E620700E. Aurora Leigh, and Other Poems (New York, 1862).
Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, July 1862, pp. 95–97.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
Some months ago we promised our readers a Sketch of “Aurora Leigh,” the greatest of Mrs. Browning’s poems, and, in original thoughts and illustrations of deep and holy truths and lofty sentiments, probably the grandest poem of the Century. We say this while fully admitting many of the objections urged in its disparagement. The story is unnatural; the principal characters are exaggerated creations of poetic fancy, mixing the sacred fires of genius with just enough of the common clay of humanity to make figures resembling women and men, but which are not the actual people of this world.
Grant this manner of portraying personages to the authoress, and we are filled with admiration at the results. What marvellous trains of thought! What wonderful pictures of life in all its varieties of action! The condensation of meanings, the originality of ideas, the versatility, richness, and aptness of language are unrivalled. How pale and insignificant are the beauties of contemporary poems beside the living, moving, teaching descriptions of Aurora Leigh, which embody forth the soul, the mind, and the heart of Mrs. Browning!
The story is neither mysterious nor complicated. The life of Aurora Leigh, which she narrates, was early clouded with sorrow. She was the only child of an “austere Englishman” who, while travelling in Italy, fell passionately in love with and married a beautiful Florentine maiden. His wife died, and Aurora was left an “unmothered little child of four years old” to the sole care and love of her father for “full nine years,” when he, too, died. Then the orphan was sent to England to be brought up and educated by his maiden sister. Aurora had been the pupil, companion, and idol of her father he had taught her
All the ignorance of men,
And how God laughs in heaven when any man
Says, “Here I’m learned; this I understand;
In that I’m never caught at fault or doubt!”
Her father’s virtues and the clinging, venerating love of his lonely child to his image in her heart are felt in many passages of pathetic beauty which no Elegiac poetry has ever surpassed.
Then we have the trials of her English training under the supervision of her maiden aunt, who had lived
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life;
A quiet life, which was not life at all;
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was art and joy enough for any bird.
Such was Aurora’s “father’s sister,” whose real love for him was not so strong as her hatred for the “foreign woman” he had married; therefore her great aim was to crush out from the heart and speech of their daughter all Italian words and idols.
The family inheritance, forfeited by her father because of his marriage with a “foreign woman,” was lost to Aurora; it had passed to a second cousin, Romney Leigh. He is a young man of pattern excellence in private life, but in his political opinions and philosophical theories a Reformer of the most exaggerated opinions, nearly if not quite a follower of Fourier and a believer in Compte. He was also Quixotic in generosity, and felt that his possession of the Leigh estates was a great wrong to his cousin Aurora; so he fell deeply in love with her and urged his suit with passionate fervor as the true way of happiness for both, and making all things right.
Aurora was as proud and quite as positive in her own opinions as Romney in his. She refused his love, and resisted his purpose of restoring her, through her aunt, thirty thousand pounds of the property. Aurora fancied that Romney did not appreciate the dignity nor the genius of woman; so she resolved, after the death of her aunt, who had no property of her own to bequeath except
A few books and a pair of shawls,
to go to London and gain support and renown by her writings. She was a poetess in her own right, or rather by the endowment of God, and she knew her gift. She was and is Mrs. Browning’s earnest soul in Aurora’s drapery.
Aurora had faith in Christ, and her feminine insight had appropriated His spiritual truth that “man does not live by bread alone,” he must have Divine aid; that the human soul must be enlightened to know and love the true good, or the mere alms that keep alive the body do not nourish and raise humanity. She expresses this earnestly to her cousin Romney, when he is urging her to marry him and work with him in his Socialistic plans of benevolence. She says—
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—even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal to blow a hair’s breadth off
The dust of the actual. Ah, you Fouriers fail
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.
Romney Leigh, however, was not only not convinced by her reasoning, but her rejection of his suit increased his fanaticism, and he determined to marry “a daughter of the people,” one from the lowest caste of English life, in order to demonstrate the folly and wrong of artificial distinctions in society. The young girl, Marian Erle, whose pitiful story and dove-like innocence half win us to rejoice that she is to be thus exalted, deserts Romney Leigh at the wedding hour, and absolves him from his engagement.
