E570600B. Aurora Leigh.
The Irish Metropolitan Magazine, June 1857, pp. 340–355.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 340–347.
In looking at a work of genius we forget the artist, so Mrs. Browning must waive a lady’s privilege against searching criticism. With many faults of conception, method, and style, “Aurora Leigh” has nothing in common with those toys of female fancy in graceful verse, which we chivalrously praise from sympathy with their authors—
Not as mere work, but as mere woman’s work,
Expressing the comparative respect,
Which means the absolute scorn,
but which in themselves are not worth a serious thought. Though imperfect as a whole, and marred with flaws and blemishes, this is a real poem, that is, a creation of Truth in Beauty; and, as such, it deserves admiration and scrutiny, without regard to its author’s personality. We shall deal with it, therefore, from this impartial level, the rather that we believe it is the only point of view from which Mrs. Browning would wish to be criticised.
Independently of this particular poem, for two reasons Mrs. Browning merits our respect. In the first place, although she is far from faithful to it, she has a true conception of the office and object of poetry, and she strives conscientiously to express it in her works. She feels that poetry should be a just representation of things seen or felt, of external objects in certain relations, or of internal emotions, which must be harmoniously and coherently set forth, and must besides be idealised into those forms of beauty which it is for the poet alone to create, and which can only be ascertained in their effect upon his readers. She is aware that it does not consist in tesselating fine words into truthless forms; nor in tricking out worthless creations in deceitful splendour; nor in daubing over the objects to be expressed with rhetorical colours, until, as she phrases it, “the memory mixes with the vision, spoils, and makes it turbid;” nor yet in flinging together beauties, however perfect, which are not in accordance with nature. She, therefore, comprehends her art; and, although in this work she has committed many of the faults she condemns, it is gratifying in an age, when, with rare exceptions, poetry is running to frippery and word-painting, to mark how earnestly and truly she appreciates it. Indeed, she lifts it to an eminence, which, we confess, we cannot quite reach in thought, when she says that poets are—
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;
The only teachers who instruct mankind
From just a shadow on a charnel wall
To find man’s veritable stature out
Erect, sublime--. [p. 341→]
This appears to us to be confounding poetry with Platonic Idealism. In the next place, Mrs. Browning has a lively faith that this present age—a drama of intense significance and moving incident—with its rich development of human action and material splendour, in solemn contrast with the pathetic scenes which every day shock our self-complacent civilization, is really full of the elements of poetry. We thoroughly agree with her in this particular. There are some who think that the highest poetry is only possible at that period when language is still in concrete simplicity, and there yet remains enough faith in mythical creations to warrant the poet in lighting them up with his genius. They would thus make an imperfect tongue the only instrument of the noblest of arts, and would limit its sphere to the imaginative reproduction of legendary characters. We deny that the only proof of this theory—namely, that some of the greatest poems, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Prometheus, Macbeth, and Hamlet have actually appeared under these conditions—shows that works of equal genius may not be produced under different circumstances, or at all establishes the conclusion sought for. It indicates, indeed, that in the states of language and thought which we have now arrived at, it is not easy for any genius to create the highest poetry, and this we believe to be correct. We are not concerned to deny that language is aptest for high poetry, when it is yet free from the diction of science; that it is of use to the poet that his works should enjoy that peculiar reverence, which in certain phases of belief clings to mythic stories, and that his subjects are most ductile to imagination, when far removed from actual existences. But granting that it is difficult to shape a modern tongue for a great poem, or to mould it out of elements the proximity of which repels idealising forces, let us not suppose that the task is impossible; that real genius cannot always find words for its purpose, or cannot have full scope in the glory and majesty of present nature, or in the mysteries of humanity, which have their being amongst us. We, therefore, sympathise with Mrs. Browning when she exclaims—
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 it (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 succeeds 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 Persian Xerxes schemed, [p. 342→]
To some colossal statue of a man:
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little of any human form
Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.
They’d have, in fact, to travel ten 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.
