E591000A. Aurora Leigh (New York).
The Ladies’ Repository, October 1859, pp. 611–615; November 1859, pp. 662–667.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26, 370–377.
Here is a novel and a poem, two thousand lines longer than Milton’s Paradise Lost, more readable, and equally spiritual; like it in boldly entering the regions of polemics, but unlike it in dealing with things of this world more than with things of angels, and falling behind it in nothing but a certain classic finish which gives eternal dominion to Milton over all minds that conquer their first indifference, and become his patient, thorough students: all this by a lady—Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Her girlhood name, Elizabeth Barrett, was seen on the title-page of more than one volume of poetry, and achieved for her a great literary reputation while she was yet young. In 1846 she married Robert Browning, the author of Paracelsus and several tragedies; and hand in hand, congenial in taste and alike gifted, they have since continued to ascend the hill of fame; her name being written in a brighter light, and, as becometh a woman, her hand scattering sweeter odors and her voice breathing sweeter sounds. Their residence is in London mostly; there at least is the date of her dedications and prefaces, and the same fact is indicated by Dr. G. W. Bethune and the North British and Westminster Reviews. [1]
Mrs. Browning has the most charming or divine beauty—beauty of the soul—and is personally as beautiful as a lady need be to be truly loved; and that is the best beauty in woman which is neither dangerous to herself nor others. Her eyes,
Too bright for blue, too beautiful for gray,
stand in dreamy steadfastness beneath a brow whose ample swell and marvelous breadth create [p. 612→] the same impression you feel in surveying a vast mountain; you look long, then turn and look again and again, still wondering to see the greatness growing full in every part; her light-brown hair, tinged with gold and very fine, falls in girlish-look and curls about her face and on her neck; face oval, somewhat short and broad; cheeks full of womanly feeling; mouth wide, with lips well set, full and firm, but not compressed, neither biting nor blabby; chin short and bold enough; light body, a little stooped in the shoulders. She has seen affliction. Such appears Mrs. Browning in her picture before me in the Eclectic Magazine for January, 1858; surprisingly intellectual and spiritual, firm, pleasant, noble woman—not a follower of fashion simply, but a mother of thought and feeling. She has had the singularly good taste—much as I love to gaze on her image I must concede it—to keep her likeness out of each and all her publications so far as I can discover.
Her poems, as at present published, are contained in four 12mo volumes of over three hundred pages each. Three of these volumes open with a principal poem of sixty to one hundred pages, entitled, severally, “Prometheus Bound,” “The Seraphim,” and “The Drama of Exile;” and each of the books is filled out with minor poems—“Bertha in the Lane,” “Casa Guidi Windows,” “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” and “Miscellaneous Poems,” long and short, too numerous to mention in this article. The fourth volume—the fourth in time but not numbered in the edition before me—is, in its whole three hundred and sixty-six pages, occupied by the poem entitled, simply, Aurora Leigh. It is the modern novel in epic, a “story” in blank verse, but merits our special study, as it embodies, Mrs. Browning tells us in the dedication to her father, “her highest convictions upon life and art”—life indicating the theme of solemn responsibility, and art, the theme or theory of beauty. These are blended in the history and didactics of the book, which in itself, aside from its high purpose, should receive the careful attention of all literary, religious, and philosophic minds. I have no doubt the work is known to many of my readers, but it has astonished me not a little that scarcely any proper allusion has been made to it by the resident contributors to the periodicals of the Atlantic states, who are so much better situated, to say nothing of other advantages, to take suitable notice of the work, than one in this intellectual chaos, or forming Pacific world. Though the English Reviews have been full of it, I shall hope for a kindly judgment in some difference from them and for the literary defects of this paper, which would not have been sent forward if other hands had done the work due to Mrs. Browning from American pens.
I shall not forearm my reader by any criticism upon the style, form, or polemics of the book. I will give the history and character of Aurora Leigh and other personages, mainly from the poem itself, by such extracts as will serve to indicate in a degree the masterly poetic abilities of Mrs. Browning. In conclusion I may give a brief judgment of the whole work.
Aurora Leigh is an authoress. Some things about her make you question whether Mrs. Browning does not personify her own history in this creation. But it is wholly owing, probably, to the fact that all loved objects of the imagination take color and personality, however unconsciously, from ourselves. God created man at first in his “own image,” and following creations proceed upon the same law. Be this as it may, Aurora gives her history delicately, and claims to be the author of the poem.
