E571121A. Aurora Leigh.
The Leeds Intelligencer, 21 November 1857, p. 3.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 364–366.
If this book survives the assaults of time, it will be very valuable to future generations; for it will, if they have skill to discern them, lay open some of the characteristics of our age. In it may be seen enshrined some of the virtues and some also of the faults of the present generation. Indeed Mrs. Browning is too much, for a poet, affected by the transient spirit of the age in which she chances to live. We do not intend to enter upon an elaborate justification of these remarks. We have hinted at the great fault of the work, and as we proceed, our meaning will perhaps become clearer, and commend itself to the understanding of our readers.
Those who are wont, (as who is not, in these days?) to read volume after volume from the circulating library, and who would seem, like a camel, to have a quadruple apparatus for digesting their literary provender, have perhaps run through Mrs. Browning’s poem without being struck by its great length. But it is as long as the whole of Virgil, half as long again as Horace, about equal to Lucretius, Catullus, and Tibullus joined together. Of Greek poems, it is about equal to the Iliad or Odyssey, a little longer than the seven plays of Sophocles, while Æschylus and Pindar if rolled into one would contain about the same number of lines. It is a little longer than Paradise Lost, but rather shorter than Dante’s three great poems. We have not made this calculation without a purpose; we intend by means of it to justify the high standard by which we propose to judge Aurora Leigh. Nor have we the slightest doubt that its gifted author intended it to be so judged. Whether it can endure the trial is another question. We intend to examine it as an epic poem. It is a long while since a work claiming this proud, and, to so many, mystical title, has fallen into the hands of the critics, and we do not think the brotherhood would be disposed to give such a one an unkindly reception, presuming of course that the claim is at all reasonably maintained. An epic poem is so great a gift, so transcendent a benefit, that we are well disposed to accord every indulgence even to an attempt. Yet we fear great poets know nothing of attempts. We cannot say it is presumptuous in one like Mrs. Browning to have attempted so great a work, but we cannot say she has succeeded. Her epic poem may be called without much injustice a novel in verse. And yet there is true poetry, there is deep thought, there is earnest purpose in Aurora Leigh, but that nameless charm so difficult to describe, but which is so easily to be found in Homer, Dante, Milton, Tennyson, and even in Virgil, Pope, and Lucretius, how is it lacking here! There are passages that challenge our admiration, but,—we speak with diffidence,—we are apt to wonder how they came where they are. Yet does not the reader ask himself, after finishing the book, what is there in these twelve thousand lines? If the question be capable of a satisfactory answer, of course the querist is self-condemned, but who comes to the end of Paradise Lost, or the Iliad, only to ask it? And yet in some respects it is always easier to tell what there is in a modern book, than what is the object of one of the great poets. Our moderns are apt to take care that it shall be your own fault if the moral, the object of the book, be not plainly seen. But in so doing they often remind you, unintentionally, we presume, that true genius flows easily and naturally like a river, while they resemble, in directness of purpose, and in stiffness also, the canal. Mrs. Browning is not free from this, she obtrudes her moral lessons, and morality or anything else, when once it is obtruded, is from the purpose of poetry. Perhaps the practice of writing so many short pieces, so many songs and idyls, prevents our present poets from attaining their full growth, and fritters away the powers given them for nobler purposes. Even Tennyson, we fear, is not what he might have been. Yet he has often so worked out an idea, so transfused his poet’s soul into a few lines, that the result is to be measured by a far different standard than mere length. Not only is genius put to an ignoble use by only attempting such short flights, but great temptation to carelessness and haste creeps in too. In Mrs. Browning’s shorter poems we can trace the want of polish, the want of correction and erasure, and—we must say it—the flippancy that form such frequent blots upon the pages of Aurora Leigh. Even the quaintness and inversion in which she seems to delight, are, we believe, often the result of want of a little care, while the obscurity that sometimes looks for a moment like profundity of thought is as often the result of want of clearness in conception. And thus the unfortunate reader is condemned to puzzle himself, and perhaps to accuse himself of stupidity, because he cannot see clearly that meaning which only loomed through a mist to the author. In Aurora Leigh, where there has been no difficulty arising from rhyme or a complicated stanza, this fault has been in a great measure avoided; in its stead we find, too often, very careless and unpolished verse, and, sometimes, slipshod English. It is because we admire Mrs. Browning’s gifts that we search out all her faults, not in a spirit of depreciation; we fear too lest her fame and her power should exercise an evil influence on the taste of the day, and therefore we criticise her books. But we do not criticise “The Course of Time” or “Proverbial Philosophy.” It is a necessary, not a pleasant task, to point out the blemishes of Virgil; Bavius and Mævius may go scot-free.
