E640200A. Poems (1864).
Weldon’s Register, February 1864, pp. 51–54.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 329.
We have several times expressed in these pages our reverent admiration for the writings of Mrs. Browning. They certainly seem to us to be among those which contain the deepest and broadest wisdom that has received literary embodiement in our time. With the exception, perhaps, of some portions of “Poems Before Congress” and “Last Poems,”—neither of which are included in the four volumes, just issued by Messrs. Chapman and Hall, which are now before us,—pre-eminent among them in this respect stands “Aurora Leigh,” which Mrs. Browning herself spoke of as “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” “Aurora Leigh” constitutes the fourth of the four volumes into which all Mrs. Browning’s published writings, with the exceptions just mentioned, are now collected, and we must confess, for our own part, that in its presence we scarcely care even to cut the other three.
“Aurora Leigh,” as it seems to us, has not yet met with due appreciation at the hands either of critics or of the public. It is unread by multitudes who read and re-read those earlier productions of its author which, however wondrous in their grand musical rhythm, their wealth of wise thought, and their deep human tenderness, are still, we cannot but think, immensely inferior to this masterpiece of her genius. Numbers who delight in “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” and “The Rhyme of the Duchess of May” have been unable to see in “Aurora Leigh” anything more than “a novel in verse.” We think,—and we shall give some extracts going, in our judgment, far to show,—that it is much more than this; as indeed no book embodying the “highest convictions upon Life and Art” of any real poet could possibly fail to be. Let us hope that we shall sufficiently call attention to this new edition of the chief part of Mrs. Browning’s works by quoting from its fourth volume some of the passages in which she embodied the maturest results of her thought and experience concerning those great subjects. And first this noble passage from Book Fifth:—
The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods;
I’ll not believe it. I could never deem
As Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineer
Who travelled higher than he was born to live,
And showed sometimes the goitre in his throat
Discoursing of an image seen through fog,)
That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high.
They were but men:—his Helen’s hair turned gray
Like any plain Miss Smith’s who wears a front;
And Hector’s infant whimpered at a plume
As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.
All actual heroes are essential men,
And all men possible heroes: every age,
Heroic in proportions, double-faced,
Looks backward and before, expects a morn
And claims an epos.
Ay, but every age
Appears to souls who live in’t (ask Carlyle)
Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours:
The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound
Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:
A pewter age,—mixed metal, silver-washed;
An age of scum, spooned off the richer past,
An age of patches for old gaberdines,
An age of mere transition, meaning nought
Except that what suceeds must shame it quite
If God please. That’s wrong thinking to my mind,
And wrong thoughts make poor poems.
Every age,
Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it. We’ll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Alexander schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man.
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little as the browsing goats
Of form or feature of humanity
Up there,—in fact, had travelled five miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them,
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky
And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso,—hand, that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down
To all the country pastures. ’Tis even thus
With times we live in,—evermore too great
To be apprehended near.
But poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things as intimately deep
As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
To sing—oh, not of lizard or of toad
Alive i’ the ditch there,—’t were excusable,
But of some black chief, half Knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,
As dead as must be, for the greater part,
The poems made on their chivalric bones;
And that’s no wonder: death inherits death.
Nay, if there’s room for poets in this world
A little overgrown, (I think there is)
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles.
To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,
Cry out for togas and the picturesque,
Is fatal,—foolish too. King Arthur’s self
Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat
As Fleet Street to our poets.
Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
“Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked!
This bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets our beating: this is living art,
Which thus presents and thus records true life.”
What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less and the external. Trust the spirit,
As sovran nature does, to make the form;
For otherwise we only imprison spirit
And not embody. Inward evermore
To outward,—so in life, and so in art,
Which still is life.
Five acts to make a play.
And why not fifteen? Why not ten? or seven?
What matter for the number of the leaves,
Supposing the tree lives and grows? exact
The literal unities of time and place,
When ’tis the essence of passion to ignore
Both time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire,
And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.
’Tis true the stage requires obsequiousness
To this or that convention; “exit” here
And “enter” there; the points for clapping, fixed,
Like Jacob’s white-peeled rods before the rams, [p. 52→]
And all the close-curled imagery clipped
In manner of their fleece at shearing-time.
