E561129D. Aurora Leigh.
The Bolton Chronicle, 29 November 1856, p. 6.
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 23.
Mrs. Browning’s new poem, Aurora Leigh, is writen 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, its authoress speaks of it as being her “most mature work,” and asserts that there have entered into it her “highest convictions upon life and art.” Of the exceeding eloquence with which it expresses these convictions, and at the same time of the tone of thought which pervades the poem, the following is by no means a too favourable example:—
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 Gunever;
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat
As Regent–street to poets.
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 do make a play.
And why not fifteen? why not ten? or seven?
What matter for the number of the leaves
Provided 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.
We propose to quote very liberally from this poem, because no description could convey a sufficient idea of its great wealth of thought and beauty, while there must be many of out readers into whose hands the poem itself cannot at present come. It represents its heroine as having been born at Naples, of an English father, but an Italian mother. The mother died when he 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. In what manner this aunt directed the education of her niece, the reader will gather from the following:—
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 ch’è), because
She liked my father’s child to speak his tongue.
I learnt the collects and the catechisms,
The creeds, from Athanasius, back to Nice,
The Articles, the tracts against the times,
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 Sara, 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.
In spite even of such training as that here indicated, Aurora developed, in time, into a poetess, and, if we pass over the next 200 pages of her history, we shall find her grown famous,—but, nevertheless, so poor as to be living in a garret at Kensington, and 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 a 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.
Apropos of certain criticisms upon some of her published poems, she has said, a little earlier,—
The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods—
I’ll not believe it. I could never dream,
As Payne Knight did,
That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high.
They were but men! his Helen’s hair turned grey
Like any plain Miss Smith’s, who wears a front;
And Hector’s infant blubbered at a plume,
As yours last Friday at a Turkey cock.
All men are possible heroes: every age,
Heroic in proportions, double-faced,
Looks backward and before, expects a morn
And claims an apos.
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 held too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it. We’ll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Persian heroes schemed,
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 torse—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.
In the course of the same reverie, upon a grand doctrine which the reader will do well not to mistake for pantheism—wherefrom, in reality, no doctrine could be further removed—she touches thus finely—
In that descriptive poem called “The Hills,”
The prospects were too far and indistinct.
’Tis true my critics said “A fine view, that!”
The public scarcely cared to climb the 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 the 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 under foot
By veritabler 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 chrisms 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 time and space,
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.
To teach in one or other of its forms, the doctrine which is involved in the above extract, and is more fully developed in other parts of the poem, is the chief subject for which “Aurora Leigh” has been written. In another place it is said:—
Truth so far in my book; the truth which draws
Through all things upwards: that a two–fold world
Goes 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
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 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 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, 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
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.
From this doctrine follows, as a necessary result, a very noble idea of the office of Art,—the nature of which idea may be gathered from the next extract.—
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 not a natural flower can grow on earth,
Without a flower upon the spiritual side,
Substantial, archetypal, all a-glow
With blossoming causes,—not so far away,
That we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared,
May not 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.”
Thus is Art
Self magnified in magnifying a truth
Which, fully recognised, would change the world
And shift its morals.
Romney Leigh, the hero of the poem, failed in the great enterprises of his earlier years, because he did not recognised this truth. Romney is Aurora’s cousin, is a man of great wealth, and is deeply impressed with a sense of the sufferings endured by those beneath him in the social scale,—is deeply troubled by that social problem which is daily pressing itself more and more upon the attention of all thinking men, and must eventually throw all other problems into the shade. “Teasing his sould for some grand cure” for the miseries of the many, he takes up with the theories of Fourier, and attempsts to reduce them to practice. Gathering outcasts from far and near, he brings them to Leigh hall, and endeavours to teach them “to live together in phalansteries,"—with what result, he thus himself relates.—
My vain phalanstery dissolved itself;
My men and women of disordered lives,
I brought in orderly to dine and sleep,
Broke up those waxen masks I made them wear,
With fierce contortions of the natural face;
And cursed me for my tyrannous constraint
In forcing crooked creatures to live straight;
And set the country hounds upon my back
To bite and tear me for my wicked deed.
Do you mind
Your ancient neighbours? The great book-club teams,
With “sketches,” “summaries,” and “last tracts” but twelve,
On Socialistic troublers of close bonds
Betwixt the generous rich and grateful poor.
