E570100H. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
The Southern Literary Messenger, January 1857, p. 80.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 364.
Here is a volume of uncommon energy from the pen of a very remarkable woman. “Aurora Leigh,” is a novel in blank verse, into which the author tells us she has thrown her “highest convictions upon life and art,” and it will probably be taken hereafter as the standard by which her true merits as a poet must be judged. Such judgment will place Elizabeth Barrett Browning foremost among the minds of the present age; and yet “Aurora Leigh,” as a poem, is not pleasant reading. Rugged in the structure of its sentences, coarse, even to indelicacy, at times, in its language, the story occasionally kindles into poetry from the heat of the passion it embodies, but the object of the writer seems to have been to expose the shams and heartlessness of society, rather than to interpret Nature or open up new wells of enjoyment in the human heart. Passages from the work descriptive of scenery in England, France, Italy, might be given, which surpass any thing Mrs. Browning has before written, and dialogues occur throughout of wonderful dramatic force, but we think we can discern everywhere the influence of her husband upon her habits of thought and style of expression, an influence which has not been happy for her general popularity. We forbear presenting any outline of the plot of “Aurora Leigh,” and must content ourselves with quoting the following passages, which will give the reader a good idea of the manner of the whole.
Here is a suddenly awakened reminiscense of an old love:
He bears down on me through the slanting years,
The stronger for the distance. 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.
The difference between men and women in love is thus hinted at:—
The man’s need of the woman, here,
Is greater than the woman’s of the man,
And easier served; for where the man discerns
A sex, (ah, ah, the man can generalise,
Said he) we see but one, ideally
And really: where we yearn to lose ourselves
And melt like white pearls in another’s wine,
He seeks to double himself by what he loves,
And make his drink more costly by our pearls.
At board, at bed, at work, and holiday,
It is not good for man to be alone,—
And that’s his way of thinking, first and last.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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