Like several modern poems, “Aurora Leigh” contains a philosophic theory. This, in one sense, however, is not left bare in versified abstractions; it can only be caught at through the outward form of a real poem, which, in itself, will please the least initiated; but it is worth extracting, as it marks out the central thoughts around which the structure grows. It may, we think, be thus analysed.—The seer of truth finds in all things material forms and spiritual significances. Every object in nature suggests ideal beauty. So man is sphered in a fleshly frame, but symbolises an image of perfection. The artist is then only worthy of the name when his work reflects this two-fold being. The educator fails in his task if he does not strive to fashion man upon this type, which is that of his true nature. This cannot be done by satisfying material wants only, which lowers the proper standard of life, and tends simply to brutalise humanity. Nor can it be done by merely cultivating the intellect, which can, indeed, perceive the ideal of existence, but cannot, by itself, express it in conduct. But it may be accomplished by training our complex nature to fulfil its proper functions; that is, by giving the body its due, teaching the mind to search for truth, and setting the affections to charity, which is love.
We are not concerned with the truth of this system, as our subject is its poetic development. It is, we think, nearly contained in the following lines, perhaps the most abstract in the poem:—
A two-fold 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 utterly as if we ate [p. 343→]
Both halves. Without the spiritual, observe,
The natural’s impossible;—no form,
No motion! without sensuous, spiritual
Is unappreciable;—no beauty or power!
And in this two-fold sphere the two-fold man
(And 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 antitype,
Some call the ideal—better called the real,
And certain to be called so presently,
When things shall have their names.
.......
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, veinéd 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 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 upwards. I, Aurora, still
Have found 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 gadfly 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.
.......
A truth
Which, fully recognised, would change the world,
And shift its morals. If a man could feel,
Not one day, in the artist’s ecstacy,
But every day, feast, fast, or working day,
The spiritual significance burn through
The hieroglyphic of material shows,
Henceforward he would paint the globe with wings,
And reverence fish and fowl, the bull, the tree,
And even his very body as a man.
.......
Art, itself,
We’ve called the higher life, still must feel the soul
Live past it. For more’s felt than is perceived,
And more’s perceived than can be interpreted,
And Love strikes higher with his lambent flame
Than Art can pile the faggots. [p. 344→]
Is it so?
When Jove’s hand meets us with composing touch,
And when at last we are hushed and satisfied,—
Then, Io does not call it truth, but love?
.......
You only thought to rescue men
By half means, half way, seeing half their wants,
While thinking nothing of your personal gain.
But I, who saw the human nature broad,
At both sides, comprehending, too, the souls,
And all the high necessities of Art,
Betrayed the thing I saw, and wronged my own life
For which I pleaded. Passioned to exalt
The artist’s instinct in me at the cost
Of putting down the woman’s,—I forgot
No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman. Flower from root,
And spiritual from natural, grade by grade,
In all our life. A handful of the earth
To make God’s image! the despised, poor earth,
The healthy odorous earth. I missed with it
The divine Breath that blows the nostrils out
To ineffable inflatus; ay, the breath
Which love is. Art is much, but love is more!
O Art, my Art, thou’rt much, but Love is more.
Art symbolises heaven, but Love is God,
And makes heaven.
These conceptions are worked out in the characters and lives of Aurora and Romney Leigh, the heroine and hero of the poem. The one, a poetess, thinks that because genius can apprehend its beauty, a life of art can fulfil the ideal of humanity; and, accordingly, spends a barren intellectual existence, until, animated by a noble and unselfish love, she rises into a higher being. The other, a philanthropist, but narrowing his charities to material bounties, and placing social welfare in physical comfort, strives, with these views, to educate masses of pauperism, and turns them out in specimens of well-fed brutality. But these leading personages are grouped with other characters, in whose collective action the poem is sustained; and thus its philosophy is veiled in a dramatic form. Looking at this outward structure only, we find much to censure and to admire. The action of the piece is interrupted by lengthy reflections, and is greatly obscured by subjective elements; the actors, in our judgment, if we except Lady Waldemar, are not well drawn, are sometimes placed in unnatural positions, often are swayed by unnatural motives, and tend to deviate into talking abstractions. There is vivid force in every page, but a want of easy mastery of the subjects expressed; and the style, though overflowing with energy and power, is sometimes crude, sometimes poor, and frequently runs into metaphorical harshness. And yet, with all these faults, the poem is full of vitality throughout; and has scenes of such real power, passages of such extraordinary beauty, and descriptions of such vividness and truth, that, in some respects, we think the author scarcely inferior to any living poet. With all its shortcomings, it is a noble work.
