E590100A. Aurora Leigh
Titan, January 1859, pp. 33–37.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26, 367-369.
There is an evident untruth in the oft-repeated assertion that the poet is as much the creature as the creator of his age. If he were the one, it is impossible that he could also be the other. His heart, indeed, with its large receptiveness, lies open to the influences that are at work, moulding the characters, shaping the opinions, and directing the tendencies of men. But he can reject as well as receive, and preserve the upright heart and pure amid prevailing corruption and the debasements of society. The true poet ever comes unto his own. He is not the creature of chance, of circumstances, or of conventionalism. It was after the Restoration, when the wildest licentiousness prevailed, and when venal rhymers pandered to courtly vices, that Milton composed the greater part of Paradise Lost. The attractions, in fact, to which genius is most susceptible, the materials which it moulds into song, and the complex influences from which it derives its purest inspirations, are precisely those that are unchangeable in their essence, farthest removed from the conflict of opinions, and least liable to be disturbed by the predominant passions and tendencies of special periods. The poet deals not with the transient and adventitious. He lies close to the heart of Nature, and closer still to the heart of Man, extracting from both the spirit of wisdom, of beauty, and of love, enriching himself and ennobling the heart of the world. He is not so much the creature as the representative of his age,—the representative of its hidden virtue and goodness—The ‘bright consummate flower’ of its nobler elements.
The genuine child of song can transform an iron into a golden age. No period is prosaic to him. He may appear at a time like the present when the practical activities of life seem utterly antagonistic to poetic repose—when material science has its legions of disciples—when mechanical inventions and appliances are multiplied with incredible rapidity—when labour ‘smites on a thousand anvils,’ and steam leviathans float many a rood on the surface of the waters; nevertheless amid all this wild whirl and deafening turmoil of our modern civilisation, he can still hear the beating of human hearts and the voices of Nature that are never dumb,—he can still see visions of loveliness and pass through the Gate Beautiful into the holy land of song. Evermore for him the outgoings of the morning and evening rejoice; the sunlight ebbs and flows; night in her solemn glory broods over cities vast and solitary shores; the summer bird sings, and the winter-storm sweeps abroad on the wings of the wind. Before his visionary eye, and moving to the sound of music, martial, mirthful, and mournful by turns, pass on all the pageants of life, fast followed by the muffled form of death, crowned with a shadowy crown, and bearing the sceptre and the pall. The worlds of mind and of matter are his; many spirits minister unto him; many-mansioned is the home he inhabits. The tears shed by the sorrowful in secret feed the deep fountains of his song, and his heart leaps to the [p. 34→] sound of the timbrel of joy. While hopes and fears, love, pity, and despair, lighten and darken the world’s tragic stage; while the mourners go about the streets, when the time of the singing of birds has come; while the dews of heaven descend on the bridal wreath and the funeral cypress, on childhood’s sunny locks and bowed heads white unto the harvest of death; while the manifold and mysterious spectacles of life remain, the poet will not cease to be visited by inspiring gleams, or to embalm in consecrated song his wonder, his grief, and his solemn joy. Nothing is common or unattractive to him in nature or in man; the world is ever young; no time, place, or condition is ignoble. ‘All the intercourse of human life,’ said John Sterling, ‘is big and warm with poetry. The history of a few weeks’ residence in a circle of human beings is a domestic epic. Few friendships but yield, in their development and decay, the stuff of a long tragedy. A summer day in the country is an actual idyl; and many a moment of common life sparkles and sings itself away in a light song, wounds as the poison barb of an epigram, or falls as a heavy mournful epitaph.’ With Matthew Arnold we believe that actions possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and appealing to the primary human affections, are the eternal objects of epic and dramatic poetry (not of all poetry, as he asserts, thereby completely overlooking the lyrical); But we are far from holding with him that in order to obtain such actions, and to appeal with effect to these elementary emotions, it is necessary to forget the modern world, and revert evermore to Prometheus, Clytemnestra, or Dido.
