E580626A. Aurora Leigh.
The Moreton Bay Courier (Brisbane), 26 June 1858, p. 2; 3 July 1858, p. 4.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 388–393.
“We think that,” says Lord Macaulay, “we think that, as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.”
Why should poetry necessarily decline with the advance of civilization? The subjects, patent to the common observer, may, indeed, diminish in numbers; but will not the eye of genius descry new subjects, and discover new and wider relations, as civilization progresses,—subjects and relations as worthy the poet’s notice, and as capable of stirring his poetic inspiration, as any that have been embodied in song? Is the poetry of Milton less admired because it was produced in an age of comparative refinement? Would we, of the present day, have been more enamoured with it,—bestowed upon it more honestly felt, and generously expressed eulogium,—paid more sincere devotion at the shrine of the “blind old man”;—if Paradise Lost had been composed when Europe was lying lifeless and cold under the crushing incubus of the dark ages? Could such a poem as Paradise Lost have been composed during the dark ages? We don’t believe it. You might have had the mythology—that was ready at hand; you might have had the poetic genius—for genius is confined to no age; but, where would have been the pure, spiritual element, that possesses the poem, as does the soul the human body? Burns is allowed to be one of the best song-writers that ever rolled out his flowing numbers before a listening, and admiring public; but the Ayrshire Bard sung his inimitable odes in an age of the highest civilization.
All science progresses; why should the arts stand still, or rather retrograde? It may be that painting, and sculpture, and music, have made no essential progress for generations, and it may be that the same may be said of poetry, in its higher developments? But is this the necessary and natural result of the march of civilization? We cannot believe it; for, were it so, then the necessary result of that would be, that men were to be dwarfed in Imagination and in Heart, in the same ratio as they became acquainted with Facts, and developed in Intellect! Science and philosophy chiefly operate upon, and call into exercise, the mental powers; the fine arts chiefly appeal to the imagination, the taste, and the heart. Now, we cannot believe that it is the “established law of things,” that, as the one part of man’s nature shall expand, and shoot upwards, the other part shall become compressed and stunted—becoming “smaller by degrees and beautifully less,”—till the human being shall be sublimated to intellectminusheart!
We believe that the secret of Nature is the revelation of the Bible,—Goodness has the precedence of Greatness; and, that when the “established law of things” has been discovered, it will then appear, that the true formula is not Intellect minus Heart, as the reasoning of Macaulay involves, but Intellect plus Heart. Intellect and Heart; intellect softened, and beautified, and rendered god-like by the presence, and constant influence of holy affections. But poetry is the language of the heart; and although, in a materialistic age, the divinest portion of our nature is hedged round, encased, overlaid with—buried under—speculation, steam-engines, cotton-mills, gold nuggets, and the like, yet a change will come—man will rise to the true dignity of his nature—he will vindicate his sonship—his relation to the Best, as well as the Greatest of all; and then the deep and true utterances of the heart will be poured forth in song, worthy to hold place beside the productions of the great masters of the Lyre.
Meanwhile, even these “iron times” are producing some things deserving of notice in the department of poetry. Such was the “Roman,” by Dobell; “Festus,” by Bailey; the “Life Drama,” by Smith; and other well known works; and such, especially, is Aurora Leigh.
We are not about to compare, or contrast, this product of Mrs. Browning’s muse, with the productions either of the living or of the dead. This is very much the style of current criticism, and the writers thereby cheaply earn a name for erudition, power of analysis, breadth of view—and one knows not all what. Our object is rather to give the reader a true idea of the work; a glimpse of the principles and aims it discloses, and a taste of the true poetry with which it abounds.
Aurora Leigh is, as the reader is aware, the name of the heroine; and the book is the fair, but greatly compressed, picture of her individual life, and its surroundings. Many and striking are the glimpses afforded of the inner life of one who is a type of a class, by no means rare in our times. It is said that not a little of Mrs. Browning’s own experience is given in this work; and we have her own authority for stating, that she considers it the ripest of all her productions. Most of her critics will agree with the author in her judgment on this point. The book, however, may be misunderstood; and it will never be, in the common use of the term, popular. But, to the thoughtful; to the lover of the solid, in preference to the frivolous; to the person who feels life to be real, and the problems of human well-being, to be of greater importance than all the raree-shows of “Vanity Fair;”—to such, Aurora Leigh will be a mine of mental wealth, a storehouse of choice poetry, a source of strong encouragement, while struggling with the evils of life. In this case, to know and appreciate the book, it must be read with care; it is like the leaves of certain plants, they don’t give out their hidden sweets, except to him to presses them.