The poem is divided into nine books. The first opens to us the [p. 345→] poetic youth of “Aurora Leigh.” The child of an English father and a Tuscan mother; at thirteen she becomes an orphan, and finds herself in England in wardship of one of those female stoics, whose life of cold decencies is a check on genius, and a protest against feeling. Under this loveless care the child grows to womanhood, instinctively turning from shallow lessons to feed her imagination upon nature. She delights to steal out to—
The beauteous country round,
The skies, the clouds, the fields,
The happy violets hiding from the roads
The primroses run down to, carrying gold,—
The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out
Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths
’Twixt dripping ash-boughs—hedgerows all alive
With birds and gnats and large white butterflies
Which look as if the May-flower had caught life
And palpitated forth upon the wind,—
Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,
Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills,
And cattle grazing in the watered vales,
And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,
And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,
Confused with smell of orchards.
Or, from her chamber to gaze at—
The folded hills
Striped up and down with hedges, (burly oaks
Projecting from the lines to show themselves)
Through which my cousin Romney’s chimneys smoked
As still as when a silent mouth in frost
Breathes—showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall;
While, far above, a jut of table-land,
A promontory without water, stretched—
You could not catch it if the days were thick,
Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwise
The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve
And use it for an anvil till he had filled
The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts,
And proved he need not rest--
At length the Psyché of her youth finds its Eros poetry, and she begins to give her thoughts to verse—
Singing at a work apart
Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm
As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,
In vortices of glory and blue air.
She forms a noble conception of Art, and in the enthusiasm of youth resolves to dedicate her life to it. Beside her dwelling is that of her cousin, Romney Leigh. Duty and feeling alike urge him to love her; for her father’s Italian match had caused her to be disinherited, and had given him the estate that was her birthright. He had received it with a paternal injunction to marry her; and, almost unconsciously she had [p. 346→] won his affections. But Romney Leigh, too, had a passion which did not indeed absorb that of his love, but prompted him to make love minister to it. He had long pondered over the sad phenomena of social want and distress.
The world half blind
With intellectual light, half brutalized
With civilization, having caught the plague
In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west
Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain,
And sin too.
He had mused over that turbid gulf of life in which the rich and poor seem to hurtle in contending currents.
Who agonise together, rich and poor,
Under and over in the social spasm,
And crisis of the ages—
Until—
The sun of youth
Had shone too straight upon his brain,
And fevered him with dreams of doing good
To good-for-nothing people.
His philanthropy, however, confines itself to material ends—to building model lodging-houses, establishing poor-clubs, institutes and so forth. He resolves that his wife, whoever she may be, shall help him in this work, and, filled with this idea, he addresses Aurora. He had chosen an unlucky occasion, when her mind was overflowing with poetic sympathies. Although not indisposed to him, she misses the note of real love in his appeal to her to aid him in his benevolence, and feels his coarse and gloomy views of human nature shock her fine artistic taste. She rejects him after a scene, which, though carefully finished, is harsh and unnatural in conception.
What you love
Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause—
You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir;
A wife to help your ends—in her no end.
Shortly afterwards the death of Aurora’s guardian leaves her to work out for herself the life of Art. She refuses a fortune, which Romney, with delicate generosity, seeks to secure to her, and departs for London. But it is evident from the closing passage of the second book, that she is not quite heart-proof to his influence.
