E561227A. Aurora Leigh.
John Bull, 27 December 1856, p. 827.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 328–329.
We have always regarded the peculiar tone of Mrs. Browning’s genius as being in some sort a psychological curiosity. We have no doubt she is perfectly feminine in all the attributes of everyday life, but there is a singularly masculine character both about her æsthetics and her philosophy. It is masculine, that her morals of life are generally viewed rather as matters of speculative judgment than as questions of instinct and feeling. It is masculine, that her ideas of the beautiful are so pronounced and vivid as at times to acquire a sort of voluptuous tone. It is masculine, that she apprehends so strongly the analogy between material and spiritual things as to make the former the type of the latter to an emphatic extent that sometimes approximates toward Pantheism. Then, again, we have in her writings that strange mixture of the comprehensiveness and abstraction of thought which distinguishes the North, with the warm electric apprehensiveness of the South—that peculiarly Dantesque combination of the Lombard and Italian which obviously suggests the co-operation of very diverse elements on the inner life of the writer. We should have been prepared to find that Mrs. Browning’s unfolding thought was tended and trained under the influence of peculiar circumstances by a male hand; and we think she has given some hints of this in her other works. We should have been prepared, too, to find that, if she had not Italian blood in her veins, she had at least drawn inspiration in early life from Italian sights and sounds. Both these are features in the experience of Aurora Leigh. She is the only child—the motherless child—of her father; and he loves to draw her into his own favourite studies. After his death she dwells upon them for the love of his memory:—
I read much. What my father taught before
From many a volume, Love re-emphasised
Upon the self-same pages: Theophrast
Grew tender with the memory of his eyes,
An Ælian made mine wet. The trick of Greek
And Latin, he had taught me, as he would
Have taught me wrestling or the game of fives
If such he had known,—most like a shipwrecked man
Who heaps his single platter with goats’ cheese
And scarlet berries; or like any man
Who loves but one, and so gives all at once,
Because he has it, rather than because
He counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave;
And thus, as did the women formerly
By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil
Across the boy’s audacious front, and swept
With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,
He wrapt his little daughter in his large
Man’s doublet, careless did it fit or no.
So also she is born and brought up till her father’s death in Italy, and she regards the mountains that look on Vallombrosa with the passionate fondness which afterwards makes her exclaim when she is returning to them after many years:—
And now I come, my Italy,
My own hills! Are you ’ware of me, my hills,
How I burn toward you? do you feel to-night
The urgency and yearning of my soul,
As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe
And smile?
Not that we imagine that “Aurora Leigh” is in the ordinary sense of the word an autobiographical poem. That is, we take for granted that the actual incidents of the story are merely imaginary; but we cannot help thinking that the effects produced on the mind of the heroine by the influences described correspond with those which the writer traced in her own experience as the result of some other and, perhaps, very different circumstances. The unsympathetic loneliness of Aurora’s early days—the harsh and self-involved views of life which might be expected under such auspices—the disposition towards theory and generalization, which is commonly connected with these solitary aspirations—all remind us very strongly of peculiarities in the turn of Mrs. Browning’s intellectual character, as expressed in her poetry. Indeed, this sort of self-revelation, unconscious, perhaps, in a great degree, could hardly be avoided in a book into which, as the authoress tells us in her preface, “her highest convictions of life and art have entered.”
“Aurora Leigh” is a love story, but its interest in this particular is of a very subordinate kind. Mrs. Browning herself evidently regards this portion of her plot as merely auxiliary to the expression of her philosophical ideas. Her mind is of too subjective a temperament to impart much individual life and warmth to the creatures of her imagination. She regards men and women as representing certain types of thought and classes of ideas, not as the world of flesh-and-blood realities, with all their wonderful variety of separate being. This must of course spoil the incidents of the fiction, so far as its artistic purposes as a fiction are concerned. Thus, how utterly inconsistent with such a character as Lady Waldemar is imagined, is the tame letter which she writes in answer to the indignant expostulations of Aurora Leigh. The commonest observation, or the authority of Juvenal, might have reminded Mrs. Browning that
Mulier sævissima tunc est
Quum stimulos odio pudor admovet.
There are, however, passages of lofty beauty in the poem which owe their interest entirely to the delineation of strong emotion. Above all, in that striking scene in the last book, where Marian Erle renounces the offered hand of Romney Leigh, the grandeur and pathos of the tragic interest are worthy of a drama of Sophocles.
In Romney Leigh, the cousin and lover of the heroine, we have an impersonation of the systematic and theoretical good-doing which is so remarkable a feature of our time, and constitutes perhaps the besetting weakness of some of our most exalted spirits. Romney Leigh is bent on meeting with his own effort the difficulties propounded by
The social Sphinx,
Who sits between the sepulchres and stews,
Makes mock and mow against the crystal heavens,
And bullies God.
