E620600B. Aurora Leigh.
The National Quarterly Review, June 1862, pp. 134–148.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
Only two years have elapsed since we had an elaborate critical paper in this journal on the poetical works of Mrs. Browning. We were able, however, to do little more than to allude to Aurora Leigh; but we promised to review the whole poem on an early occasion. The recent death of the gifted author has imparted new interest to her writings. Of her life, it is needless to say anything here, farther than that she was born at London, in 1809; that she commenced to write verses and scan Greek when a mere child; that she travelled much, resided a good part of her time in Italy, where she died last June; and now reposes, under an Italian sky, beside John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. For the rest, we refer to her poems, with much more confidence than to any biography of her that has yet appeared.
Some books we read and throw aside, never again to touch, and wonder why they were written. What fools men do make of themselves! And yet these books have [p. 135→] their uses. We doubt not but that they have proved, often, an unexpected blessing to their authors; some have awakened as from a dream, affrighted, and have had no more dreams because they have not eaten such stuff as dyspeptics feed on, and, therefore, have grown fat. They have more wisely given themselves up to trade and physic—perhaps to the plow and the sickle, and henceforth been happy in turning up the warm earth. Others have worked themselves clear of all the crudities of the brain, and have thrown off the superabundant matter floating there once and for ever, and by thought and patient effort have dived deeper within the ocean of thought, and have brought up pearls and gems of rarest beauty and priceless worth. Did not Byron do this? have not a few more done the same? Therefore, let them write and publish what they write; the great public must be patient; we can afford to wait upon these fledglings, who may have the will but not as yet the power. If they belong to the tribus that sings, we shall hear them on some clear June morning, and all the world will listen—as we now listen to Aurora! Alas, some are killed in the effort; witness Keats; but he had first sung those carols which are not of earth and worthy of Shelley’s Adonais—
All he had loved and moulded into thought
From shape, and hue, and odor and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought
Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
Afar, the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay.
We have found many passages in Aurora Leigh to mark to erase; some with a rapid stroke, and hands somewhat nervous; others calmly, and with meditative head and heart. We have read no modern poem more full of thought, that stirs the blood, quickens the pulse and makes it leap. At times, we pause and listen, for the notes of Aurora are not always clear. Why should they be?—this mild Florentine, with the smell of oleanders on her wings, and her heart all full of snatches from the Tuscan groves; full-throated, she can scarcely pant them out, without, at times, tripping each other’s heels. We sometimes say, either the poet must be dazzled or we are. Well, we read her again, and it is all clear. The fault is in us, not in her. Often have we known that [p. 136→] the reader must be en rapport with such poets, or they can not be understood. Never read Aurora Leigh, when your head is weak from too full a stomach, or dyspeptic—better read Japanese. Whether it is that we cannot see the pebbles shining at the bottom of this tarn, or so shallow that the pebbles have no shining, we cannot, at times, say; but, it is certain that, like the great cosmos, it has its riddles, mysteries, morasses, deserts, fogs and fens; but, for all these, it is God’s cosmos.
This Aurora Leigh is a great poem. It is a wonder of art. It will live. No large audience will it have, but it will have audience; and that is more than most poems have. To those who know what poetry is, and in what struggles it is born—how the great thoughts justify themselves—this work will be looked upon as one of the wonders of the age.
We say Aurora Leigh will live, not by special grant of the great public, for this will not know that such a thing has dawned upon it. The day dawns upon us, not because we will, but because the sun wills. It will not be by grant of the king or the senate, or because of tinted paper and gold, but because,
It is a thing of beauty and a joy forever!
It is one withal that has in it life and cannot perish. It is sometimes quaint, as the oaks of Wordsworth’s:
Those fraternal four of Bowerdale
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove
Of intertwisted fibres, serpentine,
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved—
Nor uninformed of phantasy and looks
That threaten the profane!
This book could not have been written when Prometheus Bound and her earlier works were wrought. These, like all works from the great masters, were but the froth and bubbles tossing on that sea which alone could have produced them, but which, at best, were froth and bubbles, not the sea. She did not know until Aurora arose what daylight was, what the sun could do, what glory it casts upon the breezy trees and the slumberous earth, the seas and its multitudinous waves.