The vicar preached from “Revelations” (till
The doctor woke) and found me with “the frogs”
On three successive Sundays; ay, and stopped
To weep a little (for he’s getting old)
That such perdition should o’ertake a man
Of such fair acres,—in the parish, too!
I had my windows broken once or twice
By liberal peasants, naturally incensed
At such a vexer of Arcadian peace
Who would not let men call their wives their own
To kick like Britons,—and made obstacles
When things went smoothly as a baby drugged
Toward freedom and starvation.
I was shot at, once,
By an active poacher who had hit a hare
From the other barrel, tired of springing game
So long upon my acres, undisturbed,
And restless for his country’s vortue, (yet
He missed me),—ay, and pelted very oft
In riding through the village. “There he goes,
Who’d drive away our Christian gentlefolks
To catch us undefended in the trap
He baits with poisonous cheese, and lock us up
In that pernicious prison of Leigh Hall,
With all his murderers! Give another name
And say Leigh Hell, and burn it up with fire.”
And so they did, at last.
Through much experience of this sort he at last learns, what Aurora had told him years before, and what is, in substance, the grand moral of the book,—namely, that “it is impossible to get at men excepting through their souls,”—that men's lives can only be rendered more orderly by their souls being first purified,—and therefore that society is to be regenerated, not by systems which occupy themselves only with the natural side of things, and have no higher end than material ease, but by the spread of a pure, spiritual, and so practical, Christianity. The poem is, in effect, a grand protest against the materialism of the present age. Says Romney,—
Verily I was wrong;
And verily, many thinkers of this age,
Ay, many Christian teachers, half in heaven,
Are wrong in just my sense, who understood
Our natural world too insularly, as if
No spiritual counterpart completed it,
Consummating its meaning, rounding all
To justice and perfection, line by line,
Form by form, nothing single nor alone,—
The great below clenched by the great above;
Shade here authenticating substance there;
The body proving spirit, as the effect
The cause: we meantime being too grossly apt
To hold the natural, as dogs a bone,
(Though reason and nature beat us in the face,)
So obstinately that we break our teeth,
Or ever we let go. For everywhere
We are too materialistic,—eating clay ,
(Like men of the west) instead of Adam’s corn
And Noah’s wine; clay by handfuls, clay by lumps,
Until we’re filled up to the throat with clay,
And grow the grimy colour of the ground
On which we are feeding. Ay, materialist
The age’s name is. God himself, with some
Is apprehended as the bare result
Of what his hand materially has made,
Expressed in such an algebraic sign,
Called God;—that is, to put it otherwise,
They add up nature to a naught of God,
And cross the quotient. There are many, even,
Whose names are written in the Christian Church
To no dishonour,—diet still on mud,
And splash the altars with it. Close to heaven,
They see, for mysteries, through the open doors,
Vague puffs of smoke from pots of earthenware;
And fain would enter, when their time shall come,
With quite a different body than St. Paul
Has promised,—husk and chaff, the whole barley-corn,
Or where’s the resurrection?
He adds, in reference to his old social theories:—
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 is dwarfed,—and Cabet puerile.
Subsists no law of life, outside of life.
And no pure manners without Christian souls:
The Christ himself had been no law–giver,
Unless He had given the life, too, with the law.
We must quote one more passage,—the last, with the exception of a few lines, in the poem. It is Romney, who has become blind, who speaks, and he speaks to Aurora:—
I do but stand and think,
Across dim waters of a troubled life,
The flower of Heaven so vainly overhangs,—
What perfect counterpart would be in sight,
If tanks were clearer. Let us clean 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,—
And 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,
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 the 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 they assemble on earth’s flats
To 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 aye, 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 hour 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.
We have quoted thus largely from “Aurora Leigh,” because only by quotation could we hope to convey a sufficient idea of the wonderful beauty of a poem which we belive to be one of the most remarkable, and destined to become one of the most famous, in our language. We know no other poem, in any language, which seems to us so full of what may be called interior truth. One book,—little read now, but certain to be widely read in an age which must come,—one book we know which may compare with it in this respect, but only one, and that,— strangely enough, those readers will think who know it only by its title,—is Garth Wilkinson's “The Human Body and its Connection with Man.” To those who have a closer knowledge of that book, we would say that “ Aurora Leigh” is worthy to be placed beside it on their library shelves. They will know that it were scarcely possible for a book to deserve higher praise.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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