We do not intend to make many quotations to prove the assertions we may make against the work, nor to justify the praises we may bestow. Most have read the book, and to those who have not, any extracts for which we could find space would be of little use. We should indeed be doing a very different work to that we have proposed to ourselves, if any should be deterred by us from studying any work of Mrs. Browning’s, however unworthy we may think it of her great powers. We desire, then, to be believed to write with fairness and candour. In order to form a fair estimate of our meaning, it must be remembered too that we are comparing Aurora Leigh with the great epic poems of the world.
An epic poem ought, in the first place, to have a subject, and a worthy subject. Now there is but one subject to man; there are many in the Universe, but he cannot grasp them as yet; his one and only subject is human life; if he tries to ascend, his angels are good men; if he goes to the pit for a subject, his devils are (however the force of transcendant genius may disguise it) merely evil men; if he tries to soar to the Throne of Heaven, his rash wings are inevitably entangled in anthropomorphism. In this sense the line is perfectly true which tells us that
“The proper study of mankind is man.”
It is by no means necessary, then, that an epic poem should have its scene laid in Heaven or Hell, nor yet among heroes, nor in remote antiquity, as some appear to think; it is only necessary that its subject should be human life; but it must not be a human life; it must be man, not one individual man, or if it be, that one life must seem (it cannot in reality) to have scope enough to include more within its range, than its own existence. It will be remembered that in the great epic poems the characters are not very minutely painted; too close a description would rob them of their representative character and show us in too plain a light the private foibles and personal weaknesses of the individuals. It almost seems as if the very double name Aurora Leigh bound down the scope of the character too closely to that of an every-day person; and we really think that there is a deeper error than lies in the mere sound of the words, in giving a Christian name and surname to the heroine of a poem. It has brought her down to the ordinary and common-place rank of characters. For a family name or surname, that we know, brings before us, by its very sound, the family peculiarities, and offers to our view the family, not as men and women, but as they are distinguished from other men and women. Add the Christian name, and to the family peculiarities the idiosyncracy of the individual is added, and then in general we have only a patched and dwarfed specimen of humanity. We are not so foolish as to quarrel with a mere name, although it may endanger a book’s success, but we think that Mrs. Browning has not only in name but in very deed, represented in her heroine one of the small jots of humanity who are to be met with in the parish registers. We mean that Aurora Leigh is, estimable and even admirable character as she may be, in no sense representative, and therefore unworthy of the position she claims. Nor can it be said that she is only a part of the work, and that it is not necessary that a poem should be devoted to the glorification of one hero or heroine. No doubt a poem might be written which should not depend upon one character, and so the strain, and expectation from a single conception might be relaxed. It is possible to imagine it at least, but it has not been done in the work before us, which is rightly named; it is Aurora Leigh. Whether an epic poem could be successfully dependent upon its representation of woman’s nature, as distinguished from human nature, we do not know; genius does many things which unless they were accomplished would be thought impossible, but we cannot pronounce Aurora Leigh,—we continually feel tempted to say Miss Leigh,—even an ideal woman. Now this strong individuality, which is essential to a novel or a play, is fatal to an epic poem. No one woman’s life has, to human beings, interest enough, to claim successfully that sympathy which belongs to mankind. Man’s life has more scope, more room for action, and has thus a better chance of success, but even it must be as far a possible abstracted from individual peculiarities, if it is to assume to itself, in a poem, the attention of the world. But when a woman’s life is taken, when that woman is represented as a poetess, and moreover in the not very dignified position that Aurora Leigh occupies throughout the greater part of the poem, her claim to universal sympathy is certain to be rejected, or rather it never brings itself sufficiently home to us to be a question of acceptance or rejection at all. It may be thought that in the mind of every true poet there must be that breadth and comprehensiveness, which, if it could be made manifest, would at once meet not only with admiration but affectionate reverence. This is perfectly true, but the only way a poetess can manifest her mind is in her works, she cannot be analysed and put up for exhibition by another; and we do not think that Aurora Leigh would be recognised as a poetess, unless we were warned in the beginning