Forget to prick the galleries to the heart
Precisely at the fourth act,—culminate
Our five pyramidal acts with one act more,—
We’re lost so: Shakspeare’s ghost could scarcely plead
Against our just damnation. Stand aside;
We’ll muse for comfort that, last century,
On this same tragic stage on which we have failed,
A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same.
And whosoever writes good poetry,
Looks just to art. He does not write for you
Or me,—for London or for Edinburgh;
He will not suffer the best critic known
To step into his sunshine of free thought
And self-absorbed conception and exact
An inch long swerving of the holy lines.
If virtue done for popularity
Defiles like vice, can art, for praise or hire.
Still keep its splendour and remain pure art?
Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes,
He writes; mankind accepts it if it suits,
And that’s success: if not, the poem’s passed
From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,
Until the unborn snatch it, crying out
In pity on their fathers’ being dull,
And that’s success too.
I will write no plays;
Because the drama, less sublime in this,
Makes lower appeals, submits more menially,
Adopts the standard of the public taste
To chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round
Its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch
The fashions of the day to please the day,
Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands
Commending chiefly its docility
And humour in stage-tricks,—or else indeed
Gets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog,
Or worse, we’ll say. For dogs, unjustly kicked,
Yell, bite at need; but if your dramatist
(Being wronged by some five hundred nobodies
Because their grosser brains most naturally
Misjudge the fineness of his subtle wit)
Shows teeth an almond’s breadth, protests the length
Of a modest phrase,—“My gentle countrymen,
There’s something in it haply of your fault,”—
Why then, besides five hundred nobodies,
He’ll have five thousand and five hundred more
Against him,—the whole public,—all the hoofs
Of King Saul’s father’s asses, in full drove,
And obviously deserve it. He appealed
To these,—and why say more if they condemn
Than if they praise him? Weep, my Æschylus,
But low and far, upon Sicilian shores!
For since ’twas Athens (so I read the myth)
Who gave commission to that fatal weight
The tortoise, cold and hard, to drop on thee
And crush thee,—better cover thy bald head;
She’ll hear the softest hum of Hyblan bee
Before thy loudest protestation!
Then
The risk’s still worse upon the modern stage;
I could not, for so little, accept success,
Nor would I risk so much, in ease and calm,
For manifester gains: let those who prize,
Pursue them: I stand off. And yet, forbid,
That any irrelevant fancy or conceit
Should litter in the Drama’s throne-room, where
The rulers of our art, in whose full veins
Dynastic glories mingle, sit in strength
And do their kingly work,—conceive, command,
And, from the imagination’s crucial heat,
Catch up their men and women all a-flame
For action, all alive and forced to prove
Their life by living out heart, brain, and nerve,
Until mankind makes witness, “These be men
As we are,” and vouchsafes the greeting due
To Imogen and Juliet—sweetest kin
On Art’s side.
’Tis that, honouring to its worth
The drama, I would fear to keep it down
To the level of the footlights. Dies no more
The sacrificial goat, for Bacchus, slain,
His filmed eyes fluttered by the whirling white
Of choral vestures,—troubled in his blood,
While tragic voices, that clanged keen as swords,
Leapt high together with the altar-flame
And made the blue air wink. The waxen mask,
Which set the grand still front of Themis’ son
Upon the puckered visage of a player,—
The buskin, which he rose upon and moved,
As some tall ship first conscious of the wind
Sweeps slowly past the piers,—the mouthpiece, where
The mere man’s voice, with all its breaths and breaks,
Went sheathed in brass, and clashed on even heights
Its phrased thunders,—those things are no more,
Which once were. And concluding, which is clear,
The growing drama has outgrown such toys
Of simulated stature, face, and speech;
It also, peradventure, may outgrow
The simulation of the painted scene,
Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume,
And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,
With all its grand orchestral silences
To keep the pauses of its rythmic sounds.
