E561203A. Aurora Leigh.
Hereford Journal, 3 December 1856, p. 4; 17 December 1856, p. 4.
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 23.
It is not an easy matter to rank Mrs. Browning in her place among “the poets.” She has a good many of the tendencies of what has been christened the “spasmodic school;” but in that the exponents of that egotistical balderdash are mostly men, the feminine softening of the lady-author comes in with very material abatement of the obnoxious rabidness of her male collaborateurs. Still, Mrs. Browning, with all her womanly delicacy, and all her religious faith, is an artist in the Turneresque style; she lays on the colouring in such broad patches, gives such glaring prominence to certain equivocal portions of the picture, and with so little regard for the conventional, that the startled beholder is in some doubt whether to admire or reprove. Adopting a prevalent caprice current with our modern poets, she grapples boldly with the subject, be it a system or a passion, stares it straight in the face, and says right out what discreeter and less impulsive writers might be content with vaguely indicating. The antecedents of Mrs. Browning, however, will make “Aurora Leigh,” the most mature of her works, “and the one into which her highest convictions in Life and Art have entered,” one of the books of the day. A perusal of it will suggest a doubt why it should be called a poem, or why the form of a not over–rhythmical measure should have been adopted instead of simple prose. A good deal of the versification is very diffuse and slipshod; and many pages and some chapters of the work demand an explanation of their being taken out of the category of an ordinary “novel.” Nor is this by any means the only disappointment of the book. Throughout its pages, at frequently–recurring intervals, there is painful evidence of the contortion of the sybil—if not without the inspiration at least without the eloquent utterance. It is not the ambiguity of a hidden meaning, but the want of an intelligible expression,—perhaps a result of the absence of a defined conception. There are evidences, too, of a blind surrender to the impulses of a potent “afflatus,” which may be poetic inspiration, or may be the sheer wilfulness of indulged mental caprice. Much that is transcendental and esoteric “nonsense” is met with in this pretended autobiography of a poetess; and through many weary pages the reader will wonder why such skimble–skamble stuff, in such pretentious phrase, was ever writ or publish. Some of it, too, is marvellously like Bailey’s “Festus,”—washed–out in remarkably cold water. But in spite of all this dilution, it is impossible to deny to Mrs. Browning, even on the shewing of her new volume, the merit and the praise of a writer of supreme talent. Her portraits are daguerrotypes; her landscapes Claudes; her social “philosophy” shines with the light of a penetrating intellect, and the warmth of a genial heart; her pourtrayals of passionate emotion are as startling in their reality as they are staggering in their boldness. The lady’s poetry embraces, too, what the present cultivated tone especially of lady–readers so much affects—that interweaving, by allusive reference, of subjects of a “classic” association, illustrations drawn from the æsthetic without the parade of pedantry. “Aurora Leigh” abounds with beauties, variegated as the blooms in a bouquet; some dazzling by the brilliancy of their hues, some giving us unexpected pause by the pungency of their equivocal aroma. But the world of fashionable light literature has been agape for this matured record of the passionate experiences of one of its chief idols; and there is plenty in its pages to justify the admiration of her worshippers, and to exercise that peculiar development of the poetic faculty of the age, of which Mrs. Browning may be accepted as the chief feminine exponent.
