E570101A. Aurora Leigh.
The Critic (London), 1 January 1857, pp. 13–15.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 368–372.
Mrs. Browning is not a popular writer, nor does her latest work indicate that she is likely to become popular. Read Mrs. Browning’s poems once, and you are conscious of floating in a charmed atmosphere; but you cannot particularise the nature of the charm. Read them again, and you become aware that the attention has been excited by the fervour of the poet’s ideas, not by a correctness of arrangement. Mrs. Browning is less fanciful than Felicia Hemans, less sweetly lyrical than Eliza Cook, less emotional than L. E. L.; but she surpasses them each and all in the intellectual breadth of her poems. Thus her name is not familiar in our streets; the ballad-singer does not torture her genius, neither is she familiar by cottage firesides; because to understand her poems aright, and especially her latest poem, a certain amount of mental culture is required. She does not in the absence of thought pile up glittering similes merely to catch the eye, and which are as coldly beautiful as ice-spars with the sun shining on their bald tops. Write when and where she may, she will always command intelligent readers. She may be accused of carelessness in the construction of her sentences, and we are not disposed to defend her against the charge of mannerism; but these drawbacks are only occasional. In her grand flights we can overlook incidental failings, knowing, as we do, that the eagle which soars nearest to the sun is no less a royal bird because the tip of his pinion has been soiled in its contact with the earth.
That the highest convictions of life and art have entered into the composition of this new poem, Aurora Leigh, there can be no doubt, since every page shows the result rather than the process of thought. The whole poem is wonderfully suggestive; it takes up an ordinary subject of the day, and in a poetical sense—we are not so sure about the philosophical sense—makes it extraordinary. This is clearly not a poem for flippant readers—not a poem that any one, for fashion’s sake, may canter through. It is not a fashionable Rotten Row of rhythm, but the bold broad path leading to some magnificent cathedral. In its every page there is a living thought, throbbing like a pulse. Life is always more serious than the fool in his folly believes, and this poem is life intensified. Its obvious pleasure, and that which will make itself first of all felt, is the story, for this is charmingly varied; and although it bristles with conceits and ethical crotchets, yet it speaks a language which is absolutely universal. The love which is purified by wanderings and sufferings comes home at last like a wounded bird to its nest, as did Aurora and Romney Leigh’s. Every man and woman can understand that, though not every reader will be able to divide the natural from the philosophic love, so as to see that beneath the hard crust of the latter Mrs. Browning is developing an important social truth. Scores of individuals who have no taste for statistics or unadorned facts will read this remarkable poem, and thereby better understand the surgings of society, the social volcanoes which struggle in the very centre of English life. First the enjoyment of the story will break upon them with a new rapture like morning; then, as they read more intensely for the story’s sake, they will perceive that Romney and Aurora Leigh are types of distinctive endeavours to elevate the condition of humanity—Romney dealing with “statistically packed disorders” in the body, and Aurora contending with the diseases of the soul. These converging actions—the two cousins, like their ideas, have been moving in distant orbits—come home at last to reap the knowledge that it is idle, if not wicked, to expect too much from individual effort,
To give up much on each side, then take all.
But the triumph of the poet, of Aurora, is complete when at length Romney, in the luxury of requited love, exclaims:
Fewer systems; we who are held and do not hold.
Less mapping out of masses, to be saved,
By nations or by sexes. Fourier’s void,
And Comte is dwarfed,—and Cabet puerile.
Subsists no law of life outside of life;
No perfect manners, without Christian souls:
The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless He had given the life, too, with the law.
