E570400B. Aurora Leigh.
The Dublin University Magazine, April 1857, pp. 460–470.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 316–323.
We are disposed to think that no better test can be found of the civilization and enlightenment of any people than the position which woman attains to amongst them, both in a social and intellectual point of view. It is quite true that her position and her power in some of those ancient kingdoms of the world which may to a great extent claim the character of being civilized, at first sight appear to contradict our assertion. True it is, that in that splendid era of Greece, when Socrates discoursed wisdom, and Pericles exhibited the power of the statesman, the orator, and the savant—women occupied a place, which, though socially elevated as wives and mothers, was intellectually an inferior one, and the woman who dared to step out of the ranks of her order, and had the bold ambition to share the learning and the acquirements of man, did so at a perilous price. She purchased knowledge as it has been often purchased—the knowledge of good with the knowledge of evil. She passed forth from the companionship of women—who to her could no longer be companions in mind—to the unrestrained intercourse with the more congenial spirits of men. She forfeited, by a cruel social necessity of the time and place in which her life was cast, the purity of the woman, in seeking the freedom of soul which she could then and there alone enjoy amongst man; and casting off the chains that galled she, cast off with them the robes that attired her. Such was Aspasia—learned, eloquent, witty, a politician, a philosopher; such were, in an inferior degree, many Grecian women distinguished by the title, at once their shame and their glory, Hetæræ [p. 461→] —companions of man. But even from these depths, woman sent up her strong cry against the barbarism that denied to the intellect, which she had in common with man, the culture which he reserved for himself, and attested that no civilization was based on sound principles which did not tend to raise her higher and higher from that state of inferiority to man, which is the mark of savage life.
But the light of the world’s true civilizer, the Christian gospel, had not shone into the Greek mind to teach them the God-bestowed equality of women; and it is profoundly instructive to observe how the influence of Christianity operated upon pagan civilization in this respect, even where its faith was not professed. Take, for example, the position of women in the Roman Empire, two centuries after the birth of Christ. We find them aspiring even to reign, and sharing in the councils of the legislative body; and better still—because truer to the less obtrusive mission—we find two women, wise, learned, and good, instructing the tender mind and guiding the youthful hand of an emperor; and when Mæsa died, the noble mother Mamæa, as the sole regent of her son and of the empire, watches, guides, moulds, and forms the character of Alexander Severus, till she gave to her country a ruler whose virtues and justice made him a blessing to his people, while she maintained her influence over him through life.
Passing on to more modern times when Christianity had, in a voice as authoritative as clear, propounded the true position of woman in relation to man; that indissoluble “companionship” which springs from the reciprocal wants in each supplied by the other—that part which she forms of a harmonious moral whole—supplement and complement—diverse, that the two may form a concord, not alike, to produce but a unison. Thenceforth the truth of this test of civilization becomes clearer; and though it may occasionally seem under particular circumstances to fail, still we may confidently assert, that as the tide of civilization rises higher and higher, so does it bear up with it this great principle—albeit that now and then some wave may not be urged as far inland as that which preceded it, or that a neap may follow a spring tide.
Looking to the nations which take the lead in civilization, we find there also that woman is held in the highest consideration—her rights most acknowledged, her intellect most cultivated by man; and in return she there best vindicates his judgment and her own worth by taking her place beside him, and establishing her true companionship to man in all things that the intellect can attain to. We do not stop to illustrate this fact, which as a truth will be evident to every philosophical student of history. The seventeenth century was remarkable for the great strides which man made in civilization. The activity of the human mind manifested itself in every direction, and it was in a word, as M. Guizot says, “Un temps de grands hommes et de grandes choses.” May we not add, too, that it was the age of great women? Thenceforth women took a higher place, not only socially but intellectually; and from that to the present we find them occupying elevated places in the literature of their day. In science, and above all in imaginative literature, we see woman vindicating her intellectual powers, and contributing her share in the further advancement of that civilization to which she is so much indebted.
Yet with all this, as a class, woman has not yet practically attained to her true position, however in theory that position may be acknowledged; and though the woman who stands on the same level as man no longer forfeits respect or sympathy, she still is exceptional, and not the representative of her class. Even to-day the observation of Chaucer is not without its application:—
Wommen ben born to thraldom and penaunce,
And to ben under mannes gouvernaunce.
From time to time some larger heart or bolder spirit amongst them reclaims against this. And at the present the social wrongs of woman have forced eloquent protests from many a sister. It is evident that the greatest female poet of our own age—for such undoubtedly is Elizabeth Barrett Browning—has been [p. 462→] mainly animated by this feeling in the production of her last and, with all its drawbacks, her greatest poem, “Aurora Leigh.”