He smiled as men smile when they will not speak,
Because of something bitter in the thought;
And still I feel his melancholy eyes
Look judgment on me. It is seven years since:
I know not if ’twas pity or ’twas scorn
Has made them so far-reaching: judge it ye
Who have had to do with pity more than love,
And scorn than hatred. I am used, since then,
To other ways from equal men. But so, [p. 347→]
Even so, we let go hands, my cousin and I,
And, in between us, rushed the torrent world
To blanch our faces like divided rocks,
And bar for ever mutual sight and touch
Except through swirl of spray and all that roar.
The third book gives us the artist-life of the heroine. She devotes her youth to poetry, shut up alone in London, and slowly rising into intellectual fame. This picture is vivid and true:—
Happy, and unafraid of solitude,
I worked the short days out,—and watched the sun
On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons,
Like some Druidic idol’s fiery brass,
With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,
In which the blood of wretches pent inside
Seemed oozing forth, to incarnadine the air,—
Push out through fog with his dilated disk,
And startle the slant roofs and chimney-pots
With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog,
Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void,
Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge
Had wiped out London,—or as noon and night
Had clapped together and utterly struck out
The intermediate time, undoing themselves
In the act.
So three years pass away. Meantime Romney Leigh, not indeed forgetful of his first love, but over sensitive at Aurora’s refusal of him, gives his whole soul to his philanthropic works, and never sees the lonely poetess. He seeks, after his fashion, to solve the social difficulty that had awed him. He strives everywhere to ameliorate want. He visits and endows hospitals, and all kinds of charitable institutions. He establishes on his estate refuges for pauperism, and organizes misery into a gross, sensual socialism. In Parliament he takes up the “condition of England” question, and becomes famous as a “practical” philanthropist. The lives of the hero and heroine are thus running apart, when to Aurora’s solitary cell there comes a certain Lady Waldemar:—
She had the low voice of your English dames,
Unused, it seems, to need rise half a note
To catch attention,—and their quiet mood,
As if they lived too high above the earth
For that to put them out in anything:
So gentle, because verily so proud;
So wary and afeard of hurting you,
By no means that you are not really vile,
But that they would not touch you with their foot
To push you to your place: so self-possessed
Yet gracious and conciliating, it takes
An effort in their presence to speak truth:
You know the sort of woman,—brilliant stuff,
And out of nature. [p. 348→]
Lady Waldemar, whose character we think very well drawn, brings strange tidings to Aurora Leigh. She is one of the hard and varnished shams of “High Life.” She has a fair exterior, a subtle and plotting mind, a bold will, and a callous heart, that yet is capable of a selfish passion. She is very much “in love” with Romney Leigh. She haunts him in society, mingles in his pursuits, and does all she can to win him. At last she hears that in one of his philanthropic tours he has met with a girl of the lowest origin, and is resolved to marry her, partly from affection, chiefly to give a Socialist lesson to humanity. She is determined to mar his project. She goes to Romney, volunteers to be kind to his future wife, and to associate Aurora, whom she falsely pretends to know, in the exemplary work. She had supposed that Aurora, in the pride of birth, would have reasoned Romney out of such a union; and, for herself, she was resolved to undo it if possible. Romney accepts the deceitful proffer, and hence the visit to Aurora Leigh. She tells her tale with much art—her pride chafing at the confession of her passion, her false ideas of high natures assuring her that Aurora would help her in her scheme. She is dismissed with this answer:—
I love love! truth’s no cleaner thing than love.
I comprehend a love so fiery hot
It burns its natural veil of august shame,
And stands sublimely in the nude, as chaste
As Medicean Venus. But I know,
A love that burns through veils, will burn through masks,
And shrivel up treachery. What, love and lie!
Nay—go to the opera! Your love’s curable.