The affair is surrounded with mystery which in its development is shocking. We consider this the blot of the book, and wish the poetess had invented a less terrible catastrophe. Doubtless Mrs. Browning thought it a clear way of showing that virtue is lovely and respectable under all circumstances; that no soil can remain upon her, no ignominy disgrace her. There is, truly, a noble dignity and disinterestedness in poor Marian’s love and life which make her interesting; but the deep pity her great wrong awakens is akin to horror, and far more distressing than any sorrow over the dead.
It was on Aurora’s twentieth birth-day that Romney Leigh made his offer of marriage to her, as she thought, because he wanted “a wife to help his ends”—some of which she enumerated as follows:— [p. 96→]
He might cut
My body into coins to give away
Among his paupers; he might change my sons,
While I stood dumb as Griseld, for black babes
Or piteous foundlings; might unquestioned set
My right hand teaching in the Ragged Schools,
My left hand washing in the Public Baths,
What time my angel of the Ideal stretched
Both his to me in vain!
And so she turned to her books, wrote her poems, and strove to do good in her own way.
Ten years passed; they met again in Florence. It was evening. She had gained fame, friends, the means of independent living, and of doing good. He had failed in his philosophic plans (as all Socialistic plans do fail), and lost his sight in his exertions for the benefit of the miserable, who would not be helped in his way. But we will let them explain. Aurora said—
“I’m thinking, cousin, of a far-off June,
When you and I, upon my birth-day once
Discoursed of Life and Art, with both untried.
I’m thinking, Romney, how ’twas morning then,
And now ’tis night.”
“Yes,” he said, “’tis night.
* * * * * * *
How dark I stood that morning in the sun,
My best Aurora, though I saw your eyes—
When first you told me—oh, I recollect
The words, and how you lifted your white hands,
And how your white dress and your burnished curls
Went greatening round you in the still, blue air,
As if the inspiration from within
Had blown them all out when you spoke the same—
“You will not compass your poor ends, not you!”
I’m ready for confession; I was wrong,
I’ve sorely failed, I’ve slipped the ends of life;
I yield; you have conquered.
“Stay,” I answered him;
“I’ve something for your hearing, also—I
Have failed too.”
“You!” he said, “you’re very great;
The sadness of your greatness fits you well,
As if the plume upon a hero’s casque
Should nod a shadow on his victor face.”
I took him up austerely—“You have read
My book but not my heart; for the rest,
Look here, sir; I was right upon the whole,
That birth-day morning. ’Tis impossible
To get at men excepting through their souls;
However open their carnivorous jaws,
The soul’s the way. Not even Christ himself
Can save man else than as he holds the soul.
We both were wrong that June day—both as wrong
As an east wind had been. I, who talked of Art,
And you, who grieved for all men’s grief; what then?
We surely made too small a part for God
In these things, Romney. Though we fail, indeed,
You—I—a score of such weak workers—He
Fails never. If He cannot work by us,
He surely will work over us.”
“Could we sit
Just so forever, sweetest friend,” he said,
“My failure would be better than success.
Oh, cousin, let us be content in work
To do the thing we can, and not presume
To fret because ’tis little. Hearken, dear,
There’s too much abstract willing, purposing
In this poor world. We talk by aggregates,
And think by systems; and, being used to face
Our evils in statistics, are inclined
To cap them with unreal remedies,
Drawn out in haste on the other side the slate.”
“That’s true,” I answered, fain to throw up thought
And make a game of’t. “Oh, we generalize
Enough to please you. If we pray at all,
We pray no longer for our daily bread,
But next centenary’s harvest. If we give,
Our cup of water is not tendered till
We lay down pipes and found a Company
With Branches. Ass or angel, ’tis the same;
A woman cannot do the thing she ought,
Which means whatever perfect thing she can
In life, in art, in science, but she fears
To let the perfect action take her part
And rest there; she must prove what she can do
Before she does it—prate of woman’s rights,
Of woman’s mission, woman’s function, till
The men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry—
‘A woman’s function plainly is—to talk.’
Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
They cannot hear each other speak.”
“And you,
An artist, judge so?”
“I, an artist, yes,
Because, precisely, I’m an artist, sir,
And woman; if another sate in sight,
I’d whisper—Soft, my sister! not a word!
By speaking we prove only we can speak:
Which he, the man here, never doubted. What
He doubts is whether we can do the thing
With decent grace we have not done at all:
Now do it; bring your statue, you have room!”
“It is the age’s mood,”
He said; “we boast and do not.”
We have not room for more extracts here; but hope these glimpses of the story will induce those who love the memory of the poetess to read this great poem attentively. It ends happily, and in the usual way of romance. The originality we claim for Mrs. Browning is certainly not to be found in these incidents, nor in the meagre love-story, which is ill-constructed, and has been told a thousand times in verse and prose of different merit. Everything but the story is original, the ideas, the illustrations, the manner of description, the trains of thought, the wit, the eloquence, the language even.
Mrs. Browning thinks and feels as though inspired by the beauty and holiness of Truth, and writes as though she sought only to express, in the fearless and passionate language of Genius, her real thoughts and feelings. Other poets have the elegancies of literature and classicalities of colleges so ornamenting their lines, that the original spark is often but a feeble twinkle; the result is sweetness, prettiness, and, according to poetic rules, greater perfectness; but not the strength, power, and soul-compelling poetry of Aurora Leigh.
Compare this poem with “The Princess” or “The Idyls of the King,” both works beautifully rich in that musical “mirage of words” which no writer except Mr. Tennyson can raise, and see in the images of life and truth, in the anticipations of faith and hope, in the real worth of true principles to guide and noble desires to purify humanity, how inferior are those great poems of the English Laureate to this grand poem of Mrs. Browning. It is not that the woman is original from ignorance of the deep fountains of antiquity, far from it; her scholarship has never been disputed; but her own inspirations quite surmount the classic nurture study afforded her. She does not equal, much less imitate, the subtlety, delicacy, and exquisite grace of language which characterize the poetry of Mr. Tennyson; but in power, pith, and pathos she is the superior. We think, when remembering her delicate organization, refinement of mind and feeling, and the sweet womanliness of her character, while we read her strong, stirring, vigorous verse, we think of the “angels that excel in strength.”
It is a very hard matter to make extracts from a book that has such bright excellencies on every page; the selections given are not the best specimens, because we aimed at illustrating the story, not displaying its gems. When we have room we intend to string a few of the precious pearls for display at our “Table.” But the work of mortals is never perfect; we are compelled to point out one great fault; there is a mistake in “Aurora Leigh,” a vital mistake, affecting the whole truth of Bible History and the sacredness of the Decalogue. It struck us on our first reading, soon after the poem ap- [p. 97→] peared; it was so strange, so utterly unaccountable that we felt sure Mrs. Browning would see it and revise the text; this was not done, nor has a single critic or reviewer, to our knowledge, ever noticed the mistake. Has it passed unobserved? Then we should infer that the poetess was not alone in her ignorance or misconstruction of the sacred text. This, too, is very strange.
Mrs. Browning has ignored the Sabbath by making the work of Creation continue through the seven days. God had no rest in her version, because the human pair were made on the “last day” of the week: thus—
Seven days’ work,
The last day shutting ’twixt its dawn and eve,
The whole world, bettered, of the previous six!
Since God collated and resumed in man
The firmaments, the strata, and the lights,
Fish, fowl, and beast, and insect—all these trains
Of various life caught back upon His arm,
Reorganized and constituted Man,
The microcosm, the adding up of works;
Within whose fluttering nostrils, then at last,
Consummating Himself, the Maker sighed,
As some strong winner at the foot-race sighs
Touching the goal.
[Page 203 American edition, Book Sixth, line 152, etc.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: James Miller, 1862.
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