... ing melody, as well as in its warm imaginative glow, it is superior to George Eliot's Spanish Gipsy. It is not without rather severe disappointment that on examining "Aurora Leigh" with more care and closeness than I had brought to the task for many years, I have found the poem so much more faulty than previous readings led me to expect. The metaphoric richness, the wealth of picturesque phrase and colored word, the animation, and even, on the whole, the melody of "Aurora Leigh" are beyond praise; but it lacks modulation, variety, repose. There are, indeed, passages in which the thoughts and images fairly float themselves away in the sphere-dance of harmony; wonderful passages, in which it is again demonstrated that true melody in language is but the rhythmic cadence natural to a mood of imaginative thought, sufficiently elevated, calm, and mighty. But over wide spaces of the poem the ear finds no delight. The crowding, the vehemence, the feverish haste and impatience, which so frequently characterize Mr. Kingsley's novels, can hardly fail to be recalled by many passages. The heroine invariably talks like one of Mr. Kingsley's characters. There is a lack of tender strains to refresh and relieve the ear; the atmosphere wants calm, the landscape wants perspective. But it is with the poorness of the human element throughout the poem that I have, in the last reading, been most painfully impressed. I am indeed not so sure as I once was that Romney Leigh could not have existed. He had a bee in his bonnet, but genius may be combined with almost lunatic unpracticality. But Marian Erle is a fancy portrait, and Lady Waldemar is an impossibility. The only personages in the poem whose existences are thoroughly realized are Aurora and the aunt. Agreeable or disagreeable, Aurora has poetic vitality. Mrs. Browning made use, without question, of her own experiences in delineating the successful authoress; and though we cannot impute to Aurora the high qualities of Mrs. Browning, or to Mrs. Browning the flightiness and flippancy and tone of conventional satire of her heroine, there are unmistaka ble traits of reality in the girl. The aunt, too, is a typical English lady of a certain class, and might, with more patient finish and more tender and intelligent sympathy, have been a lovely figure. But Marian Erle has no life that we can call her own. She is and does what the poetnovelist wants, neither more nor less, exactly as a woman of wood, in an artist's studio, wears black or white, red or green, a widow's cap or a huntress's feather, according to the painter's design and grouping. Lady Waldemar is not only an extravagant caricature of aristocratic coarseness in speech, but superficial and incorrect as a study of human nature. It was most unlikely that she should have fallen in love with such a man as Romney Leigh, yet a woman's freakishness may account for that; but has a clever, un. principled, strong-willed, intriguing woman no cunning? Could Lady Waldemar have been so childishly maladroit and indelicate as to let both Aurora and Marian into the secret of her love? In real life such an one as Lady Waldemar would be the last person in the world to wear her heart upon her sleeve. If the individuals described in the poem yield so little satisfaction, the classes described make no amends. Mrs. Browning fails both with the aristocracy and with the poor. We have seen her account of the reception met with by Aurora when she visited Marian Erle in St. Margaret's court, and her description of the crowd of poor people assembled in the chapel of St. James's to see Romney Leigh wed his plebeian bride. That Aurora should have been insulted on entering a house in St. Margaret's court is of course possible; but I think that all who have engaged in visiting the poor in their own dwellings will admit that such an occurrence is in a high degree improbable. It cannot be said of the English poor that they are slow to recognize the wish to do them good, or to reciprocate kindly feeling. The hideous badness, the rabid illtemper, attributed to the crowd that went from St. Giles's to see Marian Erle married to Romney Leigh, prove that Mrs. Browning had no real knowledge of the London poor. Romney Leigh, a gentleman of birth and wealth, spending his money for the benefit of the destitute and miserable, and proposing to show his sense of the brotherhood of humanity by marrying a needle-woman, would have been the darling of the multitude. They would have thought him a fool, but would have loved him for all that. Instead of coming to the wedding in foul rags, they would have come in the best things they could buy, beg, or borrow. They and their babies would have been well washed at least; their faces would have been as red as cherries or strawberries with satisfaction and jollity; their temper would have been in a state of radiant goodness, not only on account of the delightful wedding and the expected feast, but from that appreciation of the humor of the whole affair which a London crowd would assuredly have displayed. Had such a celebration as the marriage of Romney Leigh and Marian Erle ever taken place, the appearance of the crowd