Romney had resolved to wed his bride in her actual station, and thus to mark his scorn for social distinctions. Aurora, who had heard of her whereabouts from Lady Waldemar, hurries off to discover the daughter of the People. She finds her in a miserable abode, with a St. Giles’s populace for her fellow-lodgers. It is so unnatural that any man of common decency should leave his future wife in the midst of such influences, that Mrs. Browning’s genius of description is here merely aggravation. Marian Erle is the name of the girl, and she tells the story of her life to Aurora Leigh. She is one of those impossible ideals of purity, simplicity, and noble-mindedness, true to virtue in the midst of moral contagion, which poets of the first rank have never delineated, but which are the special favourites of those of the second. Her narrative, however, is rich in poetry. She is the offspring of vagrants in whom misery and sin have almost effaced humanity; but from earliest youth she communes with nature and ripens to moral beauty. By fits and starts, too, she picks up some knowledge from which her innate instinct purges all evil. At length, as she reaches youth, her mother tries to sell her to pollution. She flies away; breaks a bloodvessel in her flight; and is carried in a swoon to an hospital. Here she meets with Romney Leigh. On her recovery he apprentices her to a sempstress; but she leaves her work to tend a sick companion. He finds her engaged in this pious duty, and watches her day after day until—
She felt within his utterance, and his eyes,
A closer, tenderer presence of the soul,
Until at last he said, ‘We shall not part.’ [p. 349→]
Here at last appears his helpmate. He thus addresses her:—
“Dear Marian, of one clay God made us all,
And though men 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 pats all even. Need we wait for this,
You, Marian, and I, Romney?
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?[”]
Marian Erle accepts the proffered hand with meek devotion. The marriage, in which benevolence and a worshipping gratitude unconsciously feign a real passion, is to be a protest against class differences. The bride is to leave her sordid abode, in company with a horde of paupers, and the bridegroom, with friends of his own degree, is to meet her at church. It is no wonder that Aurora is astonished at such arrangements, and hints a doubt whether love could be in them. At this moment Romney enters. The scene which follows is well executed. It is plain that, as soon as he sees Aurora again, Romney feels his old attachment. She too, without knowing why, is troubled in spirit. As she takes leave, Romney offers to escort her home, sensible how unfit it is for her to be alone, even for an instant, where his intended wife spends her life by his wishes. The passage seems to us well conceived.
“Dear Romney, you’re the poet,” I replied,
But felt my smile too mournful for my word,
And turned and went. Ay, masks I thought,—beware
Of tragic masks, we tie before the glass,
Uplifted on the cothurn half a yard
Above the natural stature! we would play
Heroic parts to ourselves,—and end perhaps
As impotently as Athenian wives,
Who shrieked in fits at the Eumenides.
His foot pursued me down the stair. “At least
You’ll suffer me to walk with you beyond
These hideous streets, these graves where men alive,
Packed close with earth-worms, burr unconsciously
About the plague that slew them; let me go.
The very women pelt their souls in mud
At any woman who walks here alone.
How came you here alone?—You are ignorant.”
We had a strange and melancholy walk:
The night came drizzling downward in dull rain;
And, as we walked, the colour of the time, [p. 350→]
The act, the presence, my hand upon his arm,
His voice in my ear, and mine to my own sense,
Appeared unnatural.
.......
A month passes, and the day of the marriage arrives. The flower of St. James’s and the scum of St. Giles’s—the living contrasts of wealth and want—meet in church to witness the ceremony. Mrs. Browning crowds together worthless fops, Aspasias of rank, fetid drabs, and a sans culotte mob, and, in a pause of preparation, makes them talk after their kind. The scene is daguerreotyped with revolting accuracy, and is so unnatural that we hurry away from it. Romney Leigh is there, but Marian does not appear. At last he receives a letter from her, telling him to expect her no more. A few hints from Lady Waldemar, a word or two from Aurora, dropped in the midst of much kindness, had satisfied her that love could not bridge over the social chasm between them. She bids him farewell, and charges him not to vex himself on her account. Romney searches for her in vain. Aurora suspects Lady Waldemar’s hand in her disappearance, but fails to convince him that she is a traitress. At the close of the fourth book the cousins part again, each to resume the duties of life.