The main object of this work, which we are now about to consider, is, we take it, to deal with some of the great social questions of our own day through the powerful vehicle of poetry, as Kingsley and others have done in prose. The lesson that is most prominently taught we conceive to be this, that no social reform can be successful which seeks to obliterate class distinctions by fusing them one into the other—a truth we should think sufficiently obvious to every reflecting mind. Concurrent with this runs the illustration of woman’s life, in its social suffering and in its highest intellectual development; and beneath both, in the failure both of Romney and Aurora to work out to a prosperous issue their own theories, is finally exhibited to an extent, perhaps beyond what the author intended, the utter dependence of each sex upon the other, the truth that if a primæval decree gave man the dominion, it was as much for woman’s happiness as his own—a dominion which the holy principle of love turns into a blessing to both, by making obedience an anticipating assent. “Bowing beneath that law which sounded through the darkening paradise, she wins for her dower the only freedom that is worthy of woman—the moral liberty which God bestows upon the faithful and obedient spirit.”
Aurora writes her biography. Her father, an austere Englishman, goes to Florence, where he sees her mother in a religious procession,
From which long trail of chanting priests and girls,
A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,
And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,
Transfiguring him to music.
Her mother dies while Aurora is an infant, and her father retires with the child to the mountains above Pelago. There she is educated amidst books and nature, and receives the great inspirations that make her a poetess; and on her father’s death is taken to England, and placed under the guardianship of his sister. The portrait of the aristocratic English lady is drawn with much felicity—starch, cold, formal, and exacting, externally, yet with a loving heart and a high moral feeling. Here is her first reception of her niece:—
She stood upon the steps to welcome me,
Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck,—
Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool
To draw the new light closer, catch and cling
Less blindly. In my ears, my father’s word
Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,
“Love, love, my child.” She, black there with my grief,
Might feel my love—she was his sister once—
I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,
Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,
And drew me feebly through the hall, into
The room she sate in.
There, with some strange spasm
Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands
Imperiously, and held me at arm’s length,
And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes
Searched through my face,—ay, stabbed it through and through,
Through brows and cheek and chin, as if to find
A wicked murderer in my innocent face,
If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,
She struggled for her ordinary calm,
And missed it rather,—told me not to shrink,
As if she had told me not to lie or swear,—
“She loved my father, and would love me too
As long as I deserved it.”
Aurora’s English education commences, which is, in a great degree, to unlearn what she had gathered from nature, and to substitute such things as form the indispensables of an English lady’s acquirements. The course of this study is described with a railing bitterness that betrays the sense that in this lies one of the wrongs wrought upon woman:—
By the way,
The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary—or a stool
To stumble over and vex you .. “curse that stool!”
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not, [p. 463→]
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this .. that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps.
Romney Leigh, her cousin, full of high and unattainable notions of social reform, seeks the love of Aurora. How finely is the first manifestation of his feeling given in a single touch:—
Once, he stood so near
He dropped a sudden hand upon my head
Bent down on woman’s work, as soft as rain—
But then I rose and shook it off as fire,
The stranger’s touch that took my father’s place,
Yet dared seem soft.
The girl does not understand the young philosopher, and rejects his suit, while she unconsciously loves him; but she has found, meantime, a treasure—a garret filled with books of her father’s. These she devours indiscriminately, and at last she chances upon the poets:—
As the earth
Plunges in fury, when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat
The marts and temples, the triumphal gates
And towers of observation, clears herself
To elemental freedom—thus, my soul,
At poetry’s divine first finger-touch,
Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,
Convicted of the great eternities
Before two worlds.
It would be difficult to find within the range of poetry anything finer than the disquisition that follows this outburst— profound, impassioned, true: we have therein no doubt a revelation of the past life and poet—thoughts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning—a self-portraiture as manifest as those of Rubens or Titian. By all means, let all young poets read and study this fine analytic criticism, and thereby learn to know their high mission, and learn how best they may work it out. We pass from it with one quotation, which we cannot resist giving:—
But the sun was high
When first I felt my pulses set themselves
For concords; when the rhythmic turbulence
Of blood and brain swept outward upon words,
As wind upon the alders, blanching them
By turning up their under-natures till
They trembled in dilation. O delight
And triumph of the poet,—who would say
A man’s mere “yes,” a woman’s common “no,”
A little human hope of that or this,
And says the word so that it burns you through
With a special revelation, shakes the heart
Of all the men and women in the world,
As if one came back from the dead and spoke,
With eyes too happy, a familiar thing
Become divine i’ the utterance! while for him
The poet, the speaker, he expands with joy;
The palpitating angel in his flesh
Thrills inly with consenting fellowship
To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves
Outside of time.