“Aurora Leigh” is a poetess, full of burning aspirations, and resolved to accomplish “woman’s mission,” according to her appreciation of it. Her cousin, Romney Leigh, the head of the family, is a practical philanthropist, loving, and wishing to marry his poetic cousin, but rejected by her, on account of supposed incompatability, and because the practical turn of his “socialism” scorns the romantic of the feminine ideal. Driven by the refusal of his hand to his great external work of social regeneration, Romney Leigh is about to marry a “daughter of the people,” Marian Erle, a sot of Fleur–de–Marie, whom he picks up at a hospital which his benevolence prompts him to visit. St. Giles and St. James, the aristocracy and the people, the “nobs” and the “snobs,” are assembled at a fashionable church at the west–end of London to witness, at the invitation of the bridegroom, this amalgamation of the too much separated “classes” of society, The intrigues of a certain lady of fashion, however, a Lady Waldemar, keep the humble bride away; and she is, subsequently, the victim of an outrage, the grossest that can be inflicted on female humanity, ,and the revolting circumstances of which Mrs. Browning delineates with a pencil as unsparing as the point of a dissecting–knife. Lady Waldemar, however, misses her point, for Romney is proof against her blandishments, and devotes himself more than ever to Prudhomme and Fourier. Meanwhile, Aurora Leigh, who all the while loves her cousin, though she knows it not, goes to her native Italy, taking with her Marian Erle, whom she encounters by accident, the mother of an angel boy, in Paris. Romney’s philanthropic efforts bear poor fruit; he converts the family mansion into a “social institution” for the benefit of the sick and indigent of the neighbourhood, and has the gratification of seeing it burned over his head by its ungrateful inmates, for his pains; while a descending beam from the burning fabric, turned towards him by the malice of one of his “phalansterians,” deprives him of his sight. On a subsequent retributive pilgrimage to Aurora’s Italian retreat, he meets Marian Erle, offers her the fulfilment of his pledge to make her his wife, is rejected by Marian on the ground that though she worships she “loves” him not, and has no thought beyond her fatherless child; and then, of course, the somewhat frigid catastrophe of the discovery of Romney’s loss of vision, breaks up the fountains of his cousin Aurora’s sympathetic heart, and they marry selon le regle. But the description of “frigid” must be taken as by no means applying to the narrative of the denouement, though it sufficiently characterises the catastrophe itself. In fact, any term that antithesis of cold and formal and undemonstrative, would be the correct one to indicate the manner of the heroine's passionate avowal. The closing scene of the drama, is the culminating point of her emotional “intensification;” the verbal eruption of a life–long suppressed volcano of passion; the concentrated–essence–of–the–sublimated–spririt–of–Browning:—
Romney!—will you leave me here?
So wrong, so proud, so weak, so unconsoled,
So mere a woman!—and I love you so,—
I love you, Romney!
Could I see his face,
I wept so? Did I drop against his breast,
Or did his arms constrain me? Were my cheeks
Hot, overflowed, with my tears, or with his?
And which of our two large explosive hearts
So shook me? That I know not. There were words
That broke in utterance .i.i.i. melted in the fire;
Embrace, that was convulsion; then a kiss .i.i.i.
As long and silent as the ecstatic night,—
And deep, deep shuddering breaths, which meant beyond
Whatever could be told by word or kiss.
Mrs. Browning and the patrons of her school—which means all the readers in “society,”—must settle between themselves how much further in this direction our drawing–room literature is to be permitted to go. The lady, we have said, is a bold artist, and elaborates her subject as a sculptor does a nude statue,—in the interest of “high art.” It is a question how far the conventionalities are prepared for the exhibition. Apart from this, the reader will perceive, the story is the machinery of a ”novel;” and barring the structure of Mrs. Browning's composition, it would have passed with the thousand–and–one others which go to make up the fashionable light literature of the day. But, by the exercise of that poetic faculty which she possesses in such large abundance, the authoress has made her book a vehicle for exhibiting a succession of pictures, which depend for their charm in no degree upon their connexion with the story, but solely upon their inherent artistic merits. With the view to indulging our readers with a peep at Mrs. Browning’s “collection,” we transfer to our pages some of the chef’s d’œuvres. The first we will catalogue as
my mother’s picture.
That picture of my mother on the wall—
The painter drew it after she was dead;
And when the face was finished, throat and hands,
Her cameriera carried him, in hate
Of the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocade
She dressed in at the Pitti. ‘He should paint
No sadder thing than that,’ she swore, ‘to wrong
Her poor signora.’ Therefore very strange
The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch
For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up,
And gaze across them, half in terror, half
In adoration, at the picture there,—
That swan-like supernatural white life
Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk
Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power
To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds;
For hours I sate and stared. Assunta’s awe
And my poor father’s melancholy eyes
Still pointed that way. That way, went my thoughts
When wandering beyond sight. And as I grew
In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,
Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,
Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,
Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,
With still that face . . . which did not therefore change,
But kept the mystic level of all forms
And fears and admirations; was by turns
Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,—
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,
A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,
A still Medusa, with mild milky brows
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes
Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon,
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords
Where the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,
And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;
Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile
In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth
My father pushed down on the bed for that,—
Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,
Buried at Florence.