The fifth book, in our judgment, is the feeblest in the poem, and is spun out to an extravagant length. Marian Erle’s fate remains a mystery. The hero and heroine work on in their several ways, and nothing remarkable occurs to either, until Aurora hears that Romney is to marry Lady Waldemar, who had been helping him earnestly in his philanthropy. She has never got rid of her suspicions, but wisely resolves not to interfere, and departs on a foreign tour. The love of Art begins to lose for her its former charms, and she turns her thoughts to Florence, where her childhood grew. Romney has disappointed her, but as she leaves her lonely poetic cell, a yearning for him is touchingly revealed. This is the feeling, though expressed elsewhere—
He bears down on me through the slanting years,
The stronger for the distance. If he had loved,
Ay, loved me with that retributive face,
I might have been a common woman now,
And happier, less known, and less left alone,
Perhaps a better woman after all,
With chubby children hanging on my neck,
To keep me low, and wise. Ah me! the vines
That bear such fruit, are proud to stoop to it.
The palm stands upright in a realm of sand.
The sixth book brings Aurora to Paris, which Mrs. Browning makes the occasion of a very just and thoughtful panegyric on the French people. She is wandering through the brilliant streets and historical monuments of the City of Civilisation, when suddenly a figure crosses her path, and is lost in the crowd—
It was, as if a meditative man
Were dreaming out a summer afternoon,
And watching gnats a-prick upon a pond, [p. 351→]
When something floats up suddenly, out there,
Turns over … a dead face, known once alive—
So old, so new! It would be dreadful now
To lose the sight and keep the doubt of this.
She is convinced that she has seen the long-lost Marian, and she uses every exertion to discover her. It is not the less a duty, because the figure seemed to carry an infant, from which she infers the worst. At length—
A simple chance
Did all. I could not sleep last night, and, tired
Of turning on my pillow and harder thoughts,
Went out at early morning, when the air
Is delicate with some last starry touch,
To wander through the Market-place of Flowers
(The prettiest haunt in Paris), and make sure
At worst, that there were roses in the world.
So wandering, musing, with the artist’s eye
That keeps the shade-side of this thing it loves,
Half absent, whole observing, while the crowd
Of young, vivacious, and black-braided heads
Dipped, quick as finches in a blossomed tree,
Among the nosegays, cheapening this and that
In such a cheerful twitter of rapid speech,—
My heart leaped in me startled by a voice--
which proves to be that of Marian Erle. After much opposition, Aurora insists upon accompanying her to her home. The first object she beholds there is Marian’s child, thus exquisitely portrayed:—
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;
For, since he had been covered over much
To keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeks
Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose
The shepherd’s heart-blood ebbed away into,
The faster for his love. And love was here
As instant! in the pretty baby mouth,
Shut close—as if for dreaming that it sucked;
The little naked feet drawn up the way
Of nestled birdlings: everything so soft
And tender,—to the little hold-fast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of ’t.
At first Aurora quietly reproves, thinking that she sees the fruit of voluntary sin. But Marian interrupts her with stern pathos, and tells her melancholy tale, which we think by far the finest part of the poem, and instinct with great genius. The following lines, which begin it, sound to us very Shaksperian:—
For the rest,
I am not on a level with your love, [p. 352→]
Nor ever was, you know,—but now am worse,
Because that world of yours has dealt with me
As when the hard sea bites and chews a stone,
And changes the first form of it. I’ve marked
A shore of pebbles bitten to one shape
From all the various life of madrepores;
And so that little stone called Marian Erle,
Picked up and dropped by you and another friend,
Was ground and tortured by the incessant sea,
And bruised from what she was,—changed! Death’s a change,
And she, I said, was murdered; Marian’s dead.
What can you do with people when they are dead?
But, if you are pious, sing a hymn and go,
Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go,
But go, by all means.
