E561215A. Aurora Leigh.
The Morning Post, 15 December 1856, p. 3.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 323.
[Also reviewed in this article were Poems by Emmeline Hinxman; Queen Eleanor’s Vengeance and other Poems by W.C. Bennett; and Neville Howard by Lentus in Umbra; these we omit.]
“Aurora Leigh” is from the pen of Mrs. Browning, a lady whose writings we could never understand. “There is much of seriousness, nay sadness,” said “Delta,” “in the general tone of Mrs. Browning’s verse, and it abounds with solemn questionings; but her speculations are for the most part, if not quite, objectless, mere gropings and guessings in the dark. She has considerable inventiveness, yet without much variety, and almost nothing of art. She seems to satisfy herself with mere hasty sketches, and even in them we have want of outline, haziness, or exaggeration. We have occasionally the germ of fine things; but her blossoms, nipped by the canker-worm, seldom ripen into fruit. She seems never to dream of elaboration—her structures are mere walls without roofs, or, if we have these, the window-frames are left unglazed, shrubs grow in the front plot, but the wicket-gate has been carelessly flung open, and the nibbling sheep have managed to make sad work with the flowers and evergreens. She is capricious and uncertain, not only in the selection and management of her subjects, but also in her language and style. Her mannerisms amount to affectation, and too often her thoughts and images are crude, careless, and only half brought out. In her compositions she seems utterly to disregard correctness, combination, and elegance.”* So spoke Dr. Moir four years ago, and since then Mrs. Browning, instead of improving, has deteriorated. She is now absolutely unintelligible—at least, she is so to us. Indeed, we are most unfortunately circumstanced in her regard, inasmuch as not only do we not understand her ourselves, but we never met with any one who did. We have occasionally found persons who affected to admire her, but when we asked them to vindicate their admiration they were invariably unable to do so. The passages which we requested them to explain to us they declared to be sublime, but they failed to make them intelligible. “Aurora Leigh” talks of “unmothered babes” (can it be a misprint for “unsmothered?”); of “Pan’s white goats, with udders warm, and full of mystic contemplations;” of a “face which flashed like a cymbal, and shook with silent clangour (!) brain and heart,” transfiguring people “to music;” of “the smooth fair mystery of perpetual life;” of “the chin-bands of the soul;” of “smooth, endless days notched here and there with knives;” of “a weary, wormy darkness spurred i’ the flank with flame that it should eat and end itself like some tormented scorpion;” of people who are thrown out as “a pasture to the stars;” and of “that murmur of the outer infinite which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep”!! We confess that these are things which utterly transcend our comprehension. We know not what they mean, and we believe, in our conscience, that Mrs. Browning does not know herself.
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* Editors’ note: Cf. David Macbeth Moir, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century in Six Lectures (Edinburgh, 1851), pp. 277–278.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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