E561220B. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
New-York Daily Tribune, 20 December 1856, pp. 5–6.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 324–327.
A poem of love and art and Italy; the history of a woman’s genius and a woman’s heart, traced through all the seasons of a chequered life, from her suddenly-blighted Spring on to the happy golden hours in which the harvest-moon of love and fame stands steadfast and serene above her; and this poem, the ripest result of years of such devotion to the poetic art as has been always rare, and is now, perhaps, more rare than ever; and this history, in the deepest and truest, if not in the ordinary and superficial sense, an autobiography of the only Englishwoman who has ever won for herself an unquestioned and unquestionable place among the greater poets, the
teachers who instruct mankind
From just a shadow on a charnel wall
To find man’s veritable stature out
Erect, sublime——.
such is the new gift which Mrs. Browning brings to us out of the treasury of her rich mind and heart.
To trace a woman’s unfolding life, from the close-shut bud up to the full sweet flower—to tell the story of a woman’s soul through all the struggle of long years between the proud aspiring intellect and the humble loving heart on to the perfect peace of their final reconciliation—to follow the subtle, secret course of a true woman’s true love through all the labyrinth of her will—to do this, and to do it with the firm hand and the clear eye of a genuine artist, was Mrs. Browning’s lofty aim—to have achieved it in the composition of “Aurora Leigh” is nobly to have won a right to all the poor written praise of critics, and the richer unspoken praise of all who have eyes to see and hearts to understand the sweet miracles of poetry.
This is a sad, unbelieving world at the best; we are all, at the core of us, incredulous alike of singular evil and of singular good, and it may be, perhaps, that this our radical incredulity is the condition of our deepest impressions, and our most exquisite delights. Every new promise that comes to us brings with itself the shadow of our old doubts. We question the sweetest certainties of existence, hesitate on the threshold of immortal happiness, and tremble before each fresh venture of our most victorious faculties. As we are skeptics for ourselves, so are we for others, and most for those in whom we trust the most and from whom we hope the highest things.
As Charles Tennyson admirably sings, in one of those charming sonnets which his laureled brother might be proud to own:
When desire hath fullest power,
Hope treads too lightly for herself to hear,
And doubt is ever by until the hour.
Many a true lover of poetry and of Mrs. Browning as a true poet, will take up “Aurora Leigh” with a kind of tremulous reluctance, the fruit of no vulgar fear for the poet’s success, but of this deeper, subtler feeling which is as real, if not so intense in all appreciative as it is in all creative natures.
“Here is June come again! Can it be June indeed? Can you believe in it? Will you test it?” And you pause on the last step—and slowly draw the bolts within, and pass the doorway—and lo! a world of sweet assurance, a delicious world of blue sky, and sunshine, and blossoms!
What was hesitation at the first line of “Aurora Leigh” becomes glad certainty ere you turn a single leaf, and grows into impassioned interest before you reach the first crisis of the heroine’s history. For the tale of “Aurora Leigh” is no mere thread on which to string pearls of pretty phrases and fine thoughts. It is a nervous, passionate story, seizing upon your sympathies with the grasp of life and holding you as a face holds you, by the natural play of passions and emotions, thoughts and sentiments, as sound and human in substance as they are subtle and poetic in quality. Not that Mrs. Browning has completely freed herself from those vague and undramatic tendencies towards episode and rhapsody over which no living English poet of eminence, with the exception of her own husband, has wholly risen. She has indulged these tendencies too freely even in this new poem—but her indulgence of them is so clearly an indulgence and not an imbecility—she is so plainly capable of clinging to a grand purpose with the close constructive power of an Italian or a Greek, that the supreme general effect left by “Aurora Leigh” upon the mind is one of the noblest unity and deepest intensity. In this respect it is as unlike as possible to Tennyson’s “Princess,” with which, in point of conception and purpose, it has so many analogies that you cannot read the one without thinking of the other. The “Princess” was most rightly named a “Medley” by its author; “Aurora Leigh” is monumental in the coherence, dignity, and order of its composition.
