E570100E. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, January 1857, pp. 28–38.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 350–356.
Ten years ago, it was the fashion to praise, almost without stint, this age in which we live. A long peace over all the world, and the multiplication in every land of the resources of human life and human happiness, had put almost everybody into a good-humor with his race. The tone of satire itself was more amiable than in ancient days, and the few Cassandra voices which were raised amid the general hum of satisfaction and anticipation won little attention and less respect from the jubilant, self-confident public.
Everybody admitted that the moral world was, by no means, purged of evil, but then all the sluices of philanthropy had been opened, and the Augean stable was in a fair way to be cleansed. The material earth had not yielded all her treasures to her lord; but then the magic of machinery was in his hand, and the complete conquest of nature was but a question of time. There were to be no more wars; pauperism and crime were to be abolished; slavery, in all its shapes, despotism, in all its degrees, were to be obliterated from the very memory of mankind; and the golden age was clearly dawning upon us.
So we talked, ten years ago, in the newspapers and the magazines, from the platforms of the public meeting, and over the tables of the cozy tea-party. We kept up a general chorus of self-congratulation, and mutual encouragement. We compared statistics; we sent committees of inquiry from America to Prussia, from England to France; we inaugurated the most imperial reforms; entertained the most seraphic ideas, and set the most white-winged projects flying over sea and land.
Then came certain tremendous crashes of thunder out of our seeming clear sky, which broke up this universal philan- [p. 29→] thropic Pickwickian picnic of all the talents and all the sentiments, and threw the universe again into trepidation and confusion.
Ireland starved through a long summer, and then lay down and died in the winter’s snow; all Europe blazed from end to end with the fires of war, and trembled with the earthquake of revolution; the ghosts of dead and buried evils arose out of their graves and walked the world again, seating themselves on thrones, stealing into cabinets and the councils of statesmen, haranguing and misleading the multitudes of men. Loudly and fiercely, over the dulcet discussions of the peace societies and the political economists, rang out the terrible roar of the cannon and the cry of tribes, as restless and rebellious as in the earliest times. Thereupon, our talk of the age began to change in tone. From piping we betook ourselves to wailing. The desolate minor domineered in all the symphony of the world. We began to put our faith in Jeremiah alone, of all the prophets. This prosperous age, which had been so praised and flattered, got no mercy now from its fairweather friends. It became the most material, the meanest, the most sordid age that had ever disgraced the decent domain of history. It was an age which ought to go down on its knees in sack-cloth and ashes—an age of which every honest and high-minded man ought to be ashamed, and in which to be born should be counted the chief of calamities. Cringing in character, tawdry in taste, vulgar in demeanor, false in sentiment, weak in will, abject in aim, what could be expected of such an age by its most sanguine son—what could be done for such an age by its most devoted friend?
Were we wise in our pæan of ten years ago? Are we wise in our lamentations of to-day? Has the sharp experience of recent years so changed the character of the generation to which we belong, or has it only brought into keener and clearer relief the virtues and the vices which distinguished that character from the character of generations past, and happily laid to rest in their moss-grown graves? Here are questions worth pondering, and worth answering by the man who can answer them fitly.
Meanwhile, let us point our readers to one glorious reality in this much-debated age, from which they may take good heart of grace for the present, and for the future, too.
Whatever man in these days may be, woman never wielded, in any time, a nobler influence than now, and never won such recognition of her greatest qualities as from the generation which has had to bear the glittering scoffs of the “Princess” and the fiery scorn of George Sand. Since the heroic age of Italian life, and Italian letters, there has been no such crowning of woman as our own eyes have seen. Classes of women, and individual women, have attained great power in different countries, at different times, in virtue of diverse qualities. The willful, witty womanhood of the old régime ruled France by fascination and by fear; the ardent faith and the unconquerable hate of her woman’s heart, gave to Maria Theresa the strength to save an empire. The story of the last century is starred all over with the names of women conspicuous for the power which they achieved by the extremity of their virtue or their vice. But never, until now, never until this nineteenth century, has it been possible to say that men were approaching a general recognition of the absolute value of the female character, and of female genius; a general, and, therefore, tacit, easy, and unconstrained admission of woman’s claim to be held for a power in the world. While people are quarreling in conventions about “Woman’s Sphere,” and pamphleteers are doing battle for and against her right to vote, and to hold property, to command steamers, and to preach in churches, and to work mills, and to cure diseases, and to break horses, the growing good sense and advancing appreciation of the civilized world are gradually, but surely, coming to the righteous conclusion of the whole matter. Of course, a great many highly respectable persons continue to be as absurd upon this subject as they are upon all other subjects. You may still meet in polite society with elderly gentlemen, whose views of the female intellect, if not couched in language as surly as that in which Dr. Johnson was given to uttering his oracles, will be found to be quite as silly as those of the dogmatic doctor; and the cathedral excommunication of woman from the loftier themes of human discourse is still not seldom decreed by beardless young pon- [p. 30→] tiffs over their punch and their cigars. But, for the first time in the history of our much-striving and much-stumbling race, a man’s respect for women and for the womanly mind is coming, and that very rapidly, to be accepted, by the cleverest and the most cultivated of his own sex, as a final standard of his own character and capacity.