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others’ uses, will write now for mine—
Will write my story for my better self.
* * * * * * *
I, writing thus, am still what men call young;
I have not so far left the coasts of life
To travel inland, that I can not hear
The murmur of the outer infinite,
Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep
When wondered at for smiling. (P. 1.)
She commences almost immediately her touching history:
My mother was a Florentine,
Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old.
She was weak and frail;
She could not bear the joy of giving life—
The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kiss
Had left a longer weight upon my lips,
It might have steadied the uneasy breath,
And reconciled and fraternized my soul
With the new order. (P. 2.)
As it was she felt indeed “a mother-want about the world” which her father’s considerate love could not supply. She says:
My father was an austere Englishman,
Who, after a dry lifetime spent at home
In college-learning, law, and parish talk,
Was flooded with a passion unaware,
His whole provisioned and complacent past
Drowned out from him that moment. (P. 3.)
This happened in Italy, the land of passion, whither Mr. Leigh had carelessly journeyed. There, from a religious procession in honor of the holy sacrament,
A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,
And shook with silent clangor brain and heart, [p. 613→]
Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,
He too received his sacramental gift
With eucharistic meanings; for he loved. (P. 4.)
When after four or more years of wedded life he laid the mother in the church-yard, he had become a man of sentiment.
There’s a verse he set
In Santa Croce to her memory:
“Weep for an infant too young to weep much
When death removed this mother;” (P. 4.)
and then he retired to a picturesque home in the mountains, where he gave himself to the education of his daughter, teaching her what he “had learned the best—grief and love.” She says also:
Out of books
He taught me all the ignorance of men.
* * * * * *
He sent the schools to school, demonstrating
A fool will pass for such though one mistake;
While a philosopher will pass for such
Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross
And heaped up to a system. (P. 7.)
At the age of thirteen, her father dead too, Aurora came to England to live with a maiden aunt, and was introduced to quite another school. The person and welcome of aunt Leigh are thus described:
She stood straight and calm;
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight,
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with gray
By frigid use of life; * * *
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.
* * * * * * *
She stood upon the steps to welcome me,
Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck.
* * 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.
Then with some strange spasm
Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands
Imperiously, and held me at arm’s length,
And with two gray-steel, naked-bladed eyes,
Searched through my face; ay, 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.
(Pp. 10, 11, 12.)
The secret of all this was the hate her aunt bore her Tuscan mother, for having fooled “a wise man from wise courses.” Under this experienced young lady Aurora grew up; “learnt,” she tells us,
My complement of classic French—
Kept pure of Balzac and Neologism—
And German also. * * *
Brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the sciences.
* * Learnt much music. * *
The hearer’s soul shuffling off through hurricanes of notes
To a noisy Tophet; and I drew .. costumes—
* * I washed in
From nature landscapes—rather say washed out—
I danced the polka and cellarius,
Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modeled flowers in wax. (P. 14.)
Here is the usual programme of female education, somewhat extended and delineated with quiet irony and sprinklings of sharp disgust. It did not kill her as it has others, though it might have done so. She wished it would. Her heart was with her father in the grave. Her aunt has a cousin, Romney Leigh, the proprietor of Leigh Hall, who came frequently to see—his aunt, of course, and took some notice of her; chiding her sadness, beguiling to a walk, and sometimes sighing and looking so! She says,
Once he stood so near
He dropped a sudden hand upon my head,
Bent down on woman’s work, as soft as rain,
But then I rose and shook it off as fire—
The stranger’s touch that took my father’s place,
Yet dared seem soft.
I used him for a friend
Before I ever knew him for a friend.
’T was better, ’t was worse also, afterward;
We came so close we saw our differences
Too intimately. Always Romney Leigh
Was looking for the worms, I for the gods.
Aurora woke in this world. She was here “for uses she must count worth while.” She found in an attic large cases of her father’s books, and read them indiscriminately. This
Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,
gives rise to many lines of pregnant wisdom. Take the following example:
Behold! the world of books is still the world;
And worldlings in it are less merciful
And more puissant. For the wicked there
Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes
Is edged from elemental fire to assail [p. 614→]
A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right
By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness. (P. 25.)
