E570200E. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
United States Magazine, February 1857, pp. 182–187.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 284–288.
Of all modern women Elizabeth Barrett Browning is one of the most gifted. Of all writers of the sex none carries a more original, a more powerful or more prophetic pen. It may be she is, as a whole, superior to each and all. We, as one of the sex, are willing cheerfully to concede this. She is not only endowed, wonderfully endowed, but she is framed, as it were, most appropriately. It is as if a goodly temple were builded with one niche shrined therein, where tender cathedral lights, deep, solemn music, sacred incense, and devout worshipers, should stand ready to consecrate the pale beautiful statue which it was designed to hold. She is happy in being born in England. We mean, happy for her immediate fame. There she is in a class who welcome and uphold genius, and amid institutions which give her the required perspective. Had she appeared in America, where the competition is greater, and the prestige of rank and genius less, where new opinions are so severely handled, Elizabeth Barrett Browning would have been hunted down by press and pulpit, even worse than the gifted Margaret Fuller was. We certainly have something of the colonial taint lurking in our veins as a people, or we should be less subservient to foreign opinion. But this is a subject upon which we mean to speak hereafter.
This last work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the most characteristic and most remarkable of all her writings. The dedication to her “Cousin and Friend” meets you at the threshold as the warm out-speaking of a full, generous-hearted woman, and the first paragraphs of the book challenge an interest which does not flag to the close. The poem of “Aurora Leigh” is written in blank verse, and, as that greatest of all poetic measures, so fit for the utterance of gods in the hands of a true artist, and so repugnant to us in the crude and unconsecrated, always wears the peculiar stamp of the mind which makes it the medium of expression, so the blank verse of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is peculiarly her own—rapid, rough, sometimes incoherent—it hurries onward like a mountain torrent; but it is not destructive in its course—it flows amid fertile meadows no less than around jutting promontories; it catches the sound of the oak restling in the storm, but it listens to the song-bird also; it spreads into lovely basins in which pale lilies gleam above the tide, and violets tread to the brink; and then leaps the rocky gorge to waste itself in rainbows. It has not the measured cathedral flow of the Miltonic blank verse. On the contrary, it is more human, more familiar, with here and there the sweet cadences and deep passionate utterances of a Shakespeare. It is as if her soul sang forth its inspirations, not as if she wrote poetry.
The story is a simple one, and not well put together, according to the old formulas. The reader will not say it is a fine story—not in the least; but he will not care so much for the story as the thought it embodies, the aspiration it calls forth, the deep, significant human utterances which make it alive in every page, and the touches of pathos which will cause him to ache at the heart.
She writes outside of all institutions. Church and state, society, philanthropy, all are rebuked by her keen, observant and courageous pen. She speaks like a prophet, and with the affluence of a queen. She sweeps onward, with broad human sympathies, till her pathway glows before you like the radiant pathway of an angel. She takes the significant ground of art as the basis of all true reform. The man or the woman who hammers upon the armored bosses of error only because it is black and monstrous, and deadening to human progress, will do little or nothing; while he or she who takes art, or the beautiful, as the stand-point, may fail individually, but will from this lofty point send forth an influence which will be long and deeply felt, and which will of itself build up at least a section of that temple whose “gates are called beautiful.” She insists too strongly upon the stand-point of art, and in this view is less generous to the efforts of the many who do the masonry of reform than we should expect from a mind like hers. Despite of all this beautiful theory, the man or woman who writes and acts only from a profound egotism will not do the whole office of the idealist, who must enter more deeply into the great common heart of our humanity, or he will be blind to its best aspects. He must see our whole nature, in its synthesis as well as analysis, and art is not the whole. The “Cousin Romney” of the poem was no less artistic than “Aurora Leigh,” only he would have wrought his poems from the living men and women of the times rather than with the words of the poet. He would have constructed a form of society which should have been of itself a poem; but he found human wills and human brains, and human bones and muscles, less manageable than the figures and tropes of the poet, who uses the alphabet as the medium of expression. To our mind “Cousin [p. 183→] Romney,” unselfish as he is, struggling with a divine patience to realize a better social state for his fellows, living in his own life the dreams of the poet, while he toils with the zeal of the philanthropist, is a far nobler creature than even “Aurora Leigh,” who will see nothing but from the stand-point of art, and ignores work that she may realize in herself her own ideal.
