E570300A. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
The Knickerbocker, March 1857, pp. 315–316.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 293–294.
We have an absolute respect for the author of “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” the “Vision of Fair Women,” the “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” and we would like exceedingly to love Mrs. Browning with that reverent affection accorded to great poets, and which some of our cotemporaries [p. 316→] declare she merits. But we cannot do this so long as she persists in hiding what golden grain she has gleaned from the harvest-field of song, under such vast heaps of chaff as the most of Aurora Leigh. We cannot read her with pleasure, for the hope of getting a few tender womanly beauties of thought, while the most of her diction is so turgidly common-place, and her style so hopelessly and irrecoverably opaque. She has been blamed already for this, and has not profited by the criticism. This Waterfall, that
Cries out for joy or fear
In leaping through the palpitating pines,
Like a white soul tossed out to eternity
With the ills of time upon it,
is just as when, long ago, she called Powers’ Greek Slave “the thunder of white silence;” that is, it is the “echo of blue or brown or chrome-yellow nonsense.”
She certainly says very pretty things, as of her severe maiden aunt, as possessing
Cheeks in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure.
But what in or out of nature is the
Lava lymph, which trickles from successive galaxies,
Still drop by drop adown the finger of God
In the new worlds?
Or what picture of mountains is it to describe them
Sitting in the magic circle, with the mutual touch
Electric, panting from their full, deep hearts
Beneath the influent heavens; and waiting for
Communion and commission?
It sounds far more like the description of a fat broker in his pew in church. If we were asked what then is this poem, we would say: “It is more than twelve thousand lines of blank verse, hopelessly obscure, and we fear that the beauties occupy to the language the relative position of the classical needle in the haystack.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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