SOURCE: "E. B. Browning: Aurora Leigh," in E. B. Browning; R. H. Home: Two Studies, The Wellesley Press, Inc., 1935, pp. 5-27.

[In the following essay, Shackford discusses Aurora Leigh in the context of Browning's other works and her literary interests, as well as in relation to other narrative poems.]

The manuscript of Aurora Leigh is a green-bound octavo notebook of about four hundred pages, written in a small, cramped, delicate hand. A reader needs a magnifying glass in order to decipher the text, where corrections, emendations, and amplifications, written at various angles, give many pages some resemblance to a literary spider's web. In this first draft the heroine's name was Aurora Vane; minor differences between the manuscript and the printed versions offer an interesting study of Mrs. Browning's critical judgment. Aurora Leigh was first published early in January, 1857, by Chapman and Hall; a fortnight later, a second edition was issued; between 1857 and 1884 eighteen printings were made necessary by the demand for the book. Probably the most enthusiastic reader (except Robert Browning) was John Ruskin who in a long letter to the author said, in part:

I think Aurora Leigh the greatest poem in the English language, unsurpassed by anything but Shakespeare—not surpassed by Shakespeare's Sonnets—and therefore the greatest poem in the language. I write this, you see, very deliberately.

At the other extreme is the opinion of a distinguished modern critic who wrote of Aurora Leigh: "the work will probably survive the exaggerated contempt which its undeniable faults have called down upon it in our day."

Although Mrs. Browning herself had high hopes for the lasting success of Aurora Leigh, she was not guilty of self-laudation, being a cool and sane critic of pretentiousness on the part of authors, and she touched merrily the weakness of those who had delusions of greatness. A note written August 12, 1846 to Robert Browning is illustrative:

Here is a letter from a lady in a remote district... who sends me lyrical specimens, and desires to know if this be Genius. She does not desire to publish; at any rate for an indefinite number of years; but for her own private and personal satisfaction, she would be glad to be informed whether she is a Sappho or George Sand or anything of that kind.

Furthermore, Mrs. Browning was aware that her own widely extended reputation was based partly upon the fact of her femininity rather than upon her artistic merit. The hero of Aurora Leigh said to the heroine:

You never can be satisfied with praise
Which men give women when they judge a book
Not as mere work but as mere woman's work,
Expressing the comparative respect
Which means the absolute scorn: "Oh, excellent!
What grace, what facile turns, what fluent sweeps,
What delicate discernment almost thought!
The book does honor to the sex, we hold,
Among our female authors we make room
For this fair writer, and congratulate
The country that produces in these times
Such women, competent to. . . . spell."

Regarding the future rank of Aurora Leigh it is safest not to offer prophecy; yet the work may be judged, today, in comparison with other narrative poems of the nineteenth century and, with some justice, may be given a comparative position. It stands below The Prelude, Hyperion, Childe Harold, The Ring and the Book, but certainly far above certain works that had a vogue in their time. What is the reputation, to-day, of Southey's long epics which so fascinated and influenced young Shelley, Thalaba particularly? What is the fate of Lallah Rookh for which Moore was paid £3000 upon its publication? Who now reads Gertrude of Wyoming? The Princess to-day seems sentimental and mawkish, not even required reading for our defenceless high-school students, though it must be remembered that Tennyson by this gilded poem helped somewhat to reconcile the Age to academic women. Surely Aurora Leigh, despite any and all faults, holds a secure place among nineteenth-century poems, for its theme has perennial appeal, its scope is wide, its drama realistic, its tone liberal, its manner distinguished, and its wisdom that of a sound and acute thinker. Aurora Leigh does not propound the views of a cult; it is not bent on mere description or on local color; it has no such record of intimate personal experiences as appears in Patmore's The Angel in the House, nor is it the expression of emotional bias as is The City of Dreadful Night. Moreover, it is free from many of the blemishes which disfigure Mrs. Browning's earlier poems, The Romance of the Swan's Nest, The Lay of the Brown Rosary, Lady Geraldine's Courtship, and that over-ambitious experiment in the circle of the supernatural, The Seraphim, in all of which poems appear themes tenuous, sentimental, egotistical, developed by a technique often faulty, with too much "scope" for rimes that "droop." These poems are notably amateurish in execution, weakened by a hovering, uncertain stroke, and an equally tremulous sentiment that falls short of genuine lyric emotion. Moreover, the learned lady is dominant. One critic, favorably inclined toward Mrs. Browning's verse, spoke harshly of her "abstruse wanderings of thought" and "terrible phalanxes of Greek and German expressions."