But Elizabeth Browning is greater than her theories, and what “Aurora Leigh” assumes becomes significant, because it emanates from Elizabeth Browning, who will still be greater than her achievement. One would think that she designed, in the career of “Cousin Romney,” to illustrate the experience of some of our idealists in this country. She gives us a better idea of Brook Farm, and the aims of its founders, than Hawthorne has given in “Blithedale,” which is a caricature, and a sarcastic one also, from a prosaic and unsympathetic mind. The incidents of the dispersion of its members, the recoil, the odium, the fire, all have a more than shadowy resemblance to Brook Farm. Margaret Fuller and others of this country have been associated with Elizabeth Browning abroad, and we see evident traces of the American mind in the poem. Indeed, it is far more Young American than English, both in thought and expression.
The poem opens with Aurora Leigh, who gives an account of her childhood, which is touchingly expressed. She is an orphan. Her mother
Was weak and frail;
She could not bear the joy of giving life—
The mother’s raptures slew her;
and thus her child was left to the tenderness of a father, whose affection for his sweet Italian wife had been of the most absorbing kind. It had turned him aside from all his English habits and modes of life, and made an exile of him in the sweet South, where music, poetry and love combined to “lap him in Elysium.” This tender father, learned and studious, becomes the companion and teacher of the child, Aurora, until his death, from the corrodings of grief, when she is carried to England. Though thus tenderly cared for during the life of her one parent, she says, still,
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.
There is the orphan tear and the orphan sigh in this sweet utterance, and the soul of a lovely womanhood lurks in expressions like the following:
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.
Of this loving, good father, speaking, she forces the tears to your eyes thus:
I’ve heard it said,
That but to see him in his first surprise
Of widower and father, nursing me,
Unmothered little child of four years old,
His large man’s hands afraid to touch my curls,
As if the gold would tarnish—his grave lips
Contriving such a miserable smile,
As if he knew needs must, or I should die,
And yet ’twas hard—would almost make the stones
Cry out for pity.
It is touches like these that will endear Elizabeth Browning to the hearts of thousands—not men, not women merely speaks through her, but the dear soul of our humanity. She has been out all night in some lonely soul-Olivet before she could rain for us this heart-blood of divine sacrifice.
The incompleteness of this man, who called Aurora child, is told in a brief sentence. Grief had not apotheosized him—he did not arise from the ashes of his affliction to the sublime hights of the truly beautiful—he did not shake himself from the dust of sorrow into a noble human action, which is the intended mission of grief. She says:
He lived as one entranced, with thoughts not aims,
Whom love had unmade from a common man,
But not completed, to an uncommon man.
At thirteen she has no parent left, and she must bid adieu to the flowering fields of Italy and its high soul-stirring mountains; leave her parents there to their long resting, and go to England, where her estates are held—and where she is an heiress upon conditions; and where her father’s sister will receive her and cherish her in the cold formal way of spinstery; where hearts have never gushed up into human affections. This aunt, who meets her standing upon the hall-step, is thus described, in a manner that leaves little for the painter to do, so vividly does the thin, sharp woman picture herself upon the mind’s eye:
She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight,
As if for turning accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with gray
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, [p. 184→]
Or, peradventure, niggardly half-truths;
Eyes of no color—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
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.
Thus much of this aunt; but Aurora Leigh adds in her own right:
Dear Heaven! how silly are the things that live
In thickets and eat berries.
