E571000B. Aurora Leigh.
The Westminster Review, October 1857, pp. 399–415.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 357–363.
Mrs. Barrett Browning has won for herself the first place among our female poets. Falling short of the exquisite grace characterizing the masterpieces of Felicia Hemans, without the simplicity of L. E. L., or the variety of dramatic power which distinguishes Joanna Baillie, her earlier volumes contain poems evincing a depth of thought and subtlety of expression peculiarly her own. The “Graves of a Household” is not more delicately beautiful than those verses of “Caterina to Camoens,” or more passionately tender than “Isobel’s Child.” “The Romaunt of the Page,” “The Swan’s Nest among the Reeds,” “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” “The Rhyme of the Duchess May,” “The Rhapsody of Life,” with some of the best sonnets and the most stirring lyrics in the language, give proof of poetic genius no less various than powerful, and would of themselves vindicate for the Authoress the position we have assigned her. No one could fail therefore to regard “Aurora Leigh”—the most mature, as well as the longest of her works—that into which she says her “highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered”—with profoundest interest and sanguine expectations.
The attempt to write a novel,—which shall be also a poem,—is a daring one. We have abandoned the absurdity of setting limits to the sphere of poetry, but there is a certain incongruity between the natural variety and expansion of the one, and the concentration required in the other. The general success of this effort is remarkable. Few volumes of verse have such intense interest. It has been found by an ingenious critic to contain more lines than “Paradise Lost” or the “Odyssey,”—yet there are few people who do not try to read it at a sitting. Once into the vortex of the story, we are whirled on, forgetful of criticism, [p. 400→] of the Authoress, and of ourselves. This is a high recommendation, and has contributed largely towards the enthusiastic reception of the work; but when one has leisure to be censorious, he is met by defects equally striking. The difficulties of the design have not been entirely surmounted. The Authoress is given to a diffusive style: she drags us through many pages in “Aurora Leigh” which are unnecessary, trifling, and wearisome. That it may become a story, it sometimes ceases to be a poem. Blank verse is the most flexible and accommodating of all measures: it can sound, as in “The Brook,” like graceful conversation, or with the Æolian pulsation of the “Morte d’Arthur,” preserving its harmonious fulness; but in “Aurora Leigh” there are cases in which Mrs. Browning has broken loose altogether from the meshes of versification, and run riot in prose cut up into lines of ten syllables. Is there any sign of verse, for example, in the following:—“When he came from college to the country, very often he crossed the hills on visits to my aunt, with gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses, a book in one hand,—mere statistics, (if I chanced to lift the cover) count of all the goats whose beards are sprouting.” Yet, with the simple change of often into oft, Mrs. Browning has made six lines out of it, as good as about one-third of those in the volume. There are so many minor faults throughout the poem, that they cease to be minor faults, and are a serious hindrance to our enjoyment of its beauties. Those are not mere deviations from conventional practice. At the present day such deviations, in Art at least, are not apt to be harshly judged. The age is past when critics presumed to lay down rules for poetry, strict as the dogmas of heraldry, and more meaningless. The reaction against classicism has reached its climax. Even the Unities have died out. We favour an artist who has ventured on a new method, or sought to evolve a new design; let him but keep within the bounds of reason, he obtains the praise of originality.
It would be fortunate if, in revolting against restraint, we were never led to transgress those laws of rhythm and construction which, fixed by Nature herself, are never forgotten but with offence to harmony, taste, and sense. The affectation of Originality is the next fault to the want of it. Irregular lines, extravagant metaphors, jarring combinations, are the occasional defects, never the signs of genius. An ostentation of strength is the most infallible proof of weakness. A profusion of words is no voucher for richness of thought. Those are not the best scholars who make the most numerous quotations from the Greek. We know no poem so good as this, with so many glaring offences against those first principles. Mrs. Browning’s greatest failure is in her metaphors: some of them are excellent, but when they [p. 401→] are bad—and they are often bad,—they are very bad. By a single ugly phrase, a single hideous word, dragged in, one would think, from the furthest ends of the earth, she every now and then mars the harmony of a whole page of beauty. She sadly wants simplicity, and the calm strength that flows from it. She writes in a high fever. She is constantly introducing geographical, geological, and antiquarian references, almost always out of place, and often incorrect.* Here are three wise lines of her own, which ought to have preserved her from many errors:
We strain our natures at doing something great,
Far less because it’s something great to do,
Than, haply, that we, so, commend ourselves
As being not small.
