E611000B. Poems (1856); Aurora Leigh; and Poems Before Congress.
The British Quarterly Review, 1 October 1861, pp. 350–381.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 341–352.
We have lately lost one of the foremost poets of our age and country; we have lost her at a time when her mind was still advancing in culture, when her genius was still maturing. The personal friends of Mrs. Browning, who knew her as the delicate and fragile woman, will, perhaps, express surprise that she survived so long and accomplished so much. The public, who knew only that there was a spirit among them singing beautiful odes, sonnets, poems of all kinds, must simply mourn her too early departure. The verses which she had, but a few months ago, thrown into the Cornhill Magazine, had kept her name fresh before the reading public, and the news came as of the sudden extinction of one from whom it was expecting still greater and greater things. It might be an erroneous inference to conclude that the poems published in this magazine were her latest productions because they appeared the latest; they might have been lying for some time in the poet’s desk; we can only say that we read them with singular pleasure, and thought they betokened an increasing mastery over her beautiful art. There was more unity than her shorter poems used to display; the leading thought was more vigorously expressed, more tenaciously kept in view, and the strong poetic vision made throughout subservient to it. Never was Pagan god brought more clearly or delightfully before the fancy than Pan amongst the reeds, and in the very last piece, Little Mattie, the contrast between the simple and lovely child that has just died, and that immortal spirit into which we believe it transformed, was never touched upon more tenderly or more thoughtfully. Alas! she too, now, in her own striking language,
Knows what Ramses knows.
She has gone to other spheres and to other harps, to songs that will not have and will not need—as all earthly songs occasionally do—the sad stimulants of sorrow and of doubt.
We feel that there can be no real difficulty in forming an estimate of the poetry of Mrs. Browning; its excellences and its defects being both so distinctly marked. If there is any difficulty, it must arise from that impatience of mind which seizes upon the most conscientious reader when he is once thoroughly vexed and provoked at some absurd mannerism, and unfits him for perceiving the real beauties which may lie in close neighbour- [p. 351→] hood to the faults that have annoyed him. And some injustice of this kind may have been occasionally done by the much-vexed critic. But, speaking generally of the merits and demerits of Mrs. Browning’s poetry, it is hardly possible that two opinions of very wide divergence could be formed; nor is there any writer of poetry whom we could mention on whom so uniform a judgment has been hitherto passed. All our leading reviews and magazines, so far as our memory can serve us, have from time to time expressed substantially the same admiration and the same censure. The tenderness and pathos of her verse have been universally admitted—her tendency to deep thought, and the wealth of her imagination, have been always pointed out and ungrudgingly applauded. On the other hand, her faults have not been spared. The occasional violence of her metaphorical language, the carelessness which sometimes allows the verse to be defaced by a line no better than doggerel, and, above all, the obscurity, the straining after a thought where there is no thought possible, or where some distortion of language is made to serve in place of thought, all these errors have been duly commented on. By some they have been encountered with a smile of irony, by others they have been gravely regretted, and the author solemnly, and, of course, fruitlessly admonished to abstain from them in future. By no critic have they been overlooked. This will render our own task the more easy.
We think it might be said, without any hesitation whatever, that Mrs. Browning is the greatest poetess that England in any age has produced. Nor would this be slight praise, considering that we live in a land which still remembers the songs of Felicia Hemans and the dramas of Joanna Bail[l]ie. But praise of this kind seems to imply that a poetess is to be judged by some less elevated standard, or by some less rigid rules than those we apply in the poets generally; and a reader of Mrs. Browning’s poetry will not need to be reminded that any leniency of this description would have been considered as more offensive than the rudest censure. The authoress has, in many an indignant verse, repudiated such praise as “good for woman”—has denounced it with a most eloquent anger. We should feel ourselves guilty of an act of discourtesy, if not of critical injustice, if we used any form of speech which seemed for a moment to give her, as rivals or compeers, writers only of her own sex. Nor would comparison with writers of her own sex suffice to bring out to view all her varied excellences. She enters fairly into the lists “against all England.” She claims a place in the great array of English poets. What place shall we venture to assign her?
Fortunately it is not necessary for the purposes of criticism that a scale of genius should have been formed—that a list of [p. 352→] our poets should be made out in the order of their merit, and that we should be able at once to assign to any given author his place in that list. Perhaps few men form such a list even for themselves, and certainly no two persons would arrange the literary worthies of England exactly in the same order. What most of us do, we suspect, is something of this kind. We bracket off some two or three names of world-wide celebrity, a Shakspeare, a Milton, about which we are all supposed to be enthusiastic; we next admit a larger class of celebrities who have also stood the test of time, but to many of whom we may declare ourselves personally indifferent—a Pope, a Dryden, a Chaucer, and the like. Hitherto the opinion of the world has had much to do in determining our judgment. But next comes the class of personal favourites, chiefly perhaps of writers that have lived near our own times, and given expression to sentiments somewhat peculiar to our own age. Some make a selection in which Byron, Moore, Scott take highest rank. Others, in which Wordsworth and Tennyson would figure as the chiefs. In this selection each one gives full scope to his own personal tastes and his own modes of thinking; he demands that his own sentiments, his own philosophy, his own religion, be rendered back to him with that pathos and beauty which it is the part of the poet to supply. Mere artistic merit is but one element in the choice. Well, in this selection of favourite poets which each one makes for himself, the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, we feel assured, has frequently been placed. If more frequently by women than by men, this was owing to the greater tenderness of her verse, not to any weakness in it; it was owing to the simple fact that a woman’s heart had spoken itself out in her poetry. And her earlier poems did address themselves peculiarly to womanly sympathies, to womanly culture, and had indisputably some of the peculiar charms, and some also of the peculiar defects which are frequently observable in the writings of women. But men also, especially of late years, had put the name of the authoress of Aurora Leigh, and of many a beautiful sonnet and lyrical effusion, in the list of their favourite poets. Some high upon the list, others, of course, upon a lower level.
We will venture to make a comparison which will not be thought otherwise than complimentary, and which will somewhat assist in determining the intellectual rank of our poetess. Longfellow is a universal favourite. Always polished, never deficient in sentiment or feeling, Longfellow has scarcely a verse you would be solicitous to erase. Except that his metrical experiments have been, in our opinion, most unfortunate, and that we can never forgive him for telling his New England story in detestable [p. 353→] hexameters, we hardly know a vulnerable point in which to assail him. He is master of his art. There are no metaphors that have evidently carried away the poet till thought is lost in some fantastical image; there are no obscurities, no mystical half-meanings; the writer always knows what he means to say, and says it well. Nor does he wantonly break down the melody of his verse by the introduction of crude and rugged lines, as if he despised the peculiar labour which metrical composition requires. His pedantic hexameter being excepted, he never willingly inflicts a torture on the ear; for it is a torture to be compelled to read verse that has ceased to be musical. The most rugged prose that was ever written is melody itself compared to the style of versification which some of our poets—if poets they are to be called—have thought fit to introduce. If they disdained the trial of sustaining a perpetual but varied rhythm—if they disdained the charm of perfect rhyme and cadence—why did they write verse at all? Plain prose was open to them. Now from Mrs. Browning’s poems a whole volume might be selected of instances of just those faults the absence of which we have noticed in Longfellow. But, on the other hand, in those volumes which would remain after this expurgation, there is a wider range of thought, there is more of pathos, there is a greater wealth of poetic imagination than you will find in Longfellow. Thus would stand the comparison as it seems to us. The stream of the poet is neither so broad nor so deep as that of the poetess. But it flows more gracefully and with a constant fulness, and between banks that are well preserved, and on the margin there are none of those unsightly patches that are neither green land nor flowing river—barren, stony, disfiguring, useless;—all the bed of the stream is filled with pure and transparent water.