The blue-stocking of the last century, terror of gods and men, is happily extinct, having gone out with the dodo about thirty years since; the Laura Matilda is rarely to be found, excepting in the more remote villages of the interior; and the “strong-minded” woman of the present day excites, in both sexes, such intense emotions of dislike and disgust as human nature keeps in reserve for monsters alone, woman being no longer expected to be weak or odious. Our grandfathers used to patronize our grandmothers in the most humiliating way: when a young lady made herself ridiculous by an affectation of sentiment, she was held to be in her vocation, and her follies were ranked with the pets and poutings of a child; when an elderly spinster dished up theological twaddle with her tea, and buttered her toast with Greek, the gentlemen in bobwigs only smiled supreme; for women must be either silly or sinful, and, of course, it was better that they should be nonsensical than naughty.
These things we have changed; not completely, to be sure, but, so far changed, that a woman may now enjoy the reputation of being clever without ceasing to be regarded as a woman, so far that the noblest truths and the loftiest principles are not necessarily brought to scorn when they are spoken by a woman’s lips, or written by a woman’s pen.
This is a glory of our age which should never be forgotten by those who mean to paint its portrait, or to analyze its character—a present glory and the herald of brighter glories yet to be. For the world can no more spare the intellect of woman than it can dispense with the affections of man; and infinite good will result to us and to our children, we may be sure, from the growing recognition of this truth, and the consequent acceptance, into our literature and our life, of a new and noble spirit. When the follies of the fanatical friends of “Woman’s Rights” shall have been utterly forgotten, for the lack of a modern Aristophanes to preserve their memory in a new Ecclesiasuzæ, and that golden year arrives, of which the poet prophesies, the year of the
World’s great bridals, chaste and calm,
Whence springs the crowning race of human kind;
when mannish women and womanish men shall have become alike impossible, and each respecting each, and each by the other respected, man and woman find peace at last and harmony in the ordered freedom of dual but equal lives, then at least, if not before, the names of the women who have illustrated the literature of the present age will become as stars in the minds of men for the “sweet influences” they shall forever rain upon the race. Those women have done more for the world than plant its garden-plats with tube-roses and with tulips. They have breathed the summer breath of their own souls into this generation. The faith, the hope, the earnestness of woman are found everywhere contending with the doubt, the despair, the listless apathy into which we, miserable money-making, self-seeking men, had fallen. Those immortal instincts and sovereign passions, without which literature languishes, because without them life grows worthless, are more inextinguishable, it would seem, in woman than in man. Swift and warm as the sunlight are her sympathies and her convictions, and, pouring their genial splendor upon the chilled and frozen temper of man, they set free again the fettered currents of his inward life. In every age, the hearts of women have kept the hopes of the world, and, within the narrow circle of the home, it has never been possible wholly to deny to the intellect of woman its proper sphere and its legitimate authority. That the intellect of woman could fill its sphere and wield its authority in the wider circle of the world, without drawing away into itself the precious life of her affections and her graces, men used to doubt. But they can doubt no longer. It was idle to appeal, against this skepticism, to the examples of exceptional women in the past; but, beneath the constellated heaven of the present, skepticism has become ridiculous. It must be silenced now, as Napoleon, upon the deck of his war-vessel, sailing over the [p. 31→] still southern sea in the starlit summer night, silenced the atheist wrangling of his friends, with a finger lifted to the skies.
