E580513A. Aurora Leigh (New York).
The National Era, 13 May 1858, p. 73.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 385–387.
Mrs. Browning’s late work is the “Story of Art and Love,” otherwise, Aurora Leigh and Romney Leigh, starting in life. Art, on her twentieth birthday, full of herself, puts on her long white morning robes that brush a grand trail across the dewy lawn, goes humming, sometimes warbling out heartily her descant upon singing thrush and blackbird, upon beauteous guelder-rose, sweet verbena, and acacia; upon poet-wreaths, put mostly, so she murmurs, upon the brows that lie dead, and past the feeling and gladness of them, as Dante’s. So, as she sings, she hunts for leaves wherewith to crown herself, catches joyfully at the ivy, of which “not a leaf will grow but thinking of a wreath,” and crowns her forehead, and there she is—Art; and, in all the big, swarming world, there is no one else beside her.
Love, concerned for her, tender toward her, follows, points to the draggled skirts, talks of headaches, tells her of the work there is for men and women to do here on this beleaguered earth.
You, you are young
As Eve with nature’s daybreak on her face;
But the same world you’ve come to, dearest coz,
Has done with keeping birthdays, saves her wreaths
To hang upon her ruins, and forgets
To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back
Those savage, hungry dogs that hunt her down
To the empty grace of Christ. The world’s hard-pressed;
The sweat of labor in the early curse
Has (turning acrid in six thousand years)
Become the sweat of torture. Who has time,
An hour’s time—think! to sit upon a bank,
And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands?
When Egypt’s slain, I say, let Miriam sing!
And he adds—
May I choose, indeed,
But now away my years, my means, my aims,
Among the helpers, if there’s any help
In such a social strait? The common blood
That swings along my veins is strong enough
To draw me to this duty.
After he has painted all the pains, sins, and wrongs, before her eyes, and said how terrible they are
For one who is not God, and cannot right
The wrong he looks on,
he asks her to be his wife, and help him do his work; to let him come to her, and lean upon her, and rest when he is aweary with his tasks among men. “Love and work with me,” he says. With indignation, quiet, but strong, Art, young, untried, undisciplined, yet having intuitions of individual powers for individual attainment and achievement, breaks in and tells him that if man says to loyal woman, if Love says to loyal Art, “Love and work with me,” he
Will get fair answers, if the work and love,
Being good themselves, are good for her—the best
She was born for—but me your work
Is not the best for.
And then she says—“Farewell.”
She is torn in the parting; but wonders why, since his chosen work and life are not her chosen work and life; since, with all the intentions that have come to teach her and be guides to her, this has not come, that they, too, Love and Art, were joined together in the beginning of God, and can never, to the end, be put asunder, without sense of loss and pain, more or less acute. So, standing erect, she says—“Farewell.”
He, with pain expressed in his words, his tones, his sorrowfully bent head, answered—“Then, farewell.”
She goes her way; he, his. He goes alone, with his heartache, and works; works all the harder, that, if possible, he may out-work, out-live the heartache. He parts his ancestral hall into almshouses, and fills them with the poor. When Art heard of it, she said:
He made an almshouse of his heart one day,
Which ever since is loose upon the latch
For those who pull the string. I never did.
No; cold, proud, arrogant! But this is what she said about the same time, after she had been a long, long time, at her chosen most successful art-work:
O, my God, my God.
O, Supreme Artist, who, as sole return
For all the cosmic wonder of Thy work,
Commandest of us just a word—a name,
“My Father!” Thou hast knowledge—only Thou—
How dreary ’tis for women to sit still,
On winter nights, by solitary fires,
And hear the nations praising them far off!
Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,
Our very heart of passionate womanhood,
Which could not beat so in the verse without
Being present also in the unkissed lips,
And eyes undried, because there’s none to ask
The reason they grew moist.
The love of all
(To risk in turn a woman’s paradox)
Is but a small thing to the love of one,
You bid a hungry child be satisfied
With a heritage of many cornfields; nay,
He says he’s hungry—he would rather have
That little barley-cake you keep from him
While reckoning up his harvests. So with us;
(Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalize!)
We’re hungry.
One time afterward she said, “It always makes me sad to go abroad”; and before she is through with the low wail, heart and pen take up over the sadness. She lets it be seen that, that evening, when she was at Lord Howe’s, my Lady Waldemar was there: was very pretty, with tresses so abundant, her maid must use both hands to coil them; and that the young man, with the German student’s look, said within her hearing—
Look that way, Sir Blaise,
She’s Lady Waldemar—to the left—in red,
Whom Romney Leigh, our ablest man just now,
Is soon about to marry.