This is the opening key; and now Aurora Leigh, with her large impulses, her half Italian blood, and soul teeming with the inspirations of true genius, begins to show her innate protest to the straight-laced conventionalities into which she has been brought. She is gentle in nature, orderly and submissive—to the external judgment no fault can be found, and yet her aunt feels that there is something beyond her reach, an internal something which she could not touch nor subdue. She learned all the lore thought requisite for girls, all womanly accomplishments;
She liked a woman to be womanly,
this aunt of hers, and so she taught her
The collects and the catechism,
The creeds from Athanasius back to Nice,
Because she liked instructed piety,
and then she dipped into most of the sciences, because
She misliked women who are frivolous.
She learned “cross-stitch,” spun glass, stuffed birds and modeled flowers in wax,
Because she liked accomplishments in girls;
and thus the child lived unknowing any life “which was not patience.”
And here she meets her Cousin Romney, the one soul which is the spirit of the book, the great manly, enthusiastic soul which blends into all her life, like the silver thread which gives the pattern to a beautiful fabric. At table she hears the guests whisper sometimes:
“The Italian child,
For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways,
Thrives ill in England; she is paler yet
Than when we came the last time; she will die.”
“Will die,” my cousin, Romney Leigh, blushed too,
With sudden anger, and, approaching me,
Said low, between his teeth, “You’re wicked now;
You wish to die and leave the world a-dusk
For others, with your naughty light blown out!”
Here she begins to show the two parties who are to be the features of her poem, and she begins also to exhibit that familiar every-day phraseology supposed to be unadapted to poetry; that bold, strong, courageous Saxon in which she deals lavishly.
Romney is a few years older than herself. He is cold and shy, and absent—tender at times, imperative, also, as a manly man may be, and a womanly woman like him none the less therefor. He is a student and a searcher after human good. When he comes from college he visits his cousin Aurora, and they thus are early companions—learn the faults each of the other, and feel the consequent repugnances which grow out of strong individualities. She uses him unconsciously as a friend—loves him cousin-wise, while he finds in her the noblest type of womanhood. She cannot sympathise in his dreams of social regeneration, nor he in her purely artistic conceptions of life, and so these two eventually float apart—she absorbed in literature, he in philanthropy. She goes to Italy and owns that, after all, her life is a failure; and he, after realizing somewhat his visions of human equality in the philanstery he has built, is attacked by a mob, his buildings fired, the inmates driven forth; and, he blinded and beggared, seeks repose, also, in Italy, where they meet once more.
Such is a hurried synopsis of the story, but the intermediate scenes are vivid and striking in the extreme. The whole social fabric is winnowed, and passes in review before her. She is like a beautiful gleaner who stands in God’s free sunshine and scatters the chaff upon the wind, while the rich golden grain gleams like a benizon between her fingers.
While her aunt lived she read by stealth old books,
Without considering whether they were fit
To do me good. Mark, these. We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits.
There is the utterance of a large soul, speaking thus; and yet we opine the “doctors, proctors” guardians, who keep men and women in swaddling bonds will have an eye at this, and denounce Elizabeth Browning as presumptuous and heretical. It will not matter. She will live long after they and their formulas, pulpits and all have crumbled to indiscriminate dust.
Thus she toils onward, always with a “silver lining to the cloud” of life; always with “bread” the dull souls about her “wot not of,” always with an almond blossoming within, despite the leafless branches without. At length she finds the poets, and a new and heavenly light is interfused all through her being:
But the sun was high
When first I felt my pulses set themselves
For concords, [p. 185→]
and she thrills and exults as only poets can who know the inspiration. Her language is here as fervid as the utterance of a Sibyl; as impassioned as that of genius; as ecstatic as the saint. She feels the light of the divine Shakinah falling from the hights of Heaven upon her own annointed head, and she weeps tears of triumphant joy, feeling that she is one with the band who drink from the fountain “fast by the oracles of God.” The reader must read; we forbear to quote.