An ancient Hindoo sage, whose name is so absurd that we shall not risk the mention of it, has left on record, in one of the many thousand scriptures of his race, his own deliberate conviction, that “all the wisdom of the Vedas, and all that has been written in books, is to be found concealed in the heart of a woman.” All the world has secretly agreed with the Hindoo sage; and, had there been no women on the earth, there would certainly have been no books written worth the reading. It was surely time that she, who had been the cause of literature in others, should vindicate her own creative capacity. This she has done, and, whatever else may be said for or against our much-debated, bepraised, and berated nineteenth century, this, at least, will remain to be said of it forever—that it saw the first great age of female authorship.
There were women in ancient Greece who wrote like women, or, at least, like Grecian women; and there were women in mediæval Italy who wrote as became the country women and the friends of a Petrarch or an Angelo. There have been women in every age who wrote the most delightful possible letters, and journals, and diaries; putting their personal histories, feelings, or fancies into that inimitable, felicitous female dialect which, in every language, moves as nimbly as a woman’s wit, and charms as subtly as her smile. But, through all the range of history, we look in vain for any class of female authors, original, powerful, unquestionably excellent, and, at the same time, distinctively feminine, until we come down to our own days. If the “large utterance of the early gods” is hushed among us now, we may have the consolation of knowing that we have been the first to hear the silvery speech of the goddesses. Since the times of Madame de Stael, who, to be sure, was not much of a goddess, and still less of a woman, and who did her best to make a man of herself, but of whom it must be always borne in mind, that she fell upon evil days, when every body had been suddenly emancipated, and nobody was really free—since the times of Madame de Stael in France, and of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, think how many charming, how many moving things have been said to us in that silvery goddess-speech!
Even the Arabian carpet of the imagination can hardly carry us back to the days when Mrs. Carter and Madame Dacier were esteemed marvels for doing men’s work almost as well as men, and the woman who published a book won for herself the same sort of fame which was achieved by Madame D’Angerville when she climbed Mont Blanc. The lioness is now become at least as common and familiar a creature as the lion, and it is simple truth, which nobody fears to utter, that one meets with women who have not ceased to be women in becoming authors, quite as often as with men who, in becoming authors, have continued to be men.
You might annihilate the works and obliterate the names of all the women who ever wrote books, from the time of the Exodus down to the French revolution, without sensibly damaging the literary renown of any country upon earth; but, take the women of the last seventy years out of the Pantheon, and how many a dismal, deserted niche will stare you reproachfully in the face!
And it is in the literatures of England and America that women have won their place most loyally, and with the least abdication of their womanhood. The old Teutonic spirit of our forest ancestors, whose glory it was, that they “consulted their women on all occasions of importance,” survives and shines again, in the reception which the Anglo-Saxon race has given to the Sybilline leaves of its modern prophetesses.
In France, woman has trenched upon the special domain of man, and the writings of the greatest and most gifted woman who ever held a pen in Paris, bear witness, on every page, to her fatal familiarity with emotions and experiences through which no woman can pass and keep sacred the special spirit of her sex. The same atmosphere suits not both men and women; and it is as idle to ignore this eternal fact, as it is imbecile and unjust to pass upon a diseased but glorious nature, like that of Madame Dudevant, the stern sentence which radical depravation, or innate incapacity of good, alone invites. The worst quality, let us say it frankly, the only really evil quality of Madame Dudevant’s works, seems to us to be this, that her im- [p. 32→] morality is mannish. The discipline to which she subjects Consuelo is a discipline of which a man might conceive for himself, but from the thought of which a woman should recoil with a natural shudder. That sad man’s name, “George Sand,” is for us the symbol and sign of all that is most deplorable in the training of the splendid genius which has made it immortal. No such nom-de-plume could, for a moment, conceal the womanhood of the greatest female writers of our own race.
Within the small and fragile person of Charlotte Bronte, for instance, there throbbed a life as vivid and as passionate as that which tinges the pages of “Lélia” or “Indiana” with its fiery glow.