He who would criticize a voluminous and varied writer, must not be afraid of uttering what may, at first, appear to be contradictory verdicts. There is one form of composition, and that the most difficult and elaborate, in which Mrs. Browning has been eminently successful. The sonnet has not been a favourite with English poets, nor would the collection of really good English sonnets be very large. With the exception of Wordsworth, no English poet has written many excellent sonnets. Here and there one may be found of surpassing merit. Now we will venture to say—if we may reduce our general praise to a numerical specification—that from no English writer, with the exception, perhaps, of Wordsworth, shall you select half-a-dozen sonnets so excellent as you might with ease extract from these volumes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In saying this we do not forget that Shakspeare wrote sonnets; or at least that a huge [p. 354→] collection of poems so called stands attributed to Shakspeare. We have our own opinion as to those sonnets, both as to their merit and their authenticity; but let that pass—all we have to say is, let some one who can read them through, select his half-dozen—we stand ready with ours.
Now, when it is considered what a good sonnet requires—how much skill and patience as well as poetic thought—how a noble or tender sentiment has to be rendered in most lucid language, and in a most difficult scheme both of rhyme and metre, it will be admitted that one who has succeeded in this style of composition must be a consummate artist. And after such an admission to hint at such faults as a defiant carelessness of all the artistic requisitions of poetry, to suggest that there breaks out occasionally a headstrong, violent, turbid, and obscure strain, sounds contradictory. It surely is a mistake. It is no mistake, however. A wilful abandonment of the very music of poetry by one who can write most musically—a confused commingling of thought and metaphor by one who can elucidate a chosen thought till it stands out distinct and graceful as an image of Parian marble—nay, even a turbulence and violence in the sentiment itself in one distinguished for tenderness, for power blended with sweetness—all these contradictions are what the critic has to deal with. Nor are such inconsistencies, as we very naturally but not very accurately call them, at all uncommon. So far from surprising us, they ought rather to be expected from a writer of vigorous genius, writing at different periods of life on different themes, and under various influences. It is plain that the only way to form a just estimate of such writers is to examine each poem individually, or, at least, to attempt some classification of their works according to the nature of the subject, or the epoch of their literary career in which they were written. We cannot attempt a minute examination of Mrs. Browning’s numerous poems; but a perusal of her works, aided by such knowledge of the biography of the writer as has been long open to all the world, will enable us in some measure to classify her poems—will enable us to describe the several manners of the great and amiable artist whom we have lost.
The first image which we remember to have had presented to us was of a young girl, piously brought up, the child of wealthy Dissenters, living the secluded life of an invalid in a large London house. Books and her own imagination supplied the place of a more actual intercourse with society, and of the more active duties of life. We heard, too, that this young and delicate girl was a Greek scholar, and had translated the Prometheus of Æschylus. We found also, that in her own poems she had, with [p. 355→] the characteristic boldness of youth, seized upon the theme which Milton had made his own, and had sung the triumph of Satan and the expulsion of our first parents from Paradise. She had even ventured on a higher theme than any Milton had attempted, that of the crucifixion of our Saviour. The Drama of Exile and the Seraphim are poems in which angels and the spirits of Nature, and God Himself, are introduced, and where man is seen in relationship with the supernatural. Other and smaller poems were also published with these, expressive of great tenderness and a habit of reflection, but not without those defects which young poets of both sexes are apt to fall into. The picture presented to us was interesting in the extreme, and lent an additional zest to the poems. Here, in the dim retirement of a sick room, in one of those dreary London houses into which sunshine and the breeze seem never to penetrate, a young girl lives out her thought-life, and pours forth from the exuberance of her imagination many a strain, not only of men, but of angels, and not only of our present times, but of antiquated mediæval forms of existence. How beautiful a compensation! You have taken health and pleasure, and left little of companionship, and shut up the young heart in a darkened chamber, where the roll of the carriage-wheel, on the paved street is almost the only sound that penetrates. You would think the life of the soul must go out. It burns all the more brightly. The roll of the carriage-wheel, suggestive of many a social pleasure, is very patiently heard by one who is riding with Milton in the chariot of God; by one who has had her heart moved to tenderness by the records of romance; or, better still, by the recorded distresses of her own contemporaries. The dim life has only made immortality a more vivid and palpable reality.
The poems of this epoch—wherein we have before us a youthful mind deeply imbued with sentiments of Christian piety, weaned by illness from the earth, thinking of no personal object, looking upon mortal life only as a preparation for immortality, having no terrestrial passion except that love of fame which must hang over the purest of terrestrial harps—form in some measure a class by themselves. Knowing so much only of the biography of our author as her writings disclose, and the date of her compositions being not always preserved for us, we do not pretend to specify the circumstances under which each individual poem was written. But this epoch in her writings is sufficiently marked for the purposes of criticism. A transition takes place, or is made manifest, in those sonnets feigned to be ‘from the Portuguese.’ After this, we hear of the invalid breaking like a butterfly from the chrysalis, breaking from her dim retirement, [p. 356→] the bride of a poet, of one whose fitful genius had won for him a fitful admiration from his contemporaries—breaking from the sick chamber, from the London house, from the fogs of England, and opening her new wings under the sun of Italy. The proud and happy bride of a man of genius, she wakes to new interests; the world itself grows large, and present and vivid before her. Its manifold progress, its politics, its social hopes and activities, and especially the great political revolution she witnesses in Italy—all these take possession of her heart, and impress a new character on her poetry. She, who had lived only in the past or in the future, lives now in the present; she who had lived only for immortality, lives also in the grand life of humanity. Not that she resigns for an instant her great Christian futurity, but the moral and social aspect of the living world arrests her attention. She is now in the open air, in the bright sunshine, and stands face to face with nature, and society, and God. The problems of this world engage and oppress her: the problems of this world, and something also of the doubts and fears, and occasional clouds of terror and distrust, that attend upon all the speculations of mere human reason. Her writings of this later epoch are still those of the Christian poet; but the Christian poet who takes his stand on earth, beset by all its fears, earnest with all its hopes. With the heart of the Christian she is taking up her stand-point on humanity.
Her great poem of this epoch is Aurora Leigh. Others of a quite political character, as Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress, are very inferior, but must not be overlooked. The latter is especially interesting as significant of the manner in which her mind was developing, though it may add but little to her poetical celebrity.
We have, therefore, two well-defined epochs in the literary life of our poetess, with a sort of transition stage between them. We must begin with some notice of the former. Opening the edition before us, the first piece we encounter, though we believe it was not the first in actual publication, is the Drama of Exile. This takes up the great eventful history of our first parents at the point where Milton had closed it.
They hand in hand with melancholy step
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Better if it could have been left there. One Satan, one Adam, one Eve, one Paradise Lost is quite enough. Better if subsequent poets would allow the imagination to rest here, and see our first parents commencing, under the common daylight of the world, the sad journey of life. But our young poets will not [p. 357→] suffer the imagination to rest here. Our drama opens with the following scenic description:
Scene.—The other side of the gate of Eden shut fast with cloud, from the depth of which revolves a sword of fire, self moved. Adam and Eve are seen in the distance flying along the glare.
Lucifer Alone.