________
*Is it hypercritical to advert to the fact that the main incident in “Aurora Leigh” is, as Mrs. Browning represents the circumstances, physiologically impossible? Mrs. Browning ought to have known that a reversal of any great law of nature is beyond poetic licence.
________
Mrs. Browning seems at once proud and ashamed of her womanhood. She protests, not unjustly, against the practice of judging artists by their sex; but she takes the wrong means to prove her manhood. In recoil from mincing fastidiousness, she now and then becomes coarse. She will not be taxed with squeamishness, and introduces words unnecessarily, which are eschewed in the most familiar conversation. To escape the imputation of over-refinement she swears without provocation. Those are grave accusations: but the Authoress would be the first to disclaim the shield of that spurious gallantry which accords her sex an exemption from the full severity of legitimate censure. A few examples, taken almost at random from among many, will vindicate the justice of our remarks.
The description of a face that haunted Aurora’s early years, gives scope for a perfect shoal of mangled and pompous similes. It was, she says, “by turns
Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,—
A dauntless Muse, who eyes a dreadful Fate,
A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,
A still Medusa, with mild milky brows
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes
Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or anon
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords
Where the Babe sucked; or Lamia in her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,
And shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean.
What a confusion of violence is the account given of London streets and the wretched beings who dwell there:— [p. 402→]
Faces! phew,
We’ll call them vices festering to despairs,
Or sorrows petrifying to vices: not
A finger-touch of God left whole in 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 heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost
In fiery swirls of slime, &c.
How much more full of meaning, to one who has seen such sights, is the simple phrase of our Laureate’s, in “Maud:”—
And I loathe the squares and streets,
And the faces that one meets.
In another passage (p. 178) Mrs. Browning designates the hard heart of society as—
This social Sphinx,
Who sits between the sepulchres and stews,
Makes mock and mow against the crystal heavens,
And bullies God,—
Payne Knight (p. 186) is compared to a “mythic mountaineer”
Who travelled higher than he was born to live,
And showed sometimes the goitre in his throat
Discoursing of an image seen through fog.
To illustrate the way in which individual words are often misused, we may take the following. “My life,” Romney says (p. 388)—
Scarce lacked that thunderbolt of the falling beam,
Which nicked me on the forehead as I passed.
Of Florence (p. 307) she says—
The town, there, seems to seethe
In this Medæan boil-pot of the sun,
And all the patient hills are bubbling round
As if a prick would leave them flat.
Of Romney Leigh excited (p. 164)—
Was that his face I saw? ......
Which tossed a sudden horror like a sponge
Into all eyes,
Of an angel face, that it shone in Heaven in “a blotch” of light!
To Lady Waldemar, Aurora writes (p. 287) with a strange confusion of biblical reference—
For which inheritance beyond your birth
You sold that poisonous porridge called your soul. [p. 403→]
Those pieces of bad taste mainly arise from that straining after strength which mars some of the Authoress’s best writings; but there are others which, in their rough treatment of themes we are accustomed to see handled with reverence, are still more repulsive. Witness the comparison of Christ to a hunter of wild beasts (p. 343).
In the picture of London (p. 95), she has so overlaid her colours, as quite to destroy the effect of what might have been a most impressive sketch. Sometimes the mixture of metaphors is such as to make the passage utterly unintelligible; as for instance, in the invective against the German scholar, Wolf, who, good unsuspecting man, when he first ventured to criticise Homer in his study at Halle, never dreamt of being called such names by an English poetess.