Late in the season of life, but not too late, these toilers in a noble cause—a cause made only slightly less noble by the impatience and fretfulness of the poet and philanthropist—are brought to see that all work for the regeneration of men is circumscribed by two circles. The first circle is that which is grandest, broadest, and most luminous, and designated “God’s love;” the next is termed “the love of wedded souls.” There certainly is poetic force, if not human justice, in afflicting Romney with blindness in the sequel—made blind by the vulgar wretches whose condition he had employed his generous youth to ameliorate. The situation is pathetic; but it shows clearly the domination of that idea—Aurora’s idea—which sought to elevate the flesh by the elevation of soul. Aurora must gaze for Romney now, she must shine out for two, and no less work for both. It will be seen, therefore, that this poem has a design; but whether this design has been developed with philosophic regularity, as it certainly has been unfolded with poetic beauty, is a question that every reader will answer for himself. We have no hesitation in saying that no modern poem has so many passages of brilliant description. If it were worth while to cite any passages unworthy the poem, we should instance the feeble gossip in the church when Romney is about, as some respectable persons would say, to make a fool of himself by marrying a seamstress—but then Romney is true to his principle of human equality. Our objection to this gossip is not that it is a fabrication and wholly untrue to life, but that it is ill suited to the character and manner of the poem. It cannot be looked upon as that true repose, or artistic declension, so often successfully applied by great poets, just before the situation is strained towards its highest pitch. It is rather like an indignity to the muse, just as if an Arabian steed of high mettle and proud action were compelled to bear the dishonour of panniers. Mrs. Browning’s views on art are so elaborated, form in fact so large a feature in this poem, that they would require a long article either to support or refute them; we therefore leave them to the quarterlies, at the same time suggesting that they afford material for a very interesting paper. Our object is rather to give our readers some choice poetic portions of the poem. If we retrace the story, it will be in so brief a manner as to do no injustice to Mrs. Browning by cheating her readers of an anticipated pleasure. Our object is to render the extracts still more interesting by showing them in their natural conjunctions. First, then, this book is an autobiography, written when Aurora Leigh was still “what men call young”—when she had not so far left the shores of life as not to hear “the murmur of the outer Infinite.” Our first extract will lodge us on the threshold of Aurora’s career. It is full of wisdom and truth too; and for these so truthful words grim men should be tolerant of nursery “trifles.” If any man has the Dombey vein, let him read this extract a dozen times; and if he do not then become wiser, there is no hope of his redemption.
I write. My mother was a Florentine,
Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old; my life,
A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp
Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;
She could not bear the joy of giving life—
The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kiss
Had left a longer weight upon my lips,
It might have steadied the uneasy breath,
And reconciled and fraternised my soul
With the new order. As it was, indeed,
I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,—
As restless as a nest-deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away, though what
It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born
To make my father sadder, and myself
Not overjoyous, truly. 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.
Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well
—Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier brains,
And wills more consciously responsible,
And not as wisely, since less foolishly;
So mothers have God’s licence to be missed.
Aurora is just thirteen when with a strong struggling heart she stands by a “stone-dead father.” The nine years preceding she had lived among the hills, with vocal pines and water, with all that could create poetry in the child. After the father’s death there came a stranger, with authority, and took weeping little Aurora to England. She was not altogether happy under the guardianship of an aunt—an aunt whose amiability was certainly not increased by being a spinster. Aurora’s picture of this Christian lady who took to knitting stockings for the poor, is admirable, and a telling daguerreotype.
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.
Romney Leigh, the cousin, comes upon the scene early, and Aurora, too young to know of what material women’s hearts are made, hopes to use him as a friend. If our experience goes for aught, it is that friendship between the youthful of opposite sexes is but the bud of which love is the blooming flower. The description of the scene where “cousin Romney’s chimneys smoked” is surpassingly fine.
First, the lime,
(I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure,—
My morning-dream was often hummed away
By the bees in it;) past the lime, the lawn,
Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,
Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream
Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself
Among the acacias, over which you saw
The irregular line of elms by the deep lane
Which stopped the grounds and dammed the overflow
Of arbutus and laurel. Out of sight
The lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign tramp
Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales
Could guess if lady’s hall or tenant’s lodge
Dispensed such odours,—though his stick well-crooked
Might reach the lowest trail of blossoming briar
Which dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms,
And through their tops, you saw the folded hills
Striped up and down with hedges, (burly oaks
Projecting from the lines to show themselves)
Through which my cousin Romney’s chimneys smoked.