Under the tutelage of a maiden aunt, the heroine receives
a “serious” education.
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 husband’s 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: she owned
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.
Here is a
criticism upon books.
I read books bad and good—some bad and good
At once: good aims not always make good books:
Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soils
In digging vineyards, even: books, that prove
God’s being so definitely, that man’s doubt
Grows self-defined the other side the line,
Made atheist by suggestion; moral books,
Exasperating to license; genial books,
Discounting from the human dignity;
And merry books, which set you weeping when
The sun shines,—ay, and melancholy books,
Which make you laugh that any one should weep
In this disjointed life, for one wrong more.
........
At last, because the time was ripe,
I chanced upon the poets.
As the earth
Plunges in fury, when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat
The marts and temples, the triumphal gates
And towers of observation, clears herself
To elemental freedom—thus, my soul,
At poetry’s divine first finger-touch,
Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,
Convicted of the great eternities
Before two worlds.
Now we have
an english landscape.
I learnt to love that England. Very oft,
Before the day was born, or otherwise
Through secret windings of the afternoons,
I threw my hunters off and plunged myself
Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag
Will take the waters, shivering with the fear
And passion of the course. And when, at last
Escaped,—so many a green slope built on slope
Betwixt me and the enemy’s house behind,
I dared to rest, or wander,—like a rest
Made sweeter for the step upon the grass,—
And view the ground’s most gentle dimplement,
(As if God’s finger touched but did not press
In making England!) such an up and down
Of verdure,—nothing too much up or down,
A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;
Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures, where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew,—at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade,—
I thought my father’s land was worthy too
Of being my Shakespeare’s.
.......
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.
Next we come to what, by the aid of our resumé of the story, the reader will comprehend, and which we will christen
a love scene.
Time followed one another. Came a morn
I stood upon the brink of twenty years,
And looked before and after, as I stood
Woman and artist,—either incomplete,
Both credulous of completion. There I held
The whole creation in my little cup,
And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank,
‘Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine,
And all these peoples.’
I was glad, that day;
The June was in me, with its multitudes
Of nightingales all singing in the dark,
And rosebuds reddening where the calyx split.
I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!
So glad, I could not choose be very wise!
And, old at twenty, was inclined to pull
My childhood backward in a childish jest
To see the face of’t once more, and farewell!
In which fantastic mood I bounded forth
At early morning,—would not wait so long
As even to snatch my bonnet by the strings,
But, brushing a green trail across the lawn
With my gown in the dew, took will and way
Among the acacias of the shrubberies,
To fly my fancies in the open air
And keep my birthday, till my aunt awoke
To stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on,
As honeyed bees keep humming to themselves;
‘The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned
Till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone,
And so with me it must be, unless I prove
Unworthy of the grand adversity,—
And certainly I would not fail so much.
What, therefore, if I crown myself to-day
In sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it,
Before my brows be numb as Dante’s own
To all the tender pricking of such leaves?
Such leaves! what leaves?’
I pulled the branches down
To choose from.
‘Not the bay! I choose no bay;
The fates deny us if we are overbold:
Nor myrtle—which means chiefly love; and love
Is something awful which one dares not touch
So early o’ mornings. This verbena strains
The point of passionate fragrance; and hard by,
This guelder-rose, at far too slight a beck
Of the wind, will toss about her flower-apples.
Ah—there’s my choice,—that ivy on the wall,
That headlong ivy! not a leaf will grow
But thinking of a wreath. Large leaves, smooth leaves,
Serrated like my vines, and half as green.
I like such ivy; bold to leap a height
’Twas strong to climb! as good to grow on graves
As twist about a thyrsus; pretty too,
(And that’s not ill) when twisted round a comb.’
Thus speaking to myself, half singing it,
Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bell
To ring with once being touched, I drew a wreath
Drenched, blinding me with dew, across my brow,
And fastening it behind so, .. turning faced
.. My public!—cousin Romney—with a mouth
Twice graver than his eyes.