The following are two of the many passages in Mrs. Browning’s writings in which she proclaims that doctrine of a “correspondence” between the spiritual world and the natural world to which allusion was made in these pages last month, and speaks of the office of the Artist as Interpreter of material shows, and Revealer of the spiritual truths which are symbolised by the objects and phenomena of external nature:—
Truth, so far, in my book;—the truth which draws
Through all things upwards,—that a twofold world
Must go to a perfect cosmos. Natural things
And spiritual,—who separates those two
In art, in morals, or the social drift,
Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,
Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,
Is wrong, in short, at all points. We divide
This apple of life, and cut it through the pips,—
The perfect round which fitted Venus’ hand
Has perished as utterly as if we ate
Both halves. Without the spiritual, observe,
The natural’s impossible,—no form,
No motion: without sensuous, spiritual
Is inappreciable,—no beauty or power;
And in this twofold sphere the twofold man
(For still the artist is intensely a man)
Holds firmly by the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it,—fixes still
The type with mortal vision, to pierce through,
With eyes immortal to the antetype
Some call the ideal,—better called the real,
And certain to be called so presently,
When things shall have their names. Look long enough
On any peasant’s face here, coarse and lined,
You’ll catch Antinous somewhere in that clay,
As perfect featured as he yearns at Rome
From marble pale with beauty; then persist,
And, if your apprehension’s competent,
You’ll find some fairer angel at his back,
As much exceeding him as he the boor,
And pushing him with empyreal disdain
For ever out of sight. Ay, Carrington
Is glad of such a creed: an artist must,
Who paints a tree, a leaf, a common stone
With just his hand, and finds it suddenly
A-piece with and conterminous to his soul.
Why else do these things move him, leaf or stone?
The bird’s not moved that pecks at a spring-shoot;
Nor yet the horse, before a quarry a-graze;
But man, the two-fold creature, apprehends
The two-fold manner, in and outwardly,
And nothing in the world comes single to him,
A mere itself,—cup, column, or candlestick,
All patterns of what shall be in the Mount;
The whole temporal show related royally,
And built up to eterne significance
Through the open arms of God. “There’s nothing great
Nor small,” has said a poet of our day,
Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve [p. 53→]
And not be thrown out by the matin’s bell;
And truly, I reiterate, nothing’s small!
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;
No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim;
And, (glancing on my own thin, veined wrist,)
In such a little tremour of the blood
The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul
Doth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common fire bush a-fire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more from the first similitude.
Truth, so far, in my book! a truth which draws
From all things upward. I, Aurora, still
Have felt it hound me through the wastes of life
As Jove did Io; and, until that Hand
Shall overtake me wholly, and on my head
Lay down its large unfluctuating peace,
The feverish gad-fly pricks me up and down.
It must be. Art’s the witness of what Is
Behind this show. If this world’s show were all,
Then imitation would be all in Art;
There, Jove’s hand gripes us!—For we stand here, we,
If genuine artists, witnessing for God’s
Complete, consummate, undivided work;
—That every natural flower which grows on earth
Implies a flower upon the spiritual side,
Substantial, archetypal, all a-glow
With blossoming causes,—not so far away,
But we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared,
May catch at something of the bloom and breath,—
Too vaguely apprehended, though indeed
Still apprehended, consciously or not,
And still transferred to picture, music, verse,
For thrilling audient and beholding souls.
By signs and touches which are known to souls.
How known, they know not,—why, they cannot find,
So straight call out on genius, say, “A man
Produced this,” when much rather they should say,
“’Tis insight and he saw this.”
* * * * * *
In that descriptive poem called “The Hills,”
The prospects were too far and indistinct.
’T is true my critics said, “A fine view, that!”
The public scarcely cared to climb my book
For even the finest, and the public’s right;
A tree’s mere firewood, unless humanised,—
Which well the Greeks knew when they stirred its bark
With close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs,
And made the forest-rivers garrulous
With babble of gods. For us, we are called to mark
A still more intimate humanity
In this inferior nature, or ourselves
Must fall like dead leaves trodden underfoot
By veritable artists. Earth (shut up
By Adam, like a fakir in a box
Left too long buried) remained stiff and dry,
A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,
Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes,
And used his kingly chrism to straighten out
The leathery tongue turned back into the throat;
Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitates
In every limb, aspires in every breath,
Embraces infinite relations. Now
We want no half-gods, Panomphæan Joves,
Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads and the rest,
To take possession of a senseless world
To unnatural vampire uses. See the earth,
The body of our body, the green earth,
Indubitably human like this flesh
And these articulated veins through which
Our heart drives blood. There’s not a flower of spring
That dies ere June, but vaunts itself allied
By issue and symbol, by significance
And correspondence, to that spirit-world
Outside the limits of our space and time,
Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice
With human meanings,—else they miss the thought,
And henceforth step down lower, stand confessed
Instructed poorly for interpreters,
Thrown out by an easy cowslip in the text.