The thread of the narrative, finely spun as it is, is so clear and strong that the most complicated incidents arrange themselves about it in their natural relations, and it is not difficult to condense the plot into the simplicity of prose.
“Aurora Leigh” is an Anglo-Italian girl, the daughter of a blue-eyed Florentine mother and of an austere English father, who came to Italy conventional and calm, was waked to life and love by the sudden splendor of a sweet Italian face, sad when the brief bright Summer of his heart was smitten by the cold blast of death, drooped and died among the Tuscan mountains, letting fall from his relaxing hand the one small flower that remained to him.
The desolate child was taken from her home of dreams among the hills of Pelago, to dwell with stern realities in the precise British home of her bitterly-virtuous British aunt. There she was taught all decent and decorous things, and trained to live without sunshine or motion, to repress the exuberance and to chastise the audacities of her soul. It was her father’s sin, she found, to have been her mother’s husband—for the ancient house of Leigh abhorred all “entangling foreign alliances,” and she who should have been the heiress of all the lands of Leigh must be left a penniless orphan because her sire had chosen to barter his daughter’s broad acres for an Italian woman’s smile. But Aurora was one of those beings who, though they may be thwarted, can never be tamed. She remembered her mother’s mystic portrait which had been the fascination of her childish years; she remembered her father’s sad sweet eyes, and the last words of his dying lips, “Love! Love! Love!” and she knew in her heart that her father had done well, and to her
There seemed more true life in her father’s grave
Than in all England.
She succumbed, but she never submitted to the discipline of her British aunt; shutting her soul up far within her eyes, but keeping it well alive and waiting for the morning to come when it should be free to soar. As her aunt bade she worked [p. 6→] on the trifling works thought fit for women, because her aunt
Liked a woman to be womanly;
And Englishwomen, she thanked God and sighed,
(Some people always sigh in thanking God)
Were models to the universe.
So too, she learned, as her aunt bade, all learning suitable for women’s minds,
Books demonstrating
Their right of comprehending husbands’ 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 “Aye!”
For that is fatal; their angelic reach
Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,
And fatten household swine; their, in brief,
Potential faculty in everything
Of abdicating power in it.
Meanwhile her soul, amid these tasks and lessons,
Was singing at a work apart
Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm
As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight
In vortices of glory and blue air.
As “safe from harm,” indeed, but not so wholly “out of sight.” For there was one who watched this soaring, singing soul with serious, earnest eyes. And this was Romney Leigh, Aurora’s cousin, and by her father’s fault made heir of Leigh. Aurora’s proud, chafed spirit could not bear in this calm, noble Romney something which seemed to ally him with the conventional world about her. She could not see, poor child, the depth of his deep, proud nature, free as her own but with another freedom, earnest as her own but with another earnestness.
He overfull
Of what is, and she, haply, overbold
For what might be.
For Romney’s spirit was troubled with the weight of possession as Aurora’s was fevered with the desire of emancipation and achievement. He, the lord of Leigh, shuddered with the sense of that world wrong which made him so rich and great, while millions were chafing around him in want and wretchedness and sin. She, the waif of love and Italy, burned with longing for the beauty which through her memory and her hopes alike wooed her away from the grim, ungenial face of miscalled duty. She would not understand him—he could not understand her, and yet it vexed her that Romney would not rejoice with her when
The thrushes sang,
And shook her pulses and the elm’s new leaves;
and it saddened him that Aurora held in all her talk with him to this,
He knew the world
And only missed his cousin!
Very distinctly the clear-sighted bystanders would have said, “These two that so torment each other, were born to love each other, and are not likely to fail of their vocation.” But the fate of Aurora and Romney was like the fate of many another two, and Heaven chose a sweet June morning for the first act of their life’s drama. He asked her to be his wife, misstating rather than misconceiving his hopes of her. She refused him for a husband, misjudging the man rather than misinterpreting his words. And so they parted, he passing to his work in the wide world—she turning to her art and poet’s life, yet retaining always
The very last word which she said, that day,
As you the creaking of the door, years past,
Which let upon you such disabling news,
You ever after have been graver.