In this world of books, God’s providence being over all, Aurora fell upon the poets,
The only truth-tellers now left to God,
she thinks. She is awaked from her doubts and dim conventionalisms to faith;
Convicted of the great eternities
Before two worlds. (P. 29.)
Now nature has a voice which she wanders forth to hear, listens to the birds, looks long at flowers, bathes in the sunlight, sings matins with the lark, gazes at the stars to catch the “angels in their games,” sits in the shade beside the sparkling brook, and often sees Romney. She becomes a poet and bursts out,
O life! O poetry!
Which means life in life! Cognizant of life
Beyond this blood-beat—passionate for truth
Beyond these senses—poetry, my life,
My eagle, with both grappling feet still hot
From Zeus’s thunder, who has ravished me
Away from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,
And set me in the Olympian roar and round
Of luminous faces, for a cup-bearer
To keep the mouths of all the godheads moist
For everlasting laughters—I, myself,
Half-drunk, across the beaker, with their eyes!
How those gods look! (P. 31.)
At twenty, crowning herself with an ivy in a dream of joy on her birthday, Aurora is surprised by Romney, who has found, “in the hollow by the stream,” a manuscript book of her poetry, and brings it to her. Romney is a great socialist, and wants help for sweeping barns and keeping hospitals. Aurora has a vastly-different idea:
It takes a soul
To move a body. * * *
It takes the ideal to blow a hair’s-breadth off
The dust of the actual. Ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within. (P. 55.)
This quarrel over, the social problem ends in her rejecting Romney’s hand, protesting she did not love him, but blushing terribly when her aunt tells her, “I know you love that man; I am not so old for nothing.” Strange freaks have proud girls! She will not descend to the dull uses of wifehood. No, never—that is, not then! But the estate, Leigh Hall, descends by positive exclusion of the heirs by foreign wives, by will a hundred years old. Romney, her aunt tells her, would marry her and save her from the interdict. Without that she was poor. This made the matter worse. She would not have a suspicion over her that sordid aims could come to her heart.
I say no, no!
I tie up “no” upon his altar-horns
Quite out of reach of perjury! At least
My soul is not a pauper; I can live,
At least my soul’s life, without alms from men;
And if it must be in heaven instead of earth,
Let heaven look to it—I am not afraid. (P. 61.)
Not long after the aunt dies suddenly, willing Aurora “three hundred pounds and any other sum of which she died possessed.” The unopened letter contained a deed of gift from Romney to his aunt of thirty thousand pounds, and he assures Aurora it was her aunt’s money. “How?” she demands. “By deed of gift,” and she “died possessed of it.” So she—Aurora—inherited it. But she claims her aunt had not accepted it; she will not accept it. The letter unopened is handed back to Romney. He opens it and produces the deed. There is evidence of gift, but none of acceptance.
Death’s black dust being blown,
Infiltrated through every secret fold
Of this sealed letter by a puff of fate,
Dried up forever the fresh-written ink,
Annulled the gift, disutilized the grace,
And left these fragments.
As I spoke I tore
The paper up and down, and down and up,
And crosswise, till it fluttered from my hand
As forest-leaves stripped suddenly, and rapt
By a whirlwind on Valdarno, drop again,
Drop slow, and strew the melancholy ground
Before the amazed hills … * I .. * *
* * * * Exaggerate
A small thing with a great thing topping it.
But then I’m thinking how his eyes looked.
(Pp. 77, 78.)
Thus they parted then: she to London; the “gathering-place of souls,” to live her life out in poetry; he to duty, to live his life out in Phalanasteries, work, and food for the poor.
And in between us rushed the torrent-world
To blanch our faces like divided rocks,
And bar forever mutual sight and touch,
Except through swirl of spray and all that roar, (P. 80.)
is the sad wail of Aurora.
“Seven years after she commences this history in London, where she has formed for herself a congenial sphere of action, and achieved much in poetry which brings her a taste of fame;” not forgetting the surprise of the June morning in the summer garden, where she often lingers in imagination and sees Romney, and confesses
He bears down on me through the slanting years
The stronger for the distance.