The first verses, even of true poets, are generally formal and precise, imitations perhaps of others. Pretty verses, suited to the modes of thought and taste of the people, on a level with those who are pleased with them—“flats,” noth- [p. 137→] ing more. All men are poets of the kind that young poets are who appear in ladies’ magazines, but all have not the power to sing. If they have the will, they lack the ambition to tempt them to make the effort. Some mistake the will for the power, and chatter like the jay-bird; and they are as well pleased as the lark with his morning carol. So Byron sang his early lays, and so Pope and Dryden. They sang in youth as if from the experience and deep insight of age, making sad music, discordant, false. The key-note was false, and they mistook the minor for the major.
But few have escaped this anachronism of their life in poetry. They antedate their power and sing at sixteen what can only be sung at forty, if sung at all. Burns escaped this, and so did Henry Kirke White. They took their lessons from their hearts, and never went beyond them. They sang because they could not help it. They borrowed no notes, even from the nightingale.
Why Aurora Leigh was written may be seen in the first lines of the poem:
Of writing many books there is no end;
And I, who have written much in prose and verse
For other’s uses, will write now for mine,
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.
She also says, in her dedication to John Kenyon, Esq.: “Ending, therefore, and preparing once more to quit England, I venture to leave in your hands this book, the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon life and art have entered.”
Thus, as is well known, she had written much both “in prose and in verse,” for others’ uses—this book for her own. In all her previous contributions, the same original, self-poised mind appears at times, but in none of them does it stand out so fully and so clearly as in Aurora Leigh; and hence its superiority to anything written by her pen. She lost sight of old, dead forms. No longer the mocking bird—if, indeed, she ever was—but now the lark, up-springing from the dewy grass, she flings her arrows, clear and keen:
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lone cloud,
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. [p. 138→]
What her conceptions are of a poet, his mission and his uses, may be seen in the following passage:
I write so
Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;
How she looks down upon
Your common men
Who
Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,
And dust the flaunty carpets of the world
For kings to walk on, or our senators,
The poet suddenly will catch them up
With his voice like thunder—“This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said in heaven,
Here’s God down on us! What are you about?”
At this voice of thunder, they are startled from their daily work;
Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,
That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,
Is not the imperative labor after all.
The uncommon force and felicity with which Mrs. Browning expresses her thoughts are not the least of her excellencies. She has a rich vocabulary—a large utterance, never at a loss for the right word in the right place. This strikes the reader throughout the entire work. She is not always smooth or even in the flow of her language, as Wordsworth, nor is she tame, as he sometimes is, in the medium through which she chooses to give expression to her conceptions of truth. Never cramped by system, as though poetry had a language solely its own, but in the largeness of her ideal, she deals with the world of art as God does in nature. Sometimes rugged, disjointed, abrupt, throwing up her mountain masses as fiery sparks, letting down the awful avalanche, with the thunder which follows it; and then, as the river flowing “at its own sweet will,” through open glades and towering trees, castles and broken towers, now spreading out over the marsh-moor, then compressed between the jaws of mountains, ready to devour it. In any phase of thought, finding, without effort, apparently, words which convey their own music, independent of the thoughts which they utter. No writer was ever truer to her own ideal, than our Aurora. [p. 139→] She writes from her heart, and is one with nature in all her moods.
The poet’s lyre, to fix his fame,
Should be the poet’s heart;
Affection lights a brighter flame
Than ever blaz’d by art.
The life of Aurora shows the training to which she had subjected herself in view of her art. It is worth our study. She was of a Tuscan mother, the heroine of the poem, but of an English father. At the age of four years, her mother died in Florence, and left her in the hands of her father and the nurse Apunta. She tenderly refers to this scene in her past life of helplessness, and ever after laments the loss of a mother’s care and love.
My mother was a Florentine,
Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old; my life,
A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp,
Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;
She could not bear the joy of giving life,
The mother’s rapture slew her.
She felt, after this, a mother-want, and went bleating through the world, as a lamb shut out, at night, from the fold. Her father, kind, good man, did all he could to reconcile her “to the new order,” but, like all fathers, failed, not from the want of will, but power.
Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just),
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words.
Fathers love as well,
Mine did, I know—but still with heavier brains,
And wills more consciously impossible,
And not as wisely, since less foolishly;
So mothers have God’s license to be missed.
The mother of Aurora was first seen by her father, when a trail of chanting priests and girls were passing along the streets to the cathedral; when
A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,
And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,
Transfiguring him to music.