Fast upon this parting came the aunt’s death, and then a generous attempt of Romney to fasten a fortune upon the proud Aurora, and Aurora’s putting back of the cousinly hand stretched out to help her; and she went up to London, there to work her own work and soar as high as her wings might bear her, and win, if happily it might be so, the ivy-wreath of poets.
She is faithful to her purpose, and Romney, meanwhile, not less faithful to his. He becomes a Socialist, a Christian Socialist, throws himself into the van of the war with Mammon, and becomes the cynosure alike of all who hope and of all who scoff, of the lovers and the haters of their kind.
The cousins do not meet, till one day a light, glittering Lady Waldemar comes to Aurora’s study, and beseeches her to interpose her cousinly hand and save Romney from a marriage with an outcast girl whom he proposes to wed, in the face of God and man and fashion—to save him for the sake of the proud name of Leigh, for his own sake, and for Lady Waldemar’s! The light, glittering lady does not much move Aurora’s heart; but she goes to find the chosen bride of Romney, and finds her; and finding her, so loves her, that when Romney comes in upon their interview, Aurora clasps his hand and says:
I’ve sate a full hour with your Marian Erle,
And learnt the thing by heart—and from my heart
Am therefore competent to give you thanks
For such a cousin.
The wedding day is appointed, St. Giles and St. James are bidden to meet beneath the sacred roof of God’s own house to witness there the boldest protest of a bold, true man against the falsehoods of the world, and all the masks of form and circumstance.
The company are gathered, the strange, unparalleled company of the rich and the poor, of the decorous and the devilish, mixed and mingling before God’s altar, as at the Judgment Day they must before his throne. But no bride comes. The hour wears on, and no bride comes; but at the last, when the rich have begun to smile with scorn, and the poor to mutter with suspicion, comes news of her—that she has fled away to live a life of shame! Then follows a terrible tumult, and once again the cousins are parted. Romney returns to his work, saddened, but not cast down; Aurora to her art, more saddened than he, and conscious of a vague yearning after something which her art cannot supply. After a year she goes to France, and there in Paris she meets with Marian Erle, a mother now, although no wife, and more hopelessly an outcast than of old. But Aurora sees the girl’s heart in her face, and not in her history; and she takes Marian to her home, and hears her terrible tale of deceit and wrong. It was the Lady Waldemar who sent her out of England, persuading her that Romney’s marriage with herself would be the ruin of his hopes and happiness; it was the Lady Waldemar who chose for her the woman who was to take her to a far southern land, there to live a remote and honest life of toil; it was the woman chosen by the Lady Waldemar who had brought her, instead of this, to France, and there surrendered her, robbed, deserted, drugged, to infamy and ruin.
And the Lady Waldemar who was to wed Romney Leigh!
It might be too late, but Aurora must do her duty; and she wrote to Romney’s friend and hers, the painter Vincent Carrington, detailing all this dreadful history; and taking Marian and her child departed, herself, to Italy.
In Italy Romney found her again. He came there to find her—to find Marian, and to take to himself again the poor child, who through him had come to such unutterable woe. His socialistic dreams had been sternly dissipated—for those whom he would have saved had turned upon him, blind and brutal, and the mob had fired the stately ancestral mansion of the house of Leigh, and he, its lord, striving to save from the flames the wretches who would not let him save them from their stupor and their sins, had been struck down by a burning beam, and so had purchased the clearer vision of the soul with the loss forever of the body’s sight. Inexpressibly pathetic was his interview with Marian—and beautiful and noble was the spirit in her which put back his proffered hand, and laid it in the hand born for his at first—the hand so long withheld—given at last so grandly and so graciously—of Aurora Leigh!