Pent in her poor secluded home, among the Yorkshire hills, the slight, hard-favored daughter of the English parish priest had to struggle with womanly instincts as warm, and with a thirst of love as keen as the instincts that were outraged, and the thirst that was not quenched in the spirit of the granddaughter of Marshal Saxe. But all this vivid, passionate life, these instincts repressed by fate, this thirst ungratified, never wrought upon Charlotte Bronte any unwomanly change of nature; never dimmed the delicacy of her perceptions; never chilled her deeper inward sympathies. When you read “Jane Eyre,” or “Shirley,” or “Villette,” you feel that you are standing face to face with a woman who has seen a thousand illusions vanish without losing her faith in the realities which survive all illusion—a woman too clear-sighted to be sentimental, but too sincere to scoff. Nothing can less resemble that dismal disgrace of civilization, the “femme incomprise,” than this proud, passionate creature, thwarted but not perverted—vexed but not vitiated—swift-sighted to pierce every disguise of falsehood, but strong-hearted with the immortal hope of truth.
Though not all of one genius, most of the female writers, whose names are likely to survive the present age, have been of one spirit with Charlotte Bronte, and, like her, have done honor to their sex in doing service to their art. What author of our times has held more loyally to the great aims of authorship than Elizabeth Browning, and yet where shall we look for a more womanly woman than she? We speak as if to those who know her personally; for there never was a writer whose words were more transparent than hers to betray the living soul within them; and those who know her poems, do, indeed, know herself—know her lofty ambition and her modest spirit—her constancy to right and her gentleness in judgment—her ardor and her tenderness. There is nothing paltry in her purposes, and nothing morbid in her moods. She writes, because, in the long solitude of her earlier years and the love-lit happiness of her womanhood, a thousand thoughts have grown up within her that could not be repressed from utterance; but she writes as one who knows that the thought most precious to ourselves is worth little to the world unless it be fitly uttered. She does not sing merely to unburden her own heart, but also to enrich the hearts of those who hear her; and her first hope for all her poems doubtless is, that they may truly add to the world’s stock of beauty and of truth.
We give to a new poem from her, therefore, an artist’s welcome, first heartily receiving it and rejoicing in the real life it is so sure to bring to us; then, as heartily reviewing it, to measure our artist’s progress by the standard of her earlier works. For Mrs. Browning is one of the few writers of our time in whom we recognize a steady progress; and because her faults were always as sharply defined and as specially hers as her powers are, it has not been difficult to note her upward steps. In her first-published poems, the whole idiosyncrasy of the writer was far from being revealed, though it was very clearly indicated. The melody of her poems was broken, and their phraseology unequal. They reminded you of the strong mountain-brooks that, far up in the forest, fight their new way over the rocks with lapses of smooth flowing, and intervals of sudden cataract. It hardly needed any external evidence to satisfy you that these were the first works of a woman of genius, who had lived a very sad, peculiar life, and had trained herself in studies as unusual as her experience. Her pedantries of allusion were no pedantries at all; her quaintnesses and obscurities of phrase had no savor of affectation. She had acquired those tricks of thought and speech, just as those, who live much alone and sor- [p. 33→] row; greatly, acquire tricks of manner and of bearing quite their own. They were in her the evidences not of an imitative and incapable nature, but of an isolated and intensely individual life. And all, who had eyes to see and hearts to understand, hoped very high things of this new singer. That she sang like the nightingale, against a thorn and in the dusk, saddened but did not diminish our hopes of her; and when we heard that the sunlight had suddenly broken in upon her existence, and that the solitary sufferer in England had become the happy wife in Italy, we all felt that, however long a time the age might have to wait for its recognized poet, of its poetess, at least, we were sure.
Nor was our confidence unfounded. Already, though but in the prime of her years, Mrs. Browning has made her name a household word in the best and most cultivated homes of the Old World and the New, and the influence of her spirit, grave as sweet, and earnest as serene, may be traced in lines of light by every observing man, through all the circle of his acquaintance. The imitation of her mannerisms and her faults, which is obvious in the recent writings of so many women, is an unmistakable indication of the interest which she has inspired, and the attention which she has commanded. And the little harm which the imitation may do to our literature, need not, surely, trouble us much, when weighed against the great good which the influence will do to our life. What does it matter that a dozen young ladies, reading “Bertha in the Lane,” should, for several years thereafter, write nonsensically of being “Flooded with a Dark,” while they themselves, and so many hundreds more that write no nonsense at all, live better lives, and think better thoughts, and are more womanly-strong, and sweet, and just, for the inbreathed spirit of that beautiful, sad story? Or, who could turn from the lovely picture of the Lady Geraldine, drawing all men
On to love her,
And to worship the divineness of the smile hid in her eyes,
to worry himself about a whole train of
Resonant steam-eagles
Following far on the direction of her floating dove-like hand?
