E561227B. Aurora Leigh.
The Saturday Review, 27 December 1856, pp. 776–778.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 330–333.
The negative experience of centuries seems to prove that a woman cannot be a great poet. Those who are curious in intellectual physiology may find, in Aurora Leigh, some materials for the explanation of feminine misadventures in art. It was natural that, in the exceptional position of a poet’s wife, herself possessing undoubted genius, Mrs. Browning should enter on an ambitious enterprise; but it is not surprising that she should have failed in the attempt to achieve several simultaneous impossibilities. A novel in blank verse, containing twelve thousand lines, is in itself alarming to an ordinary reader. The Iliad is of equal length, and the Divine Comedy is even longer; but the Odyssey, the Æneid, and Paradise Lost, are considerably less voluminous. It is possible that some of Southey’s unread epics may be equally long; but Madoc and Don Roderick at least contain the result of much historical study. Aurora Leigh is wholly and obviously a fiction. The characters are few and unreal—the incidents, though scanty, are almost inconceivable—and the heroine and autobiographer, as a professed poetess, has tastes and occupations which are, beyond all others, incapable of poetical treatment. With all nature and life at its command, Art is only precluded from selecting its own mechanism as its subject. But, of late, the poet’s eye, instead of glancing from earth to heaven, seems, by some strange inversion, to be exclusively fixed on the process of writing verses. The details of authorship probably possess a professional interest for those whom they concern; but life at a college, in a hospital, or in a special pleader’s chambers, would furnish more interesting pictures to the world at large. The poets with whom Dante dealt were accepted heroes—Homer, l’altissimo poeta, and the sacred Virgil, and Statius, traditionally rescued from Paganism and from its doom; but neither the Latin guide nor his Tuscan follower is employed in making verses, or in talking about verse-making. In the three mystical realms which they traverse, they are only reporters and witnesses. The occupation of wrapping up ordinary thoughts and events in mysterious language is different in its purpose and results. “It is the glory of God,” says Bacon, in one of his quaintest scriptural quotations, “to conceal a matter; but it is the glory of the King (i. e., of literature, personified in James I.) to discover a matter.” In Aurora Leigh, as in many other poems, the glory of discovering the matter is carefully reserved for the reader.
Imagination and passion naturally express themselves, from time to time, in figurative terms, when they overleap or outrun the capabilities of ordinary language; but an unbroken series of far-fetched metaphors indicates a deliberate exercise of ingenuity which is in itself essentially prosaic, and all dramatic illusion disappears when two persons pitch their dialogue in the same artificial key. Minds in a state of imaginative exaltation will never run in couples. Two Pythonesses singing their responses in parts, and keeping time in their contortions, would have destroyed the popular faith in Delphic inspiration. The poetess Aurora, in controversy with her philanthropic cousin and lover, may perhaps be allowed to vindicate Art as opposed to utilitarian practice, in long strings of allusive phrases; but Romney Leigh is equally incapable of calling a spade, in plain language, a spade; and when one of the disputants starts a metaphor, the other almost invariably hunts it down. “Who,” Romney asks, “has time—
An hour’s time—think! to sit upon a bank,
And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands?
When Egypt’s slain, I say, let Miriam sing;
Before—where’s Moses?”
Œdipus himself would have paused before he deciphered such a riddle; but Aurora answers, without the slightest hesitation, in the same oracular style—
“Ah! exactly that!
Where’s Moses?—is a Moses to be found?
You’ll seek him vainly in the bulrushes,
While I in vain touch cymbals.” [p. 777→]
This passage has a meaning, and the allusion, if not imaginative, is fanciful; but all its propriety is lost when two intellects are employed in pulling at one transient thought. Immediately afterwards, Aurora, in her turn, talks of planting tulips on dunghills; and Romney at once follows up the hint:—
“True. A death-heat is
The same as life-heat—to be accurate.”
