E570117A. Aurora Leigh.
Newark Daily Advertiser, 17 January 1857, p. 2.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 372–374.
Florence,
Dec. 15th, 1856.
What may be said in some sense of all capitals, applies in its entire sense to Florence: that there are two worlds here—an outer and an inner world. Both are busy worlds; only one a living world, in the true signification of the word. While the former—composed of society and the people—is just now occupied, loyally enough, in celebrating the arrival of the Archduke, Ferdinand, hereditary prince of Tuscany, with his Saxon bride; the latter—a smaller sphere, a world in a nut-shell—is stirred to the heart, first, by the return of a princelier pair, “the Brownings,” to Casa Guidi (more truly immortalized by the Crown of female poets, than the Pitti palace is by all its royal crowns) and again by the appearance of Aurora Leigh,—Mrs. Browning’s new poem—the most beautiful of modern visitants from the world ideal. No one who has seen—with spiritual eyes—this vision of truth and love, will marvel that it has so charmed England, as to be hailed by one voice of praise. Even literary cynics have not yet dared to cry out against that which is too high for their reach, (cynics are of necessity hunchbacks, cramped and dwarfed through “sucking the paws of self-importance,”) too deep for their depth, too subtle for their touch: only the full-statured, broad shouldered critic can come up to the height of this “high argument;” or grasp the great intent “which here to life is brought.”
No wonder if a poem of nine books and eleven thousand lines look despair into the face of the hurrying day: Yet let the Day, with all its cares pressing at its back, once fairly open book first, and To-morrow will kick in vain at its heels, till the last book is finished! Such is the interest alone of Aurora Leigh: Aurora! the Morning indeed, with all its dew upon it, with its radiance, its birds, its flowers, its human voice! “A morning without clouds!” in whose clear light may be seen the ladder reaching from the Human to the Heavenly, and the angels descending and ascending: Woman’s morning—the dawn of her glory, when the lord of creation shall no more ask, “What living work has any woman ever given to the world?”
Mrs. Browning has cast light before into the depths of the soul—into the soul of Truth; now she has laid open to day the true woman’s heart—the poet’s heart, with all its love, its truth, its conscious blood of the prophets, its struggles up through earth’s clinging soil to freedom, and its heaven of attainment. She has always had “fit audience;” now the wide world of feeling is her audience—she speaks to the universal bosom, and it will respond with simultaneous throb. In forgetting herself in art, she has raised herself to the throne of art, above all modern poets, where the spirit of ancient Poesy, embracing her, circles her brow with laurel from his own crown. The highest individual authority in England says, unhesitatingly, that “Aurora Leigh is the greatest poem in the English language.” Of course he means the greatest epic: and, as the epic of the human heart, it is superior to any other. This is high praise; though it does not imply the most perfect poem: Yet, if it lack in some parts the condensation and finish of such as have grown, and been pruned, through a life-time; it comes fresher from the poet’s heart, and palpitates throughout with its warm life-blood. Thousands will feel the poem, because they too, have hearts; yet miss, for lack of inner perception, its purpose and art, if not the living pictures, the striking metaphors, the subtle reasoning, the glowing passion, the keen satire, the gems of thought, “the ring of the true metal,” which place it among the master-works.
Some will balk at the story—call it unnatural, and that, as if all possibilities did not lie in the mystery of life; as if new forms of developing passion were necessarily false ones, and might be in nature truer than actual manifestations; as if the elements which compose character did not admit of infinite combinations. But the story of Aurora Leigh, and every character in it, seem to us natural—real. Marian Erle, herself, is true: as true as the flower one sometimes sees blooming among rank weeds and filth, and by its fragrance almost purifying the air around it from vile odors. One wonders how it came there—it is a God-planted flower.
Aurora Leigh will ere this have told her own tale to the American public: at any rate, it is not fair to anticipate her, after the manner of critics, in telling it. The story is only the embodiment of a high purpose, which is its soul; but it would also be unfair to pluck the heart of the poet’s mystery out of that beautiful body, which lives and breathes with its vitality, and whose perfect whole will best reveal it. If one would quote; where begin, where end? Every page is a special temptation. Shall this, or this, or this passage come first? Neither: they are all too long for our space. But here is a portrait: who has not seen the original among the orderlies of the sex?
I think I see my father’s sister stand
Upon the hall-steps 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 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 country squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyrean to assure their souls
Against chance vulgarisms, * * *
* * * She had lived
A sort of cage bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act enough of joy for any bird.
Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live
In thickets and eat berries!
Aurora has been a reader; listen to some of her book-hints:
We get no good
From being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits—so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves; and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—
’Tis then we get the right good from a book.
* * * * * * *
——good aims not always make good books:
Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soils
In digging vineyards even: books that prove
God’s being so definitely, that man’s doubt
Grows self-defined the other side the line,
Made atheist by suggestion.
Here is the sum of moral philosophy:
* * * All this anguish in the thick
Of men’s opinions.
* * * the best of it perhaps,
But throws you back upon a noble trust
And use of your own instincts—
————fix against heaven’s wall
Your scaling ladders of high logic—mount
Step by step! sight goes faster; that still ray
Which strikes out from you, how you cannot tell,
And why you know not—(did you eliminate
That such as you indeed should analyze?)
Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.
Would that the whole passage might be here given—read it all! In the next quotations, how delicately, yet surely, is the line drawn between the poet, or creator, and the mere imitator:
My own best poets, am I one with you,
That thus I love you,—or, but one through love?
Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your heavenly hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odors? When my joy and pain,
My thought and aspiration, like the stops
Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb
If not melodious, do you play on me,
My pipers,—and in sooth, you did not blow,
Would no sound come? Or is the music mine,
As a man’s voice or breath is called his own,
Inbreathed by the Life-breather?
* * * Many fervent souls
Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel
If steel had offered, in a restless heat
Of doing something. Many tender souls
Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread,
As children cowslips:—the more pains they take,
The work more withers.
See the poet’s struggle between the ideal and the actual life:
Day and night
I worked my rythmic thought, and furrowed up
Both watch and slumber with long lines of life
Which did not suit their season. The rose fell
From either cheek, my eyes globed luminous
Through orbits of blue shadow, and my pulse
Would shudder along the purple-veined wrist
Like a shot bird.
Having bread
For just so many days, just breathing room
For body and verse, I stood up straight and worked
My veritable work. And as the soul
That grows within a child makes a child grow,—
Or as the firey sap, the touch from God.
Careering through a tree, dilates the bark,
And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikes
The summer foliage out in a green flame—
So life, in deepening with me, deepened all
The course I took, the work I did. * * *
* * * But I felt
My heart’s life throbbing in my verse to show
It lived, it also certes incomplete,
Disordered with all Adam in the blood,
But even in its very tumors, warts and wens,
Still organized by, and implying life.
Hear, in the following, the nightingale’s sigh, on returning alone to her empty nest! Never did bereavement, seeing sympathy in nature, find more vivid, or manifold expression:
I took up the old days
With all their Tuscan pleasures, worn and spoiled—
Like some lost book we dropt in the long grass
On such a happy summer afternoon
When last we read it with a loving friend,
And find in autumn, when the friend is gone,
The grass cut short, the weather changed too late,
And stare at, as at something wonderful
For sorrow—thinking how two hands before,
Had held up what is left to only one,
And how we smiled when such a vehement nail
Impressed the tiny dint here, which presents
This verse in fire forever! Tenderly
And mournfully I lived. I knew the birds
And insects—which looked fathered by the flowers
And emulous of their hues: I recognized
The moths, with that great overpoise of wings
Which make a mystery of them how at all
They can stop flying: butterflies, that bear
Upon their blue wings such red embers round,
They seem to scorch the blue air into holes
Each flight they take: and fireflies that suspire
In such short lapses of transported flame
Across the tingling Dark, while overhead
The constant and inviolable stars
Out-burn those lights of love: melodious owls
(If music had but one note and was sad,
’Twould sound just so) and all the silent whirl
Of bats, that seem to follow in the air
Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome
To which we are blind: and then the nightingales,
Which pluck our heart across the garden wall,
(When walking in the town) and carry it
So high into the bowering almond trees,
We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if
The golden flood of moonlight unaware
Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth,
And made it less substantial. And I knew
The harmless opal snakes, and large-mouthed frogs
(Those noisy vaunters of their shallow streams)
And lizards, the green lightnings of the wall,
Which, if you sit down still, nor sigh so loud,
Will flatter you and take you for a stone,
And flash familiarly about your feet
With such prodigious eyes in such small heads!—
I knew them, though they had somewhat dwindled from
My childish imagery—and kept in mind
How last I sate among them equally
In fellowship and mateship as a child
Will bear him still toward insect, beast and bird,
Before the Adam in him has foregone
All privilege of Eden, * * *
But now the creatures all seemed farther off,
No longer mine, nor like me; only there,
A gulf between us. I would yearn indeed,
Like other rich men for a drop of dew,
Of irrecoverable child-innocence
(Before the heart took fire and withered life)
When childhood might pair equally with birds;
But now the birds were grown too proud for us,
Alas, the very sun forbids the dew.
And I, I had come, back to an empty nest,
Which every bird’s too wise for.
We had intended to give some other passages, finer even than any of the above; but have already exceeded our limits, and must reluctantly omit them. But if the extracts given do not justify all praise, read the episodes touching Marian Erle; or after her final rescue, Aurora’s letter (that urgent arrow shot from a Dian’s bow into the bloodless heart of Treachery) to Lady Waldemar—that brazen idol of Fashion, that whetted Sophistry, that bundle of selfishness done up in velvet, and sealed with the armorials of the Prince of lies! Or, read the highly imaginative passage preceding the crowning interview between Aurora and Romney Leigh, and then the sublime of the passionate intreat which follows her lovely confession. But we must give the concluding lines of this:
——Could I see his face.
I wept so? Did I drop against his breast.
Or did his arms constrain me? Were my cheeks
Hot, ever flooded with my tears, or his?
And which of our two large explosive hearts
So shook me? That I know not. There were words
That broke in utterance . . . melted in the fire;
Embrace that was convulsion . . . then a kiss . . .
As long and silent as the ecstatic night—
And deep, deep shuddering breaths, which meant beyond
Whatever could be told by word or lip.
Enfin, read the book! It is a grand opera, to be judged, not by its melodious airs, but by its harmonious whole.
Mrs. Browning works with a single eye to art, and the true vision, the inspiration are vouchsafed her. Never was the difference between the theory of doing good, and the doing good so clearly illustrated as in this poem; never the poet’s high calling more poetically shown; never morality more enforced, without a moral; or religion so preached without a sermon. Love, beauty, philosophy—or poetry, the three in one—glow, breathe, teach, charm, elevate thro’ their “real presence” on every page. In short, it is a book of revelation—the Apocalypse of Poesy.
[Elizabeth C. Kinney]
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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