Poor Art! poor Aurora Leigh! And so she says:
And now I’m sadder that I went to-night
Among the lights and talkers at Lord Howe’s.
And it is plain she was.
By and by she is in Paris. She goes and wanders early, because she is restless—
Through the market-place of flowers
(The prettiest haunt in Paris,) and makes sure,
At worst, that there are roses in the world.
She finds poor Marian Erle there; and, listening to the story of her wrongs, knows that false, vile, wicked Lady Waldemar is at the bottom of the deadliest of them all. So she mourns for poor Love, “poor Romney Leigh,” that he will take this woman for his wife. Sick at heart, weary, worn with life, she takes Marian Erle and her baby along, and travels night and day to her mother-land, Italy; hears Romney’s marriage-bells, fancies that she does, so sick are brain and heart, so conjured with the solitary buffeting. “The marriage-bells of Romney must be loud,” she says:
To sound so clear through all;
and adds, “I was not well.” No, Art was not well. Her heart and all her frame were sick for want and need of Love to cherish and warm, to fold her close and safe from the wear and tear of the way.
But on she is borne, past Dijon, past Lyons, past Marseilles, and at last she is in Italy. At Florence she takes a villa. Surely she’ll get rest now. Surely now shall come a glow, and a warmth, and a delight, into her art-life, living here in the midst of a garden where the olive grows and ripens, in her villa that overlooks the sun’s rising and setting, the Vallombrosan mountains—
Cathedral, tower and palace, piazza and street,
The river training like a silver cord
Through all,
the golden atmosphere of Italy upon all, without, within—all save her own within—surely she’ll let her feet rest soon, and her heart will rest.
We shall see. A letter comes to her from England, from a friend of hers and Romney’s, Vincent Carrington, to tell her how wonderfully her last book succeeds, to say of “poor Romney”—
When the fever took him first,
Just after I had writ to you in France,
They tell me Lady Waldemar mixed drinks
And counted grains like any salaried nurse,
Excepting that she wept too.
Vincent nowhere says he’s married, but, putting this with what she has heard before, she says:
Well, he’s married; that is clear.
No wonder that he’s married, nor much more
That Vincent’s therefore “sorry.” Why, of course
The lady nursed him when he was not well,
Mixed drinks—unless nepenthe was the drink,
’Twas scarce worth telling. * * *
Why, this room stifles. Better burn than choke;
Best have air, air, although it comes with fire,
Throw open blinds and windows to the noon,
And take a blister on my brow instead
Of this dead weight! Books succeed,
And lines fail. Do I feel it so, at last?
Kate loves a worn-out cloak for being like mine,
While I live self-despised for being myself,
And yearn toward some one else.
She sits a long time, sad, doubting, questioning, musing on art and life, and at last on love. At the end of her musing, when she has things somewhat adjusted, she thinks she would be happy if Romney were married well; to her blue-eyed friend Kate, for instance; happy, because Marian is gentle and loving, and lets her hold the baby; because baby, sitting on her bed in the morning, wakes her pelting her with flowers, and when she sleepily beckons him, kisses her until mouth, cheeks, and all its face, is dissolved on hers. She says—
God love him! <meaning the baby.>* I should certainly be glad,
Except, God help me, that I’m sorrowful
Because of Romney.
________
*Reviewer’s insertion.
________
Yes, because of Romney. Poor, dear, dearest Art! poor Aurora Leigh!
’Twas Marian laughed. I saw her glance above
In sudden shame that I should hear her laugh,
And straightway dropped my eyes upon my book,
And knew the first time, ’twas Boccaccio’s tales,
The Falcon’s—of the lover, who for love
Destroyed the best that loved him. Some of us
Do it still, and then we sit and laugh no more.
Laugh you, sweet Marian! you’ve the right to laugh,
Since God himself is for you, and a child!
For me there’s somewhat less—and so I sigh.
She, by the by, Aurora, is alone upon the terrace; Marian, awhile is in the garden below, with her baby. Then she comes in, and goes to her chamber with the child; and Aurora still sits, watching the gathering night, and how the purple shadows are like an enchanted sea.
Drawing you who gaze,
With passionate desire, to leap and plunge,
And find a sea-king.
When, all at once,
In my ears
The sound of waters. There he stood, My king!
I felt him rather than beheld him. Up
I rose, as if he were my king, indeed,
And then sat down in trouble at myself,
And struggling for my woman’s empiery [sic].
