E570200F. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, February 1857, p. 265.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 273–274.
What shall we call this book? Is it a novel of English society put into blank verse? or an epic, of which the heart of a woman and a poet is the scene, her thoughts of art and life, her hopes, mistakes, and love are the actors and events? There are a few incidents, persons, a plot; but these are merely incidental to the main action, which is the growth of a woman’s and a poet’s soul. The real action goes on within the heart of Aurora Leigh, child of an English father and Italian mother, born in Italy, and taken in early youth to England, and in the heart of Romney Leigh, her cousin, a wealthy patrician, and radical social reformer. Art, reform, and love are the dominant thoughts, the motives of the poem; love, the universal solvent, touched and saddened by the harsh experience of life, subduing, melting the coldness of an art that reaches after only intellectual beauty and the mechanism of systems of reform, which aim not at regenerating society by a new and better growth of the individual, but at remolding it from without, after the patterns and arbitrary schemes of the Fouriers and Cabets. The artistic idea of the poem, we suppose, is to be found in these lines, in which the work of modern poets is declared to be “to represent the age—their age, not Charlemagne’s—this love-throbbing age, that brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, and spends more passion, more heroic heat, betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms than Roland with his knights at Roncasvalles.” There are many lines of concentrated force, many of quiet beauty, in the poem, but not many passages of matured power, except, perhaps, the closing scene. It is a scholarly piece of English Iambic, half as long as the Iliad, and (may we say it?) at the very opposite pole of the heavens of poetry, for in the Iliad we have thought and feeling only as incarnate in word and deed, while with Mrs. Browning words and deeds are but the shadows, of which thought and feeling are the substance. Aurora is a woman’s Iliad, a true epic of the nineteenth century, of which the heart is the Ilion, love and art the Hector and Achilles.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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