As still as when a silent mouth in frost
Breathes—showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall;
While, far above, a jut of table-land,
A promontory without water, stretched,—
You could not catch it if the days were thick,
Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwise
The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve
And use it for an anvil till he had filled
The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts,
And proved he need not rest so early:—then,
When all his setting trouble was resolved
To a trance of passive glory, you might see
In apparition on the golden sky
(Alas, my Giotto’s background!) the sheep run
Along the fine clear outline, small as mice
That run along a witch’s scarlet thread.
The substructure of Aurora’s character is formed when she discovers a vast store of books in a garret-room—cases of books in her father’s name.
Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high with cases in my father’s name;
Piled high, packed large,—where, creeping in and out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In beats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow in the morning’s dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
Cousin Romney is pleased to walk with Aurora, and they often read and quarrelled, for they were “scholars upon different tracks.” Romney, though so young, gazes with serious brow on the world’s inequalities, but Aurora’s poetic nature breaks on his mood like a quivering sunbeam. Surely this is delightful.
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, [p. 14→]
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.
We must pass over the social theories propounded at this time by the two companions. Romney has offered to make Aurora his wife; but the offer is warmly repulsed by the observation—
Why, sir, you are married long ago.
You have a wife already, whom you love—
Your social theory.
After the death of the very amiable Aunt, Romney parts from his cousin—goes on his mission. Everybody has a “mission” now, and why should not Romney? Romney’s mission is “to make earth over again”—a difficult task, no doubt; but if a man will squander his energies it is no business of ours, so that he pays his just share of the income-tax, and does not owe for his newspaper. While Romney is out, endeavouring to rub the rust off the ample shield of society, a certain Lady Waldemar pays Aurora a visit, with the apparent design of patronising the muse. Very considerate of Lady Waldemar! and the example might have gone far to draw down aristocratic smiles on the labours of poor bards, were it not for the disagreeable fact that Lady Waldemar is in love with Romney. But Romney, true to his philanthropic resolve, scorns the high-born lady and determines to wed Marian Erle—a sweet creature, but the daughter of brutalised and brutalising parents. He would conciliate the poor by marrying into their ranks, and shame the rich by giving a personal proof of human equality. Half the interest of the poem hangs on the eventful life of Marian Erle. We watch the fate of this blossom with intense apprehension. Every wind that sends it eddying through the dusty highroads of life has its especial interest. When it is at length stripped—for no fault of its own—of a portion of its beauty; when it—that is, Marian Erle—quivers with the first sharp knowledge that man’s violence, not his seduction, has blighted her, then the poet is developing in that poor forlorn girl those holy feelings which place a mother only a little lower than the angels! But, not to anticipate the course of events, we must show how Marian escaped from her vile parents. This passage, for fervent, forceful description, has scarcely a parallel in the English language.
One day, said Marian,—the sun shone that day—
Her mother had been badly beat and felt
The bruises sore about her wretched soul,
(That must have been): she came in suddenly,
And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage,
Her daughter’s headgear comb, let down the hair
Upon her, like a sudden waterfall,
And drew her drenched and passive, by the arm,
Outside the hut they lived in. When the child
Could clear her blinded face from all that stream
Of tresses . . there, a man stood, with beast’s eyes,
That seemed as they would swallow her alive,
Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,—
With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,
He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,
Saying hard between her teeth—“Why wench, why wench,
The squire speaks to you now—the squire’s too good;
He means to set you up, and comfort us.
Be mannerly at least.” The child turned round,
And looked up piteous in the mother’s face.
(Be sure that mother’s death-bed will not want
Another devil to damn, than such a look) . .
“Oh, mother!” then, with desperate glance to heaven,
“God, free me from my mother,” she shrieked out,
“These mothers are too dreadful.” And, with force
As passionate as fear, she tore her hands
Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,
And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,
Away from both—away, if possible,
As far as God,—away! They yelled at her,
As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell,
She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,
Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had cast
The voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fear
Was running in her feet and killing the ground;
The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,
The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back
To make room for her. Then, her head grew vexed,
Trees, fields, turned on her, and ran after her;
She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,
Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,
Could run no more, yet, somehow, went as fast,—
The horizon, red ’twixt steeples in the east,
So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart
Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big
It seemed to fill her body; then it burst,
And overflowed the world, and swamped the light.
