
That every creature, female as the male,
Stands single in responsible act and thought,
As also in birth and death. Whoever says
To a loyal woman, “Love and work with me,”
Will get fair answers, if the work and love,
Being good themselves, are good for her—the best
She was born for. Women of a softer mood,
Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,
Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,
They pick much oakum; earth’s fanatics make
Too frequently heaven’s saints. But me, your work
Is not the best for,—nor your love the best,
Nor able to commend the kind of work
For love’s sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir,
To be over-bold in speaking of myself,—
I, too, have my vocation,—work to do,
The heavens and earth have set me, since I changed
My father’s face for theirs,—and though your world
Were twice as wretched as you represent,
Most serious work, most necessary work,
As any of the economists’. Reform,
Make trade a Christian possibility,
And individual right no general wrong;
Wipe out earth’s furrows of the Thine and Mine,
And leave one green, for men to play at bowls,
With innings for them all! .. what then, indeed,
If mortals were not greater by the head
Than any of their prosperities? what then,
Unless the artist keeps up open roads
Betwixt the seen and unseen,—bursting through
The best of your conventions with his best,
The speakable, imaginable best
God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond
Both speech and imagination? A starved man
Exceeds a fat beast: we’ll not barter, sir,
The beautiful for barley.—And, even so,
I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet’s individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul,
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,
To move the masses .. even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal, to blow a hair’s-breadth off
The dust of the actual. Ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.——For me,
Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,
Of work like this! .. perhaps a woman’s soul
Aspires, and not creates! yet we aspire,
And yet I’ll try out your perhapses, sir;
And if I fail .. why, burn me up my straw
Like other false works—I’ll not ask for grace,
Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I
Who love my art, would never wish it lower
To suit my stature. I may love my heart.
You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,
Seeing that to waste true love on anything,
Is womanly, past question.”
The aunt is, of course, astonished and indignant that so good a match should be thrown away, and soon after the old lady dies, leaving Aurora almost penniless. Romney endeavoured to enrich her, by the delicate means of making a gift of 30,000l. to the aunt just before her death, and with the knowledge that she had willed her all to her niece; but Aurora discovers the generous trick, and declines the present in a scene of rare merit, and seeks her fortune as an authoress in London. Romney preserves his plan of material improvement, makes a phalanstery of Leigh Hall, and proposes to marry Marian Erle, a tramper’s daughter, whom he had rescued from a life of shame to which her mother was about to commit her. Marian is full of dog-like gratitude for his kind treatment; but her true woman’s nature developes itself, and when an intriguing woman of fashion, who wants Romney for herself, tells her that he has only proposed to marry her in pursuance of a social theory, she runs away on the wedding morning, and hides herself from his inquiry. Time passes, Aurora wins fame as a poet, Romney’s schemes fail, and the vagabonds of both sexes, whom he has collected at Leigh Hall, burn it down, and he loses his eye-sight in the conflagration. Aurora finds Marian Erle with a child, the offspring of violence offered to her in her wanderings; and by-and-bye Romney meets them, and offers to marry Marian, and adopt her child as his own. She feels that she has no true love for him, and shrinks from the idea that she might give birth to other children, who would stand before her illegitimate offspring, and she refuses the offer. Then follow explanations between Aurora and Romney; both confess the imperfect aims they had sought; Aurora declares her love for her cousin, and the story ends in mystical language from Revelations, by which we learn that the foundations of their “New Jerusalem” are laid, and that both have found out how to walk in the path of God. It is a volume to which we must recur.
[Continued in the issue of 10 January 1857, p. 31.]
Immediate success is the test by which immoral and ignoble minds try human character and human worth. The baseness of their nature removes them from all sympathies with genius, which is ever striving towards the undeveloped and the new. Such persons can be loud enough in praising dead heroes, whether they were of peace or war, because for this no other intelligence is wanted than suffices to ascertain the fact of their extensive recognition by other folks; but even this cannot be done manfully, and their cowardice and stupidity will be displayed in the exceptions and reservations they will make against every unorthodox genius of whom they venture to speak. This method of judgment is not confined to any single department; for while in literature and art those who employ it are maliciously humble to merit that has risen beyond their assaults, and torment and persecute every new man who dares to speak a true and new thought, in politics they adulate the L. N. Bonapartes, and in private life they cringe before the Robsons and Redpaths that have not been found out. Mrs. Browning has a keen appreciation of these people, and her critic “Belfair” must evidently be the author of many literary notices in a notorious journal:—
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 generous public, full of nerves—),
Good things, not subtle, new, yet orthodox,
As racy 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.