A considerable portion of the book is devoted to a minute and not very profitable analysis of the process of making verses. There is surely some “playing at art” here, and science too:—
I ripped my verses up,
And found no blood upon the rapier’s point;
The heart in them was just an embryo’s heart,
Which never yet had beat that it should die;
Just gasps of make-believe galvanic life;
Mere tones inorganized to any tune.—(p. 98.)
This “ripping up” does not seem to have been sufficiently savage; but Mrs. Browning has her excuse for the jolting of her Pegasus—
But I felt
My heart’s life throbbing in my verse to show
It lived, it also—certes incomplete—
Disordered with all Adam in the blood,
But even its very tumours, warts, and wens
Still organized by and implying life.—(p. 101.)
Yet it is those very warts and wens that we complain of as degrading her best poetry from the first to the second rank. It is that exaggerated mysticism and confusion of phrases that has given men, who pride themselves on their common sense, a distaste to metaphorical or even imaginative writing, and has done more than anything else to lower the esteem in which works of Art are held.
Did our survey cease here, we should not be so unfair as the Saturday Reviewer; but we would give the reader only some such conception of Aurora Leigh as he would have of the Ajax, from the bad joke on the hero’s name,—of “Romeo and Juliet,” from the wretched puns it contains,—of Byron’s “Don Juan,” from the stanzas in which he offends against delicacy,—of Wordsworth’s “Idyls” from Goody Blake and Harry Gill,—or of Tennyson’s “Maud,” from the rudest of his hobbling hexameters. The worst [p. 404→] pieces are short. The poem contains passages of concentrated beauty and sustained grandeur, enough to establish half a dozen reputations. In the presentation alike of character and scenery Mrs. Browning has proved herself in every sense a Master. Those pictures of England and of Italy which so adorn the first and seventh books are already familiar to our readers; and they will take a permanent rank among our best specimens of descriptive poetry. Some of the portraits exhibit a fund of subtle humour. Witness that oft-quoted sketch of the Aunt, a lady whose temper is perhaps best represented in those three lines—
And English women, she thanked God and sighed
(Some people always sigh in thanking God),
Were models to the universe.
There are many passages which we value, as much for the truth they condense as for the beauty of their language. We shall select one or two of those wise sentences at a venture:—
We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits—so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth,—
’Tis then we get the right good from a book.—(p. 26.)
Many tender souls
Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread
As children cowslips:—the more pains they take
The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,
Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse,
Before they sit down under their own vine
And live for use. Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn; and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.—(p. 34.)
The rest are like it; those Olympian crowns
We run for, till we lose sight of the sun
In the dust of the racing chariots.—(p. 72.)
There’s not a crime
But takes its proper change out still in crime,
If once rung on the counter of this world;
Let sinners look to it.—(p. 120.)
We are wrong always when we think too much
Of what we think or are; albeit our thoughts
Be verily bitter as self-sacrifice,
We’re no less selfish.—(p. 151.)
I’ve known the pregnant thinkers of this time,
And stood by breathless, hanging on their lips, [p. 405→]
When some chromatic sequence of fine thought,
In learned modulation phrased itself
To an unconjectured harmony of truth.
And yet I’ve been more moved, more raised, I say,
By a simple word—a broken, easy thing,
A three-years infant might say after you—
A look, a sigh, a touch upon the palm,
Which meant less than “I love you” … than by all
The full-voiced rhetoric of those master-mouths.—(p. 174.)
The Greeks said grandly, in their tragic phrase,
“Let no one be called happy till his death.”
To which I add,—Let no one till his death
Be called unhappy. Measure not the work
Until the day’s out, and the labour done;
Then bring your gauges. If the day’s work’s scant,
Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;
And, in that we have nobly striven, at least
Deal with us nobly, women though we be,
And honour us with truth, if not with praise.—(p. 183.)