We will not proceed to quote the soliloquy of Lucifer, nor do we feel tempted to enter analytically into Mrs. Browning’s personification of the spirit of Evil. She makes him, in one fine burst of utter irrationality, choose evil and hate for their own sakes, and thus far, we suppose, she is faithful to the character she intends to delineate; but her Satan, in spite of all his terrific wickedness, leaves the impression upon us of a very weak, miserable, remorseful, irrational creature. After Lucifer has delivered his soliloquy, the angel Gabriel descends, charged apparently with the mission of expelling the Evil One from the earth. Lucifer refuses to take his departure, and, much to our surprise, he holds his ground, and Gabriel commands in vain. In this dialogue between Lucifer and Gabriel there is a passage we must quote, because it shows that our young poetess had not neglected her metaphysics, and was quite capable of a subtle train of reasoning. Lucifer has been boasting of his revolt, of his independence, as if, whatever desperation he might assume, he could possibly project himself out of the laws of God. Gabriel replies:—
Spirit of scorn,
I might say, of unreason! I might say,
That who despairs, acts; that who acts connives
With God’s relations set in time and space;
That who elects, assumes a something good
Which God made possible; that who lives, obeys
The law of a Life-maker.
Sir William Hamilton himself could not have better expressed the impossibility of any power (save that of the Absolute) being exercised but in obedience to pre-appointed relations. When this dialogue is closed we hear “a chorus of Eden spirits, chanting from Paradise, while Adam and Eve fly across the sword-glare.” The song with which the Bird-spirit dismisses the late occupants of the happy garden is pretty. We cannot say much for the poetry of the other spirits. Throughout the drama there are many of these spirits, personifications of the earth, or animal and vegetable life, which hardly seem to harmonize with the presence of Gabriel and Satan. These, so far as they are the creation of our epic poet, may indeed be described as mythological [p. 358→] persons; but, even so, they belong to another scheme of mythology. In one scene these spirits of the earth surround Adam and Eve, reproaching them bitterly for the curse that had alighted on all nature, owing to their sin. They all “wail” round these two bewildered exiles. One spirit says:—
I bounded with my panthers! I rejoiced
In my young tumbling lions rolled together!
Another says:—
I wail, I wail!
I had no part in your transgression—none.
My roses on the bough did bud,
My rivers did not loiter in the sun;
I was obedient.
The earth, it is true, so far as food of man is concerned, was cursed with comparative barrenness; but there is no Scriptural authority for supposing that animal life or vegetable life were cursed in themselves. Nor can any one understand what all this “wailing” is about. There are still bounding panthers, and tumbling lions, and rivers that do not loiter in the sun. What had these “wailers” lost?
The redeeming point in the drama is the tenderness thrown over the dialogue between Adam and Eve, and the sweet heroism with which Eve, in the name of all womankind, takes upon herself her especial office of minister to the sick and the distressed. Adam says:
God! I render back
Strong benedictions and perpetual praise
From mortal feeble lips (as incense-smoke
Out of a little censer may fill heaven),
That Thou, in striking my benumbèd hands
And forcing them to drop all other boons
Of beauty, and dominion, and delight,
Hast left this well-belovèd Eve, this life
Within life, this best gift between these palms,
In gracious compensation!
Eve answers:
Is this thy voice,
Or some saluting angel’s calling home
My feet into the garden?
And further on she says:
Noble work
Shall hold me in the place of garden rest,
And in the place of Eden’s lost delight,
Worthy endurance of permitted pain. [p. 359→]
It illustrates the difficulty inherent in the subject, that this very representation of the virtues and affections of Adam and Eve irresistibly suggests to us the idea that they seem now more worthy of Paradise than before their expulsion from it. Nay, Adam and Eve seem more happy in their exile than the poet could possibly have portrayed them in the uniform prosperity of Eden. These supernatural themes are unavoidably encumbered with difficulties of this description. A writer should think long before he touched them, and probably, after long meditating on them, he would leave them untouched.
This Drama of Exile is replete with passages illustrative of all the faults we have mentioned as defacing the poetry of Mrs. Browning; but it would be ungenerous to select them from a performance of her early years. Indeed, as such faults have been often commented on, and must, on all hands, be frankly admitted, a very few examples of them will suffice. We may pass on to the other sacred drama, The Seraphim.
The plan of this poem is highly commendable for its simplicity. There are here no questionable inventions. The signs of the zodiac are not made to do duty like so many spectres in a grand incantation scene, as they do in the Drama of Exile. Two seraphim, Ador and Zerah, witness together the Crucifixion. The poem almost entirely consists of the dialogue between these two spirits. They watch together from the gate of heaven, or in mid-air above Judea.
Here and there we meet with a thought or a line we would willingly quote; but we look through the drama in vain for any lengthened passage to which we could fairly call the admiration of the reader. Permitting ourselves large omissions, we will present them with the following extract, as an example both of the style and mode of thinking of this, which, we believe, was the earliest of her longer poems:—
Ador. The flame
Perishes in thine eyes.
Zerah. He opened His
And looked. I cannot bear——
Ador. Their agony?
Zerah. Their love. God’s depth is in them. From his brows,
White, terrible in meekness, didst thou see
The lifted eyes unclose?
He is God, seraph!
Heaven is dull,
Mine Ador, to man’s earth.
My heaven! my home of heaven! my infinite
Heaven-choirs! what are ye to this dust and death,
This cloud, this clod, these tears, this failing breath, [p. 360→]
Where God’s immortal love now issueth
In this Man’s woe?
Ador. Hereafter shall the blood-bought captives raise
The passion-song of blood.
Zerah. And we extend
Our holy vacant hands towards the throne,
Crying, “We have no music!” Oh, the love,
The love, mine Ador!
Ador. Do we love not?
Zerah. Yea—
But not as man shall!
This may be sufficient to show what strain of thought had, at this time, taken possession of the young poetess. Almost contemporary with these sacred dramas are some romances, or pieces framed from mediæval manners and ideas, such as the Duchess May, and the Romaunt of Margret. These have received their full meed of praise—and something more—we are not tempted to pause upon them. The poems which made the name of Elizabeth Barrett dear to all her countrymen, were those which appealed directly to the sympathies of her contemporaries—poems of the affections, full of tenderness, pity, sadness, and love; such as Bertha in the Lane, Caterina, and that marvellous poem, The Cry of the Children. Speaking generally of these charming lyrics, one has to regret a fault very common amongst young poets of both sexes, and—we must be excused for saying it—which especially besets our female poets—they do not know when to stop. One verse suggests another, and that another; and as they all have some bearing on the theme in hand, there seems no reason why they should not all be admitted. If the same labour were bestowed in completing a few verses (expunging every weak, slovenly, and awkward line) that is bestowed in producing a greater number of verses, how much better would the poem be! There is scarcely one of these lyrics which would not be greatly improved by the simple process of taking half or one-third of them away. Amongst our poetesses there is a mode of composition that is revealed to us as plainly by the structure of the verses themselves, as if we were in the confidence of the writer, and stood at her elbow as she wrote. Some image, some thought, some sentiment occurs, and a single verse is penned; then this verse is allowed to suggest some other, that other its successor, without any idea of a preconceived whole ever crossing the mind. The inevitable result is, that if the poem is not long, it still wearies before we have come to the end. The same idea is perhaps repeated several times, with little variation. Look at the effusions of L. E. L. and Felicia Hemans; scarcely one has [p. 361→] the unity and completeness that a short poem should be particularly distinguished by. If there are but three verses, one, you may be sure, is superfluous. From this weakness of an unrestrained fluency Elizabeth Barrett was far from being exempt. Examine the best of these early poems, and if you have a pencil in your hand, you almost involuntarily draw it through many a line, through many a verse. Here is one to which, by the way, she had given an affected title, not English at all—The Cry of the Human. It begins with a stanza which has been often quoted with approbation:—
“There is no God,” the foolish saith,
But none, “There is no sorrow.”