His name,
Too, like a tune that runs
I’ the head, and forces all things in the world— [p. 615→]
Wind, rain, the creaking gnat, the stuttering fly—
To sing itself and vex you, (P. 280.)
is fluttering about her heart.
“The account of her London career gives occasion for a great deal of humorous satire on the fashionable life and talk of the metropolis, and there is a large amount of vivid characterization.” As the reviewers [2] concede, “Some of the dramatis personæ are drawn with great power; such as the good Lord Howe, the cautious philanthropist, never out of his depth, never honest; clever Mr. 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 the worldly woman,
So self-possessed,
Yet gracious and conciliating, it takes
An effort in their presence to speak truth.
You know the sort of woman—brilliant stuff,
And out of nature,
Lady Waldemar, by name; a widow, and capable of doing things; young, rich, fascinating, of great personal beauty—her neck so white that the pearls she wore were unseen except for the ruby clasp; eyes of dazzling brightness, an “indecent heart,”
She hurt you like the day
Let in suddenly on sick eyes;
and yet so gentle you could not complain of her; a wicked woman withal, herself in love with Mr. Romney Leigh—as far as such natures can love. She visits Aurora to secure her aid to break up a marriage which her cousin is about to contract with a “daughter of the people,” in practical illustration before the world of his communist theories. The lady fails in her mission. How sharply Aurora, as represented, draw her disappointed leave-taking:
“You take so it,”
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. 105.)
_________
[Continued in the issue of 19 November 1859.] [p. 662→]
second paper.
“Henceforth the book gathers all the tumultuous interest of the most exciting novel,” and all the sparkling beauty and power of living poetry. We [3] devour the pages, turn over leaves without seeming to know it, see the rounds of fashionable life,
Ladies …
Rustling in silks and lisping gossip,
hear the talk of artists and embryo philosophers, the jokes of old rakes and the flash and cant of swelling young snobs—all so “magically cadenced” as to highten the flow of interest and fix the attention on the “apparition and tragedy of Marian Erle.” She rises beautifully, majestically on the view; and in her character and description Mrs. Browning exhibits her masterly powers of appreciation in poetry, art, philosophy, and religion. The stately Aurora goes to see this Marian Erle, and finds in the midst of one of the wretched streets of London an “ineffable face,” which the reviewers think the most “beautiful 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. (P. 108.)
She tells her sad story, too long to repeat, too charmingly woven into the poetry to be broken by extracts, with wonderful pathos, using
Meek words that made no wonder of herself
For being so sad a creature— (P. 109.)
how, born in a hut on Malvern Hill, a drunken father and cruel mother, she was set to all mean tasks, yet comforted by the beauty around and above in the sky, from which it seemed to her
Some blind love came down
And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss;
She learned God that way, (P. 110.)
and at the Sunday school, and from stray books. At the age of fifteen her mother offered to sell her to a drunken squire, and she tears herself from them and escapes.
“God free me from my mother,” she shrieked out;
“These mothers are too dreadful,” . .
And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep
Away from both—away, if possible,
As far as God—away, * * *
* * * Mad fear
Was running in her feet and killing the ground.
All night she ran,
* * * While her heart
Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big
It seemed to fill her body; then it burst,
And overflowed the world and swamped the light.
“And now I’m dead and safe,” thought Marian Erle—
She had dropped; she had fainted. (Pp. 115, 116.)
The description of this flight is most exciting, and though not without a certain extravagance, almost the only fault of Mrs. Browning’s poetry, yet, taken all in all, comes near the harmonic grandeur of Milton in his far-famed conception of the flight of Satan in pursuit of our earth:
O’er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way;
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.
Marian was taken up senseless to a hospital, where “she seethed in fever many weeks;” then recovering, Romney Leigh sends her to a famous “sempstress-house, far off in London.” There she toils, musing of him who “touched the wounds of Christ, and made her feel more self-respecting,” and how
Romney’s face would look,
And if ’t were likely he’d remember hers
When they two had their meeting after death. (P. 121
How charmingly beautiful, I can not but exclaim in the midst of the narrative! Now Marian leaves the place to wait on Lucy Gresham—a sewing-girl companion in her death illness.
She could not leave a solitary soul
To founder in the dark, while she sate still
And lavished stitches on a ladies’ hem,
As if no other work were paramount.