Heaven forbid we should be thought to underrate the importance of words and of style. As concerning the artist herself, they are of supreme importance; for their perfection or imperfection will make to her the difference between a wide-enduring fame and a final esoteric reputation. We know this well, and Mrs. Browning knows it, too, and means to use her knowledge, we opine. For we note in her, as we said before, a steady progress and a gradual emancipation of her mind from those habits of expression which she had acquired in the narrow circle to which she at first addressed herself. Between the world, whose singer she ought to be, and herself, there was long interposed a barrier of rare old books and rare living friends, making up an audience of whose presence alone she was vitally aware. Her Gallicisms, and Grecisms, and Miltonisms, were little heeded in that audience, or, perhaps, if heeded, praised. But, of late years, she has overlooked this barrier, we judge, and so purifies her speech that it may go further and fare more happily.
In the whole of that charming volume, made up of “Casa Guidi Windows” and the “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” you will not easily find so many obscurities and incoherencies of speech as you shall stumble over in one page of the “Drama of Exile,” or a dozen verses of the “Vision of Poets.” And then, after you have marked this fact, and turn back again to the “Drama of Exile,” or the “Vision of Poets,” how plain it becomes to you that the writer of those “Sonnets,” which alone, had no other woman ever put pen to paper in the world, would suffice to pillory Jean Jacques Rousseau for his absurd blasphemy about the “incapacity of women to write well of love!” has only to go back to these earlier works, with the firm hand and the clear eye she has now acquired, in order to beat the gold of them out anew into lovely and worthy shapes. In fact, we doubt if it would be possible for Mrs. Browning now to talk, as Miss Barrett once did, about
Goethe with that reaching eye
His soul reached out from far and high,
And fell from inner entity!
For Mrs. Browning would see, as Miss Barrett did, that here was something worth saying, but, also, which Miss Barrett did not see, that here was something very badly said. If we hoped this [p. 34→] in reading “Casa Guidi Windows,” we have become sure of it in reading “Aurora Leigh.” For this best and longest of Mrs. Browning’s poems is at once a confession of her artistic creed and a witness to her faithful works.
“Aurora Leigh” is the heroine of an autobiographical novel, in verse. She writes her story to explain her life, or but to record it, as you please, sets down on paper the sorrows and the strength, the trials and the triumph of long years, that so she may put them behind her and press on to the new years waiting before her.
The victim, in her childhood, like “Jane Eyre,” of a decent tyranny, and, in her womanhood, like Tennyson’s “Princess,” the proud dreamer of a prouder dream, Aurora Leigh, fortunate in her genius, neither loses heart under the tyranny, nor goes mad in the dream.
Let us tell her story, that our readers may see its significance, and hasten to study it for themselves.
Aurora is born in Florence, of an Italian mother, “whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing” her sweet child, ere five summers had passed over her. This was the first gulf opened in her life, for
Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just),
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles; children learn by such
Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,
And get not over-early solemnized—
But seeing as in a rose-bush Love’s Divine
Which burns and hurts not—not a single bloom,
Become aware and unafraid of Love.
Such good do mothers—
Such good Aurora’s father could not do; though all his heart was in his love for her. For she alone remained to him of all the glory of his life. He was an “austere Englishman,” who, wandering off to Florence to study drains and husbandry, had there, most unawares, received his sacramental gift with eucharistic meanings, from the chanting procession that he looked upon with “comfortable island-scorn;” for, as the train of priestly banners, cross, and psalm went by him in the square,
A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,
Transfiguring him to music,
and he loved. Beloved by such a man with love so sudden and complete, Aurora’s mother, when she died, took his life with her from the world, and it was but for a few years that the child grew beside his knee,
His grave lips
Contriving such a miserable smile
As if he knew needs must, or she should die.
They lived among the mountains above Pelago, alone there with their old Italian servant, Assunta, and with the picture of the beautiful dead mother. The father taught the child strange scraps of scholar-learning, giving her all his knowledge, not because it was the best for her, but the best he had to give her, and he must give her all he had. And there he died, his last words breathing out to her the sum of his life’s lesson, “Love!”
