E570200D. Aurora Leigh.
The Rambler, February 1857, pp. 152–154.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 282–284.
Mrs. Browning is a person who has taken up poetry not merely as an amusement, or even as a trade or profession, but as the religion of life. She has no notion that the age has gone by when the vates or bard was the inspired authority, the seer whom every one consulted in every difficulty, and whose rhythmical responses formed the basis of every science. In her eyes poets are “the only truth-tellers now left to God,—the only speakers of essential truth,—the only teachers who instruct mankind to find man’s veritable stature out.” Other men are engaged in “building pyramids, gauging railroads, reigning, reaping, dining, and dusting carpets;” while the poet is “crying to them with a voice of thunder, ‘this is soul, this is life,’ making them look up for an instant, and confess that carpet-dusting is, after all, not the imperative labour of life.”
This we concede is the commission given to the true vates; but such a being makes but a rare appearance; the chair of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare is but rarely filled, or if filled, we are not ultramontanes enough to accept each edict and writ that comes from it, before it has received the sanction of the dispersed church of readers and listeners. The poet is not a poet because he says his own say, but because he says what we wish to say and cannot, because he expresses that which our lips have been vainly labouring to express, because he catches and fixes the fleeting vision which tantalises our souls, and flies from our peering eyes and clutching hands. The seal of the poet is popular acceptation; not the popularity of the hour, the offspring of the puffs and panegyrics of a party, but that silently growing love which leads men to quote his lines, to appropriate his phrases, and to adopt his expressions. Now to obtain this distinction he must have but one aim in view,—to speak truth, pertinent, universal truth, and not to be a mere posture-poet, a ballet-dancer of Parnassus. After all, carpet-beating is a prettier trade than attitudinising. Though it does not collect so great a crowd, nor excite so much wonder, to reap and to sow is a more respectable occupation than to grin through a horse-collar. And herein lies the difficulty of poets now-a-days; as musicians feel that Handel has exhausted the simple phrases and successions that produce sublimity of effect; that Bach has for ever rendered hopeless any competition in his peculiar style of “thought-entangled descant;” that in rhythmical sequence, in [p. 153→] the unexpected yet perfect response, in power combined with delicacy, Beethoven has left nothing to be improved,—so poets seem to feel that all common truths, all the ordinary feelings of the heart, have been long ago expressed, and that they must either be silent, or if they are to speak, must, like Jullien and Wagner, make up by grimaces and noise what they want of true inspiration:—make up, did we say? there can be no substitute for the calmness and self-possession which characterise every great work. The fever-screams of nightingales are no substitute for their song, nor the skeletons of muses for their youthful beauty. It is in the struggle to seem greater than they are, that our poets become so preposterous. Modern life wants not its new aspects of truth, its new phases of thought, its new feelings and philosophies, which will one day be found a rich mine for a true poet, when at length a man arises who will look outside of himself with as little self-consciousness and introversion as the ballad-makers of the people, or the hymnographers of the medieval age. We see soul best, not in our own bosoms, but reflected in the face of society: copy that with artistic truth, and the true expression of soul will not be wanting. When poets desert this standard of truth, they strive to make up in exaggeration for their loss: just as in effete and depraved society expressions become less gross, and men seek to regain in words what they have lost in virtue; so when poetry has lost all its power, it seeks to regain by violence what it has lost in muscle.
What we want in the poet is, to express these new truths and feelings with unaffected propriety: not to speak like an act of parliament, with all the affectation of precision, and all the reality of confusion; but on the other hand, not to run riot in that unintelligible jargon whose clangour in most modern poets fills our ears with the din of the cymbals of Cybele. The poetical form is, as Victor Hugo says, a powerful dyke against the commonplace, which, like democracy, is always on the point of overflowing. An idea steeped in verse becomes suddenly more incisive and more brilliant—the iron becomes steel. As the voice, says Montaigne, when constrained within the narrow tube of a trumpet comes out with more force and effect, so a sentence, when compressed into poetical feet, breaks upon us more abruptly, and strikes us with more sudden shock. Hence poetry is the first language of childhood:
What will a child learn sooner than a song?*
It expresses the first lispings of religion:
Disceret unde preces vatem ni musa dedisset?**
(Whence would man learn to pray, unless the Muse had sent a bard?)
It is more powerful to teach than the sermon or the theological essay:
The silenced preacher yields to potent strain.***
“Truth shines the brighter clad in verse,” says Swift. Poetry, says Cervantes, conveys love into hearts, and sense into souls. It is the charm, says Roscommon, which we use “heroic thoughts and virtue to infuse.” Even the lawyers allow it to be brought in as evidence, provided it does not contradict their enactments. “Licitum est,” say they, “allegare dicta poetarum ubi juri non contradicunt,”—the poets may be quoted when the law does not contradict them.
________
*Pope.
**Horace.
***Pope.
________
Now the question is, Are we to range Mrs. Browning among these true poets, or among the false ones?—among the mouth-pieces or the mouthers of this generation? [p. 154→]
And first, with regard to the truth she tells, she hardly comes up to her own estimate of the true poet. She appears to us like a dog that leaps at the morsel offered to him, but falls back without attaining it. Her intention seems good; she comes nearer the truth than most people; but at last she falls down to their level, and there for the present she remains. To continue our unfeminine illustrations, she has climbed the greased pole higher than her predecessors; and if she has failed to reach the prize at the top, at least the pole is dégraissé, and the climb rendered less slippery for the next aspirant. But for herself, she is still on the level, and speaks from the level. The “truth” that she tries to enforce on this generation is, the futility and unsatisfactory character of art, of business, of literature, of philanthropy, and even of religion; and she falls back to the assumption of the current philosophy, that the loves of the sexes and matrimony is the centre and summum bonum of humanity. And this in an age when society seeks in vain to repress the brutality of husbands, when women are demanding independence, and when the legislature is thinking of repealing the laws of Christian wedlock in favour of Pagan and Judaical right of divorce. Verily, as Voltaire says, “men seek to regain in words what they have lost in virtue.” Wedded love, as it becomes rare upon earth, is proclaimed to be the essence of Christianity. This is the key-note of Mrs. Browning’s poem; almost its opening phrase, as well as its closing cadence. Aurora’s father sees a girl going in procession to her first communion, and falls in love—
A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,
And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,
Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,
He too received his sacramental gift
With eucharistic meanings; for he loved.
And Aurora at last, having tried all the mysteries of thought, finds that she must put up with her kinsman Romney, the disappointed “Christian socialist,” and end all doubts and distresses in the religion of matrimony. Such is the beginning and end of the book; the middle is an impossible novel, contrived to carry Aurora and Romney through all the experiences and disappointments of modern theories, in order, by a process of exhaustion, to bring them to acknowledge at last the required truth. For the vulgar error into which Mrs. Browning relapses we have not much to say. But for the details of the poem, for the appreciation of the different phases of life and society, and for the approximate fairness with which she regards the Catholic religion, we confess that we have a real admiration. There is much in the poem that descends to the commonplace, even to twaddle and small-talk; but there is also much that shines like clusters of jewels.
[Richard Simpson]
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
___________________
