E561231A. Aurora Leigh.
The Guardian, 31 December 1856, pp. 999–1000.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 333–335.
This book has disappointed us. Our greatest female poet, after some years of silence, produces a long and elaborate work, in which it is natural to look for the maturity of her genius and the highest exercise of her powers. But though her longest, it is not to our taste by a great deal her finest work. The story is improbable, much of it is coarse and disagreeable, and by no means original. The style has acquired much of the obscurity and roughness which so seriously interfere with the popularity of her husband’s writings. The whole poem is spun out to an extreme and unreasonable length, and much of it is so loose and unmelodious in the versification as to be little if at all removed from prose in general effect, while it is far below good prose in ease and vigour. As a whole, the book is a failure, and Mrs. Browning will be still remembered by her beautiful lyrical compositions, the constant delight of hundreds who will never make their way through this lengthy and inartistic poem.
It is as a poem we object to it. Written in prose and as a novel in three volumes it would be a powerful composition, with striking characters, and an interesting, if not altogether original, story. The garb of verse impedes the movement and hinders the development of the conversations and the plot, and the transition from the gossip of drawing-rooms to speculations upon profound and sublime subjects is often exceedingly harsh and abrupt. In spite of the splendour of some passages, and the beauty and tenderness of others, we find ourselves perpetually feeling the verse as an incumbrance, and wishing it away. And at last we never look upon it or think of it as a poem in the conventional sense which the word has now obtained, but rather as a tale written for a special purpose, with a distinct and evident political and social bearing, and written in verse only because verse (of the sort, at least, of which the greater part of this volume is made up) is as easy to Mrs. Browning (or to anybody else) as careful prose—easier considerably than really good prose would be.
We have said that there are splendid passages, and that the story is powerful and striking. It is Mrs. Browning’s protest as to the condition of women in society, her claim for them to rank with men, and as workers and as artists to share in the world’s labours and enjoy the world’s honours equally with the sterner sex. She is undoubtedly entitled to be heard, and perhaps her pleading, like that of Mrs. Jameson, may from her great celebrity arrest the attention of even careless and prejudiced men. We will not, in a necessarily short review of a literary work, attempt to discuss at length, or with the thorough comprehension which it demands, so grave a social question as that of the position of women. That they are too often the victims of man’s selfishness and brutality, that there is an unreasonable jealousy of their influence, and an undesirable incompleteness in their education, we certainly believe. But those who reverence women most deeply and habitually, who are ready in no grudging spirit or affectation of patronage to do homage to the loveliness and dignity of their character, will be the slowest to believe that by striving to meet men upon equal terms in the pursuits of active or intellectual life, women will really elevate themselves, or will be fulfilling their true mission, or will tend in any degree to lighten those social evils and moral injustice to which, in our judgment, they are undoubtedly obnoxious. Let Mrs. Browning plead, and let us listen to her pleadings with respect, but let us not be thought hard or unjust if we say that this very book proves her intellectual inferiority, and that she herself appears ill-satisfied with the conclusions she desires to enforce.
The book professes to be an autobiography in verse, and, without presuming to inquire into the individual life or feelings of Mrs. Browning, it is impossible to escape the impression that much of her own experience, and something like the events or at least the complexion of her own life is, and is intended to be, laid before us in the story. For some of the harsher and more terrible incidents of the tale, for all, in fact, which relates to the character of Marian Erle, we would fain hope that she is indebted only to books or to her own imagination. An English girl, born of a Florentine mother and an English father, a grave yet affectionate and unworldly scholar, Aurora Leigh, loses both her parents when a child and comes to live with a quiet English aunt, the ideal of a stiff, cold, conventional, unamiable, yet thoroughly respectable and even conscientious old maid. Her cousin, Romney Leigh, to whom her father’s property had passed, falls in love with her, and asks her to be his wife. He is a noble-minded philanthropist, full of schemes for benefiting his kind, with perhaps too little personal passion, and certainly a rather undisguised sense of the inferiority of women. Aurora rejects him, infinitely to the displeasure of her aunt, who dies suddenly, leaving her very poor. She rejects a munificent provision made for her by Romney, and comes to London to work as an authoress. She is gradually, but at last wholly, successful. She then finds how little there is in fame or literary success to compensate for the want of those affections of the heart which she had rejected and endeavoured to crush; and leaves England to find in Italy the peace and happiness which literary reputation had failed to impart.