And like the swelling finale of an anthem pealing through Cathedral aisles, the music of the poem rises with its meanings to the end, and leaves vibrating in our hearts the deepest chords that thrill therein to beauty, love and life.
So runs the story of “Aurora Leigh.” How broad and bright the current is, how deep and how melodious, those of our readers who know Mrs. Browning best, will best imagine. For Mrs. Browning’s genius grows upon our admiration with study. It is so full of life, so intensely real, so substantial and warm, that it charms us less than it rewards us, and inspires us even more than it delights us. In her earlier poems indeed, there were plain and obtrusive defects, which at first repelled us more strongly than the irresistible vitality of the works attracted us. Quaint and mystical phrases, fantastic forms of words, irregularities of rhythm and inelegancies of rhyme, all the usual accompaniments, in short, of an over-morbid individuality of mind vexed at once the spirit and the ear, and interposed the unpleasant barrier of a diseased expression between the healthy integrity of the poet’s thoughts and the reader’s sympathy. When you had once overstepped this barrier you found yourself so closely drawn to the living reality within, that you ran the risk of forgetting how undesirable a thing it was that such a barrier should exist at all, to be overstepped.
But Mrs. Browning herself (in this finely vindicating the artistic instincts of her nature) has not forgotten this, and she has steadily worked on, removing one by one the obstacles which habit and the idiosyncracy of her character had erected to her attainment of absolute poetic expression, with such success that now, in this her last poem and her longest, the most fastidious foe to her earlier mannerisms will hardly find a trace of them. In fact, but for certain unnecessarily bald and flagrant phrases which Mrs. Browning has picked up, we fear, among the pre Raphaelites of poetry and painting, “Aurora Leigh” is not less remarkable for the dignity, sweetness, and simplicity of its language than it is for the variety and vigor of its music. Mrs. Browning’s control of the most difficult of measures—blank verse—is such as few masters of the art of poetry have attained. She wields it with a quiet, nervous felicity which is a perpetual delight. What living hand could wake from words a harmony more rich with modulated changes than this passage, for instance—pathetic, varied, dreamy, as a reverie of Chopin:
Alas, long suffering and most patient God,
Thou needst be surelier God to bear with us
Than even to have made us! thou, aspire, aspire
From henceforth for me! thou who hast, thyself,
Endured this fleshhood, knowing how, as a soaked
And sucking vesture, it would drag us down
And choke us in the melancholy Deep,
Sustain me, that, with thee, I walk these waves,
Resisting!—breathe me upward, thou for me
Aspiring, who art the way, the truth, the life—
That no truth henceforth seem indifferent,
No way to truth laborious, and no life,
Not even this life I live, intolerable!
The days went by. I took up the old days
With all their Tuscan pleasures, worn and spoiled—
Like some lost book we dropt in the long grass
On such a happy Summer afternoon
When last we read it with a loving friend,
And find in Autumn, when the friend is gone,
The grass cut short, the weather changed, too late,
And stare at, as at something wonderful
For sorrow—thinking how two hands, before,
Had held up what is left to only one,
And how we smiled when such a vehement nail
Impressed the tiny dint here, which presents
This verse in fire for ever! Tenderly
And mournfully I lived. I knew the birds
And insects—which look fathered by the flowers
And emulous of their hues: I recognized
The moths, with that great overpulse of wings
Which makes a mystery of them how at all
They can stop flying: butterflies, that bear
Upon their blue wings such red embers round,
They seem to scorch the blue air into holes
Each flight they take: and fire-flies that suspire
In short soft lapses of transported flame
Across the tingling Dark, while overhead
The constant and inviolable stars
Outburn those lights-of-love: melodious owls,
(If music had but one note and was sad,
’Twould sound just so) and all the silent swirl
Of bats, that seem to follow in the air
Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome
To which we are blind; and then, the nightingales,
Which pluck our heart across a garden wall,
(When walking in the town) and carry it
So high into the bowery almond trees,
We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if
The golden flood of moon light unaware
Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth
And made it less substantial. And I knew
The harmless opal snakes, and large mouthed frogs,
(Those noisy vaunters of their shallow streams)
And lizards, the green lightnings of the wall,
Which, if you sit down still, nor sigh too loud,
Will flatter you and take you for a stone,
And flash familiarly about your feet
With such prodigious eyes in such small heads!—
I knew them though they had somewhat dwindled from
My childish imagery—and kept in mind
How last I sat among them equally,
In fellowship and mateship, as a child
Will bear him still toward insect, beast and bird,
Before the Adam in him has foregone
All privilege of Eden—making friends
And talk, with such a bird or such a goat,
And buying many a two-inch-wide rush-cage
To let out the caged cricket on a tree,
Saying, “Oh, my dear grillino, were you cramped?
