E610200A. Aurora Leigh.
The Dublin Review, February 1861, pp. 540–541.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 383–384.
[Also reviewed in the article containing this review were works by Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and James Burton Robertson. We include only those remarks pertaining to EBB.]
The “Aurora Leigh” of Mrs. Browning stands in need of criticism and defence. It is a greater poem than it appears at first sight, or to a casual reader. In spite of its gross and prominent faults, its exaggerated style and bombastic language, its mannerism and incoherence, it is a great and a true poem. Grave as its defects may be, its excellencies more than restore the balance in its favour. It exhibits a powerful but uncontrolled imagination, and we are continually startled and carried away by great bursts of passion. We cannot now attempt to give even a fair outline of the poem. “Aurora Leigh” is a long epic in blank verse, and is intended to represent society in the nineteenth century, to portray its wants and sufferings, its social inequalities, the separation of classes, their mutual hatred and suspicion, the noble but futile attempts to reconcile deep-seated evils, and to bridge over, by the use of inadequate and mistaken means, almost impassable gulfs. In this singular poem we have shown to us, in passionate verse and noble metaphor, a woman’s wrongs in the present state of society, her restricted action, her wasted energy, her fruitless love, herself thrown back upon herself to prey upon her vitals, forced by the selfishness of man to consume her heart in silence. We have woman’s love, baffled, disappointed, and long-enduring, triumphant at last through the instrumentality of a terrible accident, that reminds us, in its singularity, of the catastrophe which in the most powerful and entrancing of Charlotte Bronte’s novels, joined the long-parted but passionate hearts of Rochester and Jane Eyre.
Oh was there ever tale of human love
Which was not also tale of human tears?
Oh must the cup that holds
The sweetest vintage of the vine of life
Taste bitter at the dregs? [p. 541→]
Not at all. Such exceptional tales of human love which the poet in his plaintive accents doubtingly demands, are forthcoming every day by the score, to reverse the verdict of our greatest poet who knew so well the troubled history of the human heart.
Ah me, for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth:
But either it was different in blood;
Or else it stood upon the choice of friends:—
Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning.
Like all the love-tales of the present day, reversing the rough course of the actual world and making life a valley of smiles, “Aurora Leigh” terminates with the inevitable chiming of the sweet marriage-bells.
In spite of much that is exaggerated, much that is unnatural, in spite of bad taste and false philosophy, there is a strong poetic yearning and high imaginative expression in “Aurora Leigh,” which will enable it, we are strongly inclined to believe, to overlive its grave faults. The foolish, phrenzied rhapsodies, which Mrs. Browning has lately published, confirm us still more in our opinion, that her uncontrolled imagination stands in greater need than ever of the discipline of judgment, the repose of reflection, and the training of study. If vain of applause, and eager for an immediate and low popularity, she permit her fancy to run riot, she will only be remembered as one, who, capable of higher aims, was content to be the victim of an ignoble vanity.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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