Alongside with Aurora’s life Romney had been pursuing his philanthropic schemes, and had intended to demonstrate the reality of his convictions as to the equality of mankind, by a marriage with a daughter of the people. This character, Marian Erle, is drawn by Mrs. Browning with unusual care and with evident satisfaction. Sprung from a villainous father and a degraded mother, beaten, starved, surrounded all her life with corrupting influences and vile companions, she grows up pure, gentle, loving, and, if not educated, yet with a feeling and a wisdom which supply the place of the highest culture. This poor girl Romney Leigh has determined to make his wife, hardly from love, certainly not from passion, but from a kind of high philosophical affection and a wish to set an example of the mingling of one class with another. A beautiful and fashionable Lady Waldemar falls in love with Romney, and in pursuit of her schemes upon him persuades Marian that he does not love her, and she goes off with a servant of Lady Waldemar’s on the very morning of the intended marriage. The scene in St. James’s Church, when the bride does not arrive, is one of the most powerful in the whole book. She disappears, however, and it turns out the Lady Waldemar’s servant sells her into the vilest hands in France. We need not pursue this part of the story, though we do not agree with what has been said of it that such stories are necessarily impure and are not fit subjects of tragic interest. No one who has ever read the magnificent tragedy of Clarissa Harlowe will be disposed to deny the capacity of its subject for exciting the pro- [p. 1000→] foundest emotion, nor inclined to assert that there is anything in the interest it creates either mischievous or offensive. Nor with the noble modern example of Ruth before us can we desire to withdraw from hands fit to deal with it a subject so full of stern and pathetic teaching as the fall and repentance of women. Yet this story of Mrs. Browning’s is more horrible and certainly less natural than either Ruth or Clarissa, and the preservation of Marian’s purity of soul and purpose is copied without being improved either in probability or feeling from the Mysteries of Paris. It serves no end which we can see—it teaches no moral. It gives rise, indeed, to a noble but unnatural resolution on the part of Romney to take Marian, even as she is, as his wife, and her unfathered offspring for his own. Aurora discovers Marian; they go to Italy together. There she writes to unmask Lady Waldemar, who, after all, does not marry Romney. Romney goes blind, comes to Florence to marry Marian, and ends (of course) by marrying Aurora.
Such is the story, made up, as our readers will easily perceive, from several well-known tales. It is not a pleasant story; nor is Aurora an agreeable character. Far too strong-minded, to use a cant phrase, for ordinary men, she gets more than she deserves in the heart and steady love of such a man as Romney. Nor is Romney himself, noble-minded as he is, very attractive. He is too calm, and reasonable, and philosophical, in all he does; one thorough mistake, one hearty burst of human temper, would make him, to our notion, far more delightful. Lady Waldemar is simply hateful. The minor characters, especially the artist Charrington, the clever, well-meaning, impulsive aristocrat, Lord Howe, are lively and pleasant. The result of the book is not felicitous. Aurora is far nobler, and carries our sympathies more completely, when she is working on in solitude in London, than when she marries Romney at the end. Mrs. Browning, we suppose, intends to say that, after all, women must love and marry. It may be so; but all her best powers are exerted, and her best effects produced, in that part of the story in which Aurora is struggling for an opposite conclusion. It is as if Mrs. Browning shrank from teaching distinctly the conclusion at which she has arrived, and pays for her want of intellectual courage by a loss of poetical power. At all events, our extracts shall be from the earlier and finer portions of the book.
And here we must warn our readers that extracts do not adequately represent the general impression of the book. Mrs. Browning is a poetess second to few women who have ever lived. She has written grand and beautiful poems before now; and in the book before us are beautiful passages, noble thoughts, musical sentences, which may be read with pleasure and remembered with delight. But the book is not made up of such. There are dreary wastes between, in which, if our Sappho does not nod, at least her Pegasus seems tired, and jogs on with a shambling and ungraceful gait. With these remarks, by way of warning, we set before our readers some beautiful bits of poetry. Such surely is the following piece of description:—
Whoever lives true life, will love true love.
I learnt to love that England. Very oft,
Before the day was born, or otherwise
Through secret windings of the afternoons,
I threw my hunters off and plunged myself
Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag
Will take the waters, shivering with the fear
And passion of the course. And when, at last
Escaped—so many a green slope built on slope
Betwixt me and the enemy’s house behind,
I dared to rest, or wander—like a rest
Made sweeter for the step upon the grass—
And view the ground’s most gentle dimplement,
(As if God’s finger touched but did not press
In making England!) such an up and down
Of verdure—nothing too much up or down,
A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;
Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures, where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew—at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade—
I thought my father’s land was worthy too
Of being my Shakspeare’s.