We doubt whether a more striking figure than this can be found, as expressive of a face of beauty and of brightness; [p. 140→] and the sudden and transforming effect it produced upon the beholder. It lives in the memory, and transfixes both the sight and the seer at once and for ever. We feel “the silent clangour” of “brain and heart” as this bright cymbal, in the sun, flashes on our face. After her death, Aurora, her father, and Apunta left Florence, and sojourned among the mountains of Pelago—
God’s silence on the outside of the house,
And we, who did not speak too loud, within.
The effect of the picture of her mother, taken after she was dead, upon the mind of Aurora, is touchingly and truthfully exhibited. It carries us back to childhood, when all things are strange and new, and phantasies flit through the heart and brain, which are too evanescent and shadowy to be distinctly remembered, and which only a few can ever recall:
I, a little child, would crouch
For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up,
And gaze across them, half in terror, half
In adoration, at the picture there—
That swan-like, supernatural life,
Just sailing upward from the red, stiff silk
Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power
To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds;
For hours I sate and stared.
For years, that picture took all shapes and forms; from every object she saw, and all the books she read; some, strange and fantastic, others dull and vague, or beautiful and sweet; and finally fixed itself on the dead mother, without sigh or smile, in her grave at Florence.
Her father died when she was ripening into girlhood—just thirteen—and left her in the world to grope her way along its tortuous paths. She woke up as from a dream, as one does after the fever fit is over, not able to gather up the threads of life, so strangely broken, so inextricably tangled. Just two lines we quote, for their singular strength and sublimity, with reference to death—the death of her father:
Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning.
Many such short, Shaksperian sentences may be found in this work, which will pass into the common speech, as they never can be forgotten. We deem this to be one of the triumphs of poetry. It fulfils its office in those words [p. 141→] which linger in the memory, and enter into the life of all this busy, bustling world—of duty and enjoyment, of grief and love. It does more for us than kings or senators, than philosophy or art—than a hundred battles, which give birth to empires or level them in the dust. Those sentences which we learned at school, or at our fathers’ hearth-stone, or which were floating on the genial air and caught up by every breath of wind, are the waifs, belonging to the king, which all his subjects share in—the seed-truths, which make our golden harvests in life. Every language possesses them; and a nation owes its stability more to their presence and power, than to all its laws or institutions. Shakspeare abounds with them, and also Milton; you find them in Bunyan’s Pilgrim; in Gray’s Elegy; in Cowper’s Task; in Longfellow’s and T. Buchanan Read’s poems. They partake of the nature of the parable and the fable; of the familiar sayings—the maxims of Solon, or the greater of Solomon. They are the crown-jewels of a kingdom, distributed, not in parts, but in whole, to all the subjects—each having all, without trenching on the rights and privileges of others—like the blue sky, and the common earth, and the great seas. They are loop-holes, through which we look into the unseen and the eternal. They contain in them the wealth of an empire, as they give it all its wealth. Their power lies in the harmony unconsciously felt by all men, and by deeper minds continually recognized, in the resemblances of the natural and the spiritual—the conventional and the real. They are witnesses for the truth amidst the lies and storms of this most unintelligible world. They are the true types of all the antitypes which lie in our pathway—not chosen arbitrarily from the dead forms which everywhere appear, but, being one with nature, they harmonize with it, and permit us
To see into the life of things.
There are some minds, so dull and stupid, so earthly and sensuous, that all poetry to them is as unsightly as dead seed in the fructifying soil, forgetful that from these the beautiful forms of life are eliminated—both the graceful flower and the thick corn; and for this it is sown. They are but the prophecy of the future. To the one, but seed in a state of decay; to the other, the oleander and the violet—and the harvests of every autumn. To those who shrink from con- [p. 142→] templating a higher-world order than that which lies around them, all this is illusive, if not mummery; to them, earth casts no shadow—nor the sun. Images of the beautiful and the sublime waylay them never in the dusty road of life. To them, as to Peter Bell,
A primrose by a river’s brow,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
But Nature is a loving mother. She would tell us all she knows, if we had ears to listen; but she will do it in her own way and time. The fewest willingly listen to her voice. The poets are her chosen children, on whom she lavishes her richest love—the Benjamins of the family of Rachel, having the lordly dish. They learn as much from her silence as from her utterances. Her “dark sayings” to them leave large inferences. Latent affinities, remote allusions, enigmatical forms of speech, are the thyme from her skirts, scenting all the air, or voices which
Thrill inly with consenting fellowship
To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves
Outside of Time.