It is, however, to the general management of the poem that we must look for its main excellences, as well as for its gravest defects. The outline of the story is well known. The writer—whose sentiments and opinions we cannot avoid identifying to a large extent with those of the Authoress—is a Tuscan girl, left from her birth alone with an English father, to grow up, at once shy and impetuous, under Italian skies. He dies in her thirteenth year, leaving her to be conveyed by strangers to a strange land, under the charge of his sister. This lady has harboured a long hatred against Aurora’s mother, who bewitched the stiff English gentleman, from his home, his duties, and his estate. She receives the child with all the chill kindness of an unsympathetic guardian. Under her, the wild girl has to become tame—to grow in the prescribed way to the prescribed end. And so she shoots up into womanhood in outward conformity, yet fluttering more and more against her cage, seeking a solace from the weariness of her tasks in the land of thought and fancy:—
I was not, therefore, sad;
My soul was singing at a work apart,
Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm
As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,
In vortices of glory and blue air.
Gradually she grows to learn the beauty of that England which at first seemed cold and repulsive. Here is introduced that exquisite landscape painting to which we have referred. (See pp. 39–41.) Then comes the crisis of her life—the scene with her cousin Romney. He has lived near them, and seen [p. 406→] Aurora daily, and grown to love her. She, too, loves him, unconsciously to herself, plainly enough to the reader; but they have their own distinct views of life. He is a poet in action—she in verse. His soul is “grey with poring over the long sum of ill”—of wretchedness, and poverty, and vice, in the world around him; he has, with all the foolish enthusiasm of youth, resolved to devote his fortune and his life to lessen this ill. One fine morning he comes to seek a helpmate in his career of beneficence. But she is twining wreaths around her brow, dreaming of Dante and Florentine bays. Their interview has been compared to that famous one between Jane Eyre and St. John. There is some show of resemblance between them; but the difference as to the essential question is infinite. St. John thought of Jane as a mere missionary; he would as willingly have had her go with him as a sister, were it not for public opinion. Romney loves Aurora far more deeply than she deserved; and he shows this by tone and look and gesture throughout the whole colloquy. He talks too much, perhaps, of his philanthropy, his schemes—some foolish, some as wise as any yet devised for reforming the world; but he is diverted from superfluous display of tenderness, by the noblest thoughts of others and their welfare—
Thinking love’s best proved unsaid,
And by words the dignity
Of true feeling’s often lost,
He was vowed to life’s broad duty,
Man’s great business uppermost
In his mind—not woman’s beauty.
She, on the other hand, turns from him because she thinks too much of herself. Because he will not protest that she is born to be a poet, she distrusts and rejects his love with a most magniloquent disdain:—
“Now,” I said, “may God
Be witness ’twixt us two!” and with the word
Meseemed I floated into a sudden light
Above his stature,—am I proved too weak
To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear
Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,
Yet rich enough to sympathize with thought?—
Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,
Yet competent to love, like Him? I paused:
Perhaps I darkened, as the lighthouse will
That turns upon the sea.
He writes next day, renewing the assurance of his affection, but the aunt in her indignation has let out the secret that Aurora, by her father’s foreign marriage, is left undowered, and Romney, the sole heir;—interpreting his offer as an act of charity, [p. 407→] her pride revolts still more. Shortly after, her aunt dies, holding in her hand a letter with a transfer of a large portion of Romney’s estate to her, and so, by inheritance, to Aurora. Unfortunately it is found unopened, and the heroine tears it up with infinite grandeur. “Penthesilea mediis in armis;” or, as she modestly expresses it, like the whirlwind on Valdarno. The cousins separate—she to the central seat of English life, to work out her independence, he to forget his own great sorrow in the activity of a greater mission. Seven years after, she writes the first part of this history from her room three stories high, in Kensington, where she has found for herself a sphere of action and a taste of her much coveted fame. Yet the memory of that morning in the summer garden haunts her still:—
He bears down on me through the slanting years,
The stronger for the distance.