Lady Waldemar, reckless of all but her selfish passion, had won her confidence; and, with cruel art, had persuaded her that Romney could never truly love her. Gradually she was led to consent to make a generous self-sacrifice, and to depart for Australia, with a servant of her adviser. This woman was a cateress for infamy. Her victim is drugged and violated. She lifts up her eyes in frenzy. The entire description is appalling, but not revolting, and shows very great art; but we have only space for the closing lines. There is, in our judgment, something peculiarly fine in the way in which external objects are made to wear the hues of her distempered fancy:—
They feared my eyes, and loosed me as boys might
A mad dog which they had tortured. Up and down
I went by road and village, over tracts
Of open foreign country, large and strange,
Crossed everywhere by long, thin, poplar lines
Like fingers of some ghastly skeleton Hand
Through sunlight and through moonlight evermore
Pushed out from hell itself to pluck me back,
And resolute to get me, slow and sure;
While every roadside Christ upon His cross
Hung reddening through His gory wounds at me,
And shook his nails in anger, and came down
To follow a mile after, wading up
The low vines and green wheat, crying, “Take the girl,
She’s none of mine from henceforth.” Then, I knew,
The charitable peasants gave me bread
And leave to sleep in straw: and twice they tied,
At parting, Mary’s image round my neck—
How heavy it seemed! as heavy as a stone;
A woman had been strangled with less weight;
I threw it in a ditch to keep it clean,
And ease my breath a little, when none looked;
I did not need such safeguards:—brutal men
Stopped short, Miss Leigh, in insult, when they had seen
My face,—I must have had an awful look.
And so I lived: the weeks passed on—I lived.
’Twas living my old tramp-life o’er again,
But this time, in a dream, and hunted round
By some prodigious Dream-fear at my back [p. 353→]
Which ended, yet: my brain cleared presently,
And there I sate, one evening, by the road,
I, Marian Erle, myself, alone, undone,
Facing a sunset low upon the flats,
As if it were the finish of all time,—
The great red stone upon my sepulchre,
Which angels were too weak to roll away.
At length the agony of her spirit subsides, and as she phrases it, “A pure amen is set to hideous deeds.” She gives birth to the child, in whom what remains of her feelings is centered. Aurora Leigh is satisfied of her innocence, and entreats her to accompany her on her journey. But how is she to act with regard to Romney? She is convinced that Lady Waldemar had abetted Marian’s ruin. Is she to acquaint him with the villainy of one perhaps already his wife? After some self-commune, in which again affection for her cousin betrays itself, she confides the tale to a friend, that—
If that convicted She
Be not his wife yet, to denounce the facts
To himself; but otherwise to let them pass
On tip-toe, like escaping murderers--
And she warns Lady Waldemar, in a separate letter, that her secret is known; but will be kept, if she proves true as Romney’s wife. This done, Aurora and Marian set off. The narrative of their journey is beautiful, but we can only quote the following description of the shores of Italy, as they break upon the view from the Mediterranean:—
I felt the wind soft from the land of souls;
The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,
One straining past another along the shore,
The way of grand dull Odyssean ghosts
Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas
And stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peak
They stood: I watched beyond that Tyrian belt
Of intense sea betwixt them and the ship,
Down all their sides the misty olive-woods
Dissolving in the weak congenial moon,
And still disclosing some brown convent-tower
That seems as if it grew from some brown rock,—
Or many a little lighted village dropt,
Like a fallen star, upon so high a point,
You wonder what can keep it in its place
From sliding headlong with the waterfalls
Which drop and powder all the myrtle-groves
With spray of silver. Thus my Italy
Was stealing on us.
The last two books of the poem are well conceived, but want condensation. Aurora settles at Florence, she has won fame and mastered Art, but she feels that something is lacking to life. Is this intellectual existence the sum of perfect being? Does this mental glory satisfy the soul? Slowly the conviction grows on her, that sympathy and affection are necessary to happiness. Her spirit is humbled, and her [p. 354→] heart turns wistfully towards her cousin. Just then she misinterprets the letter of a friend, and is assured that Romney had married Lady Waldemar. She looks back and perceives that she had always loved him, and that intellectual pride alone had steeled her against him. This change in her nature is portrayed with great art, and is the finest ethical passage in the poem. While she is in this state Romney appears before her. His philanthropic schemes had failed; the paupers he had stall-fed in moral darkness had burned down his house; and he was thoroughly cured of his false philosophy. He had lost his sight in the conflagration; but, like Œdipus, he now beheld clearly his mistakes; and with sad and chastened spirit, having heard of her safety, he was coming to fulfil his promise to Marian Erle, although still, in truth, attached to Aurora. As for Lady Waldemar, she had at last perceived that she never could win him; and when charged with the horrid guilt imputed to her, had simply disproved it, and, scorning herself and hating Aurora Leigh, had abandoned a hopeless pursuit. Of course Aurora knows none of these things; and there is some skill in the method by which her ignorance ministers to the action of the poem. Thinking that he is the husband of Lady Waldemar, she at first resents the tone of earnest pathos in which he speaks; but through her scorn her own feelings appear. When at last disabused of this mistake she furthers Romney’s purpose of marrying Marian; but her counsels have a note of dignified self-sacrifice. Romney speaks to Marian, but is thus touchingly rejected—
Did I love,
Or did I worship? judge, Aurora Leigh!