And Nature oft the cry of faith,
In bitter need, will borrow.
Eyes, which the preacher could not school,
By wayside graves are raised;
And lips say, “God be pitiful,”
Who ne’er said “God be praised.”
Be pitiful, O God!
With the exception that words ought to be pronounced in poetry as we pronounce them in prose, and no one says raisèd and praisèd, we have not the least objection to make against this stanza. But read on; you find no second stanza of the same completeness; you find the same idea repeated or illustrated; and nothing but some measurement of the eye seems to have set any limits to the facile production of verses on so fruitful a theme. Those favourite verses of Caterina to Camoens would be much improved by mere excision. Here is a piece called Man’s Requirement[s], intended to be pungent and satirical. The sting at the close loses its effect simply because we are kept too long from the close. Even that beautiful poem which made the hearts of all Englishwomen to ache with pity, The Cry of the Children, would have been twice as beautiful had it been half as long. The poem is probably too familiar to our readers to permit us to quote from it, or we should have been tempted to present it to them in an abridged form. Here are some verses on a subject which must have been most congenial to our poetess, on Cowper’s Grave. Some of them are admirable; but how the reader wishes that the force displayed in some were sustained throughout. How willingly would he barter half a dozen of them for another such stanza as this:—
O poets, from a maniac’s tongue was poured the deathless singing!
O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!
O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling!
Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while you were smiling! [p. 362→]
There is a pathos in many of these poems of so delicate a character that it hardly bears transplanting; you are stirred and touched, and you could hardly justify the emotion you have felt by any limited quotation. One may say generally, that wherever our poetess yields to some natural sentiment of her own, she always succeeds, more or less, in interesting us. It is otherwise where the strain is evidently an imitation of some other poet; whether she attempts to transfer some graces of a Greek poet into her own Saxon tongue, or is misled by the mannerisms of some poet nearer home, as Keats or Tennyson. We mean the Tennyson of early years, for in his later works he has established himself as a classic of our language. Lady Geraldine’s Courtship wears the appearance of an imitation of Locksley Hall, and of a very exaggerated imitation. In Locksley Hall the angry lover had full right to complain. We do not altogether admire his style of complaint, but the lady had been false to him, and his anger is excusable. But in Geraldine’s Courtship the poet lover plumes himself upon his genius, and on this ground loudly protests that the Earl’s daughter ought to marry him! Only some insane youth, mad with vanity, could talk like this. The poem is called a Romance of the Age, but it is not the manners of our age to rail at a lady, to scourge her with our tongues into loving us! We wonder that Mrs. Browning, at all times a champion of her sex, instead of caricaturing Locksley Hall, did not write the appropriate pendant to it. If frivolous women overlook our poetic youths, and choose some wealthy squire, descending to a “lower level” of thought and feeling, pray what sort of woman is it that your man of genius most frequently chooses for the “idol of his soul?” What is his choice? What is that level of thought and feeling into which he subsides? The poetess might have painted for us, on one side, a pretty doll-like figure, pretty face, pretty manner, nothing more; on the other side, a cultivated woman, with that beauty which the mind throws over the face, but which does not at once fascinate the eye. She might have put our poet between the two, and if she had made him choose the doll, she would have done no violence to probability. To the level of the doll, to the level of waxen cheeks and flaxen hair, to the level of paint and bran, our man of genius is seen to descend. He is well punished for his folly. Poet indeed! The pretty doll loved nothing but the name—knows nothing of the life of one—hates and distrusts the silent and the solitary hour—loves in her man of genius what she loves in her spaniel, something that will fetch and carry, and smile up to her from her footstool. Oh, to what level the intellectual man may sink!—it is too humiliating to think of—let us be thankful that Mrs. Browning did not describe for us our folly and its punishment. [p. 363→]
As to the strain of sentiment generally expressed in her poems, we cannot over-estimate their purity and tenderness. Sometimes there is a magical pathos suffused over the whole piece, sometimes, but more rarely, a couplet or a verse stands out from the rest, and fastens itself for ever upon the memory.
Thou knowest, though Thy universe is broad,
Two little tears suffice to cover all.
How perfect in every way! And other gems like this might be collected. If we might hint at any fault in the general strain of her sentiments at this epoch, it is that her piety sometimes takes the hue of asceticism. Even this may be thought hypercriticism. All we mean by it is, that in the glorious hope of immortality there is an undervaluing of this terrestrial life. The sadness of the young poet we are not complaining of; this must always be excused—we could not have his poetry without it. As she herself writes:
Poet’s sigh—and poet’s sadness—
Alas! they come together!
And a mere sentiment of sadness is too vague a matter to deal with controversially. You cannot argue against a sigh; but there may be a systematic disparagement of human life open to grave objection. Immortality is the faith which renders a grand life possible on earth—possible even to those who tread the most retired paths of existence. It grows up from that which is highest, purest, best in human life—it eternizes what is noblest; it is not built on a destruction of human life, as if all must be swept away to make a foundation for it. Accordingly it is the constant labour of every sane theologian to teach us to exalt our lives, not to despise. Still less does he ever teach us to regard external nature with any other sentiment than that of gratitude for the admirable relationship which has been established between it and the human being. What Christian theology could have taught our young poetess to pen such lines as these?—
Like a wind-exposed, distorted tree,
We are blown against for ever by the curse
Which breathes through nature.
This is said deliberately in one of her sonnets, not dramatically and in the person of another. A painful poem, called Isabel’s [sic] Child, will illustrate this occasional tendency to an ascetic piety. A mother is nursing her sick child, who is indeed on the point of death. She prays earnestly for its recovery, and the prayer is heard and answered. The prayer of the mother is very touching. The babe wakens. But the infantine features are animated by [p. 364→] the wisdom of mature years, and in grave solemn voice it reproaches the mother for calling it back from the gates of Heaven:
The babe has awakened from sleep
And unto the gaze of its mother,
Bent over, is lifted another!—
Not the baby-looks that go
Unaimingly to and fro,
But an earnest gazing deep,
Such as soul gives soul at length,
When by work and wail of years
It winneth a solemn strength;
And mourneth as it wears.
A strong man could not brook,
With pulse unhurried by fears,
To meet that baby’s look
O’erglazed by manhood’s tears—
The tears of a man full-grown,
With a power to wring our own,
In the eyes all undefiled
Of a little three months’ child!
The image is indeed unpleasing and preposterous. The wisdom “won by work and wail” in a child that has not lived! And which apparently has had nothing to teach it miraculously but one vision of delight! The child speaks—
O mother, mother, loose your prayer!
Christ’s name hath made it strong,
It bindeth me, it holdeth me,
With its most loving cruelty,
From floating my new soul along
The happy heavenly air.
It bindeth me, it holdeth me
In all this dark, upon this dull
Low earth, by only weepers trod!
It bindeth me, it holdeth me!
Mine angel looketh sorrowful
Upon the face of God.
Mother, mother, can I dream
Beneath your earthly trees?
I had a vision and a gleam—
I heard a sound more sweet than these
When rippled by the wind.
* * * * *
Is your wisdom very wise,
Mother, on the narrow earth,
Very happy, very worth,
That I should stay to learn?
* * * * * [p. 365→]
Love! earth’s love! and can we love
Fixedly when all things move?
Can the sinning love each other?
Mother, mother,
I tremble in thy close embrace,
I feel thy tears adown my face,
Thy prayers do keep me out of bliss,
O, dreary earthly love!
Loose thy prayer, and let me go.
