E570305A. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
The Boston Daily Courier, 5 March 1857, p. 2.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 301–302.
Beyond all reasonable question, the writer of this book is one of the three greatest living poets. Here are 365 closely printed pages of blank verse making one poem, written by a woman, and so written that one who reads its first three books must read it through as he would read a novel. This alone makes a triumph. But when we state the limitations of the woman and the faults of the book, it becomes a triumph of clear, strong purpose, imaginative insight and intellectual power which no woman who has ever written English, or, so far as we know, any other tongue, has yet achieved in literature or art. She has no capacity for high and consistent characterization; whoever her characters are, and in whatsover circumstances born or placed, they all talk exactly as Mrs. Browning would talk were she in their position,—though her language descriptive of character is bold, clear and expressive. With rare exceptions, where her blank verse, in the very necessities of her expression of high thought, rises into something like a Shakspearian roll and grandeur of movement, it is harsh, stony and bare of poetic atmosphere and harmony. The character of her mind and the expression of her thought are bleak, from want of saliency, of floating and airy sweep and repose of movement, and of instinctive and subtle grace. But her main misfortune as a woman, as seen in this book, is not an excrescence, but a limitation of nature—a want, not of essential purity, but of what we must call delicate instinct—which occasionally not only makes her state palpably and baldly to offensiveness what would be expressed with far more force in suggestive and imaginative language, but which interferes with her dramatic insight and truth of characterization, as in the case of “Lady Waldemar.”
We speak of this with no squeamishness, but looking to its essential and not its petty relations. Mrs. Browning is, of course, vastly greater than any woman of comparatively small capacity for thought, however superior her delicate insight and imaginative sensibility; yet it is certain that the author would be a far greater woman, and her genius have far greater range and completeness, were her delicacy commensurate to her power. Without this addition we can hardly conceive of a woman greater than her;—with it, we believe that some woman will yet do what none of her sex has yet done—enrich our dramatic and narrative literature, not only without wrench to her womanliness, but with her creations as free from the limitations of her own individuality as they shall be full of all the thought, emotion and experience of her sex. To us it seems sad, to others inevitable, that no woman has ever yet placed upon the pages of any literature a great woman, organically and artistically consistent and self-centred. One would think that women should tell us of women. We have said that she is one of the three greatest living poets. Tennyson, wanting not only dramatic imagination but manly force and directness, is always, in the strictest sense, a poet. Shelley’s figure comparing translation of high poetry to throwing a violet into a crucible to detect the primal source of its color and beauty would apply to the attempt to reduce any of Tennyson’s poems to prose. The form is vital to the thought. Without dramatic force or variety, his characters sing with the even consistency and perfect imaginative beauty of thought with which Greek statues, could they speak, would sing the moods and phases which they embody. Such “dulcet and harmonious breath” subtle and evanescent, Tennyson catches and holds, with all the beauty, variety and precision with which our windows now show us the breath of the morning.
Robert Browning, “of imagination all compact,” full to the brim of what Tennyson lacks, sadly wanting all (but the imagination) that makes up Tennyson’s greatness,—with dramatic imagination beyond that of any English poet of the last thirty years,—with thought and feeling far more profound, and with grasp and comprehensiveness of intellect further reaching than Tennyson’s,—is so full of irrepressible freak and whim, so impatient of processes, and so deficient in fine ear for rhythm, that his marvellous flashes of dramatic power hardly light up the expectation of the great poem which his admirers look for.
We have thus far spoken only of what Mrs. Browning is not. In a future article we shall have the more grateful task of attempting to state what she is, and of dwelling at length upon the thorough earnestness, the vital grasp of truth, and the commanding power and imagination of the remarkable book which we have made the occasion of these preliminary thoughts.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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