E570219A. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
The National Era, 19 February 1857, p. 31.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 288–289.
Mrs. Browning is unquestionably a poet, who has written many fine things, full of rich thought, and glowing with the language of imagination. This may be considered a fixed fact. She has published some things which are far below her reputation as a literary artist; and this, we presume, may be regarded as likewise a fixed fact, that will not be disputed. The work before us is an exemplification of both; there are passages of superior excellence, and there are others, too, as prosaic and poor as we remember to have read in any work making pretension to the name of a poem. And there are others, still—and these, too, we are glad to say, are found among such specimens of prosaic and dull lines—which if they have any meaning, and serve thus to help in the construction or embellishment of the tale, is more than we have been able to find out. They are either too transcendental, involved, or overloaded with words, for us to be able to penetrate their deep mystery, and so we are contented to confess our ignorance, and let them pass.
It is strange, too, that she has been willing to mingle in with scenes of great descriptive power and touching pathos, others so vulgar, not merely in their subjects, but for the words employed; and some of the merest twaddle, too, that forms the gossip of life. It does well enough for a novel, or in the drama; but that for a poem, which, as she says, is “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered”—that she should have brought in so much that is of no value, and rather detracts than adds to its effect, is to us a matter of surprise. She prides herself, we know, on leaving the wonted track, and launching out into other paths; she loves to make round, hard hits on those who are filling up their life’s career unworthily: she points her arrows in such a way as to make them sting when they strike, and often thrusts in her sharp dissecting knife, so as to make a very anatomy of Human Society. She has no slight skill in this way. But, after all, wrought up, as many passages are with mastery, and fixing the reader in admiration at the lavish of golden-thoughted expressions, moved as he is at times by the touch which vibrates through the heart that can feel for the woes of the suffered, it is still a hard book to read, and we question if any one lays it down without the sensation of relief, and perhaps with no very distinct impression of the poem as a whole.
The characters are drawn with distinctness; the principal ones, Aurora Leigh, Romney Leigh, Lady Waldemar, and Marian Erle, with their relations and influences to and on each other, are seen without difficulty; the story proceeds, and the outlines are evident; but in the filling up there is a great deal of extraneous matter, and much of it, too, that, so far as we can see, if left out, it would relieve the heaviness of the drug we cannot well help feeling in turning over one page after another. Does she mean these parts as a foil, to make us more glad, and cause us to read the true poetical ones with a higher zest? If so, she doubtless attains the object, but it is by the sacrifice of no small portion of the whole meed of praise she might have earned. We are spell-bound by many a line that flashes through the murky night in which we are plodding, but the dazzling glare often only renders it darker to us ahead, and we long for that morn which comes at last breaking over the hills; we feel vexed to have been so long struggling through the bogs, chasing the ignes fatui, and not all the splendor of the mounting monarch’s beams can make us forget how long we have been tangled and bemired on our way, and how much time and labor we have lost to reach the end of our journey through such a picture of life as she has drawn out for us. We can open the book and run through its pages, and let our eye light on many beautiful, many noble thoughts, many finely variegated delineations of man and society. We can sympathize with this or that outburst of emotion, and see and feel that the mind and the heart have been thrown with strong impulse into those lines, and so we can feel that it shows its author’s earnest toil; but when we have admitted all this, we still feel she has made a failure. The best analysis we have yet met with of the volume—a most able, though searching criticism—will be found in the January number of Blackwood’s Magazine.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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