She now numbers twenty years, which have not been all Summers; yet the June is in her heart as it is in the soul of Nature, and she goes out early to hail the glad world which reflects somewhat the mystic life of her being. She will crown herself this June morning, as the years have crowned her twenty, now. What shall the crown be?
That ivy on the wall
That headlong ivy—not a leaf will grow
But thinking of a wreath—
I like such ivy—bold to leap a hight
’Twas strong to climb.
Romney finds her ready to bind the wreath about her brow, and they talk long and much, tossing rudely opinions right and left. Marriage, womanhood; action, aims, are discussed, each tenacious of individualism, as strong men and women are; quarreling somewhat, only because the blood is young and warm, and the arena of life has not been dusted by the ringing spokes of their chariot wheels. He pleads for his great, beautiful theories of social harmonies; she for her womanhood, which must not, cannot be merged into and swallowed up in the career of another.
He implores for love, the absolute love which will gild like a sacred halo the career of manly achievement—the sweet but subordinate love which it is supposed may complete the natures of the two; while she, “knowing her worthiness,” cannot yield herself to the mere uses of love, making him a potsherd rather than the flame of the alter in a woman’s soul, and so they part.
Her words here are beautiful, exceedingly, as she sees him go, and she recognizes fully the destiny before her. She says:
The palm stands upright in a realm of sand.
Her aunt is indignant to learn she has rejected Romney, to whom it seems she had been betrothed in childhood; and certain properties in which she was expected to share were made to depend upon the fulfillment of the marriage contract between the two cousins. Her aunt dies, and the scene has a cold, gray power in its description that is well nigh frightful. As the writer warms with her story, she is hurried on by her own intensity, magnetized by her own fire till she seems totally unaware of the tremendous force she is wielding. She gives us no repose; she makes us feel that if Homer sometimes nods it is a relief to the reader—that if the immortals do not sleep, because “there is no night there,” they will be transformed into devils by this absence of the Sabbath.
At length Lady Waldemar is brought upon the scene, and Marion Earle—the former a smooth, fair, aristocratic dame, who loves Romney, and who adopts his theories because of this love; but who is, after all, in heart, a beautiful spotted serpent, with hardly grace enough to hide the forked tongue; the latter, a sweet, beautiful child, whose instincts
Do God’s will and know it not.
She, also, loves Romney, in her child way. He is to her an angelic revelation, and she to Romney a sweet violet, plucked from the wayside lest a foot should desecrate it. She is the child of the people, born in its very dregs—a pearl upon a dunghill, a diamond amid the ashes. In spite of opposition, Romney will wed this girl, and in sight of all the aristocracy of London. St. James is poured into St. Giles to witness the ceremony. But Lady Waldemar has been long with the innocent child, and the bride does not come. The talk of frivolous women waiting in the church, the rude language of rude people, the jest, the jeer, the whole hurly-burly of the scene are given with a vividness of effect, a carelessness of detail, and candor of language all adapted to men and times, enough to drive a critic of the Addisonian school mad. But we believe men and women are strong enough in our day to bear it, without detriment.
This beautiful child, Marion, disappears at this crisis from the pages, and we do not find her till Aurora, disgusted with literature, disappointed also in her original views of life—finding that pure art ennobles truly, but leaves a large margin of unoccupied life—that our humanity is not full when the affections are ignored—has resolved to go to Europe, and there breathe the air of her childhood, where are buried also her beautiful dead. She is anxious to learn the fate of Marion, and at length meets her in Paris. Poor Marion has indeed walked down the burning plowshare with her naked feet, and the flame, while it has left her soul untouched, has burned into the very fibers of her being. She has been, she says, “murdered.” She calls herself “dead,” and talks in a weird, unearthly vein. Her story is terrible. It is not artistic in the high sense, and yet in the high human it is; for where thousands have been “murdered” in [p. 186→] the very way that poor Marion was, it is not for women to wrap themselves in their rattling silks and cry “indecent” at the mention of the fact. We are sick of this dainty kind of modesty, that, knowing such things are, will not lift up the cry of reform.