And when he had died, there came a stranger who took the child away from poor old Assunta and her mountain home, her mother’s picture, and her blue Italy, to carry her far away across the sea to pious, and parked, and cloudy England, to a hard new life in a hard new world.
It was her father’s sister who received her there, standing upon the hall-step of her country house, to give the poor child welcome. And what a welcome!
* * * She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight,
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with gray
By frigid use of life (she was not old,
Although my father’s elder by a year),
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,
Or, peradventure, niggardly half-truths;
Eyes of no color—once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling; cheeks in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure—if past bloom,
Past fading also.
She had lived, we’ll say,
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 county squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyreal, 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 [p. 35→]
The book-club, guarded from your modern trick
Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,
Preserved her intellectual. She had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.
Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live
In thickets, and eat berries!
I, alas,
A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,
And she was there to meet me. Very kind.
Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.
She stood upon the steps to welcome me,
Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck—
Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool
To draw the new light closer, catch and cling
Less blindly. In my ears, my father’s word
Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,
“Love, love, my child.” She, black there with my grief,
Might feel my love—she was his sister once—
I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,
Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,
And drew me feebly through the hall, into
The room she sate in.
There, with some strange spasm
Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands
Imperiously, and held me at arm’s length,
And with two gray-steel, naked-bladed eyes
Searched through my face—ay, stabbed it through and through,
Through brows, and cheeks, and chin, as if to find
A wicked murderer in my innocent face,
If not here, there, perhaps. Then, drawing breath,
She struggled for her ordinary calm,
And missed it rather—told me not to shrink,
As if she had told me not to lie or swear—
“She loved my father and would love me, too,
As long as I deserved it.” Very kind.
I understood her meaning afterward;
She thought to find my mother in my face,
And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt,
Had loved my father truly, as she could,
And hated, with the gall of gentle souls,
My Tuscan mother, who had fooled away
A wise man from wise courses, a good man
From obvious duties, and, depriving her,
His sister, of the household precedence,
Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land,
And made him mad, alike by life and death,
In love and sorrow. She had pored for years
Which 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 at church.
And thus my father’s sister was to me
My mother’s hater.
Fancy the life that the Italian child was to live with this British aunt, and you will strike the key-note of all the story of Aurora Leigh.
It did not kill her, this life, as it does so many, chilling all the warm woman’s soul within them, nor did it drive her mad. What it did do for her, her cousin Romney Leigh learned, one June day, when he surprised her crowning her own brows with ivy-leaves, and would have taken her in his hand to be his dear and docile wife, and help him in his philanthropic works. He was a proud, calm, earnest man, this cousin Romney, the unwilling heir of all the Leighs, a dreamer of dreams, not for himself but for his race, and sleepless at heart until, by personal sacrifice, and personal toil, he should have done something to bridge over the dreadful chasm between the helpless horrible multitudes of the poor and vile, and his own stately order of the rich and great. He asks his cousin’s hand to help him in his work, and when she speaks to him of her own dreams, of that artistic life she longs for, that service of beauty to which she had vowed herself when her soul,
At poetry’s divine first finger-touch,
Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,
Convicted of the great eternities
Between two worlds,
he smiles sadly, as upon the folly of a child, and speaks of woman’s sphere in the old-fashioned, maddening way, and so, unconsciously, reëchoing with his deep voice the tedious, dreary drawlings of her dismal aunt, rouses all the scornful soul within Aurora’s heart, and wins for himself a dismissal as poignant and as positive as ever man received.
Unutterable is the wrath of the dismal aunt on hearing this, and very sharply does she set before Aurora the facts, that all her father’s fortune, by the conditions of the entail in the house of Leigh, must pass away to Romney, since no child of a foreign marriage could inherit of their race. And so the aunt and the niece face each other at last; but, before either can give way, death comes and drops his baton on the tourney. In the night the aunt [p. 36→] dies, and, in the morning, they find her sitting upright near her bed, and holding in her hand a letter with unbroken seal. This letter contains a deed of gift, from Romney to his aunt, of thirty thousand pounds, intended by him to be left for a provision to the else disinherited Aurora. But Aurora will have no such gifts; and, as the letter had never been opened, she resolutely refuses to regard it as received, and, putting back her cousin’s purse as she had put back his hand, she goes her way to London, there to win for herself the bread of daily life, and the ivy-wreath of immortality.