’Tis pitiful; but women are so made!
She’ll die for you, perhaps—’tis probable—
But we’ll not spare you an inch of our full height.
We’ll have our just stature—five feet four.
“You, Romney! Lady Waldemar is here!”
Did he touch my hand,
Or but my sleeve? I trembled hand and foot, &c.
It takes them a long time; but, at last, she knows that he’s failed in all his separate work—
“Stay,” I answered him;
“I’ve something for your hearing, also. I
Have failed, too!”
knows, at last, that they he strove to benefit have turned against him, shot at him once, pelted him often through the village, and burnt his house.
They did! They burnt Leigh Hall!
Poor Romney!
She knows he is not married; for when, incidentally, she names Lady Waldemar as his wife, “with sudden clash of voice,”
“Are we mad?”
He echoed—“wife! mine! Lady Waldemar!
I think you said my wife.” He sprang to his feet,
And threw his noble head back toward to [sic] moon,
As she swims against a stormy sea,
And laughed with such a helpless, hopeless scorn,
I stood and trembled.
“Dearest, men have burnt my house,
Maligned my motives; but not one, I swear,
Has wronged my soul as this Aurora has,
Who called the Lady Waldemar my wife.”
By and by, he says—and then she knows he’s blind—
“O, love, I have loved you! O my soul,
I have lost you. * * * I attest
Those stars above us, which I cannot see”—
“You cannot! Not see the stars?”
“’Tis worse still, not to see
To find your hand, although we’re parting, dear.
A moment let me hold it, ere we part;
And understand my last words”—
He tells her what he feels, and says “Good night,” to go—
“A moment. Heavenly Christ!
A moment. Speak once, Romney. ’Tis not true.
I hold your hands, I look into your face—
You see me?”
“No more than the blessed stars.
Be blessed, too, Aurora. Ah, my sweet,
You tremble.”
He tells her, then, what a way-lost letter of Lord Howe’s should have told her long ago, that one of those who turned against him, a preacher, the night his house was burnt, struck him blind.
“Blind Romney!”
“Ah, my friend,
You’ll learn to say it in a cheerful voice,
I, too, at first, desponded.”
“No hope!”
“A tear! you weep,
Divine Aurora? tears upon my hand!
I’ve seen you weeping for a mouse, a bird,
But weep for me, Aurora? Yes, there’s hope—
Not hope of sight. * * *
* * * I am quiet now—
As tender surely for the suffering world,
But quiet—sitting at the wall to learn;
Content henceforth to do the things I can:
For though as powerless, said I, as a stone,
A stone can still give shelter to a worm,
And it is worth while being a stone for that:
There’s hope, Aurora.”
“Is there hope for me?
For me? and is there room beneath the stone
For such a worm?.. And if I came and said
What all this weeping scarce would let me say,
And yet what women cannot say at all,
But weeping bitterly, (the pride keeps 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 must not 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.”
Then she owns all.
“You were wrong
In much. You said so. I was wrong in most.
Oh, most! * * * I forgot
No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman.
* * * Art is much, but love is more.
O Art, my Art, thou’rt much, but Love is more!
Art symbolizes heaven, but Love is God,
And makes heaven. O, Romney, O, my love,
I’m changed since then. Yet in one respect,
Just one, beloved, I am in nowise changed:
I love you, loved you—loved you first and last,
And love you on forever. * * *
* * * 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.”
Could I see his face,
I wept so? Did I drop against his breast,
Or did his arm constrain me! Were my cheeks
Hot, overflooded with my tears, on his?
And which of our two large, explosive hearts
So shook me? That I know not. There were words
That broke in utterance, melted, in the fire;
Embrace, that was convulsion—then a kiss—
As long and silent as the extatic [sic] night—
And deep, deep, shuddering breaths, which meant beyond
Whatever could be told by word or kiss.
But we cling to the page too long, transcribed too much, stretch our piece out too far. Beloved Aurora!
From the day
I had brought to England my poor searching face,
(An orphan even of my father’s grave,)
He had loved me, watched me.
Dear, dear Romney!
He stood a moment with erected brows
In silence, and as a creature might, who gazed:
Stood calm, and fed his blind, majestic eyes
Upon the thought of perfect noon.
Beloved, blessed Mrs. Browning! “holy lark!” soaring upward toward divinest heights, as the music within her soars.
by the author of “susy l___’s diary.”
[Eliza Jane Cate].
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
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