I stood there fixed—
My arms up, like the caryatid, sole
Of some abolished temple, helplessly
Persistent in a gesture which derides
A former purpose. Yet my blush was flame,
As if from flax, not stone.
‘Aurora Leigh,
The earliest of Auroras!’
Hand stretched out
I clasped, as shipwrecked men will clasp a hand,
Indifferent to the sort of palm. The tide
Had caught me at my pastime, writing down
My foolish name too near upon the sea
Which drowned me with a blush as foolish. ‘You,
My cousin!’
The smile died out in his eyes
And dropped upon his lips, a cold dead weight,
For just a moment .. ‘Here’s a book, I found!
No name writ on it—poems, by the form;
Some Greek upon the margin,—lady’s Greek
Without the accents. Read it? Not a word.
I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in’t,
Whereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits;
I rather bring it to the witch.’
‘My book!
You found it’ . .
‘In the hollow by the stream,
That beech leans down into—of which you said,
The Oread in it has a Naiad’s heart
And pines for waters.’
‘Thank you,’
‘Rather you,
My cousin! that I have seen you not too much
A witch, a poet, scholar, and the rest,
To be a woman also.’
With a glance
The smile rose in his eyes again, and touched
The ivy on my forehead, light as air.
I answered gravely, ‘Poets needs must be
Or men or women—more’s the pity.’
‘Ah,
But men, and still less women, happily,
Scarce need be poets. Keep to the green wreath,
Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze
Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles
The clean white morning dresses.’
‘So you judge!
Because I love the beautiful, I must
Love pleasure chiefly, and be overcharged
For ease and whiteness! Well—you know the world
And only miss your cousin; ’tis not much!—
But learn this: I would rather take my part
With God’s Dead, who afford to walk in white
Yet spread His glory, than keep quiet here,
And gather up my feet from even a step,
For fear to soil my gown in so much dust.
I choose to walk at all risks.—Here, if heads
That hold a rhythmic thought, much ache perforce,
For my part, I choose headaches,—and to-day’s
My birthday.’
‘Dear Aurora, choose instead
To cure such. You have balsams.’
‘I perceive!—
The headache is too noble for my sex.
You think the heartache would sound decenter,
Since that’s the woman’s special, proper ache,
And altogether tolerable, except
To a woman.’
Saying which, I loosed my wreath,
And, swinging it beside me as I walked,
Half petulant, half playful, as we walked,
I sent a sidelong look to find his thought,—
As falcon set on falconer’s finger may,
With sidelong head, and startled, braving eye,
Which means, ‘You’ll see—you’ll see! I’ll soon take flight—
You shall not hinder.’ He, as shaking out
His hand and answering ‘Fly then,’ did not speak,
Except by such a gesture. Silently
We paced, until, just coming into sight
Of the house-windows, he abruptly caught
At one end of the swinging wreath, and said
‘Aurora!’ There I stopped short, breath and all.
As our extracts are no intended to trace out the story of the drama, we make no excuse for adopting the lady's suggestive example, and stopping–short in the description. Next we have a shadowing out of another of the phases of social existence, and which we christen
a death scene.
Then, suddenly, a single ghastly shriek
Tore upward from the bottom of the house.
Like one who wakens in a grave and shrieks,
The still house seemed to shriek itself alive,
And shudder through its passages and stairs
With slam of doors and clash of bells.—I sprang,
I stood up in the middle of the room,
And there confronted at my chamber-door,
A white face,—shivering, ineffectual lips.
‘Come, come,’ they tried to utter, and I went;
As if a ghost had drawn me at the point
Of a fiery finger through the uneven dark,
I went with reeling footsteps down the stair,
Nor asked a question.
There she sate, my aunt.—
Bolt upright in the chair beside her bed,
Whose pillow had no dint! she had used no bed
For that night’s sleeping,—yet slept well. My God,
The dumb derision of that grey peaked face
Concluded something grave against the sun,
Which filled the chamber with its July burst
When Susan drew the curtains, ignorant
Of who sate open-eyed behind her. There,
She sate—it sate—we said ‘she’ yesterday,—
And held a letter with unbroken seal,
As Susan gave it to her hand last night:
All night she had held it. If its news referred
To duchies or to dunghills, not an inch
She’d budge, ’twas obvious, for such worthless odds:
Nor, though the stars were suns, and overburned
Their spheric limitations, swallowing up
Like wax the azure spaces, could they force
Those open eyes to wink once. What last sight
Had left them blank and flat so,—drawing out
The faculty of vision from the roots,
As nothing more, worth seeing, remained behind?
