E570228B. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
Christian Inquirer, 28 February 1857, p. 2.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 289–291.
This novel in blank verse is the greatest poem which Mrs. Browning, or any other woman, has yet written. It is not epic, and does not class with the mighty masters of that lyre. It is not a drama, and if it were, its characterization would be found to be halting and imperfect, for in the dialogues only one person really talks through the whole, and that one is the incomparable poet herself. But it is the philosophy of life done in verse, a superb lyric of the age, rising and falling, wailing and exulting through all the notes of the gamut, and all the stops of the instrument. It is a splendid creation of art, a vital organization of all the author’s ideas on Human Life and Destiny, set and sung to the flow of magical words and the richest imagery. Religion, Science, Socialism, Love, all twist their golden threads into the warp and woof. In the wide and graceful sweep of her wing, History, Biography, the Classics, are touched upon, and she bears away riches from them all. The subtle and subjective power of the book is wonderful. Aurora Leigh is Mrs. Browning, but the impersonation is not offensive. Power sits enthroned on every page. We may sometimes pause at the audacious grasp of thought, the truth of a sentiment, or the good taste of a figure, but we are not obliged to complain that anything is dimly conceived, or lamely expressed. Indeed, we should perhaps doubt whether there was quite enough of the mystic in Mrs. Browning for the very highest poetry. When will there be such another glorious constellation of geniuses in that vein as Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth?
In “Aurora Leigh,” to use Mr. Emerson’s phrase, “beauty rides on the tiger.” Power, and pride, and strength underlie it as primitive strata. This poem reassures us that the age can produce something more than cotton or corn, and that God has still some divine souls left in his quiver. Right alongside of the Crystal Palace, the steamship, the car, and the telegraph rises fairer than marble, and subtler than science or art, the old eternal creation of the divine and the beautiful, that is “a joy forever.”
The staple idea of the work is Humanity, and the greatest experience of Humanity, Love. In this humanitarian characteristic Mrs. Browning beats time to the advancing ideas of the age. It is not necessary to date your story in a mouldy antiquity, or date it at all. The tragic, the comic, epic, lyric, moral elements are all in the everlasting Now. They are here in us today, as in Cain or Cato. God loads and fires his human cannon with full charges. The poet says it all in one phrase
Humanity is great.
This is the key of her book. It is the key of the age. It is the essence of freedom. It is the spirit of the New Testament. Humanity is great. Honor all men. Mrs. Browning sings what Channing preached.
The plot is as good as we can expect of the English mind, since Southern Europe only knows how to get up plots, for they are congenial to life there. English and American plots almost always blunder. The incidents and machinery are well-conceived and executed, though we think Romney and Aurora hold each other by the button rather too long in the last scene, before they understand what is what. The interest turns on the great hinge of love, and if it sometimes grates harshly, it grates sublime thunder. The finale has that sad success which characterizes all earthly life, as it respects this world, but which augurs all the more for it as it respects the glorious Hereafter. The ennobled and purified pair, out of great tribulation, and with the scars of battle upon them, but winners of immortal good, are grandly represented in the closing scene, as looking off from earth, one with tender eyes of sight, and the other with the deep-seeing eyes of faith, into the great coming Morn of God, “that new, near Day.”
If we were disposed to be hypercritical, we should say that Mrs. Browning’s conception outruns as yet her execution. She thinks greater than she sings. Not that her language is not fine, and rich, and genuine, but she allows at times, as most modern poets do, with a “fatal facility,” certain ragged and unhemmed sentences to flow from her pen, that should have been drilled into order—certain rudenesses that should have been smoothed. Art makes us fastidious against itself. The profuse display of so much skill awakens the hankering after perfection. If you can run the positive degree up to the comparative in this artistic declining, keep on, we say, and make it superlative. The Horatian precept of keeping a work nine years before you publish it, implies that you use the file meantime. In freshness of language, and the graceful investiture of thought with its fitting costume of words, Mrs. Browning has achieved a splendid success.
The triumph of the work is a victory for our humanity, and a victory for woman. While Conventions are held to say that woman has power, genius, art, and can hold her own with man, Mrs. Browning has done the thing. She has walked with the heroes and captains, and clashed the cymbals of Olympus, and played with the bolts of Jove. It is a grand lyric of true democracy. It is a sermon of the “Broad” New World Church. We are taught that man and woman are greater than their condition, are divine, are immortal, are channels of godlike forces and currents. We care not here for Ilium, or Eneas, or Satan, or Jerusalem freed, or Jerusalem lost, the diamond pivot of a human heart is axle enough for the grandest poem.