“And now I am dead and safe,” thought Marian Erle—
She had dropped, she had fainted.
As white as moonshine, she is found in a ditch by a waggoner, and is conveyed to an hospital. We fear the next passage is too painfully true; only “think of it, dissolute man.”
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.
Here she first sees Romney, who, in the sweet cause of charity, has visited the wards. Weeks, months pass, and then Romney is waiting in a church with his fashionable friends in order to wed Marian.
Half St. Giles in frieze
Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold.
There is first among the high-born visitors the particularly small gossip to which we have alluded; then impatience, then surprise, and lastly, it may be, the proud gratification, that Marian does not come. She, poor girl, has been what is vulgarly termed “trapped” by Lady Waldemar. She writes a letter to Romney, which delivers him up “to his own prosperities,” and in a brief space is on her way to Paris under the guidance of a “Devil’s daughter,” being no other than one of Lady Waldemar’s women. What followed we have already hinted at. Subsequently Aurora Leigh, wandering about Paris in pursuit of her divine art, accidentally discovers the wanderer. But first we must give Aurora’s description of Paris, because it is pictorial, and also because it contains some of those peculiar views of art which interlace almost every page of the volume:
The city swims in verdure, beautiful
As Venice on the waters, the sea-swan.
What bosky gardens, dropped in close-walled courts,
As plums in ladies’ laps, who start and laugh:
What miles of streets that run on after trees,
Still carrying the necessary shops,
Those open caskets, with the jewels seen!
And trade is art, and art’s philosophy,
In Paris. There’s a silk, for instance, there,
As worth an artist’s study for the folds,
As that bronze opposite! nay, the bronze has faults;
Art’s here too artful,—conscious as a maid,
Who leans to mark her shadow on the wall
Until she lose a ’vantage in her step.
Yet Art walks forward, and knows where to walk.
The artists also, are idealists,
Too absolute for nature, logical
To austerity in the application of
The special theory: not a soul content
To paint a crooked pollard and an ass,
As the English will, because they find it so,
And like it somehow.—Ah, the old Tuileries
Is pulling its high cap down on its eyes,
Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazed
By the apparition of a new fair face
In those devouring mirrors. Through the grate,
Within the gardens, what a heap of babes,
Swept up like leaves beneath the chesnut-trees,
From every street and alley of the town,
By the ghosts perhaps, that blow too bleak this way
A-looking for their heads! Dear pretty babes;
I’ll wish them luck to have their ball-play out
Before the next change comes.—And, farther on,
What statues, poised upon their columns fine,
As if to stand a moment were a feat,
Against that blue! What squares! what breathing-room
For a nation that runs fast,—ay, runs against
The dentist’s teeth at the corner, in pale rows,
Which grin at progress in an epigram.
While Aurora is musing on life and art a face flashes by—“God! whose face is that?”
That face persists.
It floats up, it turns over in my mind,
As like to Marian, as one dead is like
The same alive. In very deed a face
And not a fancy, though it vanished so;
The small fair face between the darks of hair,
I used to liken, when I saw her first,
To a point of moonlit water down a well:
The low brow, the frank space between the eyes,
Which always had the brown pathetic look
Of a dumb creature who had been beaten once.
And never since was easy with the world.
Ah, ah—now I remember perfectly
Those eyes, to-day,—how overlarge they seemed,
As if some patient passionate despair
(Like a coal dropt and forgot on tapestry,
Which slowly burns a widening circle out)
Had burnt them larger, larger. And those eyes
To-day, I do remember, saw me too,
As I saw them, with conscious lids astrain
In recognition. Now, a fantasy,
A simple shade or image of the brain,
Is merely passive, does not retro-act,
Is seen, but sees not.
Some little time passes, however, before the two friends meet:
A simple chance
Did all. I could not sleep last night, and, tired
Of turning on my pillow and harder thoughts,
Went out at early morning, when the air
Is delicate with some last starry touch,
To wander through the Market-place of Flowers
(The prettiest haunt in Paris), and make sure
At worst, that there were roses in the world.