Aurora, at the age of thirteen, was sent, by the dying wish of her father, to England, to a maiden aunt—his sister—to be cared for and educated. Her feelings, on leaving her Tuscan home, are most graphically described:
A stranger, with authority, not right
(I thought not), who commanded, caught me up
From old Apunta’s neck; how, with a shriek,
She let me go; while I, with ears too full
Of my father’s silence, to shriek back a word,
In all a child’s astonishment at grief,
Stared at the wharfage, where she stood and moaned—
My poor Apunta, where she stood and moaned!
She reached England:
Oh, the frosty cliffs
Looked cold on me.
The train swept on through the tessellated fields of her father’s island. “The skies, themselves, looked low and positive”—not like her Italy—“God’s celestial crystals!” She wondered if this could be the land of Shakspeare.
Not a hill or stone
With heart to strike a radiant color up,
Or active outline, on the indifferent air! [p. 143→]
She describes the first appearance of her aunt—surely, not a proper person to entrust this wild flower from the Tuscan groves with; but, perhaps, the best a dying father had on earth; she, at least, was his sister:
She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight,
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; * *
A close, mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,
Or, peradventure, niggardly half truths.
Aurora, then, was somewhat of a phrenologist, and took note of these defective organs; but she understood them better on a nearer acquaintance. Children are good physiognomists, at least, and read the heart in the eyes and nose and lips—more, certainly, in the atmosphere, which surrounds those with whom they come in contact:
Her aunt 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 heavens, how silly are the things that live
In thickets, and eat berries!
So thought, doubtless, this maiden aunt; and, it is no wonder, if she did not understand this oriole of the “thickets,” scarcely fledged, and now, for the first time, brought to her cage. What cared she for her “clear water” and “fresh seed”—she, who had drunk from the clear spring, and eaten of all the berries of her native woods!
Aurora threw her passionate arms around the neck of her aunt, and would have clung there through life, but for the want of that warm love, in return, which, alone, can make it:
She loved my father, and would love me too,
As long as I deserved it.
In truth, her father had married a Tuscan girl, and had not only, in her judgment,
Fooled away
A wise man, from wise courses,
but had deprived her,
His sister, of the household precedence.
For this she never could forgive her, and so she hated her,
Till hate, so nourished, did exceed, at last,
The love from which it grew, in strength and hate. [p. 144→]
She did what she deemed her duty towards Aurora, generous and bland,
More courteous, than was tender.
Sometimes, however, fearful
That God’s saints
Would look down suddenly and say, “Herein
You missed a point, I think through lack of love.”
Alas! a mother never is afraid
Of speaking angrily to any child,
Since love, she knows, is justified of love.
Aurora was a manageable child:
Why not?
I did not live to have the faults of life;
There seemed more true life in my father’s grave
Than in all England.
She was subjected to the ordinary training of young girls—studied arithmetic, geography, and grammar; the creeds, from Athansius back to Nice:
The articles—the tracts against the time;
Dances the polka and Cellarius;
Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax;
Read scores of books on womanhood,
To prove, if women do not think at all,
They may teach thinking,
And last,
I learned cross-stitch, because she did not like
To see me wear the night with empty hands,
A-doing nothing.
Romney, her cousin, when he returned from college, was her friend and companion. He was rich, talented, had much of the genius of Aurora, but was taken up with generalities and systems, and tangled in the meshes of socialism. Their lives were not set to the same music; of course he fell in love with her, but was rejected. Sorry girl! what a good match it would have made, looking from the standpoint of her maiden aunt and any one’s maiden aunt. She was in love with art—with life, which was her art. He,
Why, sir, you are married long ago,
You have a wife whom you love,—
Your social theory.
Already had Aurora been communing with her own heart and nature. She had felt the dawning of a “new life within her life.” She had read, by stealth, the books, bad and good, [p. 145→] found in the garret of the old manse of her fathers. She had fallen upon the poets and drank their nectar, as of one of the gods and had written verses—such as young poets write:
Oh happy mornings, with a morning heart
That leaps for love, is active for resolve,
Weak for art only.
So, like most young poets, in a flush
Of individual life, I poured myself
Along the veins of others, and achieved
Mere lifeless imitations of life verse,
And made the living answer for the dead,
Profaning nature.
But it was not always so, nor yet, we think, long. A nature like hers would find enough within to satisfy the demands of her art. It was natural enough for one, just waking from the conventional life about her, to imitate the life, or forms of life, into which she had entered. You see her now, looking out from her green room, upon the trees and shrubbery—stealing out before day from the sleepy house, and taking her fill of the sweet breath of morn, and drinking inspiration from the hills and woods,
As a hunted stag
Will take the waters, shivering with the fear
And passion of the course!