Marion flies from Aurora, who will not be parted from her, and so they go out into the country, where Marion takes her up into a little garret and shows her child, which is the tie now that holds her to earth. Mothers will appreciate the following beautiful description of a sleeping babe:
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 over-much,
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.
Aurora smiles, as who could help, and yet rebukes the girl Marion, doubtful of her, and thoughtful for the well-being of the child. Her rebuke is couched in mournful words of tender, womanly wisdom:
My Marion,
The priest who stole a lamb to offer him,
Was still a thief. And if a woman steals
(Through God’s own barrier-hedges of true love,
Which fence out license in securing love,)
A child like this, that smiles so in her face,
She is no mother, but a kidnapper,
And he’s a dismal orphan, not a son;
Whom all her kisses cannot feed so full
He will not miss hereafter a pure home
To live in, a pure heart to lean against,
A pure good mother’s name and memory
To hope by when the world grows thick and bad,
And he feels out for virtue.
It is touches like these—words wisely and fitly spoken—which will make this book to thousands of hearts “like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” We are glad to find these pure, beautiful words in the mouth of a woman, as an antidote to the flood of morbid sentiment and corrupt opinions which have too much flooded our American press of late.
Marion relates her sad, terrible story. Her unfathered baby is a waif floated into her bosom from the black turbulent waters of life, and it becomes to her the one oasis of the desert. At the close of the story the pure, wise Aurora does not fail to open her arms and take the pure-souled Marion to her heart. They go to Italy together, and here there is much that is winning and beautiful described. There is true art in this period of repose.
In the meantime Romney has drifted hither also, disheartened, but still gentle and noble and ready to gather up the broken threads, the scattered spars wrenched by the storm. He meets the sweet child, Marion, again, and renews his proffer of heart and hand. This interview between the two is in the highest degree dramatic and beautiful. Over colored, over affluent, in that avalanche of words which sometimes incumber the sense, but still exquisite in sentiment and holy in purpose. The great fault, which will not be overlooked by the reader, in these conversations, is the want of adaptation in the speakers. Everywhere it is Elizabeth Browning, nowhere Marion Earle. Romney, Aurora, Marion all talk alike, but then they all talk well and to the point, and we will have done our cavilling.
Marion’s questioning of Romney is impressive and noble, and when she at length refuses his hand in marriage, the mother’s heart gushes out in all its fondness:
I’ve room for no more children in my arms;
My kisses are all melted on one mouth;
I would not push my darling to a stool
To dandle babies,
and so she goes out, and Aurora and Romney sit together under the stars, in the bland air of Italy, and talk as old friends talk, to whom life is dear, although a melancholy Autumnal cadence has usurped the June melody. The close is strikingly tender and exquisitely ideal. Aurora is enraptured with the lovely, pensive light of the stars, and more than ever she speaks of their still solemn beauty. At length a vague suspicion haunts her mind, and she exclaims:
A moment, Heavenly Christ!
A moment. Speak once, Romney, ’tis not true!
I hold your hands; I look into your face—
You see me?
No more than the blessed stars!
He is blind. You remember Jane Eyre here, undoubtedly, but the scene is not the less original. Aurora weeps; she gives utterance now to those burning words of love and passion, in which Elizabeth Browning is so preëminent. All plans of life, all womanly scruples, melt away before the conviction that she loves Romney, to the total abnegation of self; and now begins the true and beautiful human life of Aurora Leigh, and her soul suns itself in the sunlight of love. Her language is here bold and fervent—it is a lava flood bursting from the pent-up heart of a true woman. Somewhat over-humble, as in her sonnets, somewhat deprecatory, as women should not be, yet most tender and touching.
And now we must close, with the conviction upon our mind that Elizabeth Browning has in this work proved herself greater than in any [p. 187→] preceding one. It has in it a consistency, fiber and coherency which she has never before equaled. It has a manly force, combined with a womanly insight and tenderness.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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