Mrs. Browning’s poem is open to criticism in all its three component parts, of fable, manners, and diction. The story is fantastical, the conduct of the personages in the narrative is whimsically absurd, and their language is as euphuistic as that of Don Armado or of Sir Piercie Shafton. Aurora Leigh, daughter of an English landed gentleman by an Italian wife, finds herself disinherited by an arrangement which displays a truly feminine contempt of legal probability. Her father ought, as she is told by an indignant aunt, to have
Shrunk before that clause in the entail
Excluding offspring by a foreign wife,
(The clause set up a hundred years ago
By a Leigh who wedded with a French dancing girl,
And had his heart danced over in return.)
The good lady might have added, that a gentleman of large fortune, who had lived in Italy for thirteen years with a single woman servant, ought to have left some personalty to his only child; but it is necessary for the purposes of the story that Aurora should be almost penniless, that she may with more dignity refuse a fortune from Romney Leigh, the heir-at-law, after rejecting his personal suit as a lover. This cousin, the hero of the poem, subsequently determines to show his contempt for social distinctions by marrying Marian Erle, a vagrant girl, of the vilest parentage and most delicate sentiments, for whom he feels no attachment whatever. Aurora, entering into his whims as readily as into his metaphors, shows her high approbation of his choice, by forming a sudden friendship with the bride. The wedding-day arrives, and the fashionable world is invited to meet the rabble and swell mob on this auspicious occasion:—
Half St. Giles in frieze,
Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold,
And after contract at the altar, pass
To eat a marriage-feast on Hampstead Heath.
The incidents of dreams, whether in bed or in books, never excite surprise. The aristocracy accept Mr. Leigh’s invitation as a matter of course, and a riot got up by the mob on the nonappearance of the bride is easily suppressed by the police. It afterwards appears that Marian, although desperately enamoured of her high-born benefactor, has been persuaded that he will injure himself by the connexion. With an exalted self-denial, she has determined to withdraw herself from his sight; and she communicates her purpose in a letter as grandly unintelligible as if it had been written by Romney himself, or by Aurora, who, she says, had once admitted—
“He loves you, Marian,” in a sort of mild
Derisive sadness—As a mother asks
Her babe, “You’ll touch that star, you think?” Farewell,
I know I never touch’d it—This is worst—
Babes grow, and lose the hope of things above;
A silver threepence sets them leaping high,
But no more stars—mark that.
Romney, as might be expected, takes his loss very quietly; and, indeed, greatly prefers to Marian’s company conversations with his transcendental cousin, who explains to him, if it can be called explanation, the nature of Art:—
“What is Art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher
When, graduating up in a special line
Of still-expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite—
Art’s life, and when we live, we suffer and toil.”
“You take it gravely,” he replies. “You refuse your dreamland, you let in the axes to the legendary woods, to pay the head tax; you had better take a trade and be of use.”
“Of use!” I softly echoed, “there’s the point;
We sweep about for ever in argument,
Like swallows, which the exasperate dying year
Sets spinning in black circles, round and round,
Preparing for far flights o’er unknown seas—
And we—where tend we?”
“Where,” he said, and sighed.
Swift’s “little language” was intelligible only to Stella—Romney’s big language serves the same purpose with Aurora. A still closer literary parallel may be found in the case of Lord and Lady Froth, in Congreve’s Double Dealer, where, in the list of dramatis personæ, the gentleman is described as “a solemn coxcomb,” and the lady as “a pretender to wit, poetry, and learning.” “That look,” says Lord Froth, in the euphuistic language of his time—“ah! there it is; who could resist? ’twas so my heart was made a captive first, and ever since ’t has been in love with happy slavery.” Lady F.—“O that tongue! that dear, deceitful tongue! that charming softness in your mien and expression! and then your bow,” &c. &c. The analogy is rendered perfect by Lady Froth’s composition of an heroic poem called The Syllabub, in which she designates her lord as Spumoso and herself as Biddy.