I write: my mother was a Florentine,
Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old.
Of her mother, thus so early taken from a devoted husband, and a helpless child, we learn that—
She was weak and frail;
She could not bear the joy of giving life—
The mother’s rapture slew her.
Her father was an “austere Englishman,”
Who after a dry life-time spent at home
In college-learning, law, and parish talk,
Was flooded with a passion unawares,
and doated with the utmost fondness on his Italian bride. Death leaves them, as he leaves every one, in a sad condition. Here the authoress has put in—burned in, we might say—some deep strokes, in simple words:—
Still I sit and feel
My father’s slow hand, when she had left us both,
Stroke out my childish curls against his knee;
And hear Assunta’s daily jest (she knew
He liked it better than a better jest)
Inquire how many golden scudi went
To make such ringlets. O my father’s hand,
Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily,—
Draw, press the child’s head closer to thy knee!
I’m still too young, too young, to sit alone.
How touching, too, is this,—
I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb—
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold.
The father now left Florence, and made haste to hide
Himself, his prattling child, and silent grief,
among the mountains.
So, nine full years, our days were hid with God
Among his mountains. I was just thirteen,
Still growing like the plants from unseen roots
In tongue-tied springs,—and suddenly awoke
To full life and its needs and agonies.
With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside
A stone-dead father! Life struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning. His last word was, “Love”—
“Love, my child, love, love!”—(then, he had done with grief.)
“Love, my child.” Ere I answered he was gone,
And none was left to love in all the world.
“There ended childhood:” well might Aurora Leigh write thus. Then there came a stranger, “with authority,” from England, with all her English coolness and precision; and then there followed the parting from her old devoted nurse Assunta,
With a shriek,
She let me go,—while I, with ears too full
Of my father’s silence, to shriek back a word;
In all a child’s astonishment at grief
Stared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,
My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!
The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,
Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer deck,
Like one in anger drawing back her skirts
Which suppliants catch at. Then the bitter sea
Inexorably pushed between us both.
And sweeping up the ship with my despair
Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.
This is a pretty good share of suffering and sorrow for one young life! The voyage is over; and as she heard, from alien lips, the language of her father, she
Wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,—
And some one near me said, the child is mad
Through much sea-sickness.
Reader, have you ever chanced to know one who might have sat for this picture:—
I think I see my father’s sister stand
Upon the hall steps of her country house
To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey
By frigid use of life, (she was not old,
Although my father’s elder by a year):
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,
Or peradventure niggardly half truths;
Eyes of no color,—once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling; cheeks in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom,
Past fading also.
Poor Aurora! What sympathy can there possibly exist between this model-matron, and thy free Italian spirit? Can ice and fire amalgamate? No more can ye; and many a squeeze, and curb, and twist, thou must submit to, ere thou shalt stand forth the paragon of womanly virtues and accomplishments, that thy father’s sister, simple soul, would fain have thee to be. Mayhap, thou shalt never reach her ideal; mayhap, it will fare better with thee, and with the world, if thou never shalt; mayhap the ideal of thy father’s sister is, like that of many others, at right-angles with the true!
Observe how the gushing love of the Italian girl is checked, and sent back into the heart, panting for an object on which to bestow its pent up feelings:—
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-steeled naked-bladed eyes
Searched through my face—aye, stabbed it through and through,
Through brows and cheeks 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.”—Very kind.
The secret of this strange treatment lies in the hatred of the Florentine mother.
Our space will not allow us to follow our heroine through the various processes by which it is, in these happy days we live in, sought to make ladies out of girls. Of course the result was “failure,” judged by the standard of Matron Leigh; not so when judged by the standard of sense and truth.
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 least, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not.
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this .... that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work perhaps.
What do you bachelors say to this? Well, we must permit many other questions to sleep undisturbed, and hurry on with our brief analysis. Her education finished—perhaps it was before it was finished—according to the ideal of Matron Leigh, our heroine comes under influences, and has become the subject of impulses, the very existence of which was hid from the good old conscientious lady. The springs of life awoke within Aurora Leigh. She held converse with books, with mother Nature, with God, with her own fresh untamed spirit. And though she drudged at work, for she was trained to prompt obedience, yet she 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.