The account of her London career gives occasion for a good deal of humorous satire on the fashionable life and talk of the metropolis. We find nothing indeed to rival the cunning disclosures of Thackeray; but in the fourth and fifth books there is a large amount of vivid characterization. Some of the minor dramatis personæ are drawn with great power;—such as the good Lord Howe, the cautious philanthropist, never out of his depth, never honest; clever Mister Smith, and Sir Blaise Delorme—
with quiet, priest-like voice,
Too used to syllable damnations round
To make a natural emphasis worth while;
and above all, Lady Waldemar—the rich, the beautiful, the fascinating, the hateful Lady Waldemar, who, herself in love with Romney, comes to ask Aurora’s aid in averting a marriage which, in practical illustration of his communism, he is about to contract with a daughter of the people—a poor girl who has lived pure in the midst of horror and penury and crime, whom he has saved from death, or worse than death, and whom he is resolved in front of all the world to make his wife. The lady fails in her mission:—
“You take it so,”
She said; “farewell, then. Write your books in peace,
As far as may be, for some secret stir
Now obvious to me,—for, most obviously,
In coming hither I mistook the way.”
Whereat she touched my hand, and bent her head,
And floated from me like a silent cloud
That leaves the sense of thunder.—(p. 115.)
Henceforth we are seized upon by a new interest which makes us hurry over everything else. Stately Aurora Leigh, her theories, her speculations and her pride,—the London life, the [p. 408→] balls, the gossip of ladies in rustling silks, the talk of artists and old rakes and embryo philosophers, amusing and graphic as they are, are cast into the shade by the apparition and the tragedy of Marian Erle. Aurora goes to see her, and finds in the midst of one of the wretched streets in London “an ineffable white face,” which we get to think more beautiful than any other in the book—
She was not white or brown,
But could look either like a mist that changed
According to being shone on more or less.
She tells her sad story with irresistible pathos—how, born in a miserable hut, she led a hard life with cruel parents, driven from place to place and set to all mean tasks, yet consoled by the beauty around, which from nature and stray books she draws to herself by some inborn instinct. At last her wretched mother offers to sell her to a rich squire in the neighbourhood. She tears herself from their hands and escapes. The account of her flight (p. 127) is a wonderful piece of writing. We read it with the breathless haste which it describes, in sympathy with the passion of fear that gave wings to the fugitive. She is found by Romney in an hospital to which she has been conveyed. He addresses her in kind words, which she never forgets—
since, in any doubt or dark,
They came out like the stars, and shone on her
With just their comfort;
and in tones of music that haunt her still in the London milliner’s, where he has sent her to work and hope:—
then she drew
The stitch, and mused how Romney’s face would look,
And if ’twere likely he’d remember hers
When they two had their meeting after death.
He meets her again when she has left her position to nurse a sick companion, and after a time seeks in her the fit associate for his task. The day is fixed for the marriage. There is an extraordinary meeting of rags and silks to solemnize the cementing of social distinctions which Romney desires to symbolize in this ceremony—
Half St. Giles’ in frieze
Was bidden to meet St. James’ in cloth of gold.
All is ready, but the bride has disappeared. He seeks her east, he seeks her west, but no trace is to be found; nothing for love or money but a mysterious letter from Marian, declining marriage, yet showing her love, evidently concealing more than it reveals:—
Very kind,
I pray you mark, was Lady Waldemar, [p. 409→]
She came to see me nine times, rather ten;—
So beautiful, she hurts me like the day
Let suddenly on sick eyes.
Time passes. We have a great deal about London society and profuse speculation on art and artists. Meantime the report grows that Romney is affianced to Lady Waldemar. We hear no more until, a year or so after, on her route towards Italy, Aurora meets Marian accidentally in the streets of Paris, with a child in her arms. Borne off in the crowd, she is again found by chance, after a long, fruitless search, and this time Aurora succeeds in tracking her to a retreat in the suburbs “scarce larger than a grave,” where she lives with her infant. There is nothing more exquisite in the poem than some of the lines which refer to this infant,—
While we stood there dumb,—
For oh, that it should take such innocence
To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb;
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.—(p. 250.)