of the book to think her one. Mrs. Browning is to be judged as a poetess, Aurora Leigh as a woman, and as an exemplar of woman’s, and through that of human, nature. But we must repeat that the novelistic element of the work has betrayed Mrs. Browning, betrayed her into negation of her first purpose, and, we cannot help thinking, into want of originality. It struck us when we read the work when it was first published that the plot was a curious composition of “Mary Barton” and “Jane Eyre.” Not, perhaps, actually and avowedly taken from these works, better if it were, for poets have a right to take from others anything they can prove their right to by making it their own. Any one who will take the pains to read the Lotus Eaters of Tennyson, and then to refer to the few lines in the Odyssey that are the basis of that poem, will recognize at once the right we assert, and the limitations that we would place upon it. Poets may take, as the bee takes, but like the bee, they must make what they take their own. Since the publication of Mary Barton we have had impressed upon us often, far too often, that a woman’s “No,” quite unconsciously even to herself, means “Yes.” Now we are not going to emulate, in knowledge of female nature, the creator of such characters as Mary Barton and Margaret Hale; we shall therefore not deny the allegation, but merely assert that such a position is not a dignified one for the heroine of an epic poem, and that she deserves exactly the amount of sympathy she is likely to get. Mrs. Browning, however, has done something to make the idea her own in these lines, very powerful in their own way.
I can tell
The weather-signs of love—you love this man!
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;
They have drawn too near the fire of life like gnats
And flare up bodily, wings and all, what then?
Who’s sorry for a gnat . . or girl?
I blushed,
I feel the brand upon my forehead now
Strike hot, scar deep, as guiltless men may feel
The felon’s iron, say, and scorn the mark
Of what they are not. Most illogical
Irrational nature of our womanhood
That blushes one way, feels another way,
And prays, perhaps, another! . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . I attest
The conscious skies, and all their daily suns,
I think I loved him not, nor then, nor since . .
Nor ever.
The plot of a great poem ought to be grand and lofty, not content with the poor source of interest shared in common with every weakly novel, marriage, or rather “a marriage, will it take place or not?” Still less ought it to be dependent for its final winding up upon the catastrophe of a fire, in which the lover of the heroine, being blinded, has, by that means, his eyes opened to the state of his lady’s affections. Besides, many people will consider the wedding, at such a price, purchased rather too dearly, and instead of rejoicing with the heroine, will begin to pity her unfortunate friend. He, for his part, as he cannot now recover his sight, finds it wise to say that he would willingly lose his eyes to gain his mistress. For our own part we pity Romney Leigh, and lament for his sake that we have in English nothing corresponding to the classical use of “desiderium,” so that he might at once call Aurora, “darling,” and at the same time relieve his mind by expressing his “regret” for his own loss.
This plot, however, managed by Mrs. Browning, enchains the reader’s attention, and makes him eager to trace it to the end, for she is, when she chooses, a great artist; but in making the mere story of her poem interesting she has put forth her powers in the wrong place. Let those who write for the amusement of their readers be as amusing as they can, but poets risk much if they tempt their disciples to hurry along the path, for the sake of arriving at their journey’s end. Rather should they tempt them to pause on the way, to gaze on, and to pluck the flowers that make it so lovely, and not seldom to retrace their steps once and again, if so doing they may longer enjoy the radiance of some rare gem. All the great epic poets have chosen as their subject, stories which were already familiar in their main outlines to their hearers. The Greeks did not need to wait to the end of the Iliad for information as to Hector’s death, the Romans knew that Latium had been colonized by the Trojans, the incidents of the Crusades were not a sealed book to those for whom Tasso wrote, and Milton tells us no more than our little children are taught in early infancy at their mothers’ knees. The consequence is that all these poems can be read again and again, that they rather grow than decrease in interest, as we become more familiar with them; but such, and we deeply regret it, will not be the case with Aurora Leigh. It has been said of it that most who take it up, endeavour to read it at a sitting; it must be a long sitting, but we have no doubt that many have read it as we did ourselves, within the four and twenty hours. Who will try the experiment of reading Milton in that time, or will any Italian read the Inferno and Purgatorio as quickly? This is not the way that poetry should be read, nor should those who are anxious to do a poet’s work, and earn a poet’s crown, tempt us so ungraciously to slight the teachers of the world.