The same view as to the office of the Artist with other noble truths, is expressed also in the following:—
And then calm, equal, smooth, with weights of joy,
His voice rose, as some chief musician’s song
Amid the old Jewish temple’s Selah-pause,
And bade me mark how we two met at last
Upon this moon-bathed promontory of earth,
To give up much on each tide, then take all.
“Beloved,” it sang, “we must be here to work;
And men who work can only work for men,
And, not to work in vain, must comprehend
Humanity and so work humanly,
And raise men’s bodies still by raising souls,
As God did first.”
“But stand upon the earth,”
I said, “to raise them (this is human too,
There is nothing high which has not first been low,
My humbleness, said one, has made me great!)
As God did last.”
“And work all silently
And simply,” he returned, “as God does all;
Distort our nature never for our work,
Nor count our right hands stronger for being hoofs.
The man most man, with tenderest human hands,
Works best for men,—as God in Nazareth.”
He paused upon the word, and then resumed;
“Fewer programmes, we who have no prescience.
Fewer systems, we who are held and do not hold.
Less mapping out of masses to be saved,
By nations or by sexes. Fourier’s void,
And Comte absurd,—and Cabet, puerile.
Subsists no rules of life outside of life,
No perfect manners, without Christian souls:
The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver
Unless he had given the life, too, with the law.”
I echoed thoughtfully—“The man, most man,
Works best for men, and, if most man indeed,
He gets his manhood plainest from his soul:
While obviously this stringent soul itself
Obeys the old law of development,
The Spirit ever witnessing in ours,
And Love, the soul of soul, within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely. First, God’s love.”
“And next,” he smiled, “the love of wedded souls,
Which still presents that mystery’s counterpart.
Sweet shadow-rose, upon the water of life,
Of such a mystic substance, Sharon gave
A name to! human, vital, fructuous rose,
Whose calyx holds the multitude of leaves,
Loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbour-loves
And civic—all fair petals, all good scents,
All reddened, sweetened from one central Heart.”
“Alas,” I cried, “it was not long ago,
You swore this very social rose smelt ill.”
“Alas,” he answered, “is it a rose at all?
The filial’s thankless, the fraternal’s hard.
The rest is lost. I do but stand and think,
Across the waters of a troubled life
This Flower of Heaven so vainly overhangs,
What perfect counterpart would be in sight
If tanks were clearer. Let us clear the tubes,
And wait for rains. O poet, O my love,
Since I was too ambitious in my deed
And thought to distance all men in success,
(Till God came on me, marked the place and said,
“Ill-doer, henceforth keep within this line,
Attempting less than others,”—and I stand
And work among Christ’s little ones, content,)
Come thou, my compensation, my dear sight,
My morning-star, my morning,—rise and shine,
And touch my hills with radiance not their own.
Shine out for two, Aurora, and fulfil
My falling-short that must be! work for two,
As I, though thus restrained, for two, shall love!
Gaze on, with inscient vision toward the sun,
And, from his visceral heat, pluck out the roots
Of light beyond him. Art’s a service,—mark:
A silver key is given to thy clasp, [p. 54→]
And thou shalt stand unwearied, night and day,
And fix it in the hard, slow-turning wards,
To open, so, that intermediate door
Betwixt the different planes of sensuous form
And form insensuous, that inferior men
May learn to feel on still through these to those,
And bless thy ministration. The world waits
For help. Beloved, let us love so well,
Our work shall still be better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work,
And both commended, for the sake of each,
By all true workers and true lovers born.