But it is difficult to select; the whole of the succeeding pages, as also that passage in pp. 288–289, present a picture of innocence and maternal fondness such as perhaps has never before been realized in verse, and which reminds one more than anything else of the masterpieces of Raphael. We confess to entertain very different sentiments regarding the two heroines of this poem. Aurora’s self-consciousness repels—her speculations do not much interest us; her genuine human feeling is reserved for the closing scene. There is something about Marian, on the other hand, that is especially attractive. All the little incidents of her early life, the court in London, the flowers, the way she tells her tale, with the exception of one or two misplaced scientific phrases, so artless and natural,—the shrinking, clinging, half reverence, half love she feels for Romney, combine to exhibit a winning beauty and grace. But nothing in the book is so grand [p. 410→] as the revelation to Aurora of her dreadful secret—how, beguiled by the serpent kindness of the Lady Waldemar to believe herself an obstacle to Romney’s happiness, committed to the charge of some female fiend, and lured into a home of horror in France, she “fell unaware, and came to butchery,” doomed to live ever after, subject to that law—
The common law by which the poor and weak
Are trodden under foot by vicious men,
And loathed for ever after by the good.
The tale has too deep a pathos to be expressed in any partial transcription. It is indeed a tragedy too terrible for tears. There is something almost superhuman in the awe of those concluding lines in which Marian describes her wanderings. We read them with a sort of breathless fear and wonder:—
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.
* * * * * * *
Brutal men
Stopped short, Miss Leigh, in insult, when they had seen
My face,—I must have had an awful look.
And so I lived: the weeks passed on, —I lived,
’Twas living my old tramp-life o’er again ,
But this time in a dream, and hunted round
By some prodigious Dream-fear at my back,
Which ended, yet: my brain cleared presently,
And there I sate one evening, by the road,
I, Marian Erle, myself alone, undone,
Facing a sunset low upon the flats,
As if it were the finish of all time,—
The great red stone upon my sepulchre,
Which angels were too weak to roll away.
The rest is soon told. Aurora, Marian, and the child go together to Italy, a report having previously reached them that Romney and Lady Waldemar have been married. One glorious evening he himself appears before them, to announce the error of this report, the ruin of all his schemes, the conflagration of the old hall which he had turned into a phalanstery for wretches who brought it down over his head, and his intention to claim Marian still as his wife. She appears herself to address him— [p. 411→]
“Romney,” she began,
“My great, good angel, Romney.” Then at first
I knew that Marian Erle was beautiful.
She stood there, still and pallid as a saint,
Dilated like a saint in ecstasy,
As if the floating moonshine interposed
Betwixt her foot and the heart, and raised her up
To float upon it. “I had left my child
Who sleeps,” she said, “and having drawn this way,
I heard you speaking. Friend! confirm me now.
You take this Marian, such as wicked men
Have made her, for your honourable wife?”
The thrilling, solemn, proud, pathetic voice.
He stretched his arms out toward the thrilling voice,
As if to draw it on to his embrace.
“I take her, as God made her, and as men
Must fail to unmake her, for my honoured wife.”
Aurora, too, confirms this, and Marian’s answer illustrates the nature of her devotion:—
“Thanks,
My great Aurora.” Forward then she sprang,
And dropping her impassioned spaniel head
With all its broad abandonment of curls
On Romney’s feet, we heard the kisses drawn
Through sobs upon the foot, upon the ground—
“O Romney! O my angel! O unchanged!
Though, since we’ve parted, I have past the grave;
But death itself could only better thee,
Not change thee! Thee I do not thank at all;
I but thank God who made thee what thou art,
So wholly godlike.”
Yet she tells him—
“You and I
Must never, never, never join hands so,”—
and abides by her resolve to live apart, and consecrate the rest of her dim life to the care of her child. Romney announces to Aurora his penitence for self-confidence in his schemes, his tardy appreciation of her genius, and the calamity which has overtaken him of incurable blindness. This mutilation (which we consider in every point of view offensive) enables Aurora to confide the secret of her own attachment to him, and the poem concludes with the magnificent verses expressing the triumph of love which are already familiar to most readers.