The mother, we are told, “changed the cruel prayer she made,” and when the morning breaks “the babe upon her arm was dead.” Now, in all the range of human sentiment there is nothing more touching, or more consolatory to the mind, than the new hope which springs up to the mother, even from the grave of her lost child. But to make this hope of its immortality an argument for quenching the maternal instinct to the living child, is simply an abuse of a great truth. And even in a poem one cannot help being irritated at the multitude of absurdities and contradictions strung together in this wondrous speech of the infant. A child who has seen nothing of the beauty of the earth complains that the trees are not sufficiently beautiful! who knows nothing, complains that the wisdom of the world is not worth learning! who as yet loves nothing, but lies in the lap of one who loves it inexpressibly, complains of the “dreary earthly love!”
But the hour was to come when this sort of asceticism, excusable, perhaps, on the ground of ill-health and other circumstances, was to vanish from her poetry. A change comes over her life. This transition we cannot better indicate than by quoting two or three of those exquisite sonnets described as “from the Portuguese.”
And yet, because thou overcomest so,
Because thou art more noble and like a king
Thou canst prevail against my fears, and fling
Thy purple round me, till my heart shall grow
Too close against thine heart, henceforth to know
How it shook when alone. Why, conquering
May prove as lordly and complete a thing
In lifting upward, as in crushing low!
And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword
To one who lifts him from the bloody earth,—
Even so Belovèd, I at least record,
Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth,
I rise above abasement at the word.
Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth.
______ [p. 366→]
Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead,
Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine?
And would the sun for thee more coldly shine,
Because of grave-damps falling round my head?
I marvelled, my Belovèd, when I read
Thy thoughts so in the letter. I am thine—
But—so much to thee? Can I pour thy wine
While my hands tremble? Then, my soul, instead
Of dreams of earth, resumes life’s lower range.
Then love me, Love! look on me—breathe on me!
As brighter ladies do not count it strange,
For love, to give up acres and degree,
I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange
My near sweet view of Heaven, for earth with thee.
______
My own Belovèd, who has lifted me
From this drear flat of earth where I was thrown,
And in betwixt the languid ringlets, blown
A life-breath, till the forehead hopefully
Shines out again, as all the angels see,
Before thy saving kiss! My own, my own,
Who camest to me when the world was gone,
And I who looked for only God, found thee!
I find thee; I am safe, and strong, and glad.
As one who stands in dewless asphodel,
Looks backward on the tedious time he had
In the upper life,—so I, with bosom swell,
Make witness, here, between the good and bad,
That Love, as strong as Death, retrieves as well.
And now a change comes over the larger and happier spirit. Whether those who have all along loved and admired the poetry of Mrs. Browning would find so many of their favourite passages in this the second epoch of her genius as in the first, may be doubtful. We think not. But that her mind henceforth takes a wider range is indisputable. We pass over the Casa Guidi Windows, a piece devoted to Italian politics, that we may have the greater space to devote to Aurora Leigh, which touches upon our social problems, and which, we think, must be considered as the greatest effort of her genius.
When speaking of the general merits of Mrs. Browning’s poetry, we observed that a singular uniformity of judgment had prevailed amongst her critics; the same qualities, almost the same verses, had been selected for applause or for censure. A like observation holds good with regard to this, her largest and most ambitious work. At the time of the appearance of Aurora Leigh, if we may trust our own memory, there were no two [p. 367→] opinions expressed by the leading organs of our periodical literature. All admitted the power and pathos, and even depth of thought, displayed in many an individual passage. All condemned the structure of the story. Some of the events imagined were deemed grossly improbable, others painfully revolting, and the character of Romney, the chief person in the book, was, or might have been, very justly described as a quite impossible compound, inasmuch as he is at one moment represented to us as a hard-headed, practical philanthropist, and the next, as a fanatic, half mad about some dream of equality. A man of cultivated mind and tastes arranging his marriage in St. James’s Church with the child of a tramper, that he might symbolize before all England the blending of the two classes of society, can only be described as a monomaniac. We entirely agree both with the favourable and unfavourable portions of this criticism. With the exception of Aurora Leigh herself, the characters do not strike us as life-like, nor is the story well contrived or the events well selected. But the individual passages, admirable in every respect, that might be extracted from it are numerous; and we may say, in general, that wherever Aurora Leigh speaks of herself the poetry rises to the highest excellence.
The great general idea which pervades the poem, and which is from time to time most ably expressed, is that in your anxiety to minister to the material wants of your fellow-creatures, in your most rational desire that all should be well fed, well clothed, well housed, you must not overlook or disparage that mental culture without which, you will find, when you have thoroughly mastered your problem, that even the material wants of society will never be satisfactorily supplied. Mrs. Browning has here struck a blow, and struck it ably, on one of the most flagrant errors of Socialism. There are men who would stop the cultivation of the refined classes till they had fed all the hungry. It is that cultivation which has induced this great desire to feed all the hungry; put a stop to it, and you check the philanthropic movement altogether. Again, the great thing is to get people to take care of themselves and of their own offspring, and this intelligent and prospective care of themselves will never be extracted out of ignorant people. And again, if the industry and intelligence of society could be successfully addressed to the one subject only of providing for all the primary requisitions of physical well-being, this would result in a most impoverished human life. Let the educated philanthropist think for a moment how he would like his own life, and the lives of all his associates, reduced to the level of mere physical enjoyment, and the industry that is to procure it. And therefore the poet is right in vindicating [p. 368→] himself and his own poetic work, even though there are still about him open mouths clamouring for food, and cold limbs shivering for raiment. Aurora Leigh says:—
A starvèd man
Exceeds a fat beast; we’ll not barter, sir,
The beautiful for barley.—And even so,
I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet’s individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man
To move the masses——
And when Romney comes to himself, he, too, denounces his own error:—
I heard the cries
Too close: I could not hear the angels lift
A fold of rustling air, nor what they said
To help my pity. I beheld the world
As one great famishing carnivorous mouth—
A huge, deserted, callow, black, bird Thing
With piteous open beak that hurt my heart,
Till down upon the filthy ground I dropt,
And tore the violets up to get the worms.
Worms, worms, was all my cry: an open mouth,
A gross want, bread to fill it to the lips,
No more! That poor men narrowed their demands
To such an end was virtue, I supposed——
I did not push the case
Up higher, and ponder how it answers, when
The rich take up the same cry for themselves
Professing equally—“an open mouth,”
A gross want, food to fill us, and no more!
In one point of view, and that the most agreeable, Aurora Leigh may be considered as the imaginary autobiography of a young poetess, in which she reveals her aspirations, her despondencies; vindicates for herself and for her sex the right to stand apart, lyre in hand, an independent and earnest artist; and also touchingly intimates that such standing apart is a trying attitude to all hearts, and not least to the feminine. Aurora is the child of an Englishman who marries and settles in Italy. At an early age she is orphaned of both her parents, is brought to England, and put under the care of a maiden aunt. The aunt is thus described:—
She had lived, we’ll say,
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,
A quiet life, which was not life at all, [p. 369→]
(But that, she had not lived enough to know),
Between the vicar and the county squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyreal, and in the abyss
The apothecary looked on once a year,
To prove their soundness of humility.
The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts
Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,
Because we are of one flesh, after all,
And need one flannel (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality). She had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.
Dear Heaven, how silly are the birds that live
In thickets, and eat berries!
I, alas!
A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,
And she was there to meet me. Very kind.
Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.