The maiden aunt dies, leaving Aurora a small pittance, the estates going to Romney, who seeks unsuccessfully to enrich her whom he cannot win for his wife. The interview between the cousins is a piece of excellent dramatic writing, still further illustrating the real defects of Aurora’s character; and forth she goes, a woman spurning man’s help, to win her way as a poet in London. Aurora becomes an author, and gains fame and name. The labour-life of the poet is here revealed with a truth that tells of no fictitious depiction—in this we can well believe that Mrs. Browning has embodied her own deep experiences of art, and her views of poetry. Meanwhile Romney works out his false theories, and seeks out a wife amongst the lowest grade of the people—one whom he has found in an hospital. Through the intervention of a Lady Waldemar, a true type of a fashionable aristocrat, who loves Romney and wishes to prevent the marriage, Aurora learns the intentions of Romney, and visits his intended wife. Marian Erle is found in a poor court, pure amidst impurities, noble amidst all that is degraded. Aurora learns the story of her life, and recounts it. It may be that such a daughter of the people may exist. Born in the midst of abject degradation, surrounded by every inducement which poverty and ignorance can offer to lead her astray, subjected to every insult and wrong which her social position exposes her to—it may be that such a one may [p. 464→] overcome all these; nay, rise the stronger from her encounter with them, and be high-souled, pure, true, holy. But we look upon such a moral portraiture as that of Marian Erle almost monstrous in its faultlessness, and cannot pronounce it true to nature; and yet, the power and beauty with which Mrs. Browning has wrought out the picture fascinate one’s gaze, and make us forget all that is unreal in our admiration of all that is rich in the colouring and forcible in the expression. The story of Marian Erle is plainly designed by the authoress as an illustration of the results of class oppression, and class suffering. That many such episodes in social life are to be found, as those which make up the whole of this girl’s trials, we have no doubt; and the writer who exposes to public view these gangrenes that eat into and corrupt the heart of the social body, discharges a high duty to humanity. The marriage day is appointed, and Romney, true to his hallucination, determines that all the world shall witness his attempt at social fusion:
Half St. Giles in frieze
Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold.
We shall not describe the latter portion of this strange assembly. Its characteristics have been written by many a pen, and its vanities become common-place beyond the power of even the poet to give them force; but the throng of the people in their deepest degradation and wretchedness, the outpourings of lanes and alleys, these are pourtrayed with a masculine vigour, and somewhat of a masculine coarseness of touch:—
They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church
In a dark slow stream, like blood. To see that sight,
The noble ladies stood up in their pews,
Some pale for fear, a few as red for hate,
Some simply curious, some just insolent,
And some in wondering scorn,—“What next? what next?”
These crushed their delicate rose-lips from the smile
That misbecame them in a holy place,
With broidered hems of perfumed handkerchiefs;
Those passed the salts with confidence of eyes
And simultaneous shiver of moiré silk;
While all the aisles, alive and black with heads,
Crawled slowly toward the altar from the street,
As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole
With shuddering involutions, swaying slow
From right to left, and then from left to right,
In pants and pauses. What an ugly crest
Of faces, rose upon you everywhere,
From that crammed mass! You did not usually
See faces like them in the open day:
They hide in cellars, not to make you mad
As Romney Leigh is.—Faces!—O my God,
We call those, faces? men’s and women’s .. ay,
And children’s;—babies, hanging like a rag
Forgotten on their mother’s neck,—poor mouths,
Wiped clean of mother’s milk by mother’s blow,
Before they are taught her cursing. Faces! .. phew!,
We’ll call them vices festering to despairs,
Or sorrows petrifying to vices: not
A finger-touch of God left whole on them;
All ruined, lost—the countenance worn out
As the garments, the will dissolute as the acts,
The passions loose and draggling in the dirt
To trip the foot up at the first free step!—
Those, faces! ’twas as if you had stirred up hell
To leave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost
In fiery swirls of slime,—such strangled fronts,
Such obdurate jaws were thrown up constantly,
To twit you with your race, corrupt your blood,
And grind to devilish colours all your dreams
Henceforth, .. though, haply, you should drop asleep
By clink of silver waters, in a muse
On Raffael’s mild Madonna of the Bird.