To narrate the story would spoil it to some who have not yet had the exquisite pleasure of its perusal, but these gems will show what a mine is this poem of “sapphire, chalcedony, and amethyst.”
The death of Aurora’s father has this vivid passage
Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning. His last word was, “Love,
Love, my child, love, love!—(then he had done with grief)
Love, my child.”
In other passages occur these brilliants
Since love she knows is justified of love.
Some people always sigh in thanking God.
On books
Mark, there. We get no good
By 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.
True, many a prophet teaches in the roads,
True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavens
Upon his own head in strong martyrdom,
In order to light men a moment’s space.
Good aims not always make good books.
Whoever lives true life, will love true love.
Every wish
Is like a prayer . . with God.
For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction.
How grand this is
What, if even God
Were chiefly God by living out himself
To an individualism of the Infinite,
Eternal, intense, profuse—still throwing up
The golden spray of multitudinous worlds
In measure to the proclive weight and rush
Of his inner nature—the spontaneous love
Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life?
If a flower
Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals,
You’d soon attain to a trick of looking up—
And so with her.
God’s better to us than many mothers are,
And children cannot wander beyond reach
Of the sweep of his white raiment.
Dear Marian, of one clay God made us all.
What is art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushes towards the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art’s life—and where we live, we suffer and fall.
Dear, be happy. Sing your songs,
If that’s your way! but sometimes slumber too,
Nor tire too much with following out of breath,
The rhymes upon your mountains of Delight
Reflect, if Art be, in truth, the higher life,
You need the lower life to stand upon,
In order to reach up unto that higher.
And whoso loves
Believes the impossible.
I called the artist but a greatened man.
God is not too great for little cares.
I will not bate
One artist-dream, on straw or down, my lord,
Nor pinch my liberal soul, though I be poor,
Nor cease to love high, though I live thus low.
And here’s the secret of a hundred creeds—
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,
By reiteration chiefly.
Humanity is great,
And if I would not rather pore upon
An ounce of common, ugly, human dust,
An artisan’s palm, or a peasant’s brow,
Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God,
Than track old Nilas to his silver roots,
And wait on all the changes of the moon
Set it down
As weakness—strength by no means.
The hungry beggar boy
Bears yet a breastful of a fellow world
To this world, undisparaged, undespoiled,
And (while we scorn him for a flower or two,
As being, Heaven help us, less poetical)
Contains, himself, both flowers and firmaments
And surging seas, and aspectable stars,
And all that we would push him out of sight
In order to see nearer. Let us pray
God’s grace to keep God’s image in repute.
And, plant a poet a word even, deep enough
In any man’s breast, looking presently
For offshoots, you have done more for the man
Than if you dressed him in a broadcloth coat,
And warmed his Sunday pottage at your fire.
Here is a picture:
And there I sate, one evening, by the road,
I, Marian Erle, myself, alone, undone,
Facing a sunset low upon the flats,
As if it were the finish of all time—
The great red stone upon my sepulchre,
Which angels were too weak to roll away.
The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud.
The devil’s most devilish when respectable.
In gravity and holy calm,
We two may live on toward the truer life.
The world’s male chivalry has perished out,
But women are knights-errant to the last.
For which inheritance beyond your birth,
You sold that poisonous porridge called your soul.
Clocks are voluble with lead.
Without the spiritual, observe,
The natural’s impossible—no form,
No motion! Without sensuous, spiritual
Is inappreciable—no beauty, or power!
The antetype,
Some call the ideal!—better called the real,
And certain to be called so presently
When things shall have their names.
The whole temporal show related royally,
And built up to eterne significance
Through the open arms of God. “There’s nothing great
Nor small,” has said a poet of our day,
And truly I reiterate, “nothing small!”
Art’s the witness of what is
Behind this show.
The spiritual significance burns through
The hieroglyphic of material shows.
Nothing single, nor alone—
The great below clenched by the great above,
Shade here authenticating substance there,
The body proving spirit, as the effect
The cause.
Art is much, but love is more.
O art, my art, thou’rt much, but love is more,
Art symbolizes heaven, but Love is God.
And makes heaven.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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