Humboldt tells a story of an old parrot which, after surviving some extinct tribe in South America, still repeated to wondering strangers a few unintelligible words from a language irrecoverably lost. The poor bird presents a striking image of loneliness; but two exclusive possessors of a dialect elsewhere unknown might console each other in their solitude. It is evident that Marian only imitated, under the influence of love, the language in which her friend and her destined bridegroom habitually conducted their mysterious converse. “I,” said the pretended Mystic, “am she. Oh most bucolical Juvenal, to whose care are entrusted the milky mothers of the herd.” “By heaven!” exclaimed Edward Glendenning, “it is the English knight.” “By heaven!” the critical reader may exclaim, “Marian’s talk about stars and threepences comes direct from Aurora.” Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately, for the composition of the second half of the poem— the philanthropist and the poetess, though they comprehend each other’s riddles, cannot understand that they are both in love, and that there is not the smallest obstacle to their marriage. It is not till after the lapse of several years and cantos, or books, that they meet once more. Aurora is living in a Tuscan villa, with Marian and Marian’s child under her protection. Romney has turned Leigh Hall into a Phalanstery for reformed criminals, including Marian’s father. The inmates, not unnaturally, rebel, and set fire to the building, and worthy Mr. Erle takes the opportunity to throw down a burning beam, which puts out his benefactor’s eyes. The blind man proceeds to Florence, for the purpose of once more offering Marian his hand, and on her refusal, Aurora at last confesses her life-long attachment. It is darkly intimated that philanthropy henceforth is to be less presumptuous, and the lovers indulge to their hearts’ content in amæbean metaphors expressing their anticipations of a golden age. At the close, they are looking on an Italian sky, and he
Stood calm, and fed his blind majestic eyes
Upon the thought of perfect noon; and when
I saw his soul saw—“Jasper, first,” I said,
“And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony,
The rest in order—last, an amethyst.”
An apocaly[p]tic conclusion not unworthy of the story.
Notwithstanding the defects of the poem, Mrs. Browning has more fully than ever proved that she is a poetess. The fable, the manners, and the diction, are, as it has been said, more than questionable; but after eliminating the story, the eccentricities of the actors, and a great part of the dialogue, there will remain an abundant store of poetical thought, of musical language, and of deep and true reflection. The book will best display its real merits on a second reading, when the paradoxes in action, language, and thought which encumber the composition are tacitly set aside. Mrs. Browning has a fine ear, and an observant mind. Her partial failure is far less attributable to a want of poetical instinct than to the erroneous theory that art is the proper subject for itself. When Aurora forgets that she is a poetess—or, still better, when she is herself forgotten—the troublesome machinery which had been interposed between the writer and reality is effectually removed. If Mrs. Browning would trust her first thoughts, and condescend to be simple, she would be almost always picturesque and forcible. The Italian girl’s portrait of her prim, dry, narrow English aunt, shows a capacity for humorous satire worth much figurative philosophy:—
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 prick’d with grey,
By frigid use of life ....
* * * *
She had lived
A harmless life; she called a virtuous life
A quiet life, which was not life at all
(But that she had not lived enough to know),
Between the vicar and the country squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyrean, 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
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.
A subsequent touch is deeper, and, if possible, more true:—
She had pored for years
What sort of woman could be suitable
To her sort of hate, to entertain it with;
And so, her very curiosity
Became hate too, and all the idealism
She ever used in life was used for hate,
Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at last
The love from which it grew, in strength and heat,
And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a sense
Of disputable virtue (say not sin),
When Christian doctrine was enforced in church.
The niece is naturally compelled to profit by a complete course of education:—
I learnt the collects and the catechisms,
The creeds from Athanasius back to Nice.
* * * *
Because she liked instructed piety,
I learnt my complement of classic French, [p. 778→]
(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism)
And German also, since she liked a range
Of liberal education—tongues, not books.
I learnt a little algebra, a little
Of the mathematics, brushed with extreme flounce
The circles of the sciences, because
She misliked women who are frivolous.