Why should not Matron Leigh, though she hated, with right good will, the gay Florentine who stole her brother’s heart;—why should not she—she, who had reared a model lady, worthy of the time-honored name of Leigh—why should not she effect a “settlement” for her youthful charge? And there is Romney, the bearer of the honored name, the possessor of the princely lands and revenues. And Romney’s eye follows her movements; and Romney often finds himself in her presence. But, dear good lady, knowest thou not Romney is granted a cousin’s privilege; art thou not aware that there is such a thing as love, and that without this same troublesome thing, a high-minded, noble woman cannot—will not marry! Cease your match-making, then, for Aurora loves not Romney Leigh, and she will not wed where she does not love. All honor to thee, noble-minded woman! May thy sisters be imitators of thy ways!
We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced;
We were not lovers, nor even friends well-matched,—
Say rather, scholars upon different tracks,
And thinkers disagreed; he, over full
Of what is, and I, haply, over bold
For what might be.
Aye, this was precisely the rock on which they struck, and striking on it, nearly shivered their barks to very splinters! He, over practical; she, proudly theoretical. He, the philanthropist; she the poet. Is there no lesson to be learned here, by the rising spirits of the time? Go, ponder it, ingenuous youth.
Times followed one another. Came a morn
I stood upon the brink of twenty years,
And looked before and after, as I stood
Woman and artist,—either incomplete,
Both credulous of completion. There I held
The whole creation in my little cup,
And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank—
“Good health to you and me, sweet neighbor mine,
And all these peoples.”
She was glad that morning, and went forth among the flowers and dew,
To fly my fancies in the open air,
And keep my birth-day, till my aunt awoke
To stop my dreams.
In sport, not pride, she wreaths a crown—not the bay; not the myrtle, which means love; not the verbena, with its passionate fragrance; not the guelder-rose, too frail;—
Ah—there’s my choice,—that ivy on the wall,
That headlong ivy!
I like such ivy; bold to leap a height
’Twas strong to climb!
The wreath was drawn across her brow, half blinding her with dew, and fastened behind; when she, turning, faced
My public!—cousin Romney—with a mouth
Twice graver than his eyes.
Here follows a scene of great power, which will not bear condensing, and must be read in its connexion. Romney, the enthusiastic philanthropist, declares his love, and is—refused! And the scene ends thus:—
Romney.—
Then, must it be
Indeed farewell? And was I so far wrong
In hope and in illusion, when I took
The woman to be nobler than the man,
Yourself the noblest woman,—in the use
And comprehension of what love is,—love,
That generates the likeness of itself
Through all heroic duties? So far wrong,
In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love,—
“Come human creature, love and work with me,
Instead of,—‘Lady, thou art wondrous fair,
And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse
Will follow at the light[n]ing of her eyes,
And where the Muse walks, lovers used to creep:
Turn round and love me, or I die of love.’”
Aurora—with quiet indignation,—
You misconceive the question like a man,
Who sees a woman as the complement
Of his sex merely. You forget too much
That every creature, female as the male
Stands single in responsible act and thought,
As also in birth and death. Whoever says
To a loyal woman,—“Love and work with me,”
Will get fair answers, if the work and love
Being good themselves, are good for her—the best
She was born for. Women of a softer mood,
Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,
Will sometimes only hear the first word—love,
And catch up with it any kind of work,
Indifferent, so that dear love go with it;
I do not blame such women, though, for love,
They pick much oakum!
But me, your work
Is not the best for,—nor your love the best,
Nor able to command the kind of work
For love’s sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir,
To be over-bold in speaking of myself,
I, too, have my vocation,—work to do,
The heavens and earth have set me, since I changed
My father’s face for theirs,—and though your world
Were twice as wretched as you represent,
Most serious work, most necessary work,
As any of the economists’. Reform,
Make trade a Christian possibility,
And individual right no general wrong:
Wipe out earth’s furrows of the Thine an[d] Mine,
And leave one green, for men to play at bowls,
With innings for them all!......
For me,
Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,
Of work like this!—perhaps a woman’s soul
Aspires and not creates! Yet we aspire,
And yet I’ll try out your perhapses, sir;
And if I fail—why, burn me up my straw
Like other false works—I’ll not speak for grace,
Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I
Who love my art would never wish it lower
To suit my stature. I may love my art.
You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,
Seeing that to waste true love on anything,
Is womanly, past question.
I retain
The very last word which I said, that day,
As you the creaking of the door, years past,
Which let upon you such disabling news
You ever after have been graver.
How, now, Aurora, why dost thou nurse the remembrance of these last words? Hast thou not said—“I do not love thee, Romney?” If there is no love, why this pain?
Next paper will reveal the secret.