The marriage is, however, frustrated by the schemes of Lady Waldemar; Marian cannot be found. St. Giles becomes infuriate, believing that there is some foul play. Romney’s life is assailed—the police are called in—Aurora faints, and so ends a scene extravagant indeed beyond the very limits of probability, but powerful and stirring, notwithstanding the sense of the unreal that accompanies the reader throughout.
Aurora pursues her poetic course and delivers herself entirely to its study. The fifth book may be said to consist of the views of a poet upon the subject of art in general, especially in connection with poetry. Here Mrs. Browning rises to the highest [p. 465→] elevation. Profound thoughts, fine criticism, a noble, just, passionate appreciation of poetry, all poured out in a flood of rich, felicitous language, sparkling with illustrations, and glowing as if blood-hot from the heart, tell at once that we have the writer revealed to us here in her own nature. We pass with regret many fine passages which we would desire to quote in proof of this, and shall content ourselves with one singularly beautiful:—
While Art
Sets action on the top of suffering:
The artist’s part is both to be and do,
Transfixing with a special, central power
The flat experience of the common man,
And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,
Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing
He feels the inmost: never felt the less
Because he sings it. Does a torch less burn
For burning next reflectors of blue steel,
That he should be the colder for his place
’Twixt two incessant fires,—his personal life’s,
And that intense refraction which burns back
Perpetually against him from the round
Of crystal conscience he was born into
If artist-born? O sorrowful great gift
Conferred on poets, of a twofold life,
When one life has been found enough for pain!
We, staggering ’neath our burden as mere men,
Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,
Support the intolerable strain and stress
Of the universal, and send clearly up
With voices broken by the human sob,
Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!
In the midst of all this high thinking, we have interposed a scene in a fashionable London ball-room as prosaic and inane as can well be imagined. With this we are not disposed to quarrel; on the contrary, we think it has been introduced with an artistic purpose and design to produce high effect by strong contrast. We find the same thing, again and again, done by Shakspeare, in Hamlet, in the Tempest, in Lear and elsewhere. The coarse or foolish, or the low in thought and expression, following quickly upon the elevated and poetic. We see it in great paintings, as in the Marriage at Cana, where amidst the magnificence of regal splendour, the dog laps up viands from a golden dish. We see it in fine in real life—the commonplace and prosaic ever touching upon but not blending with the sublime and poetic, like colours which set off each other when in juxta-position, but do not lose their distinctive characters by fusion. Such a fusion the author might easily have effected by clothing the sentiments of the ball-room men and women in poetic language; but she would then have been neither true to their nature nor to her own art, and we hold very cheaply the superficial criticism that condemns this episode in Aurora Leigh.
Aurora leaves England for Italy, first visiting France. We have some admirable philosophic thoughts on French genius and art, as well as a picturesque description of the capital. In the midst of her musings one day,
Walking on the quays
And pulling thoughts to pieces leisurely,
As if I caught at grasses in a field,
And bit them slow between my absent lips,
And shred them with my hands,—
she suddenly sees the face of Marian Erle for a moment, and then loses it in the throng. The effect is described very happily:—
It was as if a meditative man
Were dreaming out a summer afternoon
And watching gnats a-prick upon a pond,
When something floats up suddenly, out there,
Turns over .. a dead face, known once alive—
So old, so new! It would be dreadful now
To lose the sight and keep the doubt of this.
He plunges—ha! he has lost it in the splash.
After long, fruitless search, chance at length again presents Marian to Aurora. Then comes the sequel of that life of the daughter of the poor, a portion of which was previously put forth in the poem. Marian had been committed to the care of a woman by Lady Waldemar, with the means of sending her to Australia. The wretch betrays her trust; the girl is ruined, yet still faultless. The whole story is told with terrible power. It is a masterpiece of sombre and impassioned painting; a recital in which one hears the deep cry of woman’s anguish, in her wrong and outrage, appealing against man to God. We dare not for obvious reasons venture upon the passages of the greatest power; here is one that speaks the feelings of Marian in her misery:— [p. 466→]
I was mad,—
How many weeks, I know not,—many weeks.
I think they let me go, when I was mad,
They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys might
A mad dog which they had tortured. Up and down
I went by road and village, over tracts
Of open foreign country, large and strange,
Crossed everywhere by long thin poplar-lines
Like fingers of some ghastly skeleton Hand
Through sunlight and through moonlight evermore
Pushed out from hell itself to pluck me back,
And resolute to get me, slow and sure;
While every roadside Christ upon his cross
Hung reddening through his gory wounds at me,
And shook his nails in anger, and came down
To follow a mile after, wading up
The low vines and green wheat, crying, “Take the girl!
