E561122E. Aurora Leigh.
The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 22 November 1856, p. 9.
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 23.
We have received an “early copy” of this poem, and as it can scarcely yet be in the hands of any of our readers, we hasten to lay before them some specimens which may enable them to form an idea of its character and quality. “Aurora Leigh” is written in blank verse, is 12,000 lines long, and is a kind of narrative “life drama,” purporting to be the autobiography of a poetess. In a dedication, Mrs. Browning speaks of it as being her “most mature work,” and asserts that there have entered into it her “highest convictions upon life and heart.” The following is a fair specimen of the eloquence with which she expresses these convictions:—
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 Poland 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 common-place to Lady Guenever,
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat
As Regent Street to our poets.
A little farther on it is added—
What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit
As sovereign 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.
The heroine of the poem was born in Florence, of an English father, but an Italian mother. The mother died when the daughter was four years old; the father died a few years afterwards, and Aurora was then brought to England and placed under the care of an aunt, of whom we are told—
She had lived, we’ll say,
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,
A quiet life, which was not life at all,
(But that she had not lived enough to know)
Between the vicar and the county squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyrean, to assure their souls
Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,
The apothecary looked on once a year,
To prove their soundness of humility.
The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts
Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,
Because we are of one flesh after all
And need one flannel, (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality)—and still
The book-club, guarded from your modern trick
Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,
Preserved her intellectual. She had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.
Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live
In thickets, and eat berries!
One can readily imagine how such an aunt would conduct the education of her niece, but the niece may still be permitted to tell the story of it.
So it was.
I broke the copious curls upon my head
In braids, because she liked smooth-ordered hair.
I left off saying my sweet Tuscan words
Which still at any stirring of the heart
Came up to float across the English phrase,
As lilies, (Bene, or che chée) because
She liked my father’s child to speak his tongue.
I learnt the collects and the catechism,
The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice;
The articles, the tracts against the Times,
(By no means Buonaventure’s ‘Prick of Love,’)
And various popular synopses of
Inhuman doctrines never taught by John,
Because she liked instructed piety.
I learnt my complement of classic French
(Kept pure of Balzac and Neologism)
And German also, since she liked a range
Of liberal education,—tongues, not books.
I learnt a little algebra, a little
Of the mathematics, brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the sciences, because
She misliked women who are frivolous.
I learnt the royal genealogies
Of Oviedo, the internal laws
Of the Burmese empire, by how many feet
Mount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh;
What navigable river joins itself
To Lara, and what census of the year five
Was taken at Klagenfurt, because she liked
A general insight into useful facts.
I learnt much music,—such as would have been
As quite impossible in Johnson’s day,
As still it might be wished—fine sleights of hand
And unimagined fingering, shuffling off
The hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notes
To a noisy Tophet; and I drew—costumes
From French engravings, nereids neatly draped,
With smirks of simmering godship, I washed in
From nature, landscapes, (rather say washed out.)
I danced the polka and Cellarius,
Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,
Because she liked accomplishments in girls.
I read a score of books on womanhood
To prove, if women do not think at all,
They may teach thinking, (to a maiden-aunt
Or else the author,)—books demonstrating
Their right of comprehending husbands’ talk
When not too deep, and even of answering
With pretty “May it please you?” or “So it is,”
Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,
Particular worth and general missionariness,
As long as they keep quiet by the fire
And never say “No” when the world says “Ay,”
(For that is fatal,)—their angelic reach
Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,
And fatten household sinners,—their, in brief,
Potential faculty in everything
Of abdicating power in it,— because
She liked a woman to be womanly:—
And English women, she thanked God and sighed,
(Some people always sigh in thanking God)
Were models to the universe. And last
I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like
To see me wear the night with empty hands,
A-doing nothing.
In spite, however, even of training such as this, the girl developed in time into a poetess. Passing over two hundred pages of her history, we find her famous, but so poor as to be living in a London garret, musing thus:
To sit alone,
And think, for comfort, how that very night,
Affianced lovers, leaning face to face
With sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath,
Are reading haply from some page of ours,
To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched,
When such a stanza, level to their mood,
Seems floating their own thought out—“So I feel
For thee,”—“And I for thee: this poet knows
What everlasting love is!”—How, that night,
A father, issuing from the misty roads
Upon the luminous round of lamp and hearth
And happy children, having caught up first
The youngest there until it shrunk and shrieked
To feel the cold chin prick its dimples through
With winter from the hills, may throw i’ the lap
Of the eldest, (who has learnt to drop her lids
To hide some sweetness newer than last year’s,)
Our book, and cry, “Ah you, you care for rhymes;
So here be rhymes to pore on under trees
When April comes to let you! I’ve been told
They are not idle, as so many are,
But set hearts beating pure as well as fast;
It's yours, the book; I’ll write your name in it,
That so you may not lose, however lost
In poet’s lore and charming reverie,
The thought of how your father thought of you
In riding from the town.”
To have our books
Appraised by love, associated with love,
While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think?
At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said,
Means simply love. It was a man said that.
And then, there’s love and love: the love of all
(To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox,)
Is but a small thing to the love of one.
You bid a hungry child be satisfied
With a heritage of many corn fields; nay,
He says he’s hungry—he would rather have
That little barley-cake you keep from him
While counting up his harvests. So with us;
We’re hungry.
She comes to the conclusion that in this world it is better to be hungry than to have “found the meal enough,” and proceeds:—
So, since
We needs must hunger,—better for man’s love
Than God’s truth! better for companions sweet
Than great convictions! Let us bear our weights,
Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls.
As well as a heroine, the poem has a hero—one Romney Leigh, cousin to Aurora. Romney is a man of great wealth, and is deeply impressed, with a sense of the wrongs and miseries endured by those beneath him in the social scale. He “teases his soul for some great cure,” devotes all his energies and all his wealth to the alleviation of the sufferings and the elevation of the condition of the humbler classes; takes up with the theories of Fourier, collects companies of outcasts, brings them to Leigh Hall, and tries to teach them, “to live together in phalansteries,” and in return, has his hall burnt down, and is himself gibed and shot at by those whom he had striven to benefit. Much experience of this sort at last teaches him what Aurora had striven to teach him at the outset of his career, and what is, in substance, the great moral of the book, namely, that “life develops from within,” and so that men’s lives can only be made more orderly by their souls being first purified. The poem is in effect a grand protest against the materialism of the present age. We have space, we regret to say, neither for more extracts nor for criticism, and can only add that in “Aurora Leigh” are discussed all sorts of questions, morals, social, and æsthetic, in the style of the extracts we have already given.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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