Romney, meanwhile, pursues his dream with equal faith and equal hope. He becomes a leader of the “Christian Socialists;” is foremost in every effort, anywhere made, to raise the fallen, and to steady the tottering, and consecrates his gifts, his fortune, and his life to the poor.
The cousins do not meet till one day there comes to Aurora’s study a certain lovely widow—Lady Waldemar—who, holding her gay booth in May Fair, has seen and loved the high-souled Romney, and now seeks his cousin’s intervention to save him from contracting a marriage with a poor outcast girl, Marian Erle. Romney, it seems, means to wed this Marian, partly as a protest against the wicked spirit of caste, and partly because he has found her to be a noble-hearted, pure-souled, affectionate and obedient girl, who is ready to worship him, and to do his generous will. Aurora goes to see Marian, finds her in the dismalest places—herself a flower of spring—loves her for her gentleness, pities her for her terrible story, and, when Romney comes in upon their interview, gives him her hand, and welcomes his humble bride to the haughty house of Leigh. The wedding is appointed to take place at St. James’s church, where all the fashion of London are convened to meet all London’s wretchedness, and witness this strange union. The guests arrive, rich and poor, fine and foul. The parson comes and the bridegroom; but they wait and look and wait in vain for the bride, who appears not. She has gone, it seems, gone away with some evil woman, and brought to shame the proud philanthropy of Romney.
When, in a little while after this sad business, Aurora goes to France, she leaves Romney on the point of being wedded, at last, to Lady Waldemar.
In Paris, Aurora, wandering on the quays, meets Marian—Marian, but ah! how changed! A shame-faced, sorrow-stricken shadow of that fair young Marian she had known before, and bearing in her arms the sad burden of a fatherless child. How came she there, and in such plight? Prose must not tell the dreadful tale from which the muse herself recoils with shuddering. Enough that she is there, betrayed beyond redemption, trampled, excommunicate of men and women, and there, because a lovely widow, the Lady Waldemar must have her way and wed the man she willed to love. Aurora, as the reader of discretion will have long ago inferred, is neither meek nor over mild of temper, and when she takes her pen to write the things which she has seen and heard, to her friend and the friend of Romney, the painter, Vincent Carrington, she puts such words upon the paper as well prepare the way for the indescribable letter that follows to the address of “Lady Waldemar.”
From Paris to Italy she then wends her way, back to her Italy, her mother’s and her father’s grave, and takes with her the hapless Marian and Marian’s poor child. In that fair land of light and fragrance, she breathes a while from the feverish activity of her life and the multitude of her emotions. And there again June finds her—June, that once brought to her its freshest roses, when she turned from them to clasp her ivy-wreath—June comes again with more immortal roses, and now not in vain. Romney Leigh stands before her, humbled, but more manly proud than ever. His dreams have faded—the creatures, before whom the pearls of his life were thrown by him with lavish hands, have turned again and rent him; the society he would have healed has spurned him. Leigh Hall has been laid in ashes by the besotted mob, and he, its lord, has come to take for his own wife, before the world, that desolate Marian, wronged beyong redress through him and, for his own that fatherless child of shame.
But Marian has learned something in this strange, dreadful life as well as he, and she knows now too well what love is, not to know that never did she love the Romney, whom she had so blindly worshiped, so well as when she refuses to be his, and puts back the hand he [p. 37→] proudly offers her, with a pride more subtle yet and more serene. To her her child remains: to Romney—what? The roses of that old June-day made now immortal! Blinded in the fire which had consumed, in one flame, the home of his fathers and the dream of his youth, the high-souled Romney sees with clearer inward sight than ever. And Aurora sees, too—sees the meaning of her life as she would not see it in those old, defiant days, when she had all things yet to prove, and, more, herself to try. And, seeing, she comes to Romney, and lays her hand in his, and, lo! “the morning and the evening made his day.” Upon which day let no clouded words of ours intrude, but only the song of Aurora’s self, singing
* * * O, great mystery of love!—
In which absorbed, loss, anguish, treason’s self
Enlarges rapture,—as a pebble, dropt
In some full wine-cup, over-brims the wine!