Her twentieth morn she reaches, and there she
Stood
Woman and artist—either incomplete,
Both credulous of completion!
I was glad that day;
The June was in me. With its multitudes
Of nightingales all singing in the dark,
And rosebuds reddening where the calyx split.
I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!
Early in the morning of this day,
Till my aunt awoke
To stop good dreams,
she went out in the open air to keep her birth-day, and sauntered through the acacias and over the dewy grass, to crown herself “in sport, not pride”—
to learn the feel of it,
Before my brows be numb as Dante’s own
To all the tender pricking of such leaves? [p. 146→]
She chose, not the bay, being not overbold, nor yet the myrtle—
Which means chiefly Love; and Love
Is something awful, which one dare not touch
So early o’ mornings.
Nor yet the verbena, nor guilder rose—
Ah! there’s my choice—that ivy on the wall.
That headlong ivy! not a leaf will grow
But thinking of a wreath!—
I like ivy; bold to leap a height,
’Twas strong to climb.
Thus, speaking to herself, half singing it:
Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bell,
To ring with once being touched.
Thus drawing a wreath, drenched with dew, across her brow, half blinding her with its tears, she,
turning, faced
My public!—Cousin Romney—with a mouth
Twice graver than his eyes.
It was here, and with a blush of flame, she stood transfixed, in presence of her cousin—
You, my cousin.
The passages which describe this unexpected interview no one but a poet could write. We must transcribe a few of them; but, to feel their force and beauty, the scene itself must be read and studied. To show the intense aspirations of the heroine, take the following:
I would rather take my part
With God’s dead, who afford to walk in white,
Yet spread his glory, than keep quiet here,
And gather up my feet from even a step
For fear to soil my gown in so much dust.
He twits her on the art she has chosen, and reminds her how many have failed, and that she ought not to be satisfied—will not be—with the half praise bestowed on
Mere woman’s work.
Stop there!
she answered:
I would rather dance
At fairs, on tight ropes, till the babies dropped
Their gingerbread for joy—than shift the types
For tolerable verse, intolerable
To men who act and suffer. Better far
Pursue a frivolous trade, by serious means,
Than a sublime art frivolously! [p. 147→]
Of her “sublime art,” she says:
—Poets become such
Through scorning nothing. You decry them for
The good of beauty, sung and taught by them,
While they respect your practical partial good
As being a part of beauty’s self. Adieu!
When God helps all the workers for his world,
The singers shall have help of Him—not last!
We have said Aurora Leigh should not be read, but studied deeply, meditatively. We know of no better work for the youthful mind, filled with lofty aspirations, to pore over, than this. If one wishes to know the stuff that poets are made of, the things that they endure, the struggles to reach a purer life, the patience and the toil to attain it, the self-abnegation needful, the world of thought and feeling to which they are admitted, ere they see in the desert the sphynx with sober face, the sounding of that desert ere they catch a full sight of the presiding spirit which dwells there, the failures, the praise—which means scorn, the blame which is often the highest praise, the self-reliance in a world where none can stand alone, let them read Aurora Leigh!
I worked with patience, which means almost power.
I did some excellent things indifferently,
Some bad things excellently. Both were praised,
The latter loudest!
I ripped my verses up,
And found no blood upon the rapier’s point;
The heart in them was just an embryo’s heart,
Which never yet had beat, that it should die;
Just gasps of make-believe, galvanic life;
Mere tones, unorganized to any tune.
Of the English public, she says:
I apprehend this—
In England, no one lives by verse that lives:
And apprehending, I resolved by prose
To make a space to sphere my living verse.
I wrote for cyclopædias, magazines,
And weekly papers, holding up my name,
To keep it from the mud.
We have written thus far, and felt consciously how little we have said to give proper expression of our sense of the merits of this poem, or to afford the reader a just appreciation of it. The quotations we have made were not selected because they were the gems alone to be found in the book, but to illustrate, rather, certain principles found in it, and to show how poets are made, and what food they live on. The prac- [p. 148→] tical geologist, who finds a grain or two of gold, or piece of quartz containing the precious metal, does not pronounce his judgment on the wealth which lies beneath the placer, must less does he regard the small treasures he has found a safe criterion to judge of the mines, which might contribute wealth enough for a hundred Rothschilds.
[James Challen]
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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