E570500A. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
The Christian Examiner, May 1857, pp. 461–465.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 337–339.
The Germans speak of what they call the “Storm and Pressure” period of their literary history. English poetry is now passing through what may be styled its Strain and Stress period, of which Mr. Alexander Smith and Mrs. Browning are among the most remarkable representatives. “Aurora Leigh” has more wealth of phrase and fancy than any preceding work of its author. It contains some admirable descriptions. There are passages in it of great power and real charm. But the book, on the whole, with just as many full pages of blank verse as there are days in a year, we cannot but regard as a vehement extravagance. The style is “all a-shake” with passionate movements, not without a dash every now and then of the coarse and unseemly. The characters are such as could not exist, and the incidents such as could not take place.
The heroine, born in Florence of an English father of noble connections and an Italian mother who died when her child was but four years old, goes to England, after his death, to live with an ungracious aunt, who could not be reconciled to her foreign blood. She is poet, philosopher, scholar; proud of her family descent, and conscious of her acquisitions, high spirit, and strength of mind. She is capable of being sharp with her tongue, if we may judge from many samples; among others, her boasting of having always refused to “ink her lips” by drawing through them any friendly expressions towards a certain lady, whom she upbraids with “that poisonous porridge called her soul.” An imperious and not very gentle or feminine person. She thinks of “speaking her poems”
in mysterious tune
With man and nature;—with the lava-lymph
That trickles from successive galaxies
Still drop by drop adown the finger of God.
She is deeply, though half unconsciously, in love with her cousin, Romney Leigh, whose hand she yet scornfully refuses, and whom she does not fail to tutor and snub till we come towards the end of the volume. Romney deserved, indeed, her refusal of him, by wounding her pride in his manner of addressing her. He is an aristocratic radical, a flaming philanthropist and socialist, a most unaccountable, yet represented as a most [p. 462→] admirable man. The rejected suitor, after a time, partly from affection and partly from his Quixotic fancies, proposes to take for his wife Marian Erle, a more wonderful person than himself, whose life he had helped to preserve. Born and brought up in the midst of the most filthy poverty and the most shocking crimes, and compelled at last to run away from her brutal parents, she is a paragon of purity and all excellence. Fleur de Marie was an every-day character by the side of her. Leigh is betrothed to her, and the marriage-day is appointed; the high-born gentleman preferring meanwhile to keep his bride in the disgusting and dangerous neighborhood where she had her abode. The church is now open for the nuptials. It is crowded on one side with lords and titled ladies, and on the other with swarms of loathsome and scarcely human creatures from St. Giles’s and the worst sinks of London depravity:—
’T was as if you had stirred up hell
To heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost
In fiery swirls of slime.
All these wretches are there by invitation, in deference to the principles of human equality, and are to have a great feast, after the ceremony is over, on Hampstead Heath.
But the mixed multitude have come together for nothing. The bride does not appear. The meeting breaks up in a storm of disorder, and the hero escapes narrowly with his life from the hands of the furious rabble, who believe that the plebeian maiden has suffered some foul wrong from her pretended bridegroom. It seems that the beautiful Lady Waldemar had persuaded her that she could never make so glorious a creature as Romney happy, and confessed that she was in love with him herself. In brief, she has prevailed upon Marian, the very day before the wedding, to steal away, with no companion but a strange woman, who turns out to be a very monster of wickedness, and to fly off to unknown parts of the earth. Now this is really too much. Such a sublime simpleton as that was never heard of before; and such a scene as that was never enacted on any stage.
In the course of time, the poor girl is found by Aurora in one of the flower-markets of Paris, with a child in her arms of an unknown father, but she herself the same spotless and peerless creature as before. Her story is told, if it may be said to be told, in a great abundance of words, and with the usual intensity and shadow. The two ladies seem to be the only companions for each other; and they set out together to live in her native Italian city. And here comes the winding up in a most remarkable last scene. Aurora is sitting in her house near Florence, under the full persuasion that Romney [p. 463→] Leigh is on the point of being married, if he be not married already, to that detestable Lady Waldemar, when he himself appears before her. He is stone-blind, owing to an accident, or something worse, that befell him at the burning of his house, Leigh Hall, which had been set on fire by the mob. He is cured of his socialism, but for his eyesight there is no recovery. He gives her various hints of this calamity; sometimes very tropically, as in the line,
The sun is silent, but Aurora speaks,
and sometimes in broken words; but she remains wholly unsuspicious of it, till he plainly tells her that such is the fact, at the end of a very long dialogue. It comes out that, so far from having any matrimonial engagement with Lady Waldemar, he has come from England to wed Marian Erle, to adopt her boy, and to introduce them both to his grand acquaintances. But Marian, who enters at the moment, peremptorily refuses her consent to a union that would be felt to degrade him. Thereupon Aurora astonishes Leigh with the most passionate protestations of the affection which she acknowledges she had always felt for him. As he had thought to redeem society by phalansteries and outward contrivance, and found himself miserably deluded; so she, who had thought to redeem it by poetry and æsthetics, confessed that her experiment in that opposite direction had met with an equal failure. The whole ardor of her nature runs towards her early and only love. He meets her, after a little conscientious coyness, with corresponding emotions, and their “two large explosive hearts” join together in one of the most wondrous embraces ever described. So ends the romance.
