E570300B. Aurora Leigh.
The National Magazine (London), March 1857, pp. 314–315.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 299–301.
The progress of Mrs. Browning’s mind, from her earliest poems to the present, is an interesting study for the poetic observer. After the plaintive human tenderness of her first lays, now little known, we had the spiritual aspiration revealed in the “Seraphim;” then the strife between human love with its mortal crosses, and faith with its immortal crown, which formed the frequent burden of her two volumes in 1844; then the sympathy evinced in “Casa Guidi Windows” with the present condition of Italy,—a poem proving the writer’s sense of the uses and responsibilities of her power; and finally, the present volume, Aurora Leigh, in which a direct and practical interest in the world of to-day is yet more evident.
Mrs. Browning has lost something since she began to write; but she has gained more. There is less tenderness, less of the touching music drawn from grief, less of those qualities that come home to the individual; but there is more strength, a yet nobler aim, a profounder insight, a deeper sympathy with universal man. There are times now when Mrs. Browning becomes sarcastic and denunciatory. Her genius has laid aside the lute that whispered of life’s sorrows, and done battle with its ways. Its mien is at once sterner and loftier; less winning to the many, but with a grander expression, enhanced, as it were, by the scars of conflict.
Aurora Leigh is a poetess. She is so, not by any formal choice or mere mental aptitude, but by nature. Her genius is the growth of her being, the necessary efflorescence of such a root. Given the quick instincts of right, the warm impulses, and the ideal yearnings that are blended in this woman’s heart, you have as its inevitable result such a creation as an Aurora Leigh. Such a woman will pierce to the core of things, despise all false semblances, aspire to an unattainable perfection, and turn at first with a sad scorn, not only from the counterfeits of worth, but from its true exemplars, if they move on the humble level of mere utilities, and propose by their benevolence to ameliorate man’s outward condition only. Her cousin, Romney Leigh, embodies this latter type of character. He is a philanthropist who would rescue the victims of poverty and crime chiefly by an improvement of their circumstances, and who is apt, in what are called practical reforms, to contemn the influences of imagination and feeling, and the solemn realities of man’s inner life, to which they point.
Spiritual agency and material agency are symbolised in these two persons; and their union in the sequel signifies the fusion of the principles which they represent. The aspiring and scornful idealist finds the noblest use of her gifts in their practical application. The material worker learns that man’s social progress is blindly aimed at unless pursued in the light of his immortality; and, better than all, both acknowledge that in every true worker there must be that which is lovelier than any glimpse of imagination, directer in its blessings than the most practical deed,—the surrender of the doer in soul and act to the Source of all good, a will that seeks but to reflect His, and leaves results with Him who, through all intermediates, is the One Cause. Says Aurora to Romney, referring to a long-past conversation:
“We were both wrong that June day,—both as wrong
As an east wind had been. I who talked of art,
And you who grieved for all men’s griefs . . what then?
We surely made too small a part for God
In these things. What we are, imports us more
Than what we eat; and life, you’ve granted me,
Develops from within. But innermost
Of the inmost, most interior of the interne,
God claims his own, Divine humanity
Renewing nature,—or the piercingest verse,
Prest in by subtlest poet, still must keep
As much upon the outside of a man
As the very bowl in which he dips his beard.”
Interwoven with the story of Aurora Leigh and her cousin Romney is that of Marian Erle; and there are passages in it which will startle and probably repel the reader. In selecting an image of almost saintly purity from surroundings of misery and sin, Mrs. Browning has so far exercised a choice which cannot, we think, be fairly impeached. Such cases are exceptional; but an exception, no less than a rule, is a fact, and may claim its place as a true contribution to our experience. Moreover, the exception is here fraught with meaning. Providence does at times demonstrate the worth of the soul by showing it victorious over circumstances; and the effect of such an instance is always ennobling. Still, there are certain external impresses left on the forms of character, even when they do not touch its essence. The spirit of a Marian Erle might possibly, under all opposing conditions, have remained holy and devoted, as it is here shown; but its mode of expression would have been more homely, and its very purity would have earlier conducted it from those scenes of pollution by which it is so long environed in the story. But when from these considerations we pass to the graver one, that Marian Erle becomes the innocent victim of an outrage almost too horrible to glance at, we naturally demand from the poet overpowering reasons to justify such a result.
Doubtless Mrs. Browning has set forth these terrible details partly to show the nobility of Romney Leigh, who will not allow the foulest indignity of circumstance to shake his constancy to one who is virtually pure. Doubtless the truth that no malignity of fortune can stain an unblemished soul finds a powerful illustration in such a narrative. Yet we are bound to say, that all these ends might have been attained by means less harrowing and repulsive; although we fully admit, that if we could reconcile ourselves to the obnoxious theme, it has been treated with consummate delicacy and power.
Yet again, while on points of taste, we must object to that abrupt invocation of sacred names which so often occurs in the book. Irreverence is the last quality that we should really attribute to Mrs. Browning; but there is a savour of it in her manner which will give needless pain.
