E640800A. Aurora Leigh.
Fraser’s Magazine, August 1864, pp. 206–208.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 329.
It was here that I read and mused upon what the gentle poets—Elizabeth Barret[t] Browning, Adelaide Proctor [sic], Christina Rossetti, Jean Ingelow—had said about life and death, and the life beyond.
Let me try—with your leave, O most forbearing of readers! to recall a little of our desultory woodland criticism.
The lyrical side of poetry is that on which women seem fitted to excel. Among the emotions they are, as it were, on their own ground. Yet high lyric expression, both among men and women, is a rare gift. Lyric poetry may be described as the incarnation (in a remote way, by hints, suggestions, and implication), of moods of feeling as distinguished from processes of reflection. It does not deal with thought. It is involuntary, spontaneous, unreflective. Nor does it describe; it embodies: and in proportion as it ceases to be didactic, and becomes suggestive, the higher is its reach, and the more vital its life. An inferior poet is minute, accurate, and laborious; but the true lyrist is prompt, direct, immediate, representative; his outline is bold—not depending on delicacy of shade or variety of touch. He does not discuss nor moralize; he puts his representation before you, and leaves you to interpret its signs and draw the necessary conclusions. And suggestiveness is so high a quality in lyric poetry, because a mood of feeling is sometimes most vividly presented when it is reflected, so to speak, from a substance of an entirely different colour. There are moreover, certain subtle moods of feeling (such, for instance, as we find in Heine), which do not bear to be handled, and can only be looked at from a distance. A hint wakens them into consciousness: but they are too brittle, fragile, etherial, to sustain the weight of elaborate exposition or meditation Like a modest rustic maiden, who turns away her head, nor looks you full in the face, lyric thought is reticent and shy.
Mrs. Browning was, undoubtedly, the most powerful poetess of her generation. If any woman could have succeeded in producing a really great epic or historical poem, she was clearly the most capable: but her fame will rest on her smaller pieces. Aurora Leigh is undoubtedly a surprising work—brilliant, animated, passionate, highly picturesque. The language and the imagery are often excessively poetical,—witness, among many, such lines and passages as these:—
That is said
Austerely, like a youthful prophetess
Who knits her brows across her pretty eyes
To keep them back from following the grey flight
Of doves between the temple columns.
I had a father! yes, but long ago—
How long it seemed that moment. Oh, how far,
How far and safe, God, dost thou keep thy saints
When once gone from us!
Thus, my father gave:
And thus—did the women formerly
By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil
Across the boy’s audacious front, and swept
With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks—
He wrapt his little daughter in his large
Man’s doublet, careless did it fit or no.
I took up the old days
With all their Tuscan pleasures worn and spoiled—
Like some lost book we dropt in the long grass
On such a happy summer-afternoon
When last we read it with a loving friend,
And find in autumn when the friend is gone,
The grass cut short, the weather changed, too late,
And stare at, as at something wonderful
For sorrow;—thinking how two hands before
Had held up what is left to only one,
And how we smiled when such a vehement nail
Impressed the tiny dint here, which presents
This verse in fire for ever!
Marian’s dead.
What can you do with people when they are dead,
But, if you are pious, sing a hymn and go,
Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go,
But go by all means—and permit the grass
To keep its green feud up ’twixt them and you?
Dies no more
The sacrificial goat for Bacchus slain,
His filmed eyes fluttered by the whirling white
Of choral vestures—troubled in his blood;
While tragic voices that clanged keen as swords
Leapt high together with the altar flame
And made the blue air wink.
Her father earned his life by random jobs
Despised by steadier workmen—keeping swine
On commons, picking hops, or hurrying on
The harvest at wet seasons;—or, at need,
Assisting the Welsh drovers when a drove
Of startled horses plunged into the mist
Below the mountain road, and sowed the wind
With wandering neighings.
Yes Aurora Leigh is less a great poem than a vivid and spirited romance. It is the language of fanciful excitement rather than the expression of a high, severe, and trained imagination. The difference between Aurora Leigh and authentic poetry is very much the difference between an oration by Mr. John Bright and Paradise Lost. Expressed in language which is often quite admirable for simplicity and directness—glowing, eloquent, keeping the audience captive for the hour—both are specimens of the highest kind of rhetoric which the English tongue can compass. But there is a hectic flush, a feverish air, a morbid element in both, which belongs to the transitory emotion of the theatre and the bar, and from which poetry or oratory, that aspires to live, must be freed.
P.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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