Now press the clarion on thy woman’s lip
(Love’s holy kiss shall still keep consecrate)
And breathe thy fine keen breath along the brass,
And blow all class-walls level as Jericho’s
Past Jordan,—crying from the top of souls,
To souls, that, here assembled on earth’s flats,
They get them to some purer eminence
Than any hitherto beheld for clouds!
What height we know not,—but the way we know,
And how by mounting ever, we attain,
And so climb on. It is the hour for souls,
That bodies, leavened by the will and love,
Be lightened to redemption. The world’s old,
But the old world waits the time to be renewed,
Toward which, new hearts in individual growth
Must quicken, and increase to multitude
In new dynasties of the race of men;
Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously
New churches, new œconomies, new laws
Admitting freedom, new societies
Excluding falsehood: He shall make all new.
My Romney!—Lifting up my hand in his,
As wheeled by Seeing spirits toward the east,
He turned instinctively, where, faint and far,
Along the tingling desert of the sky,
Beyond the circle of the conscious hills,
Were laid in jasper-stone as clear as glass
The first foundations of that new, near Day
Which should be builded out of heaven to God.
He stood a moment with erected brows
In silence, as a creature might who gazed,—
Stood calm, and fed his blind, majestic eyes
Upon the thought of perfect noon: and when
I saw his soul saw,—“Jasper first,” I said,
“And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony;
The rest in order,—last, an amethyst.”
Though our space draws to a close, we find it hard to stay our hand. We will conclude with a passage the views expressed in which will scarcely meet with more than partial acceptance:—
The English have a scornful insular way
Of calling the French light. The levity
Is in the judgment only, which yet stands,
For say a foolish thing but oft enough
(And here’s the secret of a hundred creeds,
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,
By re-iteration chiefly,) the same thing
Shall pass at last for absolutely wise,
And not with fools exclusively. And so
We say the French are light, as if we said
The cat mews or the milch-cow gives us milk:
Say rather cats are milked and milch-cows mew;
For what is lightness but inconsequence,
Vague fluctuation ’twixt effect and cause
Compelled by neither? Is a bullet light,
That dashes from the gun-mouth, while the eye
Winks and the heart beats one, to flatten itself
To a wafer on the white speck on a wall
A hundred paces off? Even so direct,
So sternly undivertible of aim,
Is this French people.
All, idealists
Too absolute and earnest, with them all,
The idea of a knife cuts real flesh;
And still, devouring the safe interval
Which Nature placed between the thought and
With those too fiery and impatient souls,
They threaten conflagration to the world,
And rush with most unscrupulous logic on
Impossible practice. Set your orators
To blow upon them with loud windy mouths
Through watchword phrases, jest or sentiment,
Which drive our burly brutal English mobs
Like so much chaff, whichever way they blow,
This light French people will not thus be driven.
They turn indeed,—but then they turn upon
Some central pivot of their thought and choice,
And veer out by the force of holding fast.
That’s hard to understand, for Englishmen
Unused to abstract questions, and untrained
To trace the involutions, valve by valve,
In each orbed bulb-root of a general truth,
And mark what subtly fine integument
Divides opposed compartments. Freedom’s self
Comes concrete to us, to be understood,
Fixed in a feudal form incarnately
To suit our ways of thought and reverence,
The special form, with us, being still the thing.
With us, I say, though I’m of Italy
By mother’s birth and grave, by father’s grave
And memory; let it be;—a poet’s heart
Can swell to a pair of nationalities,
However ill-lodged in a woman’s breast.
And so I am strong to love this noble France,
This poet of the nations, who dreams on
And wails on (while the household goes to wreck)
For ever, after some ideal good,—
Some equal poise of sex, some unvowed love
Inviolate, some spontaneous brotherhood,
Some wealth that leaves none poor and finds none tired,
Some freedom of the many that respects
The wisdom of the few. Heroic dreams!
Sublime, to dream so; natural, to wake:
And sad, to use such lofty scaffoldings,
Erected for the building of a church,
To build instead a brothel or a prison—
May God save France!
Whether our own high estimate of the value of “Aurora Leigh” be just or not, these specimens at least prove that it is indeed, as a critic once called it, “a book of splendid passages.”
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), 6th ed., 4 vols., London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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