She’s none of mine from henceforth.”
The soul of the poetess rises up to take part with Marian against the world’s cruelty and calumny. She takes the girl and her child with her to Italy; and believing that Lady Waldemar has wedded, or is about to wed Romney, she writes to her a letter of threatening import, and which, in its way, has pungency and trenchant bitterness enough to save it from the charge of being prosaic, though it is toned down to the language of every-day intercourse.
The journey to Italy is a fine piece of descriptive writing. A railway trip would seem to present little favourable to the poetic mind, and yet a line here and there, rapid as the transit of the train, depicts a city as it is passed by. Take one passage as an example:—
I just knew it when we swept
Above the old roofs of Dijon. Lyons dropped
A spark into the night, half trodden out
Unseen. But presently the winding Rhone
Washed out the moonlight large along his banks,
Which strained their yielding curves out clear and clean
To hold it,—shadow of town and castle blurred
Upon the hurrying river.
* * * * * * *
So we passed
The liberal open country and the close,
And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedge
By great Thor-hammers driven through the rock,
Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits,
And lets it in at once: the train swept in
Athrob with effort, trembling with resolve,
The fierce denouncing whistle wailing on
And dying off smothered in the shuddering dark,
While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressed
As other Titans, underneath the pile
And nightmare of the mountains. Out, at last,
To catch the dawn afloat upon the land!
—Hills, slung forth broadly and gauntly everywhere,
Not crampt in their foundations, pushing wide
Rich outspreads of the vineyards and the corn,
(As if they entertained i’ the name of France)
While, down their straining sides, streamed manifest
A soil as red as Charlemagne’s knightly blood,
To consecrate the verdure. Some one said,
“Marseilles!” And lo, the city of Marseilles,
With all her ships behind her, and beyond,
The scimitar of ever-shining sea,
For right-hand use, bared blue against the sky!
Thence by sea to Genoa, gives the poet a fine scope for inspiration, as she sits upon the deck by moonlight, “between the purple heaven and purple water.” How thoroughly true to nature is this description of the scenery that has delighted every one who has approached Genoa by sea from the north!
The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight
One straining past another along the shore,
The way of grand dull Odyssean ghosts
Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas
And stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peak
They stood: I watched beyond that Tyrian belt
Of intense sea betwixt them and the ship,
Down all their sides the misty olive-woods
Dissolving in the weak congenial moon,
And still disclosing some brown convent-tower
That seems as if it grew from some brown rock,—
Or many a little lighted village, dropt
Like a fallen star, upon so high a point,
You wonder what can keep it in its place
From sliding headlong with the waterfalls
Which drop and powder all the myrtle-groves
With spray of silver. Thus my Italy
Was stealing on us. Genoa broke with day;
The Doria’s long pale palace striking out,
From green hills in advance of the white town,
A marble finger dominant to ships,
Seen glimmering through the uncertain grey of dawn.
And so on to Florence, where Aurora takes up her abode at Bellosguardo. What a delicious picture we have of this spot—so warm and rich and sunny, so accurate and forcible that any one who ever rambled through the out-[p. 467→] lets of Florence cannot fail to appreciate it.
’Tis a tower that keeps
A post of double-observation o’er
The valley of Arno (holding as a hand
The outspread city) straight toward Fiesole
And Mount Morello and the setting sun,—
The Vallombrosan mountains to the right,
Which sunrise fills as full as crystral cups
Wine-filled, and red to the brim because it’s red.
No sun could die, nor yet be born, unseen
By dwellers at my villa: morn and eve
Were magnified before us in the pure
Illimitable space and pause of sky,
Intense as angels’ garments blanched with God,
Less blue than radiant. From the outer wall
Of the garden, dropped the mystic floating grey
Of olive trees, (with interruptions green
From maize and vine) until ’twas caught and torn
On that abrupt black line of cypresses
Which signed the way to Florence. Beautiful
The city lay along the ample vale,
Cathedral, tower and palace, piazza and street;
The river trailing like a silver cord
Through all, and curling loosely, both before
And after, over the whole stretch of land
Sown whitely up and down its opposite slopes,
With farms and villas.