No man in his senses would complain, if he reads poetry at all, of the length of a poem, if it were all pure gold, but—we do not like to say there is dross in Aurora Leigh—it might easily be much condensed. Even in the few terse and nervous lines we have quoted above, there is here and there a want of polish, of the poet’s last touches, touches that we ought certainly never to be able to trace, but which still more certainly we ought never to be left to miss. Such haste is the more to be regretted that we have abundant evidence, how Mrs. Browning can, when she so wills it, give her verse the brightness and polish of the diamond.
It requires the evidence of our eyesight to make us believe that a woman who has read Plato’s Phædon has written these lines—
I know we talk our Phædons to the end
Through all the dismal faces that we make,
O’erwrinkled with dishonouring agony
From any moral drug.
We prefer to make no further comment on them than to say that we find many of our authors now so eager to be real, that they become ludicrous. Yet the following lines might almost have been suggested by a touch of pathos in Plato’s Dialogue, rather unusual among the ancients,—
καὶ γὰρ τὸ μεμνῆσθαι Σωκράτους, καί ἀυτὸν λέγοντα, καὶ ἄλλου ἀκούοντα, ἔμοιγε ἄεὶ πάντων ἥδιστον.
Perhaps the pathos may be lost in the simplicity of the words to those who have not learnt, by sad experience, to translate them. Hear Aurora Leigh:—
Oh, how far,
How far and safe, God, dost thou keep thy saints
When once gone from us! We may call against
The lighted windows of thy fair June-heaven
Where all the souls are happy,—and not one,
Not even my father, look from work or play
To ask, Who is it that cries after us,
Below there in the dark. . . .
. . . . . . . . . up in heaven
I have my father,—with my mother’s face
Beside him—in a blotch of heavenly light;
No more for earth’s familiar, household use,
No more! The best verse written by this hand,
Can never reach them where they sit, to seem
Well done to them.
We had intended to say something about that long portion of the poem devoted to Marian Erle. It seems a mistake. Such miserable things are treated of best in plainest and simplest prose, and we confess while we honour Mrs. Browning for not being ashamed to advocate the cause of her fallen sisters, that we are at a loss to know what end she has proposed to herself here. Marian she represents as innocent; in order to excite sympathy for a class she has taken the most exceptional case possible. The only truth this part of her book can teach us has been burnt into our souls of late by sterner teaching than a poet’s, and we are not likely to forget it. As a moral lesson that passage of intense pathos in “Mary Barton,” where her aunt comes home to die, is worth, in its shortness and simplicity, all the long and elaborate tale of Marian Erle. We are left to suppose that Mrs. Browning thinks it impossible to obtain any sympathy for those who are ruined, and are not innocent. We are sure she does not think so, but Marian Erle’s whole story is a great mistake; the introduction of such topics must be for a sufficient end and aim to be pardonable, and what is the aim of this? Surely it is not the righteous but sinners that Mrs. Browning would wish to be called to repentance by their sisters.
Here we must end. We cannot think this “most mature of her works,” the best; it does not fulfil the promise that some of her shorter poems offer, and the defects that are to be found in them seem to have grown rather than to have diminished. We are afraid now that Mrs. Browning will never write a great poem, although we believe that she had within her the germs of the capacities that would, if they had been rightly educed and disciplined, have placed her very high among the poets.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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