But, if indeed I loved, ’twas long ago—
So long! before the sun and moon were made,
Before the hells were open,—ah, before
I heard my child cry in the desert night,
And knew he had no father. It may be,
I’m not as strong as other women are,
Who, torn and crushed, are not undone from love.
It may be, I am colder than the dead,
Who, being dead, love always. But for me
Once killed, this ghost of Marian loves no more—
No more .. except the child .. no more at all.
I told your cousin, sir, that I was dead;
And now she thinks I’ll get up from my grave,
And wear my chin-cloth for a wedding-veil,
And glide along the churchyard like a bride,
While all the dead keep whispering through the withes,
“You would be better in your place with us—
You pitiful corruption!” At that thought,
The damps break out on me like leprosy,
Although I’m clean. Ay, clean as Marian Erle:
As Marian Leigh, I know, I were not clean:
I have not so much life that I should love,
.. Except the child--
Romney is about sadly to depart, when Aurora discovers his blindness and avows her love for him. Suddenly a new existence opens for them. The lives which benevolence and genius had failed to make happy, are [p. 355→] perfected in a love, which evidences itself here in marriage blessings, but typifies an ideal union of humanity, to take place when “all men shall love one another.” The poem closes with a dialogue between Aurora and Romney, which, though rather cold and platonic, accords with the very intellectual cast of the heroine.
Our readers will have anticipated our judgment upon this poem as an entire work of art. We think that Mrs. Browning has chosen a fitting subject for the highest poetry, in portraying the struggles of noble natures to fulfil their true being in spite of self-created adverse influences. But the peculiar and mystical theory, which underlies the poem, has greatly interfered with this conception, and gives a look of stiffness to the whole work. Its dramatic character does not harmonise with the author’s genius. The action is constantly interrupted, and a mist of Mrs. Browning’s own reflections often obscures the actors from our view. In short, as a drama, there is a total want of that “disinterested objectivity” which Mr. Arnold very properly insists upon as a primary requisite in art. The characters, besides, are not well executed. We have spoken of Marian Erle and Lady Waldemar. The Electra-like grandeur of Aurora Leigh may perhaps excuse her want of true feminine feeling. But Romney Leigh is a complete failure. No genuine man would seek a wife to help a theory, or think of love as an aid to benevolence. No genuine man would leave his betrothed where he left Marian Erle, or consent to figure in the monstrous marriage scene we have referred to. Nor do we think that a genuine man would have loved so deeply and abandoned love so easily. In short, Mrs. Browning’s poem is here a false creation. We might also protest largely against the many crudities and imperfections of its style and metre. We must not, however, forget its beauties. Its intense vitality gives interest even to its characters, however faulty, and harmonises a structure often incongruous. Its noble descriptions, its reflections often touching the deepest feelings, its exquisite pathos, and its powerful style, must mark it as a real poem. Mrs. Browning seems to have filled her mind with Æschylus and Shakspeare. There is much of Æschylean exaggeration in her constant practice of flinging out descriptions of inanimate nature, in striking images of living things, instead of reflecting it simply as it is; and several of her soliloquies and thoughtful passages are after the manner of the greatest of poets. Might we venture to suggest to her the careful study of Sophocles? In him she would see the value of the finish of true conceptions, of correct method in evolving a poem, and of a chaste and simple style.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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