“Why, God,” thought Marian, “has a missing hand
This moment; Lucy wants a drink perhaps,
Let others miss me! never miss me God!” (P. 123
Here again she met Romney, who came on his mission, visiting and feeding the poor.
She said in speaking of it, “If a flower
Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals,
You’d soon attain a trick of looking up,
And so with her.”
She looked up to Romney Leigh, of Leigh Hall. They were to be married. Aurora would aid it, but Lady Waldemar will prevent it. She worked upon Marian with well-feigned kindness; makes her understand her disparity; finally that she [p. 663→] herself loves Mr. Leigh, and he loves her; but that he has a fanaticism which he means to carry out by marrying a poor girl he does not love. She tells her all this at just the last day, and partly suggesting and partly seeming only to acquiesce, she provides Marian professedly with the means of escape to Australia on the very morning of the intended marriage. Marian writes a heart-breaking letter to Romney, who receives it while awaiting, two hours behind time, his bride at church, where half St. Giles in rags and frieze, and half St. James in cloth of gold are crowding to behold the wedding. There is a picture of the disappointment, and the scene which follows, which discloses the degraded soul-sense of London poor. Instead of being taken to Australia, poor Marian is carried to a miserable house in France, where, from seasickness, heart-agony, and desolateness, alone and penniless, nothing more was wanted for her ruin. But they brought their
Damnable drugged cup—
Hell is so prodigal of devils’ gifts.
She can not flee. She becomes insane, and then the wretches left her. Bad men recoiled at “her awful look.” She describes:
That down came next day’s noon and caught me there
Half-gibbering and half-raving on the floor,
And wondering what had happened up in heaven,
That suns should dare to shine when God himself
Was certainly abolished. * * (P. 247.)
She wandered up and down while
* * * 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,
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.”
By and by her brain cleared.
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 sepulcher,
Which angels were too weak to roll away. (P. 248.)
Romney Leigh searches England in vain for her. In the mean time Lady Waldemar plies her arts to secure the end of her villainy. She visits Romney’s phalanstery, takes parts with drabs picked out of the street by his charity, puts her white arm up to elbows in suds, and makes her hands play
Like swans in water
Among lilies all ashake,
to secure his attention. The report is that she is soon to marry him. The public think so. And Aurora someway miserable at this journeys to the continent. There she chances on Marian Erle, whose story already indicated she hears and “grows passionate.” She writes to Lord Howe to break to Romney that Marian is found, and, if not married, to tell him of the perfidy of Lady Waldemar. She writes to that lady also a most withering letter—the best scolding, that is, the most poetic that I can imagine of that quality. But it is a life-art that I can not recommend to the lady readers of the Repository, and I will give no specimens. There are some things said in this part of the poem which indicate a steady, bold determination to grapple with one of the worst evils of society. Some sentiments, taken by themselves, may startle the reader. The views in this connection—on this mountain of literary glory all aflame with genius—are new, and the reviewers generally do not know what to make of them. In fact, who does know what to do with a wronged, betrayed, disgraced woman? Mrs. Browning makes Aurora Leigh take the stricken one, and her unfathered child, to her home, to her heart. She did right!
Aurora understands a letter, which, in reply to her, refers to the sad catastrophe, the burning of Leigh Hall, to signify that Romney and Lady Waldemar were married. The fact is, the phalanstery is broken up; the house has been torn down and burned up before his eyes, and then he is blinded by a blow from the base father of Marian, whom he has rescued from prison. His Communist theories are scattered to the winds.
So much worse is soul than body plague,
Bread and labor will not heal heart-depravities.
The great news-letter had miscarried.
Romney Leigh now journeys to the continent and finds Aurora in Florence. He goes to seek again Marian Erle. He and Aurora talk at cross purposes awhile—she supposing him the husband of Lady Waldemar; he confesses his materialist errors, and concedes the correctness of her views in the summer garden. He is warm in his cousinly admiration. She confesses that if she had been less proud it had not hurt her, but checks his devotion, which she thinks unbecoming in the husband of Lady Waldemar. He scorns the imputation, but declares he is married.
Is not Marian Erle my wife?
As God sees things I have a wife and child,
And I, as I’m a man who honors God,
Am here to claim my wife and child. [p. 664→]
Aurora is confounded. She could not speak. Marian Erle had heard this. The scene is thus sketched:
“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 earth, 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 honorable wife?”