The wild bird, if it was to develope itself in such a cage, was likely to lead a miserable life enough, and to vex beyond measure the methodical spirit of her guardian. But it happens, fortunately for Aurora, that she is able, from the rare universality of her talents, to succeed with ease in all the tasks and feminine accomplishments prescribed for her, and also in secret hours to carry on her own peculiar culture of mind. She steals many an hour in the morning before the household is astir for unrestrained communion with nature, and she stealthily abstracts, from a neglected package of her late father’s, many a book of a deeper cast of thought than those generally recommended to the accomplished young lady.
But I could not hide
My quickening inner life from those at watch.
They saw a light at a window now and then
They had not set there. Who had set it there?
My father’s sister started when she caught
My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say
I had no business with a sort of soul,
But plainly she objected.
A pleasant incident introduces us to cousin Romney, and leads to a very spirited conversation between the two. Aurora has reached her twentieth birthday—she rises with the dawn.
I was glad that day.
The June was in me with its multitudes
Of nightingales all singing in the dark.
I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God! [p. 370→]
I bounded forth
At early morning—would not wait so long
As even to snatch my bonnet by the strings,
But, brushing a green trail across the lawn
With my gown in the dew, took will and way
Among the acacias of the shrubberies
To fly my fancies in the open air
And keep my birthday, till my aunt awoke
To stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on
As honeyed bees keep humming to themselves.
She thinks how worthiest poets have oftentimes not been crowned till death had made their brows insensible to the laurel-leaf—had been crowned only in the marble bust—and she determines, in sport, to crown herself by anticipation that day, while the young forehead could still feel the most pleasurable wreath. She plucks a branch of ivy, and having wreathed it in her hair, she turns and faces—her cousin Romney! He had come early to congratulate her on her birthday, and had followed her to this retreat. He finds her playing at this poet’s coronation. His own mind is full of grave, practical objects, and his heart at this moment is full also of one tender project. The incident immediately gives rise to an animated dialogue. Romney wants his cousin to become his wife, and share in all his philanthropic labours. Aurora has her own life to live, has her own poet’s aspirations—refuses to be absorbed in the existence of another. All our sympathies are with the young girl. Romney loves his cousin, and has noble objects of his own; but he lacks the generosity or justice to acknowledge that she also has her own separate nobility of soul, and an intellectual career of her own. He should have let her sing her song in peace—he would have found, in the end, the companion and fellow-labourer he sought for. Bent as he was on assimilating her mind in all points to his own, we see that they must inevitably part; the philanthropist to his charity schools and public baths, the poet to her meditations and the music of her verse. Romney is made to say—for the sake, we presume, of the indignant answer—that we want the Best only in art, and that woman is intellectually too weak for the highest, whether in art or philosophy, or in any of the walks of genius. Therefore, when he proceeds to ask for help and fellowship, and the sustaining love of a wife, he receives this merited retort:—
“What help?” I asked,
“You’d scorn my help—as Nature’s self, you say,
Has scorned to put her music in my mouth,
Because a woman. Do you now turn round
And ask for what a woman cannot give?” [p. 371→]
“Now,” I said, “may God
Be witness ’twixt us two!” and with the word
Meseemed I floated into sudden light
Above his stature—“am I proved too weak
To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear
Such leaners on my shoulder? Poor to think,
Yet rich enough to sympathize with thought?
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 answer, if the work and love,
Being good themselves, and good for her—the best
She was born for. Women of a softer mind,
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. Me your work
Is not the best for. Ah! you force me, sir,
To be over-bold in speaking of myself—
I too have my vocations—work to do
That heaven and earth have set me.”
So the suit of Romney is inevitably rejected. The aunt dies; Aurora refusing the generous offers of her cousin, who would have still shared at least his fortune with her, goes forth alone and poor, resolved to pursue her poet’s vocation. The poet succeeds better than the philanthropist, who contrives, by his irrational theories and schemes, to rouse the suspicions and animosity of the very class he is labouring to serve. We need not tell the absurd story of his intended marriage with Marian, nor how his country house, which he has converted into some sort of phalanstère, is burnt down by the mob, and he himself loses his sight in the scene of uproar and outrage that ensues. Aurora writes her book in her solitude, and succeeds. She is in a measure famous. But the work done, the solitude remains, and then comes the sad reaction, which many have felt, but none so touchingly revealed.
Is this all? All that’s done? and all that’s gained?
If this then be success, ’tis dismaller
Than any failure.
O my God, my God,
O supreme Artist, who, as sole return
For all the cosmic wonder of thy work,
Demandest of us just a word—a name, [p. 372→]
“My Father!”—Thou hast knowledge, only Thou.
How dreary ’tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires,
And hear the nations praising them far off,
Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,
Our very heart of passionate womanhood,
Which could not beat so in the verse without
Being present also in the unkissed lips,
And eyes undried because there’s none to ask
The reason they grew moist.
To sit alone
And think for comfort, how, that very night,
Affianced lovers, leaning face to face,
With sweet half listenings for each other’s breath,
Are reading haply from some page of ours,—
To have our books
Appraised by love, associated with love,
While we sit loveless! Is it hard, you think?
At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said,
Means simply love. It was a man said that.
And then there’s love and love; the love of all
(To risk in turn a woman’s paradox)
Is but a small thing to the love of one.
You bid a hungry child be satisfied
With a heritage of many cornfields; nay,
He says he’s hungry—he would rather have
That little barley-cake you keep from him
While reckoning up his harvests.
The story ends, as our readers are aware, in the union of Romney and Aurora, who, however they may have misunderstood, really loved each other. Each acknowledges his error, or rather each has learned the truth that the other only had seen before. Romney admits that his hasty scheme of mechanical organization had failed—he has learned that the better social life he was so anxious to inaugurate, “must develop from within.” And Aurora, dissatisfied with her own success, has been brought to confess that “Art is much, but love is more.” There is great beauty and tenderness in the last conversation between them; but it is too long, and they talk at cross purposes, which is always wearisome to the reader, unless it is skilfully and briefly managed. Aurora not only supposes, during the greater part of the conversation, that Romney is married to Lady Waldemar, but she talks to him by the hour together without discovering that he is blind!
We must not forget to mention that the authoress of Aurora Leigh has the merit of some originality in the form of her poem. [p. 373→] She has converted the modern novel into a sort of domestic epic. In this she has already had imitators. The Lucille of Owen Meredith is also a novel in verse. We had stories in verse of most kinds, stories of knights and of peasants. Crabbe had given us the annals of the poor. But contemporary life as displayed in the fashionable novel, with its lords and ladies, and sprightly dialogue, its plot and its intrigue, had not previously been carried into verse. Whether the invention is to be applauded or not, we may venture to say that Aurora Leigh will be the first of a very numerous class.
Though not successful, as we think, in the plot of her story or the invention of her incidents, it will be admitted that she has imitated very skilfully in her blank verse the conversational tone of society—as witness the play of wit, or the sprightliness that passes for wit, amongst the fashionable ladies who are waiting the arrival of the bride in St. James’s Church. And yet again we cannot help noting that there are two long letters, one from Lady Waldemar to Aurora, and one from Aurora in answer to it, which we venture to say are not like anything which two English ladies, under the same circumstances, would have written. We cannot, however, afford space by lengthened quotations to justify the impression they made on us. At all events, we quite approve of her design to represent the very age in which she is living, its manners and its thoughts. She says very justly:—
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times;
But trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into castle courts.