For a true taste of Mrs. Browning’s quality in the high–art way,—as an illustration of the daring with which she sweeps her feminine flounces to the very verge of the utterly-forbidden in the region of passionate emotion,—we give her painter, Vincent Carrington’s, description of two of his own pictures:—
‘Let me bring the sketch.
A tiptoe Danae, overbold and hot;
Both arms a-flame to meet her wishing Jove
Halfway, and burn him faster down; the face
And breasts upturned and straining, the loose locks
All glowing with the anticipated gold.
Or here’s another on the self-same theme.
She lies here—flat upon her prison-floor,
The long hair swathed about her to the heel,
Like wet sea-weed. You dimly see her through
The glittering haze of that prodigious rain,
Half blotted out of nature by a love
As heavy as fate. I’ll bring you either sketch.
I think, myself, the second indicates
More passion.’
For another specimen in mature–painting, take the following description of
a london fog.
So, 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 spunge
Had wiped out London,—or as noon and night
Had clapped together and utterly struck out
The intermediate time, undoing themselves
In the act. Your city poets see such things,
Not despicable. Mountains of the south,
When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,
They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,
Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,
Descending Sinai: on Parnassus-mount,
You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,
Except in fable and figure: forests chant
Their anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.
But sit in London, at the day’s decline,
And view the city perish in the mist
Like Pharaoh’s armaments in the deep Red Sea,—
The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,
Sucked down and choked to silence—then, surprised
By a sudden sense of vision and of tune,
You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,
And you and Israel’s other singing girls,
Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.
There is a whole portrait–gallery of beaux, fine ladies, and “daughters of the people;” but we pass by these to copy a bit of
censorious philosophy anent “good people.”
In the middle age,
I think they called malignant fays and imps
Good people. A good neighbour, even in this,
Is fatal sometimes,—cuts your morning up
To mince-meat of the very smallest talk,
Then helps to sugar her bohea at night
With your reputation. I have known good wives,
As chaste, or nearly so, as Potiphar’s;
And good, good mothers, who would use a child
To better an intrigue; good friends, beside,
(Very good) who hung succinctly round your neck
And sucked your breath, as cats are fabled to do
By sleeping infants. And we all have known
Good critics, who have stamped out poet’s hope;
Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state;
Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause;
Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax;
Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy;
Good Christians, who sate still in easy chairs,
And damned the general world for standing up.—
Now, may the good God pardon all good men!
We have not yet done with Mrs. Browning and her new poem; there are other pictures of “life,” social, interior, conventional, and national, which we would fain transfer to our own pages. Enough, however, for the present. On an early day we hope to steal some further sketches from the teeming portfolio of “Aurora Leigh.”
[Continued in the issue of 17 December 1856.]
We resume our extracts from this book, premising that the “story” of the poem has already been told, and that what is hereafter presented is only a series of detached sketches, without reference to the sequence of the “plot.” to begin with, take a group of,
The People.
The people came in uncompelled,
Lame, blind, and worse-sick, sorrowful, and worse,
The humours of the peccant social wound
All pressed out, poured down upon Pimlico,
Exasperating the unaccustomed air
With a hideous interfusion: you’d suppose
A finished generation, dead of plague,
Swept outward from their graves into the sun,
The moil of death upon them. What a sight!
A holiday of miserable men
Is sadder than a burial-day of kings.
They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church
In a dark slow stream, like blood. To see that sight,
The noble ladies stood up in their pews,
Some pale for fear, a few as red for hate,
Some simply curious, some just insolent,
And some in wondering scorn,-‘What next? what next?’