[Continued in the issue of 3 July 1858.]
In this, the last article on Mrs. Browning’s book, we promised to tell the secret of the story; and we shall keep our word.
It appears to us that the authoress shows the working of the female heart in a way which has been rarely done before, when Aurora ruminates on the refusal, which her whole nature demanded she should give to her cousin Romney—her whole nature, that is, as she at present understood herself, and viewed the vocation to which, she believed, heaven had called her. Even clever persons sometimes commit serious mistakes; well is it, when, as in the case of Aurora Leigh, they are rectified by the after life. Her mistake consisted in this, that she projected herself, so to speak, into the Future, and treated the Present as if its claims were nought. With her, it was always, what is to be; never, what is. She labored, perhaps unconsciously, to keep herself apart from the real, every day calls and claims of humanity, and lived in the ideal world of the poet-artist.
Are there no young persons of promise; who, in these respects, walk too closely in the steps of Aurora Leigh? They dream away the best part of their existence, greatly concerned about what is to be, rarely noting, with manly seriousness, the reality of the present. Attention to the present, is the best preparation for the future.
Nothing could persuade her to marry Romney. His earnest (not passionate) pleading; her aunt’s remonstrances; the argument, that unless she marries Romney, she is pennyless and homeless; her aunt’s sudden death, leaving her in that condition, nearly; an ingenious and generous attempt, on his part, to prove to her that she was really possessed of a fortune; the prospect, immediately before her, of the cold world as her home, and literature as a “profession;”—none of these considerations moved her. And so she went forth, not knowing whither she went, young, ardent, hopeful, into the “wide, wide world,” in the firm faith that a “mission” was appointed her, and that she, Aurora Leigh, was a power in that world. She writes; and bids fair to rise to a high place in literature. She is talked of in the drawing-rooms of fashion; she is admitted to the highest literary circles; there is no “let or hindrance” to a successful authoress, and the cousin of Romney Leigh, for the Leigh’s are an honorable, and honored family.
Meanwhile, Romney is prosecuting his philanthropic schemes with untiring energy, and princely generosity,—doing much good, and doing no little harm. The motives are all right; but the plans are questionable—nay, they are, in many respects, positively injurious.
There is a certain Marian Erle, whose brutal mother treats her so, that she is driven out into the world, to save her honor. Destitute, and sick, she is taken into an institution; and when about to leave the friendly walls, Romney asks her whither she is bound? It now strikes her, with awful force, that she is alone, and helpless in the world. He secures her a situation, in the great metropolis.
He sent her to a famous sempstress house
Far off in London, there to work and hope.
With that, they parted. She kept sight of heaven,
But not of Romney Leigh. He had good to do
To others; through the days and through the nights,
She sewed and sewed and sewed.
Here is a picture of real life; will the reader excuse the length of the extract, that we may have it presented to us in full. Look upon it; study it; perchance it will make you sad; there is something in it, also, that will gladden the thoughtful mind:—
’Twas a year thence
When Lucy Gresham, the sick sempstress girl,
Who sewed by Marian’s chair so still and quick,
And leant her head upon the back to cough
More freely when, the mistress turning round,
The others took occasion to laugh out,—
Gave up at last. Among the workers, spoke
A bold girl with black eyebrows and red lips,—
“You know the news? Who’s dying, do you think?
Our Lucy Gresham. I expected it
As little as Nell Hart’s wedding. Blush not, Nell,
Thy curls be red enough without thy cheeks;
And, some day, there’ll be a man to dote
On red curls,—Lucy Gresham swooned last night,
Dropped sudden in the street while going home;
And now the baker says, who took her up
And laid her by her grandmother in bed,
He’ll give her a week to die in.—Pass the silk,
Let’s hope he gave her a loaf too, within reach,
For otherwise they’ll starve before they die,
That funny pair of bedfellows!—Miss Bell,
I’ll thank you for the scissors. The old crone
Is paralytic—that’s the reason why
Our Lucy’s thread went faster than her breath,
Which went too quick, we all know. Marian Erle!
Why, Marian Erle, you’re not the fool to cry!
Your tears spoil Lady Waldemar’s new dress,
You piece of pity!
Marian rose up straight,
And, breaking through the talk and through the work,
Went outward, in the face of their surprise,
To Lucy’s house, to nurse her back to life
Or down to death. She knew by such an act,
All place and grace were forfeit in the house,
Whose mistress would supply the missing hand
With necessary, not inhuman haste,
And take no blame. But pity, too, had dues;
She could not leave a solitary soul
To founder in the dark, while she sat still
And lavished stitches on a lady’s hem
As if no other work were paramount.