The state of Aurora’s heart is exhibited in the succeeding book of the poem with great art, and prepares us for the issue of the tale. She still loves Romney, and is conscious of it now that she believes him the husband of another. The denouement is finely ushered in by an evening scene from the terrace:—
The heavens were making room to hold the night,
The sevenfold heavens unfolding all their gates
To let the stars out slowly (prophesied
In close-approaching advent, not discerned),
While still the cue-owls from the cypresses
Of the Poggio called and counted every pulse
Of the skyey palpitation. Gradually
The purple and transparent shadows slow
Had filled up the whole valley to the brim,
And flooded all the city, which you saw
As some drowned city in some enchanted sea,
Cut off from nature,—drawing you who gaze,
With passionate desire, to leap and plunge,
And find a sea-king with a voice of waves,
And treacherous soft eyes, and slippery locks
You cannot kiss but you shall bring away
Their salt upon your lips. The duomo-bell
Strikes ten, as if it struck ten fathoms down,
So deep; and fifty churches answer it
The same, with fifty various instances.
Some gaslights tremble along squares and streets;
The Pitti’s palace-front is drawn in fire;
And, past the quays, Maria Novella’s Place,
In which the mystic obelisks stand up
Triangular, pyramidal, each based
On a single trine of brazen tortoises,
To guard that fair church, Buonarroti’s Bride
That stares out from her large blind dial-eyes,
Her quadrant and armillary dials, black
With rhythms of many suns and moons, in vain
Enquiry for so rich a soul as his,—
Methinks I have plunged, I see it all so clear …
And, oh my heart, … the sea-king:
In my ears
The sound of waters. There he stood, my king!
Romney stands before her. Woman’s pride struggles against woman’s love; and she subdues her better nature to receive him with a show of calmness. She learns the failure of all his philanthropic theories—his phalanstery dissolved itself—his efforts to force “crooked creatures to live straight,” bring down upon him the curses of the people, as a tyrant that would constrain them. He is hooted, pelted, fired at by a poacher, and as a climax his ancestral mansion of Leigh Hall is burnt by the mob. Then she finds that he is not the husband of Lady Waldemar, but that he has come to claim and protect Marian and her boy. But Marian, who unawares has approached them, declares that, while she reveres Romney more than ever, she will never be his wife; that in fact she never loved him with a woman’s passion, as she hints another does. Then Romney tells Aurora how he had ever loved her, but strangely says that he would not if he could make her his wife. At last he takes her hand at parting, and the terrible truth breaks upon her, which his vague allusions throughout confirm. Romney is blind—blinded by a burning beam directed against him by Marian’s father when the Hall was set on fire. The scene that follows this discovery is as finely wrought as anything in the volume, its pathos and its passion are each powerful in the extreme. Then the true woman’s nature is revealed, and shines forth in the glory of its humility and love. No mind but a woman’s could, we believe, fully comprehend this fine scene; no pen but a woman’s—and what woman’s pen but [p. 468→] Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s?—could adequately describe it. Aurora is now the suppliant for the blind man’s love. We cannot resist giving a passage, the rather that it exhibits one portion of the moral of this story:—
“And if I came and said ..
What all this weeping scarce will let me say,
And yet what women cannot say at all,
But weeping bitterly .. (the pride keep up,
Until the heart breaks under it) .. I love,—
I love you, Romney” ..
“Silence”! he exclaimed.
“A woman’s pity sometimes makes her mad.
A man’s distraction cannot cheat his soul
To take advantage of it. Yet, ’tis hard—
Farewell, Aurora.”
“But I love you, sir;
And when a woman says she loves a man,
The man must hear her, though he love her not,
Which .. hush! .. he has leave to answer in his turn;
She will not surely blame him. As for me,
You call it pity,—think I’m generous?
’Twere somewhat easier, for a woman proud
As I am, and I’m very vilely proud,
To let it pass as such, and press on you
Love born of pity,—seeing that excellent loves
Are born so, often, nor the quicklier die,—
And this would set me higher by the head
Than now I stand. No matter: let the truth
Stand high; Aurora must be humble: no,
My love’s not pity merely. Obviously
I’m not a generous woman, never was,
Or else, of old, I had not looked so near
To weights and measures, grudging you the power
To give, as first I scorned your power to judge
For me, Aurora: I would have no gifts
Forsooth, but God’s—and I would use them, too,
According to my pleasure and my choice,
As He and I were equals,—you, below,
Excluded from that level of interchange
Admitting benefaction. You were wrong
In much? you said so. I was wrong in most.
Oh, most! You only thought to rescue men
By half-means, half-way, seeing half their wants,
While thinking nothing of your personal gain.