Bear witness ‘Aurora Leigh.’ This noble poem is a ‘domestic epic, dealing with the details of modern life which pass daily under our eyes;’ it represents ‘modern personages in contact with the problems of modern life, moral, intellectual, and social’ and yet we can confidently assert, in opposition to Mr. Arnold’s poetic creed, that it impresses the heart and stirs the permanent passions of our nature as powerfully as the mythic and historic legends of Greece. Mrs. Browning is a learned poet; she is intimately acquainted with the Greek dramatists; she has translated the Prometheus; and it was not therefore, because she lacked the requisite learning and ability to appreciate the grand characters and actions of the classic age, that she chose to lay the scene of her domestic epic in the modern world, and to create personages representing the conflicting ideas and passions of the present age. She pronounces this poem to be the most mature of her works, and the one into which her highest convictions upon life and art have entered. Such an announcement could not fail to awaken the liveliest interest of readers familiar with the former productions of her whom the most original-minded of American poets characterized as the ‘noblest of her sex.’
The poem possesses the fourfold charm of an admirable plan, an absorbing narrative, a well-defined purpose, and a rich accumulation of profound poetical thought. The narrative grows in interest as it proceeds. Through the first three books it progresses somewhat slowly and heavily until Marian Erle is introduced,—the outcast girl with drooping head, and eyes that smiled as if remembering they had wept. The poem gains in simplicity, pathos, purity, and power, when Marian’s woful history is being told; when the poet, with intense vividness and strong womanly feeling, recounts her wrongs, her wanderings, her sorrows, her despair, her madness, her deep devotion to her benefactor, and her yearning affection for the child of her murdered innocence. There are few creations in poetry comparable to Marian Erle—few passages equal to that in which she describes her mournful madness after being subjected to brutal outrage in a shameful house in France.
‘I was mad—
How many weeks, I know not—many weeks.
I think they let me go when I was mad;
They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys might
A mad dog which they had tortured. Up and down
I went by road and village, over tracts [p. 35→]
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
Hang reddening through his gory wounds at me,
And shook his nails in anger, and came down
To follow a mile after, wading up
The low vines and green wheat, crying “Take the girl,
She’s none of mine from henceforth.” Then I know
(But this is somewhat dimmer than the rest),
The charitable peasants gave me bread
And leave to sleep in straw; and twice they tied
At parting, Mary’s image round my neck—
How heavy it seemed! as heavy as a stone;
A woman has been strangled with less weight.
I threw it in a ditch to keep it clean
And ease my breath a little, when none looked;
I did not need such safeguards;—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 sat, 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.’
Equally powerful, and deeply pathetic, is the description, in Book Ninth, of Marian and Romney meeting again on the terrace in front of Aurora’s new Florentine home, when the round Italian moon shed down her pallid radiance on the acacias of the garden, on the dim hills and the shadowy valley. Aurora Leigh and Romney fail to interest us so much as Marian, although Mrs. Browning obviously intended the main import of the poem to be interwoven with their struggles and aims. Aurora is the woman-poet; strong, self-reliant, self-sacrificing, proud of art and its pretensions, and scorning as insufficient all attempts to renovate society by material phalansteries and economic measures. Romney is the philanthropist and practical reformer, elbow-deep in social problems, writing pamphlets on social wrongs, visiting the distressed, instituting soup-kitchens, transforming the hall of his forefathers into a house of refuge for the poor and the vile, and projecting a marriage with the outcast Marian, for the purpose of bridging the gulf that separates class from class. While thus intent upon their diverse aims—the woman consecrated to art, and the man struggling with schemes of material amelioration—Aurora and Romney are exhibited in contrast, in antagonism even, with little inter-communion, although still attached to each other as cousins and friends. She is dissatisfied with him for refusing to acknowledge the power and province of the poet; for failing to perceive that life develops from within, and that it takes the ideal to blow aside the dust of the actual. He, again, is, or seems to be, dissatisfied with her for wasting the bloom of her womanhood upon the inutilities of art, and treating his aims, his means, and his ends with scornful pride. The labours of both were abortive, for both were wrong. Romney failed, because he regarded the natural world without the completing counterpart of the spiritual; because he considered the whole too partially, and took no count of God, and concluded his pattern to be perfect, and his nostrums infallible. Aurora failed, because, while seeing human nature in its breadth, and comprehending the high necessities of art, she wronged her own life; exalted the artist’s in- [p. 36→] stinct at the cost of the woman’s; and forgot that from perfect womanhood the perfect artist springs. With humbled hearts they confess their failure to each other. Leigh Hall had been burned to the ground by a village mob, the phalansterians had helped the burners, and Romney had been struck blind by a falling beam amid the conflagration. When Aurora discovers his blindness, all the long-imprisoned love of her woman’s heart breaks forth in tears and protestations and words of passionate endearment. They cling together, heart to heart—for ever reconciled—for ever one.