“Why God,” thought Marian, has a missing hand
This moment; Lucy wants a drink, perhaps.
Let other’s miss me!—never miss me, God!”
So Marian sate by Lucy’s bed content
With duty, and was strong, for recompense,
To hold the lamp of human love arm-high
To catch the death-strained eyes and comfort them
Until the angels, as the luminous side
Of death, had got theirs ready.
Cold must be the heart that is not moved by this scene; utterly incapable of appreciating moral heroism must be the soul that does not breathe forth a blessing on the heart of Marian Erle; twice dead to all aspirations after goodness, must the mind be, that does not purpose to imitate this holy example!
Lucy died; but so gently did she pass away, that it was like passing from sleep to sleep.
So gently, like the light upon a hill,
Of which none names the moment that it goes,
Though all see when ’tis gone.
Just now, Romney, on his walks of philanthropy, enters the house, and stood beside the bed. A voice said,—“Marian Erle!”
She rose:
It was the hour for angels—there stood hers!
It must suffice to say, that, through a much longer process than we can take time to describe, and, by no means an unnatural one, they were drawn together; and in due time, and in appropriate circumstances, Marian Erle is to be the bride of Romney Leigh. The day is fixed, that this large philanthropist, and scion of a noble family, shall ally himself with a daughter of the people, and thus give the best of all proofs of the sincerity of his motives, and permanency of his plans.
Does the reader remember a Lady Waldemar, whose dress narrowly escaped spoiling, when Marian shed those burning tears for Lucy Gresham? You do? Well, this noble dame—a widow, but fair and fascinating—finds her way to Aurora’s “upstairs dwelling,” and at once announces the forthcoming marriage, and reveals her passion for Romney. A heartless woman is Lady Waldemar. And failing to enlist Aurora’s help to break off the marriage, she pouts, and puts on airs, and leaves in high dudgeon. She is not to be baulked; this “cotton-girl,” this “sempstress,” shall not stand between her and Romney Leigh. So she vowed; and she kept her vow. So artfully, and successfully did she—this polished, heartless woman—poison the pure, and sensitive, and loving heart of Marian, that on the morning of the wedding, she disappears, and no one knows whither she has bent her steps!
At this stage of the story, we would fain have given some extracts, to show how admirably the authoress has managed the conflicting feelings that come now into play, but, space forbids it.
Lady Waldemar ingratiates herself with Romney; and it looks as if his weary spirit would, at last, find repose in the bosom of this accomplished lady. Repose, sustaining sympathy, happiness, from such a source!—Impossible: A whited sepulchre—full of dead men’s bones! No, no, my lady, when men want happiness, and womanly help, they don’t go to such as you.
Aurora, with the fine instinct of a noble spirit, resolves to seek the lost one. Now, she is becoming practical. She loves Marian as a sister; she mourns over her with deep, but not with helpless grief. For Romney, her deepest feelings are moved; and she fancies (so little does she, the poet-artist, know herself) that if she could but restore to him the lost one, his happiness would be secured, and hers also in his. She goes to the Continent; she makes diligent search, for she has perfect faith in Marian’s principles and virtue: but when she has found and restored her, she will seek repose in her own beautiful Italy. Time passes, and no tidings of the lost. One day, Aurora gets a glimpse of her in Paris; but she is immediately lost again to her view. This is one of the ablest parts of the poem: and from it there are profound lessons to be learned by us all. Some things are against Marian; the hasty, and the unfeeling would have adjudged her guilty—foully guilty—and there would have been an end to the matter. Not so Aurora Leigh. Though sorely perplexed, and sadly grieved, she still put faith in her sister. She could not believe her guilty; she could not conceive of her fallen. She would believe her innocent, till her guilt was proved—made as plain and undeniable as the presence of the sun in a cloudless day.
By and bye they meet, when evasion is impossible, and it is true—undeniably true—that that child, of which Aurora had got a glimpse—is Marian’s! In the name of purity—of all that is virtuous, should she not now be condemned, cast off, and shunned? The world says “yes”—put from you, chase into loathsome darkness, and unbroken oblivion, the guilty wretch! Before you, good reader, join in the cry, hear the truth:—Lady Waldemar’s agent, instead of sending her ladyship’s hapless and miserable victim to the Australias, conveys her straight to Paris. Read what follows, and say who is the guilty person:—
You feel?