These crushed their delicate rose-lips from the smile
That misbecame them in a holy place,
With broidered hems of perfumed handkerchiefs;
Those passed the salts with confidence of eyes
And simultaneous shiver of moiré silk;
While all the aisles, alive and black with heads,
Crawled slowly toward the altar from the street,
As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole
With shuddering involutions, swaying slow
From right to left, and then from left to right,
In pants and pauses. What an ugly crest
Of faces, rose upon you everywhere
From that crammed mass! you did not usually
See faces like them in the open day:
They hide in cellars, not to make you mad
As Romney Leigh is.-Faces!-O my God,
We call those, faces? men’s and women’s-ay,
And children’s;-babies, hanging like a rag
Forgotten on their mother’s neck, poor mouths,
Wiped clean of mother’s milk by mother’s blow,
Before they are taught her cursing. Faces!-phew,
We’ll call them vices festering to despairs,
Or sorrows petrifying to vices: not
A finger-touch of God left whole on them;
All ruined, lost-the countenance worn out
As the garments, the will dissolute as the acts,
The passions loose and draggling in the dirt
To trip a foot up at the first free step!-
Those, faces! ’twas as if you had stirred up hell
To heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost
In fiery swirls of slime,-such strangled fronts,
Such obdurate jaws were thrown up constantly,
To twit you with your race, corrupt your blood,
And grind to devilish colours all your dreams
Henceforth.
By way of contrast, we have a glimpse of the slip-slop of
The Upper Ten Thousand.
We waited. It was early: there was time
For greeting and the morning’s compliment;
And gradually a ripple of women’s talk
Arose and fell and tossed about a spray
Of English ss, soft as a silent hush,
And, notwithstanding, quite as audible
As louder phrases thrown out by the men.
-‘Yes, really, if we need to wait in church,
We need to talk there.’-‘She? ’Tis Lady Ayr,
In blue-not purple! that’s the dowager.’
-‘She looks as young.’-‘She flirts as young, you mean!
Why if you had seen her upon Thursday night,
You’d call Miss Norris modest.’-‘You again!
I waltzed with you three hours back. Up at six,
Up still at ten: scarce time to change one’s shoes.
I feel as white and sulky as a ghost,
So pray don’t speak to me, Lord Belcher.’-‘No,
I’ll look at you instead, and it’s enough
While you have that face.’ ‘In church, my lord! fie, fie!’
‘Adair, you stayed for the Division?’-‘Lost
By one.’ ‘The devil it is! I’m sorry for’t.
And if I had not promised Mistress Grove’ . .
-‘You might have kept your word to Liverpool.’
‘Constituents must remember, after all,
We’re mortal.’-‘We remind them of it.’-‘Hark,
The bride comes! Here she comes, in a stream of milk!’
-‘There? Dear, you are asleep still; don’t you know
The five Miss Granvilles? always dressed in white
To show they’re ready to be married.’-‘Lower!
The aunt is at your elbow.’-‘Lady Maud,
Did Lady Waldemar tell you she had seen
This girl of Leigh’s!’ ‘No,-wait! ’twas Mistress Brookes,
Who told me Lady Waldemar told her-
No, ’twasn’t Mistress Brookes.’-‘She’s pretty?’-‘Who?
Mrs. Brookes? Lady Waldemar?’-‘How hot!
Pray is’t the law to-day we’re not to breathe?
You’re treading on my shawl-I thank you, sir.’
Here we have a touch of the scalpel, in the psychological way, which shows the authoress to be an adept at the anatomy of the emotions:-
The charming woman there-
This reckoning up and writing down her talk
Affects me singularly. How she talked
To pain me! woman’s spite!-You wear steel-mail;
A woman takes a housewife from her breast,
And plucks the delicatest needle out
As ’twere a rose, and pricks you carefully
’Neath nails, ’neath eyelids, in your nostrils,-say,
A beast would roar so tortured,-but a man,
A human creature, must not, shall not flinch,
No, not for shame.
The following is a “picture of an interior,” as charming as painter ever drew. We call it
A Sleep-Waking Infant.
’Twas a room
Scarce larger than a grave, and near as bare;
Two stools, a pallet-bed; I saw the room:
A mouse could find no sort of shelter in’t,
Much less a greater secret; curtainless,-
The window fixed you with its torturing eye,
Defying you to take a step apart,
If peradventure you would hide a thing.