* * * * *
“I take her as God made her, and as man
Must fail to unmake her, as my honored wife.”
She never raised her eyes nor took a step,
But stood there in her place and spoke again,
“You take this Marian’s child, which is her shame,
In sight of men and women, for your child,
Of whom you will not ever feel ashamed?”
* * * * *
“May God so father me as I do him,
And so forsake me as I let him feel
He’s orphaned haply.” (Pp. 341, 342.)
To this also Aurora, “looking up into the sky to see if God stood near her,” assents and promises as a woman and a Leigh she’ll
Witness to the world
That Romney Leigh is honored in his choice.
But this, with wonderful impassioned energy,
With her great
Drowned eyes, and dripping cheeks, and strange, sweet smile,
That lived through all, as if one held a light
Across a waste of waters, (P. 344.)
Marian rejects. She is dead, beyond resurrection; worshipped Romney, but did not love him; knew Aurora did. She has learned that
… A woman, poor or rich,
Despised or honored, is a human soul;
And what her soul is—that, she is herself;
And though she should be spit upon of men,
As is the pavement of the churches here,
Still good enough to pray in. And, being chaste
And honest, and inclined to do right
And love the truth, …
… I should not fear. (Pp. 344–5.)
She is glad of the proffer.
Her broad, wild woodland eyes shot out a light;
Her smile was wonderful for rapture. (P. 344.)
“… O it does me good,
It wipes me clean and sweet from devil’s dirt.
… For the rest you and I
Can never, never, never join hands so.” (P. 346)
And she disappears from the narrative. My inward reflection is, that she is a marvelous but not an “impossible person, under the circumstances.” [4]
In a conversation which follows between Aurora and Romney, she discovers that he is blind, and takes occasion from it to declare her love, which she confesses she had proudly and wrongly hid, mistaking her soul as Romney had mistaken the world; yet that the fact was seen by the aunt, by Lady Waldemar, and even by Marian Erle. Now the clouds on “life and art” soon rain themselves dry, and stand variously parted, fleecy—light breaking in all around on man and nature. Heaven itself opens, and the New Jerusalem appears. And the poem closes with the spirit-eyes of these fresh-wedded souls looking out on her “walls of jasper and gold;” all of which, to my mind, suggests the vast perfection of the symbols of revelation to express in themselves more than the highest reach of poetic power.
And when
I saw his soul saw—“jasper first,” I said,
“And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony;
The rest in order, … last, an amethyst.” (P. 366.)
The poem, as a whole, is a most hopeful indication of the acknowledgment of the union of poetry and the Christian religion—a much more important union than that of science and revelation, of which so much is said in this material, practical age. Science has its home in the understandings of men. I use the term in the Coleridgean sense, to express the judgments which men form from their senses. These will necessarily be partially developed among us. Extended observation and experiment only gives the power of certainty to the understanding. While, therefore, science answers some objections to the letter of revelation and gives us a new clew to interpretation, it starts other objections also, and never can certify to any thing but external objects and the laws of nature. Supernatural things are suggested by science, but the reason, which judges from the facts of our consciousness, enables us to discern them, and faith only demonstrates them. Poetry—I mean of course that which is worthy of the name—like Mrs. Browning’s, is an insight into the spiritual life of men and things—of government, God, and heaven. The power of imagination in the field of the spiritual, in unfolding and voicing the otherwise dumb disquiet of our nature, is vastly great and important. If exercised rightly in true poetry, it will strike life and joy at once [p. 665→] into the whole mass of mind. No one looks but to love and labor; no one hears but to pray and hope. Science is circumscribed to those who have the leisure and the industry to master the details of the cumulous mass. Poetry appeals at once to the sense with the voice of the spirit. Some one has strongly said Luther did more for the Reformation by his hymns than by the translation of the Bible! And all know that without the poetry of the Wesleys, Methodism had scarcely grown to greatness. I think, then, Mrs. Browning has not committed a mistake by the exaltation of art in the poem under review. This is the main point of criticism by the North British Review. It is really the point of grandest excellence, taken as a whole, just as she presents it; not broken up into the detached parts, and narrowed down to a specific expression or two. That is no just criticism of art which takes away any part from its relations to the whole. As, then, to that part of progress to which Mrs. Browning has assigned art there is no defect in the poem. It is not against philanthropy, but that philanthropy will fail without it; it is not against the material or natural for which I almost tremble to think Mrs. Browning gives too wide a range, when she thinks the anatomist, studying a tumor, more poetic than some poets, and when she says,
He heareth the young ravens when they cry,
And they cry for carrion. My God!