But I who saw the human nature broad,
At both sides, comprehending, too, the soul’s,
And all the high necessities of Art,
Betrayed the thing I saw, and wronged my own life
For which I pleaded. Passioned to exalt
The artist’s instinct in me at the cost
Of putting down the woman’s,—I forgot
No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman. Flower from root,
And spiritual from natural, grade by grade
In all our life. A handful of the earth
To make God’s image! the despised poor earth,
The healthy odorous earth,—I missed, with it,
The Divine breath that blows the nostrils out
To ineffable inflatus: ay, the breath
Which love is. Art is much, but Love is more.
O Art, my Art, thou’rt much, but Love is more!
Art symbolises heaven, but Love is God
And makes heaven. I, Aurora, fell from mine:
I would not be a woman like the rest,
A simple woman who believes in love,
And owns the right of love because she loves,
And, hearing she’s beloved, is satisfied
With what contents God: I must analyse,
Confront, and question; just as if a fly
Refused to warm itself in any sun
Till such was in leone: I must fret
Forsooth, because the mouth was only May;
Be faithless of the kind of proffered love,
And captions, lest it miss my dignity,
And scornful, that my lover sought a wife
To use .. to use! O Romney, O my love,
I am changed since then, changed wholly,—for indeed,
If now you’d stoop as low to take my love,
And use it roughly, without stint or spare,
As men use common things with more behind,
(And, in this, ever would be more behind)
To any mean and ordinary end,—
The joy would set me, like a star in heaven,
So high up, I should shine because of height
And not of virtue. Yet in one respect,
Just one, beloved, I am in no wise changed:
I love you, loved you .. loved you first and last,
And love you on for ever. Now I know
I loved you always, Romney. She who died
Knew that, and said so; Lady Waldemar
Knows that; .. and Marian: I had known the same
Except that I was prouder than I knew,
And not so honest. Ay, and, as I live,
I should have died so, crushing in my hand
This rose of love, the wasp inside and all,—
Ignoring ever to my soul and you
Both rose and pain,—except for this great loss,
This great despair,—to stand before your face
And know I cannot win a look of yours.
You think, perhaps, I am not changed from pride,
And that I chiefly bear to say such words,
Because you cannot shame me with your eyes?
O calm, grand eyes, extinguished in a storm,
Blown out like lights o’er melancholy seas,
Though shrieked for by the shipwrecked,—O my Dark,
My Cloud,—to go before me every day
While I go ever toward the wilderness,—
I would that you could see me bare to the soul!—
If this be pity, ’tis so for myself,
And not for Romney: he can stand alone;
A man like him is never overcome: [p. 469→]
No woman like me, counts him pitiable
While saints applaud him. He mistook the world:
But I mistook my own heart,—and that slip
Was fatal. Romney, —will you leave me here?
So wrong, so proud, so weak, so unconsoled,
So mere a woman!—and I love you so,—
I love you, Romney.”
We have quoted this fine passage at length, because we felt that it could not be abridged without injuring the great lesson which it teaches—the humble outpouring of an ingenuous womanly soul in the confession of her errors. It has, however, two faults to our thinking—its passion is somewhat marred by its length, and it is too didactic in tone. Both these might have been avoided by one so skilful in composition as Mrs. Browning. Of course even the noble self-denial of Romney yields, and mutual explanations, such as lovers ever make, whether in prose or in verse, take place. In these the author works out, to its full development, the truths she would teach by her poem. In the calm beauty of the moonlight, under an Italian sky, the philanthropist and the poetess review their past lives, detect the errors they have committed, and eliminate the true and the good from the mazes of the false and the evil that environ and mislead even the best intellects and the noblest hearts. An extract here and there from this fine meditative dialogue will show how well Mrs. Browning has succeeded in this the great object and end of her task. Romney says:—
“And men who work, can only work for men,
And, not to work in vain, must comprehend
Humanity, and, so, work humanly,
And raise men’s bodies still by raising souls,
As God did, first.”
“But stand upon the earth,”
I said, “to raise them,—(this is human too;
There’s nothing high which has not first been low;
My humbleness, said One, has made me great!)
As God did, last.”
“And work all silently,
And simply,” he returned, “as God does all;
Distort our nature never, for our work,
Nor count our right hands stronger for being hoofs.
The man most man, with tenderest human hands,
Works best for men,—as God in Nazareth.”
He paused upon the word, and then resumed;
“Fewer programmes; we who have no prescience.
Fewer systems; we who are held and do not hold.