The man here pictured, but with a meaning in him the original never possessed, must certainly be the writer of the notice of “Bothwell” in the Times a fortnight back, who finds “immediate popularity” the true test of poetry, and having thus established the wrong Montgomery and the gentle Tupper (the writers who answer the requirements best) as the grand poets of our age, comfortably informs us that the writings of Wordsworth cannot live, Byron may or may not survive, but “Shelley must inevitably be forgotten.” When we read this we roared with laughter, to find that the favourite organ of the vulgar rich had got a critic of such astonishing pretensions that he would be sure of a prize if his owners exhibited him in the proper department of the Great Crystal Palace Poultry Show. Well says Mrs. Browning:—
In England no one lives by verse that lives;
or can it well be otherwise; for any new thought, or any new way of putting an old thought, wants time for its appreciation; and while the world is occupied with its money-getting and rascal-worship, it can have little sympathy with the poet who exposes the hollowness of its shams, holds up principles which it fears, and points to the ever-lasting which it dares not face.
On reperusing Aurora Leigh our sense of its merit is deepened, but have little to add to what we said of it in our first notice. We have found fresh beauty and new proofs of clear, vigorous thought; but the defects, if less displeasing, do not disappear. There it too much detail, too great elaboration of things not essential to the main effect, and a great want of a plainly visible skeleton or scaffolding of external, palpable fact. This we could illustrate at length if it were needful; but our readers will be much better pleased, and more instructed also, if we select a few passages that exhibit the peculiar beauties of the work.
The following observation on the goodness of Romney Leigh (Aurora’s cousin) reminds one of our elder dramatists:—
Indeed, he builds his goodness up
So high, it topples down the other side,
And makes a sort of badness! there’s the worst
I have to say against your cousin’s best!
In similar style is this commentary on the misapplication of the word “good:”—
And we have all known
Good critics, who have stamped out poets’ hopes;
Good statesmen, who have pulled ruin on the state;
Good patriots, who for a theory risked a cause;
Good kings, who disembowelled for a tax;
Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy;
Good Christians, who sat still in easy chairs,
And damned the general world for standing up;
Now, may this good God pardon all good men!
The folly of looking to the past alone for subjects of poetry is well exposed in another passage, and the present vindicated from the charge so often made against it of being altogether prosaic and common-place:—
The critics say that epics have died out,
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods.
I’ll not believe it.
. . . . . . . . .
Nay, if there’s room for poets in the world,
A little overgrown (I think there is),
Their sole worth is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s—this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncevalles,
To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce.
Cry out for togas, and the picturesque
In fatal—foolish too. King Arthur’s self
Was common-place to Lady Guenever,
And Camelot to ministrels received as flat
As Regent-street to poets.
Let the poets have the past as well as the present; and while we vindicate our own time as worthy of their gaze, let us not try to turn them from looking back, if so they please. There is work for all; and in the poet world, as in any other, wisdom will be justified of her children whichever way they move. The following is admirable:—
And whosoever writes good poetry,
Looks first to art. He does not write for you
Or me—for London or Edinburgh.
He will not suffer the best critic known
To step into his sunshine of free thought
And self-absorbed conception, and exact
An inch long swerving of the holy lines.
If virtue, done for popularity,
Defiles like vice, can art for praise or hire
Still keep its splendour, and romain pure art?
Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes,
He writes; mankind accepts it if it suits,
And that’s success: If not, the poem’s passed
From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,
Until the unborn snatch it, crying out
In pity on their father’s being so dull,
And that’s success too.
In our previous notice we explained the story of Aurora Leigh, and the passage with which we shall conclude our extracts, relates to the interview between Aurora and Marion Erle, when the latter is found in Paris with her child, and Aurora had spoken of her as leaving “the pure plan and the noble heart to take the hand of a seducer,” for so she interpreted her conduct and position. Marion repudiates the charges:—
Springing up erect,
And lifting up the child at full arm’s length,
As if to bear him like an oriflamme,
Unconquerable to armies of reproach;
By him, she said, “my child’s head and its curls,
By those blue eyes no woman born could dare
A perjury on, I make my mother’s oath
That if I left that heart to lighten it,
The blood of mine was still, except for grief!
No cleaner maid than I was took a step
To a sadder end—no matron mother now
Looks back to her early maidenhood
Through chaster pulses. I speak steadily,
And if I lie so— If, being fouled in will,
And paltered with in soul by devil’s lust,
I dared to bid this angel take my part.
Would God sit quiet, let me think in heaven,
Nor strike me dumb with thunder? Yet I speak:
He clears me therefrom. What! seduced’s your word;
Do wolves seduce a wandering fawn in France;
Do eagles, who have pinched a lamb with claws,
Seduce it into carrion? So with me.
I was not even, as you say, seduced,
But simply murdered.
This begins grandly, and has a fine flow of thought about it; but why should the poet twaddle about God’s thunder? Let the priest teach men to expect an immediate and supernatural vindication of divine justice. In a little melodramatic way—the thing belongs to his trade; but the poet knows in what grand cycles heaven moves, and how widely its punishments and its recompenses differ from those of man.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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