In an artistic point of view, this work has all the defects and all the excellences of the authoress’s style. Those excellences more than counterbalance the defects. But it is a work written [p. 412→] with an evident purpose, and it openly challenges criticism ethically. We cannot give a favourable verdict. Romney tells Aurora, in that early scene, that women never estimate principles, but only persons. Mrs. Browning has done her best to establish the truth of this dictum. If, as she herself declares, “wrong thoughts make wrong poems,” there is much to censure in this one. The estimate she gives of the French and the eulogy of Louis Napoleon which follows it, is a glaring evidence of a judgment easily misled by the outward shows of things, and arrested by the semblance of Power.
We do not intend to diverge into the field of politics to point out in what manner their “twice absolute” Emperor represents this “poet of the nations,” or how “his purple is lined with the democracy.” It is more within the scope of our purpose to contend with those peculiar views of reform and social philosophy which this volume has for its text. There is a wide-spread and growing error to which its success has given a new impulse—an error founded in a truth, perhaps, but none the less fatal. We allude to the mistake of exaggerating the effect of Art—whether as exhibited through Music, Painting, or Poetry—in ameliorating or elevating the condition of the masses of the people in any age or country. It probably results from a transference of the feelings and sympathies, which arise from or are possible only under a certain degree of culture, to spheres where that culture does not exist. But, however originating, History and our every-day experience combine to demonstrate the error. Art and the perfection of the poetic sentiments follow, or are contemporaneous with an age of prosperity. They do not constitute, nor can they supply the place of material comforts and free institutions. Artistic culture, far from standing in the place of philanthropic effort, depends upon the success of that effort for its own permanence. Men must be fed, clothed, and washed, ere ever “the essential prophet’s word comes in power” to awaken, elevate, and sustain their nobler energies. Mr. Ruskin, among many lasting obligations conferred on Art, has yet done something to adorn this error; and his agreement with the general drift of this poem may account for the exaggerated estimate of it which he has just recorded. He has found in the higher classes of our society, already disposed to extend beyond its due limits the domain of Taste, a wide sympathy with his eloquent exposition of its laws, even when he most misconceives their application. But in a more stirring time, it was a similar, though far grander Art-worship, a like contempt of material wants and depreciation of political struggles, that withheld many of the noblest [p. 413→] minds of Europe from a comprehension of the great head, or a full sympathy with the greater heart, of the gigantic Goethe.
An attentive examination of the latter books of Mrs. Browning’s poem will convince any one that we are not unjust in charging her with comparative contempt for the material agencies of civilization and disparagement, through precept and example of philanthropic effort. Here are some of the passages in which the moral of the whole book is, as it were, summed up:—
I walked on, musing with myself
On life and art, and whether, after all,
A larger metaphysics might not help
Our physics, a completer poetry
Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants
More fully than the special outside plans,
Phalansteries and material institutes,
The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries
Preferred by modern thinkers, as they thought
The bread of man indeed made all his life,
And washing seven times in the “People’s baths”
Were sovereign for a people’s leprosy.
....…What we are, imports us more
Than what we eat; and life, you’ve granted me,
Developes from within.—(p. 344.)