But this is so, and it is heroically said, and marvelously mixed with the spiritual character and fatherhood of God. The shadow of this æsthetical objection disappears in view of the grand whole and total of the poem, and the verdict already given by a great critic—the greatest poem of the age—will stand the verdict of the world, or extremely happy will our age be if another poem excel it.
The ideal which Mrs. Browning draws, is almost divinely perfect. The life revelation of her consciousness, if epitomized and properly worded, would correspond to the graphic passage in the epistle of St. Paul—Romans xii, 6–15—which see. The basis of this life is laid in such broad rocks of truth as this:
Get leave to work
In this world—’t is the best you get at all;
For God in cursing gives us better gifts
Than man in benediction. (P. 86.)
I have said the ideas of life in the poem are almost divine—not quite. The author aims well and labors nobly to realize in actual forms the creative beauty, the perfect love, and the wisdom of God. She bravely dares to stand by a ruined woman, one Marian Erle, and recognize God’s creation in her child. She is really innocent, however. But Jesus said to the sinning one, “Go and sin no more.” “By mercy and truth iniquity is purged.” When will poetry dare to equal this perfect moral beauty before the world, and still possess the holy light which will make the pearl of virtue appear more brightly? When will poetry say to all with house-room welcome, “Come in; wash and be clean—your sins are forgiven?” Or when will it show us the science of this divine life of purity and love in the strong “individualism” which will make the world see the thing practicable? This union of poetry with Christianity is more important, I will continue to think, than that of science and revelation, important as that may be. What has science properly to do with revelation? Who made the earth the measure of heaven? “Those who view and treat the Bible as the raw material of moral and theological science, are constantly missing or mistaking its meaning, and, of course, raying out darkness on those they attempt to teach. To such men the Bible seems very much as Milton’s Paradise Lost did to a certain mathematician, who thought it all might be very fine, to be sure, but he did not see that it proved any thing; for the aim of this and any other work of art is not to prove but to reveal.” [5] That is the mission of poetry, to copy out the revelation which the soul sees; to be the foster sister of revelation, itself a revealer; to exhibit the same depth of insight into nature which the commands of God expressed when Sinai thundered and the trumpet blew for the music; to touch the sepulcher with resurrecting power, and by its word to make “all things new.” Mrs. Browning begets the hope that its true mission can not be overstated, but it has been sadly misconceived in the world, and yet has formed the spiritual nature more than all science.
If any think poetry an unimportant, silly, unpractical thing, let them look at the fact that nine-tenths of our preachers have prosed Milton for the last hundred years as the staple of theology and metaphysics, and he can furnish the ready coin of thought a hundred years more perhaps out of his one work, Paradise Lost. And law and literature could scarcely travel if Shakspeare were not in the gears; and where would be the sanctuary songs and the brightest, sweetest power of Christianity, if it were not for David, Watts, Luther, the Wesleys, White, Montgomery, Toplady, Cowper, and other souls that swing the lights of glory over our—for them—not darkened time? Their hymns kindle the [p. 666→] fires of our devotion, swell the anthem of our joy, and feed the river of our peace.
A witty minister, whom I knew in boyhood—Rev. Parmelee Chamberlin, New York conference—was rallied one day, in the time of early temperance agitation, for carrying a jug along the street. “O ho!” said a bystander among a village group, “so you temperance advocates drink behind the door!” Mr. Chamberlin turned quietly to the company, and holding up the jug said, that he did not wonder at the suspicions of his friend; for though this was an honest jug, and never had any thing in it stronger than molasses, yet it belonged to a family which had a very bad name. So with poetry; it has a very thriftless name, yet it also only bears the most delicately-distilled honey of the soul. Mrs. Browning discriminatingly says:
Many fervent souls
Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel,
If such had offered, in a restless heat,
Of doing something. Many tender souls
Have strung their sorrows on a rhyming thread
As children cowslips: the more pains they take
The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,
Too oft 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. 32.)