. . . . . . .
But then the thrushes sang,
And shook my pulses and the elms’ new leaves—
And then I turned, and held my finger up,
And bade him mark that, howsoe’er the world
Went ill, as he related, certainly
The thrushes still sang in it. At which word
His brow would soften, and he bore with me
In melancholy patience, not unkind,
While, breaking into voluble ecstacy.
I flattered all the beauteous country round,
As poets use… the skies, the clouds, the fields,
The happy violets hiding from the roads
The primroses run down to, carrying gold—
The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out
Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths
’Twixt dripping ash-boughs—hedgerows all alive
With birds and gnats and large white butterflies
Which look as if the May-flower had caught life
And palpitated forth upon the wind,—
Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,
Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills,
And cattle grazing in the watered vales,
And cottage chimneys smoking from the woods,
And cottage gardens smelling everywhere,
Confused with smell of orchards. “See,” I said,
“And see! is God not with us on the earth?
And shall we put Him down by aught we do?
Who says there’s nothing for the poor and vile
Save poverty and wickedness? behold!”
And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped,
And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.
These lines are fine and spirited:—
“There is none good save God,” said Jesus Christ.
If He once, in the first creation-week,
Called creatures good—for ever, afterward,
The Devil only has done it, and his heirs,
The knaves who win so, and the fools who lose;
The word’s grown dangerous. In the middle age,
I think they called malignant fays and imps
Good people. A good neighbour, even in this,
Is fatal sometimes—cuts your morning up
To mince-meat of the very smallest talk,
Then helps to sugar her bohea at night
With your reputation. I have known good wives,
As chaste, or nearly so, as Potiphar’s;
And good, good mothers, who would use a child
To better an intrigue; good friends, beside,
(Very good) who hung succinctly round your neck
And sucked your breath, as cats are fabled to do
By sleeping infants. And we all have known
Good critics, who have stamped out poet’s hopes;
Good statesmen, who 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 sate still in easy chairs,
And damned the general world for standing up,
Now, may the good God pardon all good men!
In the following extract we seem to feel that Mrs. Browning has discovered the inability of a great reputation to satisfy the longings of the heart:—
O my God, my God,
O supreme Artist, who as sole return
For all the cosmic wonder of Thy work,
Demandest of us just a word .. a name,
“My Father!”—thou hast knowledge, only thou,
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,
Affianced 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 i’ the lap
Of the eldest (who has learnt 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 be 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.”
To have our books
Appraised by love, associated with love,
While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think?
At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said,
Means simply love. It was a man said that.
And then, there’s love and love; the love of all
(To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox),
Is but a small thing to the love of one.
You bid a hungry child be satisfied
With a heritage of many corn-fields; nay,
He says he’s hungry—he would rather have
That little barley-cake you keep from him
While reckoning up his harvests. So with us;
(Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!)
We’re hungry.
The following description of the quiet of a hospital to the poor neglected child Marian is very pathetic:—
She stirred—the place seemed new and strange as death.
The white strait bed, with others strait and white,
Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,
And quiet people walking in and out
With wonderful low voices and soft steps,
And apparitional equal care for each,
Astonished her with order, silence, law;
And when a gentle hand held out a cup,
She took it, as you do at sacrament,
Half awed, half melted—not being used, indeed,
To so much love as makes the form of love
And courtesy of manners. Delicate drinks
And rare white bread, to which some dying eyes
Were turned in observation. O my God,
How sick we must be, ere we make men just!
I think it frets the saints in heaven to see
How many desolate creatures on the earth
Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship
And social comfort, in a hospital,
As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,
And wished, at intervals of growing sense,
She might be sicker yet, if sickness made
The world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed,
And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;
For now she understood (as such things were)
How sickness ended very oft in heaven,
Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick,
And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,
And folding up her hands as flowers at night,
Would lose no moment of the blessed time.
This is pretty:—
If he had loved,
Ay, loved me, with that retributive face, ..
I might have been a common woman now,
And happier, less known and less left alone;
Perhaps a better woman after all,—
With chubby children hanging on my neck
To keep me low and wise. Ah me, the vines
That bear such fruit, are proud to stoop with it.
The palm stands upright in a realm of sand.
Extracts could be multiplied by hundreds, and for those who will be at the pains to read the book (though we think they will agree with our judgment upon it as a whole), there are beautiful islands amidst uninteresting wastes, and many a flower to pluck as they go along and to keep in their memories for its loveliness and fragrance.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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