So, wandering, musing, with the artist’s eye,
That keeps the shade-side of the thing it loves,
Half-absent, whole-observing, while the crowd
Of young vivacious and black-braided heads
Dipped, quick as finches in a blossomed tree.
Among the nosegays, cheapening this and that
In such a cheerful twitter of rapid speech,—
My heart leapt in me, startled by a voice
That slowly, faintly, with long breaths that marked
The interval between the wish and word,
Inquired in stranger’s French, “Would that be much,
That branch of flowering mountain-gorse?”—“So much?
Too much for me, then!” turning the face round
So close upon me, that I felt the sigh
It turned with.
They go off together, Marian leading the way to the miserable room in which she lodged. We have heard it stated that Mrs. Browning is not intelligible; that she is never certain of her meaning. The assertion is a stupid libel on her genius—for if she does not always, she certainly does frequently, speak with a natural and fervid utterance. The woman and the artist are often so exquisitely mingled, as in the passage we are about to quote, that we cannot tell which is dominant while both are working at the creation of a picture which we do not so much see as feel. No one surely can miss the simplicity of the following; and we pity the man who cannot perceive its beauty:
Alone? She threw her bonnet off,
Then sighing as ’twere sighing the last time,
Approached the bed, and drew a shawl away:
You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruise
More calmly and more carefully than so,—
Nor would you find within, a rosier flushed
Pomegranate—
There he lay, upon his back,
The yearling creature, warm and moist with life
To the bottom of his dimples,—to the ends
Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;
For since he had been covered overmuch
To keep him from the light glare, both his cheeks
Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose
The shepherd’s heart-blood ebbed away into,
The faster for his love. And love was here
As instant! in the pretty baby-mouth,
Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked;
The little naked feet drawn up the way
Of nestled birdlings; everything so soft
And tender,—to the little holdfast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of ’t.
While we stood there dumb,—
For oh, that it should take such innocence
To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb;
The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,
And, staring out at us with all their blue,
As half perplexed between the angelhood
He had been away to visit in his sleep,
And our most mortal presence,—gradually
He saw his mother’s face, accepting it
In change for heaven itself, with such a smile
As might have well been learnt there,—never moved,
But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstacy,
So happy (half with her and half with heaven)
He could not have the trouble to be stirred,
But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said:
As red and still indeed as any rose,
That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life.
She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)
In that extremity of love, ’twill pass
For agony or rapture, seeing that love
Includes the whole of nature, rounding it
To love . . no more,—since more can never be
Than just love. Self-forgot, cast out of self,
And drowning in the transport of the sight,
Her whole pale passionate face, mouth, forehead, eyes,
One gaze, she stood! then, slowly as he smiled,
She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,
And drawing from his countenance to hers
A fainter red, as if she watched a flame
And stood in it a-glow. “How beautiful,”
Said she.
Marian relates to Aurora the fearful story of the “drugged cup,” the after madness and misery, the shameful (but not so far as she is concerned) history which made her a mother. But this we must, for want of space, pass over—pass it with regret, and regretting still more that the world had so few Aurora Leighs to soothe the anguish of the unfortunate, and to say as Aurora did—
“I am lonely in the world,
And thou art lonely, and the child is half
An orphan. Come,—and, henceforth, thou and I
Being still together, will not miss a friend,
Nor he a father, since two mothers shall
Make that up to him. I am journeying south,
And, in my Tuscan home I’ll find a niche,
And set thee there, my saint, the child and thee,
And burn the lights of love before thy face,
And ever at thy sweet look cross myself
From mixing with the world’s prosperities;
That so, in gravity and holy calm,
We two may live on toward the truer life.”
Having sharpened the reader’s appetite, we will not follow them into their Tuscan home. We will even be more provoking—more torturing if you like the term better—and say that the two last chapters of the poem, the eighth and ninth, where the glorious scenery of their Tuscan home is celebrated, is the finest and grandest in the [p. 15→] book. We will merely state that Romney comes there; that he has not married Lady Waldemar; that he weds Aurora; that Marian is happy with her child; and so—“all’s well that ends well.”
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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