‘And then calm, equal, smooth, with weights of joy,
His voice rose, as some chief musician’s song
Amid the old Jewish temple’s Selah—pause,
And bade me mark how we two met at last
Upon this moon-bathed promontory of earth
To give up much on each side, then take all.
“Beloved,” it sang, “we must be here to work,
And men who work can only work for men,
And, not to work in vain, must comprehend
Humanity, and, so, work humanly,
And raise men’s bodies still by raising souls,
As God did, first.”
“But stand upon the earth,”
I said, “to raise them—(this is human too:
There’s nothing high which has not first been low,
Thy humbleness, said one, has made me great!)
As God did, last.”
“And work all silently,
And simply,” he returned, “as God does all;
Distort our nature, never for our work,
Nor count our right hands stronger for being hoofs.
The man most man, with tenderest human hands,
Works best for men, as God in Nazareth.”’
Mrs. Browning, we presume, intends the blindness of Romney, and the marriage-union of the poet and philanthropist to have a moral significance. Each is necessary to the other, and they can only work together for good when they are one in heart, one in hope, one in faith, one in aim. We only wish that Aurora had been represented with a little more amiability and loveableness throughout this remarkable poem. It was quite possible to effect this, even while she elevated the artist above the woman, and held that love is much, but art is more. Until the conclusion of the poem, when the fountains of her heart’s great deep break up, we are almost at times tempted to regard her as a female Diogenes, who has mistaken cynical philosophy for poetry.
Aurora Leigh abounds in strong and subtle thoughts expressed in vigorous language. It displays more masculine energy than feminine delicacy, although many descriptive passages are distinguished for tender and luminous beauty. It is not, however, by any means an artistically perfect poem. There is more struggle and strain than melody in the verse. Mrs. Browning does not study simplicity of utterance, nor indite her thoughts in the ‘polished form of well-refined pen.’ She too frequently employs uncommon and unpoetical words that grate harsh discord, and destroy the beauty of a description. It is scarcely possible to tolerate such expressions as ‘tolerant churning mouths,’ ‘infiltrated,’ ‘disutilized,’ ‘dynastic stars,’ ‘aspectable stars,’ ‘acquiescent shadow murmurously,’ ‘inscient vision,’ ‘visceral heat,’ and others equally absurd and discordant. There is unpardonable coarseness in the last line of the following quotation:—
‘Earth, shut up
By Adam, like a fakir in a box
Left too long buried, remained stiff and dry,
A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,
Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes,
And used his kingly chrisms to straighten out
The leathery tongue turned back into the throat.’ [p. 37→]
Such defects and specimens of bad taste are all the more to be regretted, since Mrs. Browning can write purely when she chooses, as the best portions of this book and her earlier poems testify. Aurora Leigh has been written for the few, not for the many, and we do not expect that it will ever attain extensive popularity; but it will continue to receive its due meed of recognition and generous praise from those who are capable of appreciating the profound truths it contains, and who regard it as a noble protest against the materialistic tendencies and quack-reforms of the present age.
[The article containg this review continues with notices of works by Mary C. Hume, Longfellow, Kingsley, Heraud, Robert Montgomery, and Paul Richardson.]
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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