You understand?—No, do not look at me,
But understand. The blank, blind, weary way
Which led .... where’er it led .... away, at least;
The shifted ship .... to Sydney, or to France …
Still bound, wherever else, to another land;
The swooning sickness on the dismal sea,
The foreign shore, the shameful house, the night,
The feeble blood, the heavy-handed grief .....
No need to bring their damnable drugged cup,
And yet they brought it!..........
.......... When waking up at last, ....
I told you that I waked up in the grave.
Who will throw the first stone at Marian Erle? We know One who would have said,—“neither do I condemn thee.” We shall not attempt to apportion the guilt. But guilt there is—awful guilt—in the sight of high heaven. O, if this exposure of these dens of infamy, that abound in all the great cities of the Old World, were to lead to the application of some remedy, how many victims, young, innocent, lovely, and unsuspecting, might be saved! Of all the places, this side of hell, those infernal dens, in which such persons as Marian Erle are drugged and ruined, demand our execration; the monsters—the female monsters—who allure their victims to these dens, merit unutterable loathing, and the bitterest cursing that human language can frame: the men—are they men?—for whose pleasure these innocents are sacrificed, are ten thousand times worse than dogs, and should be shunned, and pointed at, and kicked out of all society. Demons they are in human shape. Righteous heaven will not always be silent in sight of all this traffic in virtue; God hears the cry of the innocent and helpless, and woe to the transgressors when He cometh to judgment!
Her terrible, sad story told, Aurora’s soul “rose up to take her part,” against all that the world could say or do.
“Come with me sweetest sister,” I returned,
“And sit within my house, and do me good
From henceforth, thou and thine! ye are my own
From henceforth. I am lonely in the world,
And thou art lonely, and the child is half
An orphan. Come.”
Could anything be more touching, and exquisitely natural than this:—
She looked me in the face and answered not,
Nor signed she was unworthy, nor gave thanks,
But took the sleeping child and held it out
To meet my kiss, as if requiting me
And trusting me at once.
And so they journeyed southwards to Italy.
It is strange,
To-day while Marian told her story, like
To absorb most listeners, how I listened chief
To a voice not hers, nor yet that enemy’s,
Nor God’s in wrath, ...... but one that mixed with mine
Long years ago, among the garden trees,
And said to me, to me, too,—“Be my wife
Aurora!” It is strange with what a swell
Of yearning passion, as a snow of ghosts
Might beat against the impervious doors of heaven,
I thought,—“Now, if I had been a woman, such
As God made women, to save men by love,—
By just my love I might have saved this man,
And made a nobler poem for the world
Than all I have failed in.”
The secret will be out:—
O Romney, O my Romney, O my friend!
My cousin and friend! my helper, when I would,
My love, that might be!—mine!
Why, how one weeps
When one’s too weary! were a witness by,
He’d say some folly .... that I loved the man,—
Who knows?
She writes home the story of Marian Erle; and Romney sets out for Florence. Aurora believes he has married Lady Waldemar; and on his arrival she exclaims,
You are come,
My cousin Romney?—this is wonderful.
But all is wonderful on such summer nights;
And nothing should surprise us any more,
Who see that miracle of stars. Behold!
What remains is soon told—it is told by the authoress with thrilling effect—he feels bound in honor to offer his hand to Marian Erle, Aurora’s letters having reached in time, and other circumstances having transpired, to prevent his marriage with Lady Waldemar. Marian has sworn never to marry. And the end is, after much, and admirably managed cross-play of words, big with loving meanings, that Aurora makes this declaration, having discovered that Romney is stone blind:—
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!
* * * * * * *
A voice said low and rapid as a sigh,
Yet breaking, I felt conscious, from a smile,—
“Thank God, who made me blind, to make me see!
Shine on Aurora, dearest light of souls,
Which rul’st forevermore both day and night!
I am happy!”
Thus ends the book; but its influence will not end with the reading of it. The wise and the well-doing will mark the following things, all the more that they have followed closely the career of Aurora Leigh:—
Men should be wise in their philanthropy; there is something greater than artistic excellence—every day duty, lovingly performed; the highest attainment is submission to the Divine Will; “honesty is the best policy;” there are some Christ-like souls in the world; conformity to God’s will is true happiness.
It has been to us a labor of love, to call the attention of the public,—in these papers—to this, the ablest Poem that has been published in London, for years; and now, that all who are disposed, may read and judge for themselves, it is not the least part of our pleasant service to say, that we shall present the copy, used for this Review, to the Library of the School of Arts.
G.W.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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