And are you happy with the ilex leaves?
And do you love me who have let you go?
Say yes in singing, and I’ll understand.”
But now the creatures all seemed farther off,
No longer mine nor like me; only there,
A gulph between us. I could yearn indeed,
Like other rich men, for a drop of dew
To cool this heat,—a drop of the early dew,
The irrecoverable child-innocence
(Before the hearts took fire and withered life)
When child[h]ood might pair equally with birds;
But now . . the birds were grown too proud for us!
Alas, the very sun forbids the dew.
That old intensity which gave such truth, truth of feeling as well as of perception to Mrs. Browning’s descriptions and narratives in her former poems, burns still more clear and strong in this new work. The pictures of life and of nature in Italy and in England, the sketch of Assunta, the old Italian nurse of Aurora in her childhood, the portrait of the British aunt, the tale of Marian Erle in France, and the Wedding Scene in St. James’s Church, are masterly for simplicity, force and point. The characters of Lady Waldemar and of the socialistic noble Lord Howe are, however, less rigorously and satisfactorily drawn; and in her relation of Marian’s flight in her girlhood from her evil mother’s home Mrs. Browning approaches the confines of the melo-dramatic more nearly than she has accustomed us to expect of her. We must quarrel with our poet, too, for the philosophical inaccuracy of her delineation of the “Christian Socialists.” We are very sure that no friend of Maurice, or Kingsley, or Lord Goderich will recognize the features of the faith which these large-hearted and large-brained men have made so fruitful, in the odd conglomerate of opinions and purposes to which Romney is made to hold.
The character of Romney is beyond praise. It is one of the finest, noblest, and most possible conceptions of manly devotion, dignity, sincerity and earnestness which ever came from a poet’s heart and head; and worthy of Romney is Aurora, pure, passionate, mistaken, right-minded, self asserting and self-sacrificing Aurora—so much more an artist than a saint, but not less a woman than an artist. Very lovely, too, is Marian Erle, hardly a probable, perhaps not a possible creature, as the world goes, but as the world ought to go very possible, very humanly and tenderly drawn, and true to a lofty spirit’s aspirations for the lowliest.
In perfecting her artistic qualities Mrs. Browning has lost nothing of her originality. You could swear to any three lines taken at random from this book, that she and none other wrote them. Perhaps you will find here and there a gem, the peculiar luster of which will remind you of her husband’s jewels; but the resemblance is in the cutting only and the setting, not in the water of the diamond. The influence of Mr. Browning upon his wife’s genius seems to us traceable more clearly in the tone of her sympathies with certain classes of feeling and activity than in her style or habit of thought. It is pleasant to catch glimpses of his philosophy in her, as, for instance, in her brief allusion to the painter, Vincent Carrington (p. 37), which reëchoes, in three words, Browning’s protesting poem of “Fra Lippo Lippi.”
But we must no longer keep our readers from the poem itself which we delight to honor. Not that we mean to give them any more extracts. “Aurora Leigh” is no more to be taken in “extracts” than “Aurora” herself. The Dawn is its own prophet and its own praise. And so is Aurora Leigh its own best criticism and explanation and eulogy; for, had it not been the finest poem, it would still have been the most absorbing romance of the year.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
___________________