As we have already intimated, Mrs. Browning is capable occasionally of a wild metaphorical style—a mere jungle of rank imagery, that would excite our wonder if we did not know that the genius of even the greatest poets will sometimes stumble on such faults. The same ardent temperament that elevates a writer to the sublime will sometimes betray him into nonsense and rodomontade. We have no wish to pick out instances of this fault; if we were challenged, we could make no very scanty collection. Let the following passage suffice to show what can be done in this hazy metaphorical style. It holds a conspicuous place, being the opening sentence of the Fifth Book:—
Aurora Leigh, be humble. Shall I hope
To speak my poems in mysterious tune
With man and nature—with the lava-nymph
That trickles from successive galaxies,
Still drop by drop adown the finger of God,
In still new worlds? [p. 374→]
Robert Montgomery never perpetrated anything worse than this. But instead of selecting individual passages that are censurable in point of taste, it may be more instructive to notice a peculiarity in the very tissue of the thought itself, which sometimes mars an otherwise excellent passage. It is this. A writer very familiar with certain poetic conceptions, or mere imaginations, will introduce these side by side with actual details taken from real life; so that a description shall be made up partly of what is most true to nature, and partly of what is most false and fictitious. We can only explain ourselves by an instance. Here is one in the first page of Aurora Leigh. It will be observed that the first part of our quotation is a mere figment of the imagination, borrowed, it seems, from Wordsworth, and treated as a fact; the second part is a beautiful touch of truthful description. They are unwisely blended together:—
I, writing thus, am still what men call young.
I have not so far left the coasts of life
To travel inward, that I cannot hear
That murmur of the outer Infinite
Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep,
When wondered at for smiling; not so far,
But still I catch my mother at her post
Beside the nursery-door, with finger up:
“Hush, hush; here’s too much noise!” while her sweet eyes
Leap forward, taking part against her word
In the child’s riot.
Nothing can be more real and touching than the last part of this quotation; it is taken from the very life. Why is it found in juxtaposition with the silly fiction, that babies are especially familiar with the Infinite? The writer remembered the mother’s form at the nursery-door; she certainly did not remember having very clear conceptions of the Infinite at that time. We say to all young poets, when you undertake to describe or tell the truth about anything, adhere to nature. Do not pretend to see what you never saw, or to think what you never could have thought. If you want to say how old you are, do not intimate your youth by telling us that you can still hear that murmur of the outer Infinite which sets babies smiling! Do not make up your descriptions half of truths of nature and half of figments of the poets.
We cannot quit Aurora Leigh without some reference to the character and story of Marian Erle; and in this portraiture the combination we have been speaking of, of what is merely imaginative and fictitious with touches drawn from real life, is very remarkable. The tenderness which pervades the whole will pro- [p. 375→] bably have disguised from many readers this mixture of the true and the possible with the quite fanciful and the impossible. Many of the most admired passages of the poem are to be found in connexion with the history of Marian Erle; but the portraiture is unnaturally marred by the too unrestrained imagination of the writer. Marian Erle, who is described to us as pleasing, not beautiful, has one of those rare natures which outward circumstances cannot spoil. In all such cases, some circumstances, of course there must be, favourable to the development of our better sentiments; and on these few circumstances such happily-constituted minds feed and fasten, throwing off the influence of all the rest. Very few of such favourable circumstances can we trace in Marian’s career. She is the child of drunken trampers; the man curses his wife, and the wife beats her infant, “in revenge of her own broken heart:”—
Yet the outcast child,
For whom the very mother’s face forswore
The mother’s special patience, lived and grew;
Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone,
With that pathetic vacillating roll
Of the infant body on the uncertain feet,
(The earth being felt unstable ground so soon,)
At which most women’s arms unclose at once
With irrepressive instinct.
Simple and beautiful. If the line which is introduced by way of parenthesis, which is an absurd interruption, were omitted, you would say the description were perfect. A little further in the same paragraph, immediately after this accurate painting from nature, comes a passage in which this child is said to creep through the golden gorse, and look out at the blue sky; not for the charm of the blue and the vivid sensation of light, but—
She liked, she said,
To dazzle back her sight against the sky,
For then it seemed some grand blind love came down,
And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss.
She learnt God that way, and was beat for it
Whenever she went home.
In an instant we have left the region of reality; the dim abstractions of the poet are given to the tramper’s child. She goes to school, and here she wonders, and very naturally, at the mirth of the children around her. It was quite natural that she should ask Rose Bell, a seven years’ child, whether her mother “let her laugh so?” But the answer of Rose Bell is the cynicism of a grown-up person. “Ay, she lets me. She was dug into the ground six years since. Such mothers never scold nor [p. 376→] beat us! Don’t you wish you had one like that?” Rose Bell, seven years old, who lost her mother six years ago, could not be speaking from personal experience; apparently she had come to some generalizations condemnatory of all mothers.
It is very prettily told how the pedlar would sometimes tap her curly head, and “toss her down some stray odd volume from his heavy pack;” and how she weeded out and pieced together the torn fragments of books that were thus bestowed upon her. Why could not the author tell this simple incident without calling to her aid such a metaphor as this, slipped into a parenthesis?—
(She had to guess the bottom of a page
By just the top sometimes—as difficult
As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!)
Marian’s difficulties with her bits of Shakspeare and leaves from Thomson’s Seasons, are not at all explained to us by the condition of a man sitting on the moon and guessing at the earth.
The child has no sooner grown into the girl than her villanous parents plot to sell her. She flies from them, and from the hideous squire who came to be the purchaser. She runs till she falls half dead upon the ground; she is picked up, and deposited in a hospital. Here she wakes to a quite novel scene.
The place seemed new and strange as death.
The white straight bed, with others straight and white,
Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,
And quiet people walking in and out
With wonderful low voices and soft steps,
And apparitional equal care for each,
Astonished her with order, silence, law;
And when a gentle hand held out a cup,
She took it as you do at sacrament,
Half awed, half melted—not being used, indeed,
To so much love as makes the forms of love
And courtesy of manners.
To her the great distress was to leave this hospital, which is so truly depicted as being, in her apprehension, a place of rest and happiness. When the day of her departure arrives, Romney visits the hospital on one of his philanthropic missions, and inquires of her where she is going:—
“When he looked,
It was as if he spoke, and when he spoke
He sang perhaps,” said Marian, “could she tell?
She only knew (so much she had chronicled,
As seraphs might, the making of the sun)
That he who came and spoke was Romney Leigh,
And then and there she saw and heard him first.” [p. 377→]
It would have been a fortunate circumstance for Mrs. Browning if there had been no such thing as a parenthesis known in English composition, she so often takes advantage of it to fling in some monstrous metaphor or simile a world too wide for the occasion. The chronicle which a seraph might make after witnessing the creation of the sun! This is thrown in as a parallel case with Marian’s recollection of her kind benefactor.
Her kind benefactor procures employment for the destitute girl—places her with a sempstress. This position she loses in so noble a manner as to attract the regard of Romney. She leaves her work to nurse a sick companion. Here Romney finds, he thinks, a fit partner and sharer in his own charitable labours. And if this had been the sole motive of Romney’s choice—whatever his personal friends might have thought of the match—the critic of the poem would have had no ground for objection. But the authoress has thought fit to animate her hero by other motives, which he expresses in the following lucid manner. We shall leave the reader to note for himself the very appropriate and elucidating metaphors he meets in his way:—
Dear Marian, of one clay God made us all,
And though some push, and poke, and paddle in’t
(As children play at fashioning dirt-pies),
And call their fancies by the name of facts,
Assuming difference, lordship, privilege,
When all’s plain dirt—they come back to it at last;
The first grave-digger proves it with a spade,
And puts all even. Need we wait for this,
You, Marian, and I, Romney?