Less mapping out of masses, to be saved,
By nations or by sexes. Fourier’s void,
And Comte is dwarfed,—and Cabet, puerile.
Subsists no law of life outside of life;
No perfect manners, without Christian souls:
The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless he had given the life, too, with the law.”
I echoed thoughtfully—“The man, most man,
Works best for men: and, if most man indeed,
He gets his manhood plainest from his soul:
While, obviously, this stringent soul itself
Obeys our old rules of development;
The spirit ever witnessing in ours,
And Love, the soul of soul, within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely. First, God’s love.”
“And next,” he smiled, “the love of wedded souls,
Which still presents that mystery’s counterpart.
Sweet shadow-rose, upon the water of life,
Of such a mystic substance, Sharon gave
A name to! human, vital, fructuous rose,
Whose calyx holds the multitude of leaves,—
Loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbour-loves,
And civic, .. all fair petals, all good scents,
All reddened, sweetened from one central Heart!”
We have, in the progress of sketching the story of Aurora Leigh, been induced to quote more largely than we had intended; and so we have less space, and indeed less occasion, to refer to passages which in the course of our reading this volume we had marked for special notice. Let us now look at the work as a whole, unaffected if possible by the affluence and splendour of diction and imagery and thought which may be found throughout it. From what point of view are we to regard this singular production? In what category of writings are we to class it? Is it a poetic novel of real life, or a poetic romance—fiction embodying and exhibiting mere theories of life and speculations upon art, in unreal actors? If we take the latter to be the true statement, we can bear with complacency what is exaggerated, unreal, and extravagant, as we endure without complaint the supernatural heroes and the mist-inflated, giant warriors of Homer and Ossian. But on the other hand, if we are to apply [p. 470→] to it the test of real life we are met at every step by incongruities. The character of Romney Leigh is exaggerated and unnatural; weak and almost silly at times; impractical in his schemes of social regeneration, and absurd in his theories; a modern Quixote, more mad than the errant knight who assailed windmills and slaughtered sheep; and with all this is mixed a nobility of nature and a grandeur of sentiment that make him as a whole, a moral monster. Marian Erle presents, we believe, no true type of a class, either in the high moral or intellectual attributes with which she is invested, or in the sufferings which she endures. Undoubtedly the character of Aurora Leigh is developed with more truth to nature than any other in the book. Here we have indeed the woman in the attainment of her full stature of mind; but throughout the thoughts and feelings to which she gives expression, there runs a jealous and morbid sense of the misappreciation of woman by man, a “struggling for woman’s empery,” and even for something beyond it. We have a thousand passages, such as the following, in which this feeling breaks out:—
’Tis pitiful; but women are so made:
We’ll die for you, perhaps,—’tis probable;
But we’ll not spare you an inch of our full height:
We’ll have our whole just stature,—five feet four,
Though laid out in our coffins.
Indeed in the effort to stand, not on a pedestal beside man, but actually to occupy his place, we see Mrs. Browning commit grave errors. She assumes as it were the gait and the garb of man, but the stride and the strut betray her. She is occasionally coarse in expression and unfeminine in thought; and utters what, if they be even truths, are so conveyed that we would hesitate to present them to the eye of the readers of her own sex. There is nothing that detracts so much from the pleasure which the perusal of this poem has given us, as this conviction, that the authoress has written a book which is almost a closed volume for her own sex. The days when such women as Aphra Benn can hope to be palatable to the female sex are, we believe, gone for ever. Woman must be ever true to her womanly instincts if she would be the meet helper as well as companion of man. We grieve to find such a woman as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, even in a phrase or a sentiment, forgetful of that nature. Bating this, she is all that the highest feminine intellect can attain to. Thoughtful, philosophic, vigorous and tender, with a passion and an earnestness that carry her right on to her object and sustain her throughout. Her criticism as an artist and a poet is rarely at fault; her appreciation of natural beauties is intense, and her power of describing them as great, we believe, as that of any living poet. The scenes glow beneath her pencil. Nor is her power of tracing and exhibiting the intellectual processes inferior; and one feels that the mysteries of the mind are as thoughtfully expatiated upon by her quick and sagacious spirit, as are all the poetries which abound in the material world. Be the faults what they may in conception or in execution, we almost forget them in the charm of the language, and the thoughts which surprise and delight us everywhere; and we respect the high purposes of the writer and the enthusiastic earnestness with which she has penned them. No book that we know of in modern days, with perhaps the exception of Bailey’s Festus, has more isolated passages which the memory would hold enduringly for their excellence than this last and ablest work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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