Perhaps I have given extracts sufficient from the poem to convey a proper idea of its merit; but as I regard the work the most evangelical, the greatest and the best of the nineteenth century, still cognizant of some defective versification and extravagant forms of expression, I will justify the estimate by a few specific quotations. I will first present the central idea—the real evangel of the poem:
“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 that has not first been low;
My 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.”
He paused upon the word and then resumed:
“Fewer programmes; we have no prescience:
Fewer systems; we who are held and do not hold:
Less mapping out of masses, to be saved,
By nations or by sexes. Fourier ’s void,
And Comte is dwarfed—and Cabet, puerile.
Subsists no law of life outside of life,
No perfect manners without Christian souls:
The Christ himself had been no lawgiver,
Unless he had given the life, too, with the laws.”
I echoed thoughtfully, “The man most man,
Works best for men; and, if most man indeed
He gets his manhood plainest from his soul;
While, obviously, this stringent soul itself
Obeys our old rules of development;
The spirit ever witnessing in ours,
And love, the soul of soul, within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely. First God’s love.”
“And next,” he smiled, “the love of wedded souls,
Which still presents that mystery’s counterpart.
Sweet shadow-rose, upon the water of life
Of such a mystic substance, Sharon gave
A name to! human, vital, fructuous rose,
Whose calyx holds the multitude of leaves.
Loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbor loves,
And civic, … all fair petals, all good scents,
All reddened, sweetened from one central heart!”
(Pp. 362, 363.)
2. There is all the philosophy of history and providence in less than four lines of amazing significance:
There’s not a crime
But takes its proper change out in crime,
If once rung on the counters of this world;
Let sinners look to it. (P. 109.)
3. The true mission of the benevolent is beautifully exhibited in the following lines:
As light November snows to empty nests,
As grass to graves, as moss to mildewed stones,
As July suns to ruins, through the rents,
As ministering spirits to mourners, through a loss,
As heaven itself to men through pangs of death,
He came uncalled wherever grief had come.
4. The plea for woman.
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 labor 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 honor us with truth, if not with praise. (P. 166.)
5. The picture of a waking infant, over whom his mother stands, superior to any thing, the Westminster Review thinks, in the English language, is as follows:
The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,
And, staring out at us with all their blue,
As half perplexed between the angelhood [p. 667→]
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. (P. 226.)
6. The fifth book is the most specific discussion on art contained in the poem. It abounds in striking passages; like this evangelizing the great material poetry, the nebular hypothesis of La Place:
Shall I hope
To speak my poems in mysterious tune
With man and nature—with the lava lymph
That trickles from successive galaxies
Still drop by drop adown the finger of God
In still new worlds? (P. 164.)
7. The party.
And all the rooms
Were full of crinkling silks that swept about
The fine dust of most subtile courtesies.
8. Society.
Genuine government
Is but the expression of a nation, good
Or less good—even as all society,
Howe’er unequal, monstrous crazed or cursed,
Is but the expression of men’s single lives,
The loud sum of the silent units.
9. What we want.
More knowledge, that each individual man
Remains an Adam to the general race,
Constrained to see, like Adam, that he keep
His personal states condition honestly,
Or vain all thoughts of his to help the world
Which still must be developed from its one
If bettered in its many.
But life, after all, is better than poetry.
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God. (P. 275.)
Art itself,
We’ve called the higher life, still must feel the soul
Lived past it. For more is felt than is perceived,
And more’s perceived than can be interpreted,
And love strikes higher with his lambent flame
Than art can pile the fagots. (P. 278.)
S.D. Simonds
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857.
1. See Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, May, 1857, and January, 1858, from which and Mrs. Browning’s own works I take the facts of this article.
2. All the English Reviews which I have seen—Edinburgh, North British Quarterly, London Quarterly, and Westminster Reviews—agree in these points of merit in the poem. I quote above in part from the Westminster.
3. See Reviews before quoted, particularly the Westminster, copied in Ec. Magazine, January, 1858. I make the style compare for two reasons: 1. They follow the form. 2. Their estimate sustains my own. But there is only comparison, not full quotation.
4. North British Review, 1857.
5. Hudson’s Lectures on Shakspeare, Vol. I, p. 125.
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