In unfolding its general design, the poem touches upon the chief figures in modern society. The poet, the artist, the high-churchman, the pantheist, the woman of convention, the woman of fashion, the seamstress, the mechanic and labourer, with all the varied social problems which such characters suggest, have their place and their comment. Again, there are exquisite descriptions of scenery, a wonderful affluence of fresh and striking imagery, and passages of story intensely dramatic. In treating of the poet’s art, which may here stand as the symbol of all intellectual effort, the perception that religious feeling is the prime element of the highest genius is finely conveyed. The transcripts of nature and external life, it is urged, lack their real value, unless they express man’s spiritual condition. [p. 315→]
There’s not a flower of spring,
That dies ere June, but vaunts itself allied
By issue and symbol, by significance
And correspondence, to that spirit-world
Outside the limits of our space and time,
Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice
With human meanings; else they miss the thought,
And henceforth step down lower, stand confessed
Instructed poorly for interpreters,—
Thrown out by an easy cowslip in the text.
The following, too, is nobly felt and expressed:
Fame itself,
That approbation of the general race,
Presents a poor end (though the arrow speed,
Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white),
And the highest fame was never reached except
By what was aimed above it. Art for art,
And good for God Himself, the essential Good!
The poet’s duty to apprehend sublimity in the present is not less grand in conception and utterance:
Every age,
Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it. We’ll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man:
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little of any human form
Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.
They’d have, in fact, to travel ten miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them,
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,
And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso,—hand, that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down
To all the country pastures. ’Tis even thus
With times we live in,—evermore too great
To be apprehended near.
But poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things, as intimately deep,
As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
O not to sing of lizards or of toads
Alive i’ the ditch there!—’twere excusable;
But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,
As dead as must be, for the greater part,
The poems made on their chivalric bones.
And that’s no wonder: death inherits death.”
Free on the whole from the obscurity that counterfeits depth, the book is not, on the other hand, poetry made easy. It deals both with imagination and philosophy; and those who love neither, and yet expect to understand the entire poem, will be disappointed. Yet there are many pictures invested with such a glow of feeling, that even a dim imagination will make them out by the light of the heart. Has there been any thing yet written of a babe more lovely suggestive or musical than this? The mother
Approached the bed, and drew a shawl away:
You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruise
More calmly and more carefully than so,—
Nor would you find within a rosier flushed
Pomegranate—
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. And love was here
As instant! in the pretty baby-mouth,
Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked;
The little naked feet drawn up the way
Of nestled birdlings; every thing so soft
And tender,—to the little holdfast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of ’t.
* * * * * * *
The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,
And, staring out at us with all their blue,
As half perplexed between the angelhood
He had been away to visit in his sleep,
And our most mortal presence,—gradually
He saw his mother’s face, accepting it
In change for heaven itself, with such a smile
As might have well been learnt there,—never moved,
But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,
So happy (half with her and half with heaven)
He could not have the trouble to be stirred,
But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said:
As red and still indeed as any rose,
That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life.
In almost every page the reader will meet the proofs of a moral insight, keen and noble, embodied in felicitous diction. As an instance, take this on the superiority of the blindest veneration to frigid and learned scepticism:
Good love, howe’er ill-placed,
Is better for a man’s soul in the end
Than if he loved ill what deserves love well.
A pagan, kissing, for a step of Pan,
The wild-goat’s hoof-print on the loamy down,
Exceeds our modern thinker who turns back
The strata .. granite, limestone, coal, and clay,
Concluding coldly with, “Here’s law! Where’s God?”
Nor are examples wanting in which a fine meaning is disfigured by a reckless audacity of phrase. Thus:
Headlong leaps
Of waters that cry out for joy or fear
In leaping through the palpitating pines,
Like a white soul tossed out to eternity
With thrills of time upon it.
In many cases, where the talk of frivolous persons is reported, the language becomes mere prose cut into lengths; but the dramatic intention is here obvious, and the writer should be allowed the benefit of it. She never puts trite dialogue into any mouths but those from which nothing better would emanate in life.
Still, it must be said that the poem wants some of the graces of art, even though it often shows that better grace which is proverbially beyond art’s reach. Hasty and even random execution is often visible. The last touch of the chisel is lacking, and will be regretted by all except those sectarian minds who mistake roughness for strength, and cannot believe that grandeur of idea may consist with accuracy of detail. When Mrs. Browning is logical or philosophical her verse is often harsh, and outrages every rule of scanning. When, on the contrary, she writes from emotion, the defect rarely occurs; at times, indeed, the lines swell upon the ear, wave after wave, as it were, with the fullness and the cadence of a tide. As critics, we of course register these peculiarities of style for praise or censure; but let us say (and we can pay no greater homage to Mrs. Browning’s mind) that praise for her merits as an artist is the last thing we care to tender her. There is a strain of noble intensity in her book that attracts us from its manner to its substance. We feel that we have been communing with a spirit, perhaps somewhat extreme in its scorn of pigmy natures, and at times confounding narrowness of view with insincerity of motive, but a spirit so generous, earnest, and high, that it lifts from the transitory and the mean all that come within its range; translates us from the world of shows to that of realities, and makes us feel that the noblest things are also the most real. There is so much help, truth, and sympathy in the aspect of such genius, that we only notice by an after-thought the wreath upon its brow.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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