He broods over the inequalities of high and low, rich and poor; he strives to redress the anomalies of laissez-faire by systematic schemes of the most elaborate protection, after the manner of Louis Blanc; he wants to set all social mischiefs right by phalansteries, Fourierisms, and so forth. In contrast with this character, Aurora Leigh is simply willing to follow the beautiful for its own sake, to obey her own poetical instincts, without demanding to see the immediate result of her work. She is satisfied to live out her poetical life, and has no sympathy with the theories of Romney, who, she says,
lives by diagrams,
And crosses out the spontaneities
Of all his individual, personal life,
With formal universals. As if man
Were set upon a high stool at a desk,
To keep God’s books for Him, in red and black,
And feel by millions! What, if even God
Were chiefly God by living out Himself
To an individualism of the Infinite,
Eterne, intense, profuse,—still throwing up
The golden spray of multitudinous worlds
In measure to the proclive weight and rush
Of His inner nature,—the spontaneous love
Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life?
Then live, Aurora!
The latter part of this passage suggests a feature of Mrs. Browning’s writings which is not a pleasant one. We refer to the reckless habit which she has of scattering the name of God through her verse in the kind of connection in which we find it here, and which not only savours of irreverence, but indicates an imperfect conception of the Deity as the Demiurgus of nature, rather than the revealed moral governor and Father of all. Mrs. Browning has apologized for this habit in one of her earlier volumes, but she has not at all amended it. Other versifiers of very inferior power are extremely fond of the same artifice for intensifying a weak idea: but Mrs. Browning can afford to dispense with such aid.
How Romney Leigh utterly fails in his Socialist devices for bettering the state of society against the grain of nature—how he finds out by degrees, and by painful disappointment, the virtue of that old heroism which worked in the dark by faith, which worked on under the sanction of duty, and left the consequences to God, and its superiority over the modern zeal which must see an end of its labours, and sinks into quackery through its eagerness—how he learns that—
We want more quiet in our works,
More knowledge of the bounds in which we work;
More knowledge that each individual man
Remains an Adam to the general race,
Constrained to see, like Adam, that he keep
His personal state’s condition honestly,
Or vain all thoughts of his to help the world,
Which still must be developed from its one,
If bettered in its many. We, indeed,
Who think to lay it out new like a park,
We take a work on us which is not man’s;
For God alone sits far enough above,
To speculate so largely. None of us
(Not Romney Leigh) is mad enough to say,
We’ll have a grove of oaks upon that slope
And sink the need of acorns—
all this is skilfully and beautifully disclosed in the poem. Aurora herself had long ago, as we have said, distrusted these material schemes of improvement—
I walked on, musing with myself
On life and art, and whether, after all,
A larger metaphysics might not help
Our physics, a completer poetry
Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants,
More fully than the special outside plans,
Phalansteries, material institutes,
The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries
Preferred by modern thinkers, as they thought
The bread of man indeed made all his life,
And washing seven times in the “People’s Baths”
Was sovereign for a people’s leprosy,—
Still leaving out the essential prophet’s word
That comes in power. On which, we thunder down,
We prophets, poets,—Virtue’s in the word!
The maker burnt the darkness up with His,
To inaugurate the use of vocal life;
And, plant a poet’s word even, deep enough
In any man’s breast, looking presently
For offshoots, you have done more for the man,
Than if you dressed him in a broad-cloth coat
And warmed his Sunday potage at your fire.
The specimens we have given of Mrs. Browning’s verse sufficiently illustrate the high poetical merit of “Aurora Leigh.” We have, however, selected them for the purpose of throwing light on the philosophical argument of the work, and it would not be easy to pick out from it passages which expressly serve as embodiments of poetical power. There is too much unity of thought and purpose about the whole texture of the poem to permit the selection of those panni purpurei of description and sentiment which generally constitute the reviewer’s favourite “extracts.” Mrs. Browning very seldom condescends to merely descriptive writing; although she has interwoven with her thoughts on the present condition of France and her people, some most striking and graphic touches of the material features of Paris.
In conclusion, this book is not only worthy of all honour for its lofty vein of imagination, its glowing and prodigal imagery, and its truth and earnestness of feeling—all that makes it valuable as an interpretation of the inner thought of our time—but also for the medium of pure Anglo-Saxon language in which that interpretation is conveyed. We believe there is scarcely an English book which consists of so large a proportion of monosyllables. And although Mrs. Browning thus patriotically cleaves to the most sturdy and simple sounds in our language, she has at the same time a great facility and even boldness in bringing to her aid a sonorous compound from the Greek whenever it is actually required by the idea.
It would be curious to speculate on the degree in which the character of Mrs. Browning’s poetry has been modified by her coverture. We cannot help thinking that in this poem of the wife, we detect at various times an undertone of accompaniment, which belongs to the husband’s muse. Those who have not been deterred by Robert Browning’s occasional obscurity and mannerism of diction, from acquainting themselves with the works of a truly great and original poet, will be able to judge from the passages which we have quoted whether there is not some foundation for our theory.
A melancholy interest is added to the book by the warm and affectionate terms in which it is dedicated to Mr. John Kenyon, whose own dignified place in the field of literature was so soon afterwards to be rendered vacant by his recent death.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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