I saw the whole room, I and Marian there
Alone.
Alone? She threw her bonnet off,
Then sighing as ’twere sighing the last time,
Approached the bed and drew a shawl away:
You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruise
More calmly and more carefully than so,-
Nor would you find within, a rosier flushed
Pomegranate-
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 tiny holdfast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of’t.
While we stood there dumb,-
For oh, that it should take such innocence
To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb;
The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,
And, staring out at us with all their blue,
As half perplexed between the angelhood
He had been away to visit in his sleep,
And our most mortal presence,-gradually
He saw his mother’s face, accepting it
In change for heaven itself, with such a smile
As might have well been learnt there,-never moved,
But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,
So happy (half with her and half with heaven)
He could not have the trouble to be stirred,
But smiled and lay there.
Passing the description of one of the main incidents of the story, wrought out with terrible power, and leading, as in the custom of the authoress in situations of this order, to the very verge of the proscribed, we come to some descriptions of scenery, the colouring of which is pure and transparent as a Claude Lorraine. Take as a specimen this
Italian Landscape.
I found a house, at Florence, on the hill.
Of Bellosguardo. ’Tis a tower that keeps
A post of double-observation o’er
That valley of Arno (holding as a hand
The outspread city) straight toward Fiesole
And Mount Morello and the setting sun,-
The Vallombrosan mountains to the right,
Which sunrise fills as full as crystal cups
Wine-filled, and red to the brim because it’s red.
No sun could die, nor yet be born, unseen
By dwellers at my villa: morn and eve
Were magnified before us in the pure
Illimitable space and pause of sky,
Intense as angels’ garments blanched with God,
Less blue than radiant. From the outer wall
Of the garden, dropped the mystic floating grey
Of olive-trees, (with interruptions green
From maize and vine) until ’twas caught and torn
On that abrupt black line of cypresses
Which signed the way to Florence. Beautiful
The city lay along the ample vale,
Cathedral, tower and palace, piazza and street;
The river trailing like a silver cord
Through all, and curling loosely, both before
And after, over the whole stretch of land
Sown whitely up and down its opposite slopes,
With farms and villas.
Soon after, we have another artistic description of animated nature, rich and variegated as the hues of the rainbow, and sparkling as a a warm of fire-flies, which we will call the
Insect Life of Italy.
Tenderly
And mournfully I lived. I knew the birds
And insects,-which look fathered by the flowers
And emulous of their hues: I recognised
The moths, with that great overpoise of wings
Which make a mystery of them how at all
They can stop flying: butterflies, that bear
Upon their blue wings such red embers round,
They seem to scorch the blue air into holes
Each flight they take: and fire-flies, that suspire
In short soft lapses of transported flame
Across the tingling Dark, while overhead
The constant and inviolable stars
Outburn those lights of love: melodious owls,
(If music had but one note and was sad,
’Twould sound just so) and all the silent swirl
Of bats, that seem to follow in the air
Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome
To which we are blind: and then, the nightingales,
Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall,
(When walking in the town) and carry it
So high into the bowery almond-trees,
We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if
The golden flood of moonlight unaware
Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth
And made it less substantial. And I knew
The harmless opal snakes, the large-mouthed frogs,
(Those noisy vaunters of their shallow streams)
And lizards, the green lightnings of the wall,
Which, if you sit down still, nor sigh too loud,
Will flatter you and take you for a stone,
And flash familiarly about your feet
With such prodigious eyes in such small heads!
With the “philosophy” of the book we don‘t profess to deal. But the end of an experiment in the practical-philanthropic line, by one who, as the type of social regenerators of our day, devoted life and fortune to the amelioration of the condition of the working-classes, may not be unsuggestive. With it we close our extracts from “Aurora Leigh:”
A Model Philanthropist.
‘Cousin, you are sad.
Did all your social labour at Leigh Hall
And elsewhere, come to nought then?’
‘It was nought,’
He answered mildly. ‘There is room indeed,
For statues still in this large world of God’s,
But not for vacuums,-so I am not sad:
Not sadder than is good for what I am.
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
Of trying to do good without the church
Or even the squires, Aurora.
........
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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