would most certainly have suggested to no one that "you had stirred up hell to heave its lowest dreg fiends uppermost." The absence of the element of humor in Mrs. Browning's mental composition is painfully conspicuous in these delineations, and is indeed fatal to their success. - PETER BAYNE. ... In a word, it is an autobiography in verse. A wide diversity of opinion exists with regard to its merits, and to the position which it ought to occupy in modern literature. The writer herself, in inscribing it to her cousin, described it as the most mature of all her works, and the one into which her highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered. Our own view of it is that as a whole it is somewhat inconsequent; it lacks unity for a poem of such magnitude; but even in these higher respects, though not perfect, it is little beneath anything produced in this generation. When we come to regard it in other aspects, however, our praise is almost necessarily unbounded. It is a poem which we could imagine Shakespeare dropping a tear over for its humanity. Its intense subjectivity will exempt its influence on men from decay. Were we not amazed with the beauty and fulness of its poetry, we should be struck with its philosophy. The following lines might almost be taken as a digest of the whole teaching of Carlyle: "Get leave to work In this world-'tis the best you get at all; For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts Than men in benediction. God says, 'Sweat ness... The author's views on Art are set forth with some fulAs a solution for many of the problems of social life "Aurora Leigh" must be pronounced a failure. It exhibits a wonderful sensitiveness to the evils resulting from the imperfect conditions of society, but it shows no powers of reconstruction. Its principal attraction, after its poetry, which stands supremely first therein, lies in the series of pictures of human life in its varied phases which it presents, and in its power of the analysis of the human heart. Sincerity is also a prominent characteristic of the revelations which it makes; it is an autobiography in which nothing is kept back, and the inner workings of a woman's heart were never more clearly transcribed. Unevenness characterizes the narrative, but daring speculation and rich thought are embraced within the lines. There are passages of poetry as lofty and impassioned within the covers of this one book as are contained in any single lengthy modern poem of which we have knowledge. From the level of occasional mediocrity we pass on to sublime imaginative heights.-G. BARNETT Smith. If Mrs. Browning's vitality had failed her before the production of "Aurora Leigh "-a poem comprising one thousand two hundred lines of blank verse-her generation certainly would have lost one of its representative and original creations representative in a kaleidoscopic presentment of modern life and issues; original, because the most idiosyncratic of its author's poems. An audacious, speculative freedom pervades it which smacks of the new world rather than the old. Tennyson, while examining the social and intellectual phases of his era, maintains a judicial impassiveness; Mrs. Browning, with finer dramatic insight-the result of intense human sympathy-enters into the spirit of each experiment, and for the moment puts herself in its advocate's position. "Aurora Leigh" is a mirror of contemporary life, while its learned and beautiful illustrations make it almost a hand-book of literature and the arts. As a poem merely it is a failure, if it be fair to judge it by accepted standards. One may say of it as of Byron's "Don Juan" (though loath to couple the two works in any comparison), that, although a most uneven production, full of ups and downs, of capricious or prosaic episodes, it nevertheless contains poetry as fine as its author has given us elsewhere, and enough spare inspiration to set up a dozen smaller poets. The plan of the work is a metrical concession to the fashion of a time which has substituted the novel for the dramatic poem. Considered as a "novel in verse," it is a failure, by lack of either constructive talent or experience on the author's part. Few great poets invent their myths; few prose character-painters are successful poets; the epic songsters have gone to tradition for their themes, the romantic to romance, the dramatic to history and incident. Mrs. Browning essayed to invent her whole story, and the result was an incongruous framework, covered with her thronging, suggestive ideas, her flashing poetry and metaphor, and confronting you, by whichever gate-way you enter, with the instant presence of her very self. But, either as poem or novel, how superior the whole, in beauty and intellectual power, to contemporary structures upon a similar model which found favor with the admirers of parlor romance or the lamb's-wool sentiment of orderly British life! As a social treatise it is also a failure, since nothing definite is arrived at. Yet the poet's sense of existing wrongs is clear and exalted, and if her exposition of them is chaotic, so was the transition period in which she found herself involved. Upon the |