I learnt the royal genealogies
Of Oviedo, the internal laws
Of the Burmese Empire—by how many feet
Mount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh,
What navigable river joins itself
To Lara, and what census of the year five
Was taken at Klagenfurt, because she liked
A general insight into useful facts.....
..... I washed in
From nature landscapes, rather say washed out;
I danced the Polka and Cellarius,
Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,
Because she liked accomplishments in girls.
..... she owned
She liked a woman to be womanly,
And English women, she thanked God, and sighed—
Some people always sigh in thanking God—
Were models to the universe. And last,
I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like
To see me wear the night with empty hands,
A doing nothing.
Perhaps there might, after all, have been a worse education; but Aurora is not the less true to nature for a little feminine injustice, or for one or two ladylike inaccuracies. The Nicene Creed was not published at Nice, nor does Chimborazo “outsoar Hemmeleh,” i. e., the Himalaya. A girl’s studies can scarcely be kept too clear of Balzac, whatever may be the case with neologism; and, on the whole, it is not undesirable that young ladies should learn to draw, to dance, to speak French, and even to sew. But a burst of honest idiomatic spite is worth a thousand fantastical phrases, such as the proposition that—
In youth
We play at leap-frog over the god Term.
Girls at least cannot, even in metaphor, be allowed to “over” the posts or milestones.
In one passage, even the poetizing manufacture is poetically treated. Aurora, after a successful publication, is lamenting her isolation from all domestic ties:—
How dreary ’tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires,
And hear the nations praising them far off,
Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,
Our very heart of passionate womanhood,
Which could not beat so in the verse without
Being present also in the unkissed lips,
And eyes undried, because there’s none to ask
The reason they grew moist. To sit alone,
And think for comfort how that very night
Affianc’d lovers, leaning face to face,
With sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath,
Are reading, haply from some page of ours—
To pause with a thrill as if their cheeks had touched,
When such a stanza level to their mood,
Seems floating their own thought out. “So I feel
For thee,” “And I for thee: this poet knows
What everlasting love is”—how that night
A father, issuing from the misty roads
Upon the luminous round of lamp and hearth,
And happy children, having caught up first
The youngest there, until it shrunk and shrieked
To feel the cold chin prick its dimples through
With winter from the hills, may throw in the lap
Of the eldest (who has learned to drop her lids,
To hide some sweetness newer than last year’s)
Our book, and cry, “Ah, you! you care for rhymes;
So here are rhymes to pore on under trees
When April comes to let you. I’ve been told
They are not idle, as so many are,
But set hearts beating pure as well as fast.
It’s yours—the book; I’ll write your name in it,
That so you may not lose, however lost
In poet’s lore and charming reverie,
The thought of how your father thought of you
In riding from the town.”
The philosophy of the poem is its least valuable part. It amounts to a vague intimation that some socialist theory yet undiscovered may, under the mysterious inspiration of Art, hereafter correct what are too hastily assumed to be the gratuitous evils of the world. It is something that Romney’s pragmatical schemes issue in total discomfiture; but the failure of one experiment scarcely proves that there is another solution of the problem to be found. Fourier’s tea-garden and Casino-Paradise is acknowledged to be a chimera; and it yet remains to be ascertained whether an earthly paradise on a more rational model is possible. Aurora is exhorted by her lover to press her clarion to her lip—
And breathe the fine keen breath along the brass,
And blow all class-walls level as Jericho’s,
Past Jordan.....
But his own blunder might have taught him that class-walls, as he calls them, are possibly not to be thrown down with impunity. There are few prophecies more unprofitable than easy anticipations of a new world—
Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously,
New churches, new economies, new laws
Admitting freedom, new societies
Excluding falsehood.
Happily the poem contains many things more valuable than declamations on the beauties of Utopia. With all her imperfections, most of which are voluntary, Mrs. Browning may claim at least an equal rank with any poetess who has appeared in England.
[George Stovin Venables]
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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