The language in which it is set forth is of a piece with the unnatural story. Sharpness and force are its presiding powers. Its verse is often but foamy prose; its phrases are often such as misbecome the pen of a lady. Notwithstanding our ready admission that it is sometimes condensed into admirable vigor, sometimes rises to something like sublimity, and sometimes flows into figures of ingenious beauty, we are compelled to pronounce it in general to be turgid, pedantic, affected, obscure (though not to such depths of darkness as we have to complain of in Mr. Robert Browning), and on some other accounts, not suggested by either of these adjectives, eminently disagreeable. If the reader wishes to know what is meant by the Strain and Stress poetry, here is an example or two, merely for the sake of illustration. The first shall be so mild that it strangely tempts one to admire it:
My loose hair began to burn and creep,
Alive to the very ends, about my knees: [p. 464→]
I swept it backward as the wind sweeps flame,
With the passion of my hands.
Another specimen will so tempt but few persons:
They burnt Leigh Hall; but if consummated
To devils, heightened above Lucifers,
They had burnt instead a star or two, of those
We saw above there just a moment back,
Before the morn abolished them,—destroyed
And riddled them in ashes through a sieve
On the head of the foundering universe,—what then?
Surely, “Mad Nat Lee” never said anything madder. There would be no end to such quotations. Here is the last:
I flung closer to his breast,
As sword, that, after battle, flings to sheath”;—
a figure of speech which is certainly more trenchant than lucid, and a sort of English that defies criticism. We need not wonder, after this, to hear the enamored Aurora say:
And in that hurtle of united souls,
we felt the old earth spin,
And all the starry turbulence of worlds
Swing round us in their audient circles, till
If that same golden moon were overhead
Or if beneath our feet, we did not know.
The celebrated kiss, that was so laughed at a long time ago for shaking the woods in which it took place, was a slight performance compared with this, which brought down the Seven Stars and Arcturus to its audience.
In our opinion, “Aurora Leigh” is not only obnoxious to a critical judgment and a sensitive taste, but often offends one’s sense of propriety and feelings of reverence. It deals largely in what is repulsive and loathsome; while it uses the Holy Name with a looseness and prodigality that make us shrink. We hazard the surmise, and take no great risk therein, that the word God, used of the Supreme Being, does not occur more frequently in the whole twelve books of the Paradise Lost than it does in this boisterous love-tale.
Mrs. Browning’s idea of a poet is of one who says,
With his voice like a thunder… This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said in heaven,
Here’s God down on us! what are you about?
The scholar teaches her
how God laughs in heaven, when any man
Says, “Here I’m learned; this I understand.” [p. 465→]
That daring flight of Scripture imagery, which is made endurable, even in the Psalmist, only by the wrath and disdain that gave wing to it, makes a mean show, when imped and aped in this free-and-easy fashion. As Mrs. Browning is versed in many things, she gives us a lesson in theology also. For example, she assures us that
God’s self would never have come down to die,
Could man have thanked him for it;
and again she exclaims,—
Alas, long-suffering and most patient God,
. . . . aspire, aspire
From henceforth for me!(?) thou who hast, thyself,
Endured this fleshhood.
Enough of an unwelcome task. We have felt it a duty to bear this testimony against the present clamor of applause, from which we most earnestly dissent, and which we do not believe to agree with the silent judgment of our own or any other literary community. Some writers, in their admiration of this book, are ready to claim for it the dignity of an epic. And truly, its verbal dimensions are on the epic scale; it is written in the verse which Milton not only employed, but almost prescribed, for that species of composition; and one might almost affirm that neither the celestial machinery of the Tale of Troy, nor the infernal machinery of the Jerusalem Delivered, is farther removed from credibility and the world of fact, than the events that are here supposed to pass in our modern cities.
With submission, we cannot commend this poem any the more for the fact that none but an author of genius could have written it. Its vices are those of a new and pretending school, that seem to challenge notice and deference. Its distempers are catching; such as will be likely to communicate themselves to many who only fancy that they are clever or inspired. Bad examples are the most mischievous in the highest places.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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