E561213B. Aurora Leigh.
The Nation (Dublin), 13 December 1856, p. 250.
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 23.
Her votaries (and she has them) when they wish to say something that is very vaguely fine, and in the spasmodic school of criticism about Mrs Browning, commonly call her a Pythoness. For Pythoness, we are tempted to write plainly Possessed. There is indeed the afflatus, now and then, so clear and full, that it is a pity we can never separate the epileptic writhing and the foam at the mouth. This book is the book, of all her books, upon which Mrs Browning plumes herself. It is, she says, “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” It is said to be the book of the season. It affects to be the book of the age. Why not? Seasons and ages belong to the world, and the world is never jealous of the flesh and the devil. To which everlasting trinity these nine books of blank verse are, to tell the truth, more or less devoted and dedicated.
Nine books of blank verse suggest the epic, but Aurora Leigh is not exactly an epic. It is an ordinary three volume novel, of a school intermediate between Currer Bell and Eugene Sue—strikingly like, in its general conception, and much of its better sentiment, to Jane Eyre, and so much more a poem only because it is cut inot pentameters. Aurora refuses to marry Romney in his youth, as Jane reguses to marry the Indian missionary, because he would sink her womanhood in his mission. But she insists upon marrying Romney, exactly as Jane insists upon marrying Rochester, when he is deserted by everybody else, when he has failed in all his schemes, and lost his property, when he has had his house burned down over his head, and has lost his eyesight in endeavouring to resuce a life from the flames. Then she perceives that his soul is composed of
‘Jasper first, I said;
‘And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony.
The rest in order; last, an amethyst.’
Can paste diamonds be baser imitation, or a poet make himself more unintelligible to himself? One would like to ask Mrs Browning fairly, the exact meaning of a man's soul being composed of jasper, sapphire, chalcedony and amethyst. Milk and water, bricks and green cheese are figures which though equally absurd in sound and sense, would in a similar case be applicable in a dialect to which we cannot expect Mrs Browning to condescend. But how are men's souls to be weighed in carats? It is the very weakness and barrenness of modern verse, its fondness for merging sense in sound, and for believing that the absense of brilliant ideas can be compensated by a crowd of purple words. For this, did Festus Baily ransack all the mines of Ophir and all the windows of the Palais Royal to overwhelm us with wreaths of rubies and crowns of chrysoplatz. Such vulgar gimcrackery of language did for a day, but it has become as common as that Carlylian fondness for the vaguely vast, that Brummagem sublime, which fills the Poet's corner of every provincial newspaper with the eternities, and the abysses, and the empyrean—the empyrean described as abyssmal, or etern, to rhyme with epergne. Apollo preserve us from such meandering non sense!
The trunk of the story of Aurora Leigh is as follows: Her father, ‘an austere Englishman,’ of family and fortune, who had spent a dry and studious life, to middle age, travelling through Florence, saw there a lovely Tuscan girl in a procession, and loved her with the passion of all his life. He married her. She gave birth to Aurora, and died when the child was four years old. The passage which tells this is womanly and touching:—
She could not bear the joy of giving life—
The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kiss
Had left a longer weight upon my lips,
It might have steadied the uneasy breath,
And reconciled and fraternized my soul
With the new order. As it was, indeed,
I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold—
As restless as a nest deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away, though what
It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born
To make my father sadder, and myself
Not overjoyous, truly. Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just),
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles; children learn by such,
Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,
And get not over early solemnised—
But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine,
Which burns and hurts not—not a single bloom—
Become aware and unafraid of Love
Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well—
Mine did, I know—but still with heavier brains,
And wills more consciously responsible,
And not as wisely, since less foolishly;
So mothers have God’s license to be missed.
And fathers too. Aurora’s gradually withered and wasted away after the lost love of his wife, and in a few years more died saying to her, ‘Love, love, my child, love!’ His family brought the young creature away from her old Italian nurse, and native blue skies to the dull cold air of England, where for a long time she was like to die of the island climate and temperament—under the uncongenial care of her aunt, who is sketched with a quiet sufficiency of satire:—
I think I see my father’s sister stand
Upon the hall-step of her country house
To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with gray
By frigid use of life (she was not old,
Although my father’s elder by a year);
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close, mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through unrequired loves.
Or, peradventure, niggardly half truths;
Eyes of no colour once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling; cheeks in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure—if past bloom,
Past fading also.
