E570100I. Aurora Leigh.
The Westminster Review, January 1857, pp. 306–310.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 364–366.
Foster, the essayist, has somewhere said that the person who interests us most is the one that most gives us the idea of ample being. Applying this remark to books, which are but persons in a transmigrated form, we discern one grand source of the profound impression produced in us by “Aurora Leigh.” Other poems of our own day may have higher finish, or a higher degree of certain poetic qualities; but no poem embraces so wide a range of thought and emotion, or takes such complete possession of our nature. Mrs. Browning is, perhaps, the first woman who has produced a work which exhibits all the peculiar powers without the negations of her sex; which superadds to masculine vigour, breadth, and culture, feminine subtlety of perception, feminine quickness of sensibility, and feminine tenderness. It is difficult to point to a woman of genius who is not either too little feminine, or too exclusively so. But in this, her longest and greatest poem, Mrs. Browning has shown herself all the greater poet because she is intensely a poetess.
The story of “Aurora Leigh” has no other merit than that of offering certain elements of life, and certain situations which are peculiarly fitted to call forth the writer’s rich thought and experience. It has nothing either fresh or felicitous in structure or incident; and we are especially sorry that Mrs. Browning has added one more to the imitations of the catastrophe in “Jane Eyre,” by smiting her hero with blindness before he is made happy in the love of Aurora. Life has sadness and bitterness enough for a disappointed philanthropist like Romney Leigh, short of maiming or blindness; and the outflow of love and compassion towards [p. 307→] physical ills is less rare in woman than complete sympathy with mental sorrows. Hence we think the lavish mutilation of heroes’ bodies, which has become the habit of novelists, while it happily does not represent probabilities in the present state of things, weakens instead of strengthening tragic effect; and, as we said, we regret that Mrs. Browning has given this habit her strong sanction. Other criticisms might be passed on “Aurora Leigh,” considered as a representation of incident and dialogue, but we are little inclined to spend our small space in pointing out faults which will be very slightly felt by any one who has heart and mind enough to respond to all the beautiful feeling, the large thought, and the rich melodious song of this rare poem. “Quel grand homme est le seigneur Pococurante! rien ne peut lui plaire!” is a kind of praise to which we do not in the least aspire. We would rather be suspected of obtuseness to many faults than fail in giving the due tribute of reverence and admiration to a single great merit.
The most striking characteristic of “Aurora Leigh,” distinguishing it from the larger proportion of that contemporary poetry which wins the applause of reviewers, is, that its melody, fancy, and imagination—what we may call its poetical body—is everywhere informed by a soul, namely, by genuine thought and feeling. There is no petty striving after special effects, no heaping up of images for their own sake, no trivial play of fancy run quite astray from the control of deeper sensibility; there is simply a full mind pouring itself out in song as its natural and easiest medium. This mind has its far-stretching thoughts, its abundant treasure of well-digested learning, its acute observation of life, its yearning sympathy with multiform human sorrow, its store of personal domestic love and joy; and these are given out in a delightful alternation of pathos, reflection, satire playful or pungent, and picturesque description, which carries us with swifter pulses than usual through four hundred pages, and makes us sorry to find ourselves at the end. Our extracts will necessarily be very limited; and we must urge the reader to bear in mind that “Aurora Leigh” is a poem which even large extracts cannot fairly represent. It has the calm, even flow of a broad river, not the spray and rainbows of a mountain torrent:—
mother’s love.
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 solemnised,—
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. [p. 308→]
Such good do mothers. Father love as well
—Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier brains,
And wills more consciously responsible,
And not as wisely, since less foolishly.—p. 2.
a portrait.
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 pricked with grey
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 colour,—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 liv’d, 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
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!—p. 10.
seriousness of art.
You, Aurora, with the large live brow
“And steady eyelids, cannot condescend
To play at art, as children play at swords,
To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired
Because true action is impossible.
You never can be satisfied with praise
Which men give women when they judge a book [p. 309→]
Not as mere work, but as mere woman’s work,
Expressing the comparative respect
Which means the absolute scorn. “‘Oh, excellent!
What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps!
What delicate discernment .. almost thought!
The book does honour to the sex, we hold.
Among our female authors we make room
For this fair writer, and congratulate
The country that produces in these times
Such women, competent to .. spell.’”
“Stop there!”
I answered—burning through his thread of talk
With a quick flame of emotion,—“You have read
My soul, if not my book, and argue well
I would not condescend .. we will not say
To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end
Is praise of all kinds,) but to such a use
Of holy art and golden life. I am young,
And peradventure weak—you tell me so—
Through being a woman. And, for all the rest,
Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance
At fairs on tight-rope, till the babies dropped
Their gingerbread for joy,—than shift the types
For tolerable verse, intolerable
To men who act and suffer. Better far,
Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means,
Than a sublime art frivolously.”—p. 51.
italy from the sea.
That night we spent between the purple heaven
And purple water: I think Marian slept;
But I, as a dog a-watch for his master’s foot,
Who cannot sleep or eat before he hears,
I sate upon the deck and watched all night,
And listened through the stars for Italy.
. . . . . .
I felt the wind soft from the land of souls;
The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,
One straining past another along the shore,
The way of grand dull Odyssean ghosts
Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas
And stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peak
They stood: I watched beyond that Tyrian belt
Of intense sea betwixt them and the ship,
Down all their sides the misty olive-woods
Dissolving in the weak congenial moon,
And still disclosing some brown convent-tower
That seems as if it grew from some brown rock,—
Or many a little lighted village, dropt
Like a fallen star, upon so high a point,
You wonder what can keep it in its place
From sliding headlong with the waterfalls
Which drop and powder all the myrtle-groves
With spray of silver. Thus my Italy
Was stealing on us. Genoa broke with day;
The Doria’s long pale palace striking out, [p. 310→]
From green hills in advance of the white town,
A marble finger dominant to ships,
Seen glimmering through the uncertain grey of dawn.—p. 291.
We had marked many other passages for extract, but we must restrain ourselves, and only add a few short fragments:—
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.
. . . . . .
A fool will pass for such through one mistake,
While a philosopher will pass for such,
Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross
And heaped up to a system.
. . . . . .
There are nettles everywhere,
But smooth green grasses are more common still;
The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud.
. . . . . .
That makes libertines;
That slurs our cruel streets from end to end
With eighty thousand women in one smile,
Who only smile at night beneath the gas;
The body’s satisfaction and no more,
Being used for argument against the soul’s.
. . . . . .
He, the man, appeared
So pale and patient, like the marble man
A sculptor puts his personal sadness in
To join his grandeur of ideal thought.
[George Eliot]
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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