While we two sate together, leaned that night
So close, my very garments crept and thrilled
With strange electric life; and both my cheeks
Grew red, then pale, with touches from my hair
In which his breath was; while the golden moon
Was hung before our faces as the badge
Of some sublime inherited despair,
Since ever to be seen by only one—
A voice said, low and rapid as a sigh,
Yet breaking, I felt conscious, from a smile—
“Thank God, who made me blind to make me see!
Shine on, Aurora, dearest light of souls,
Which rul’st for evermore both day and night!
I am happy.”
Thus was crowned the life of Aurora Leigh—thus were the June roses twined with the ivy in her wreath.
Tamely enough have we passed over the way which the poet treads with fiery-winged feet! We have but sought to show you, reader, what manner of way it is, and in what company you shall journey upon it. Taking in either hand the hand of Aurora and of Romney, you will not find the road tedious nor the end of it unprofitable.
So much for the story’s significance! Shall we be ungracious, now, and quarrel a little with our poet? Since she is our poet, we think we must.
And let us begin by saying the worst thing we have to say of Aurora Leigh. The poem is too long, and this not because the story is diffusely told—for the absolute narrative of the work is singularly concise and nervous, nor encumbered with a dozen superfluous adjectives in the whole—but, because too many things are told besides the story. It is not well that Aurora Leigh should so often interrupt the interest of her passionate and earnest narrative with reflections artistic and philosophical, which, however good in themselves, only disturb the reader’s mind and importune him, like bores at a marriage-feast. Neither is it well that Mrs. Browning, after casting away so many of her old quaintnesses of speech, should adopt new phrases, to which no objection can be made, indeed, on the score of their pedantry, but which are only too flatly and coarsely vernacular. If these phrases were fewer in number than they are, and, still more, if they were not accompanied by images of the same kind, we should have made no allusion to their existence. But, as it is, we cannot help taking them as evidence that Mrs. Browning has picked up somewhere a realistic theory of her art, which is sure to lead her, unless she quickly abandons it, into some new and very positive faults. Nothing but a theory, for instance, we are sure could have induced a woman of genius and fine perceptions to compare the human soul and its little obstinacies to a dog snapping at a bone, in spite of all the slaps of reason and nature! Mrs. Browning should remember her own fine defense of the living age, and reflect that if, in Homer’s time, men washed neither their hands nor their words, in our time, men wash both, yet need not, for that, be less heroic than Achilles, nor less poetic than a Homer.
What shall we say, too, of the injustice which Mrs. Browning, no doubt unintentionally, does to the “Christian Socialists” of England, in her portraiture of the opinions and purposes of Romney Leigh? Simply that it is unintentional, and yet much to be regretted. It is clear that Mrs. Browning’s acquaintance with Englishmen of that stamp must be very slight and superficial, or she could never have imagined that her odd compound of Owenism, Fourierism and St. Simonism, represented the doctrines of the high-spirited, clear-headed, Christian gentlemen, of whom Frederic Denison Maurice may be taken as the type.
This philosophic blunder brings with it an artistic imperfection; for nobody ever held such notions as Romney Leigh is made to hold, and yet worked such work for others and for himself. The thing is out of nature. Out of nature, [p. 38→] too, do we hold it to be, that Aurora Leigh should have supposed that Romney had married Lady Waldemar when he came to her in Florence. Perhaps it was necessary, for the purposes of the poem, that Aurora should be made to misunderstand him in so abject a way; but we cannot help entering our masculine protest against the customary depreciation of masculine magnanimity in which all our lady-writers indulge.
Doubtless, we men are a very selfish set of creatures; but are we so utterly incapable, as a body, of high-souled actions, that a young lady, herself of very noble mind, should be fairly represented as doing violence to the language of a very intellectual man, in order to interpret it away from its natural and simply noble significance? We do not explain our allusion more fully, because we leave it to our readers to judge from an immediate perusal of the poem itself, whether we are in the right or in the wrong.
For, however they may pass upon our criticisms we are confident that they will agree with us in our commendation of this earnest and beautiful work. They will rejoice that we have anticipated, by quotation, so little of the pleasure reserved for them in its pages; they will believe, with us, that the age cannot be so very hopeless an age after all, in which such a woman as Mrs. Browning can live such a life as is borne witness to by fruits like the noble thoughts and glorious aspirations of “Aurora Leigh;” and they will echo our hope that many a Christmas yet to come may be gladdened, and many a New Year made memorable, by new songs from one who sings so wisely, so womanly, and so well.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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