E570600A. Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857).
Russell’s Magazine, June 1857, pp. 274–275.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 347–348.
This work, professing to be the most elaborate and mature production of its authoress, is generally received by the critics and the reading world at large as an autobiography. If it is—if the heroine represents the veritable Elizabeth Barrett Browning—then is she most unlike our cherished ideal of the fair poetess. Tender, shrinking, delicate, a little pedantic, but truly womanly, these were the adjectives we imagined to be applied to her; well in keeping with the shadowy figure, wistful eyes and waving curls which appeared every now and then among the pleasing reminiscences of wanderers to Florence. But Aurora Leigh is only a strong-minded genius of these woman’s right’s days, roaming alone into places full of “sights and sounds unholy,” and over half the continent, picking up stray women and children, and ready to do all sorts of conspicuous things in all sorts of conspicuous places. We have also heard it boldly asserted that in these pages is to be seen the revelation of woman’s inner life and nature. Heaven forbid! We shudder to think that we may be unwillingly surrounded by Aurora Leighs, Lady Waldemars, or even Marion Earles! Lady Waldemar is a disgraceful blot, a stain upon the whole story, a character unpardonably, unmitigatedly coarse and repulsive. Marion Earle, from babyhood in contact with everything that could defile and contaminate the purest nature, living among the dregs of the gross and uncultured, and yet a lily, “pura, pudica, pia,” is simply impossible—a vision belonging to a romance, but not to a tale of common life in our common place modern times. As for the hero of the book, Romney Leigh, we have no patience with him. He is one of those unfortunate men who fail in everything they attempt—for whom, even if we feel sympathy, it is very difficult not to entertain also a thoroughly contemptuous pity, the last sentiment, we suppose, that a man would wish to inspire. He woos Aurora, she rejects him; he tries to make her a clandestine present of money, manages so clumsily that she detects him and refuses it; wishes to marry Marion Earle as a social duty, noblesse obliging him to condescend to the lower orders; is outwitted by an intriguing woman; fails in his plans of reform; fails to the end; when Aurora at last accepts him in his blindness, we suspect merely from a strong minded desire [p. 275→] to protect and manage one of the tyrant sex, taken at a disadvantage.
As a novel, Aurora Leigh is common-place—the incidents trite and few, and the denouement taken from Jane Eyre, without the accessories of plot and character, which there render it so successful and striking. As a poem, it is entitled to far higher praise. It was impossible for Mrs. Browning to write so many lines without soaring to the regions of true genius and poetry, for she is a poet, born and made, and in spite of the embarrassment of her feminine drapery, sits high among those who crowd the poet’s corner and write their names above the stars.
In this poem, nothing can be more exquisite than the story of Aurora’s secluded girlish life with her melancholy father; nothing more touching than the epitaph on the dead young brother, which surprises you into sudden tears. The pictures of English scenery are most charmingly quiet, pure, serene and graphic; the smooth green lawn lies before you, you smell the woodbine and you see the dewy grass; and all the allusions to children and all descriptions of them are unspeakably beautiful, delicate and graceful. But even as a poem the work is very faulty. There are long passages, entire pages, of pretty fair, dull prose, unrelieved by a gleam of poetry, and, we venture to say, there is scarcely any poem, of such length, of which the reader remembers so few lines, has jangling involuntarily in his brain so few melodies, carries away so few favorite passages. As a whole, then, Aurora Leigh is a profound disappointment to most of Mrs. Browning’s readers and lovers; and with regard to it, we think the old fashioned custom, now so deservedly fallen into disrepute, of cutting up a book into “Elegant Extracts” and “Beauties,” might be most advantageously and usefully revived.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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