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 empyreal, 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, 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!
Gradually Aurora grows to womanhood, visited occasionally and at last loved by her cousin Romney Leigh, the young head of their house. The boy is a Socialist, full of phalansterian projects of organizing labour, reforming human nature, and eliminating the element of original sin out of the world. The girl is, or longs to be a poet. She loves him, unknowing it. On her twentieth birth day he asked her to marry him, but after his fashion—as it were to be matron of his phalanstery; and female superintendent of the human race. She refuses proudly first—refuses still more absolutely and angrily when she comes to understand that, owing to the fact of her father's having married a foreigner.
The clause set up a hundred years ago
By a Leigh who wedded a French dancing girl
And had his heart danced over in return.
She was disinherited, and would be penniless upon her aunt's decease. All the family estates devolved to Romney. And so, indeed, the aunt at last did die.
There she sat 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 sat . . 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?
Were those the eyes that watched me, worried me?
That dogged me up and down the hours and days,
A beaten, breathless, miserable soul?
And did I pray, a half-hour back, but so,
To escape the burden of those eyes . . those eyes?
‘Sleep late’ I said.—
Why, now, indeed, they sleep.
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayer,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in’t. Every wish
Is like a prayer.. with God.
A long scene follows between Romney and Aurora. The old lady's dead hand contained an unopened letter. This letter was a deed of gift of £30,000 from Romney, to which, as part of the old lady's personal property, he holds Aurora to be entitled. They argue the question, half as lawyers, half as lovers, altogether unnaturally, and she tears the deed. They part, Aurora to establish herself as a poetess up three pair of stairs at Kensington, and Romney to attempt Theory in Practice.
Here is introduced the grand episode of the book. Still set on marriage, Romney considers that by making an alliance which would typify a meeting of the very Poles of Society, his mission would be half accomplished. He therefore determines to wed a younger beggar girl, named Marian Erle. whom he has found in a hospital. This young girl's life and nature are wonderfully painted—the innocent reverence of her love for Romney, and the cleanness of heart which she has preserved amid all abominable associations. We come to the miraculous marriage:—
Half St Giles in frieze
Was bidden to meet St James in cloth of gold,
And, after contract at the altar, pass
To eat a marriage feat on Hampstead Heath.
Of course 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 moire 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 unsually
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 the foot up at the first free step!
There was to be no marriage, however. A woman of great beauty, a peeress, the Lady Waldemar, who loves Romney passionately and affects to eneter into all his schemes with the hope of winning his love—has secretly had Marian spirited away, persuading the poor girl that Romney is only sacrificing himself to an idea, and that her true way to love him is to immolate her heart and never see him more. We shall not follow Mrs Browning into the details of the unhappy girl's story. It was hardly a subject for a British matron to versify. Marian is drugged and ruined in a French brothel.
A few years afterwards, Aurora meets the girl in Paris, hears her story, writes it to Romney (who, it is rumoured, means to marry Lady Waldemar), and goes home with Marian—to see her babe:—
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 wild 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 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. Like a rose, I said:
As red and still indeed as any rose,
That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content in blowing, to fulfil its life,
Aurora takes them both with her to Italy, and establishes herself near her native Florence. There, she is one evening joined by Romney, who proposes, not withstanding Marian’s misfortune, to marry her. Marian refuses, but indicates Aurora, as the only wife in the world worthy of her lord and angel. Romney tells how his phalansterians have risen in insurrection and burned down his house; and how he is blind, helpless, and heartbroken. Thereupon the love of Aurora bursts forth after the repression of ten years, in such a flood, as we have seen of amethyst and chalcedony.
We have gone hurriedly over these last books which have occasional passages of rich poetry, mixed with much that is perfectly commonplace prose, and a considerable proportion of transcendental and phantasmagorial rhapsody. When we pass from the mere rhetoric of the work, we find that neither as a story nor as a poem does it possess unity and completeness of idea. It is rather a series of sketches ill tacked together, than a work self sustaining and confluent with one grand central idea. It does contain occasional passages of vivid painting and intense passion—but that exhausts our praise. Not merely the part of Marian Erle's story, which we have indicated; but other occasional sentences here and there, which perhaps Mrs. Browning merely considers strongminded—are, to our taste, from a woman, downrightly indelicate—and such as we hope she may have regret having written.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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