Marian, I being born
What men call noble, and you, issued from
The noble people—though the tyrannous sword
Which pierced Christ’s heart has cleft the world in twain
’Twixt class and class, opposing rich to poor—
Shall we keep parted? Not so; let us lean
And strain together rather, each to each,
Compress the red lips of this gaping wound,
As far as two souls can—ay, lean and league,
I, from my superabundance—from your want
You—joining in a protest ’gainst the wrong
On both sides!
Now we can see our way in the matter of the dirt-pies. All dirt alike, and this especial lump of it, absurdly dignified with the name of pie! It being no pie at all, only dirt. The other metaphor about the “tyrannous sword[”] we would rather leave to the analysis of the reader. We must hasten over our ground. While Romney was [p. 378→] preparing this extraordinary protest against the wrong done to society by the old-fashioned distinction between rich and poor, Lady Waldemar was plotting all she could to marry the representative of the noble house of Leigh. She made the poor ignorant Marian believe that she would be doing some great service to Romney by simply running away from him. She leaves London in the companionship of some wretched tools of Lady Waldemar, is foully abused, and is discovered afterwards by Aurora in Paris, poor, lonely, but with a charming infant, in which her affectionate nature finds at last its absorbing object. Childhood and a mother’s love are topics which bring out, as might be expected, the best qualities of Mrs. Browning’s poetry. We must quote a few lines from the description of Marian and her child, and then turn from the poem of Aurora Leigh to what else remains of her writings to be noticed.
There he lay, upon his back,
The yearling creature, warm and moist with life
To the bottom of his dimples,—to the ends
Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face——
Everything so soft
And tender, to the little holdfast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of it.
“Like a rose,” I said,
“As red and still indeed as any rose,
That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content in blowing to fulfil its life.”
* * * * *
The poor lip
Just motioned for the smile and let it go,
And then, with scarce a stirring of the mouth,
As if a statue spoke that could not breathe,
But spoke on calm between its marble lips—
“I’m glad, I’m very glad you clear me so—
But leave me—let me rest. I’m dead, I say.
And if, to save the child from death as well,
The mother in me has survived the rest,
Why that’s God’s miracle.
I’m not less dead for that! I’m nothing more
But just a mother. Only for the child
I’m warm and cold, and hungry and afraid,
And smell the flowers a little, and see the sun,
And speak still and am silent,—just for him!”
There remains very little else to do than to say a few words on the last publication, The Poems before Congress. The meaning of the title is not explained to us. We suppose the authoress did not intend that they should be laid before Congress, or [p. 379→] expect that they were to have an especial influence on its deliberations. The prominent theme is a laudation of Louis Napoleon. Man or woman, we have each one of us a right to form his own estimate of a public character, and if Mrs. Browning finds her ideal of a great man exemplified in the hero of the 2nd of December, we certainly shall not say that she manifests any weak or feminine predilection. “Emperor! Evermore!” This refrain means, of course, that he is to live a glorious emperor for ever in the memory of mankind. If so, history must forget as well as remember. And forsooth, this one man has a great idea, he alone—
The world is many—I am one.
It is more probable that this emperor thought to play with the great idea of the Italian nation. To assist in creating a powerful and united Italian people was the last object of his policy or his arms. To beat back Austria, to advance the glory and the power of France, to have a disunited Italy over which France could dominate, and from which it could pluck feather after feather—this was, and still is, the policy of the Emperor Napoleon. No man in England now doubts it. What we now watch with interest—the question which time has now to solve for us—is whether the great ideas of Italian unity will be sufficiently strong in the Italian people themselves to withstand the arms of Austria and the diplomacy of France. Meanwhile, it is a volume of poetry we are criticizing, it is not history we are writing. With the exception of the verse from which we have already quoted a line, we cannot say that Mrs. Browning’s genius displays itself to advantage in the eulogium of Napoleon. There are some lines upon Italy we should like to quote:—
Is it true—may it be spoken—
That she who has lain so still,
With a wound in her breast,
And a flower in her hand,
And a gravestone under her head,
While every nation at will
Beside her has dared to stand
And flout her with pity and scorn,
Saying, “She is at rest,
She is fair, she is dead,
And leaving room in her stead
For us who are later born
This is certainly best?”——
Can it be true, be true,
That she lives anew,
That she rises up at the shout of her sons,
At the trumpet of France,
And lives anew? [p. 380→]
Here and there, too, we find short passages of power as well as tenderness:—
Each one stands with his face in the light
Of his own drawn sword.
That is good; but in general—we are compelled to say it—the effort to be very energetic leads our poetess into lamentable rant. Need we quote any lines to justify this apparently harsh judgment? Here are a few, and they may serve also to show how hasty and credulous our poet-politician was. Of course it is of her great hero Napoleon she is speaking—
Is this a man like the rest,
This miracle, made unaware
By a rapture of popular air,
And caught to the place that was best?
You think he could barter and cheat
As vulgar diplomates use,
With the people’s heart in his breast.
So far well, and the last line is excellent. What follows will make the least fastidious reader raise both his hands and press them close against his ears—
Prate and lie into shape,
Lest truth should cumber the road;
Play at the fast and loose
Till the world is strangled with tape;
Maim the souls complete
To fit the hole of a toad;
And filch the dogman’s meat
To feed the offspring of God!
There is nothing to induce us to dwell upon this little volume. Before quitting it, we may notice how completely the sort of asceticism we complained of in some of her early poems had been erased from her mind. She had grown too interested in the affairs of this world to disparage human life. Her Christianity blends with her politics. Her speculations seem to be leading her to another extreme. She is able to write—what we certainly do not quote with entire acquiescence—
For civilization perfected
Is fully developed Christianity.
We do not wish to terminate our notice of Mrs. Browning’s poetry with The Poems before Congress in our hands. We have said that she has given to English literature some of the most polished and beautiful sonnets it possesses. We have already quoted three, from which the reader can determine whether we [p. 381→] have been extravagant in our praise. We will conclude with extracting two more. The first is addressed to the Poet.
The poet hath the child’s sight in his breast,
And sees all new. What oftenest he has viewed,
He views with the first glory. Fair and good
Pall never on him, at the fairest, best,
But stand before him holy and undressed
In week-day false conventions, such as would
Drag other men down from the altitude
Of primal types, too early dispossessed.
Why God would tire of all his heavens as soon
As thou, O godlike, childlike poet, didst,
Of daily and nightly sights of sun and moon!
And therefore hath He set thee in the midst
Where men may hear thy wonder’s ceaseless tune,
And praise his world for ever as thou bidst.
If this is spoken of the poet, the next we quote may be supposed to be spoken by the poet, in one of his more desponding moods. It is nearer to perfection than its predecessor, which stumbles a little midway:—
I have been in the meadows all the day,
And gathered there the nosegay that you see,
Singing within myself as a bird or bee
When such do field-work on a morn of May.
But now I look upon my flowers, decay
Has met them in my hands more fatally
Because more warmly clasped—and sobs are free
To come instead of songs. What do you say,
Sweet counsellors, dear friends? that I should go
Back straightway to the fields, and gather more?
Another, sooth, may do it—but not I!
My heart is very tired, my strength is low,
My hands are full of blossoms plucked before,
Held dead within them, till myself shall die.
It is not necessary for us to make any further summary of the excellences or faults we find in Mrs. Browning’s poetry. We have expressed more than once our admiration and our disapproval. It is a poetry of which one half one admires very much, and the other half one just as unhesitatingly disapproves. But, finally, it is from his best that every writer should be judged; and following this rule, it is a high place amongst the poets of the age that we should assign to Mrs. Browning.
[William Henry Smith]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), 4th ed., London: Chapman & Hall, 1856.
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1859.
Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.
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