Yet our physics must be seen too first. A truckle-bed is after all a narrow study for a metaphysician. It is but poor comfort to a starving wretch to tell him that it imports him more what he is, than what he eats. It must be a complete poetry indeed that will undertake the work of Mr. Mayhew among the criminals, or solve the problem of female labour in our large cities. There is some poetry that is really a power among the better portion of the labouring classes of a nation: but neither Burns nor Schiller penetrate to those depths where the zeal of a philanthropist is most beneficent. We require something more tangible to touch the under-current masses: the means of daily bread and the first rudiments of knowledge. Poetry about poetry is the last thing to descend to the people. We suspect the large sale of “Aurora Leigh” has done but little to renovate or purify the alleys of London. We doubt not the good effect of the Manchester Exhibition, the Handel and Haydn festivals, on many even of our common workmen; but their influence is insignificant compared with the benefit that would result to England from a good system of Secular Education. The new Venetian lecture room at Dublin, and the hints from Mr. Ruskin which have been acted on in its construction, must have gone far to elevate the taste of the masonic craft, but we suspect that the Northumberland baths and the National School have done still more for the morals and health of the city. In the wilder districts of England, in the moors of [p. 414→] Ireland, in Connemara or Cahirseveen, this romance of art appears in its full absurdity. You must drain those waste lands, put windows into those mud cabins, and teach their ragged inmates to read and to work, else the “prophet and the poet” will only “thunder down” in the guise of some wide-mouthed agitator preying on the passions and ignorance around him. It is well to know that man developes from within, that outward schemes are but imperfect methods, and that we ought not to sever poetry from the actual world. But if we doubt too much of our powers for doing good—of the possibility of lessening by enduring effort the ills around us, we fall into a profitless despair, or a false content, more truly named indifference; “Though we fail indeed,” our authoress tells us:—
You—I—a score of such weak workers—He
Fails never. If He cannot work by us
He will work over us. Does He want a man,
Much less a woman, think you? Every time
The star winks there, so many souls are born,
Who all shall work too. Let our own be calm:
We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars,
Impatient that we’re nothing.
Ashamed? no; proud rather, that we feel so deeply the greatness of each atom of God’s work. There is here, and in the magnificent poetry at the conclusion of the book, too much of the spirit of the Lotos Eaters—the most fatal, because the most fascinating form of the laissez faire—an acquiescence in the “Everlasting No!” The world would come right, we are told, if we leave it to God. It wont. Is it not one of the truisms of our morality, that where evil is active, good must be strenuous on all sides, or the fair fabric will go to ruin while the ministers he sent to keep it sound are singing hymns?
Romney Leigh himself seems to be treated no less unfairly than the cause he represents. There are absurd philanthropies in abundance, pretentious schemes with no heart in them, false and idle. Had the hero of this poem advocated the most impracticable of these, his punishment had been too severe. Let us see how Mr. Stephens, of the “Cambridge Essays” would phrase it? Romney Leigh for being a philanthropist,—to be rejected and lectured by his mistress—to have his intended wife stolen from him—to try everything, to succeed in nothing—to be laughed at by everybody—to lose his money—to have his house burned about his ears—to get both his eyes knocked out—to beg pardon of his old mistress at last, and confess that she was all right and he was all wrong—to have her to take charge of him afterwards in his mutilated state!!!
But Romney’s schemes were not so impracticable; he was [p. 415→] too good and too great a man to devote his whole life and energy to an honest cause without some beneficent result. He did more holy work in his tender care and reformation of those poor girls in London, than his cousin’s poems could effect, were they much better than we can imagine them to have been. If he erred, it was through excess of faith and hope and charity;—by trusting too much to the effect of kindness in remoulding rough natures; by a want of practical distrust. “Dear Romney, you’re the poet,” Aurora says herself; and some one well sings—
To have the deep, poetic heart
Is more than all poetic fame.
We do not blame Mrs. Browning for not doing what she does not profess to do,—she has, indeed, professed too much,—but for doing wrongly part of what she does. The work—full of beauty, large-heartedness, and valour, though it be,—has artistic defects sufficient to render it unworthy the place assigned to it by a great critic, as the greatest poem of the century:—it would have had a more prominent position in the first rank had it taught a truer and a nobler lesson.
Perhaps the worst effect of exaggeration is that it excites the opposite extreme. When Art is advocated by the depreciation of the other influences for the elevation of mankind, it receives the deepest injury. They who ignore its real glory and grandeur retaliate by a corresponding depreciation. The great agencies for harmonizing and adorning life should go hand in hand. The world prospers then, when “the poet and the philanthropist stand side by side” in grand equality; and its rough labour is most ennobled when music and poetry accompany and complement the worker’s toil.
[John Nichol]
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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