On the other hand, in looking over the works of the many women poets of the century, especially such popular authors as L. E. L., Mrs. Norton, Mary Howitt, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Hemans, Jean Ingelow, we must be aware that Mrs. Browning grapples with ideas more frequently than do these other women poets. She gradually grew away from plaintive ballads and naive reveries. In such poems as Crowned and Buried, Cowper's Grave, The Dead Pan, A Drama of Exile, The Cry of the Children, the sonnets, Work, and Cheerfulness taught by Reason, she welded thought and feeling in imaginative phrases. Sonnets from the Portuguese is a series of lyrics, incontestably one of the great works of the nineteenth century, and also one of the most spiritual epithalamia ever written. Even if in individual sonnets there appear inferior lines, feeble or fanciful, the sequence as a whole is a melodious, intense, stately expression of "essential passions of the heart." The imaginative elements are impressively individual, not imitative; the figures of speech have a freshness, an appropriateness, a force due to the fact that they are shaped out of the heart of experience. Casa Guidi Windows may be not a poem but a document on the problems that underlie political unity, yet as a document it will be read along with other famous passages on civil liberty.

Not only because of her ardor and sensibility, her love of nature, her profound interest in questions, social or individual, ethical or more distinctly religious and mystical, did Mrs. Browning win a place in the annals of nineteenth century poetry; she was much more than a cultured, sympathetic woman, she was a student and an independent thinker. She read the Greek text of the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, all of the dialogues of Plato, besides many other works of Hellas. Already, in the juvenile poems published by her proud father, The Battle of Marathon and An Essay on Mind, she showed both wide reading and speculative intelligence, though these poems are absurdly priggish and pedantic, bristling with countless learned allusions. An Essay on Mind, in well-pointed Popian couplets, so neatly epitomizes the history of philosophy and literature that it would be profitable reading for candidates for the doctor's degree. She was not a trained systematic thinker, she had too much of the acquisitive, too much of the quickly intuitive in her mental habit. Maturer works, in prose, that show learning more discreetly are:Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets, which appeared first as papers in The Athenaeum, 1842, as did also The Book of the Poets, a critique sparkling with piquant, penetrating comments on English poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth. Prometheus Bound, published anonymously in 1833, revised and republished in 1850, gives a comprehensive illustration of Mrs. Browning's powers. It is one of the most vivid and most idiomatic translations from Æschylus, and even if specialists may demur about an interpretation here or there, Mrs. Browning's translation is a remarkable piece of work, showing finely imaginative sympathy with the dramatist's spirit of rebellion against tyranny. Especially successful is her rendering of those complexly woven double-epithets which give the pages of Æschylus such fire, glamour, subtlety of thought, and such deep, overflowing melody.

All these aspects of her reading and study are seen reflected in Aurora Leigh, and other influences, too, appear as a result of her unexpected freedom of adventure in her father's library. The story has frequently been told of her father's command that she should not read the books "on this side," but apparent permission was granted for all others; so the young poetess read with ardor Tom Paine's The Age of Reason, Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, Hume's Essays, Werther, Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Throughout her life Mrs. Browning read widely in various fields, as will be shown later. In March, 1853, for example, she wrote to Mrs. Jameson: "We have been meditating Socialism and mysticism of various kinds, deep in Louis Blanc and Prudhon, deeper in the German spiritualists, added to which I have by no means given up my French novels." . . . More, however, than anything else Aurora Leigh was inspired by and influenced by Mrs. Browning's devotion to prose fiction.

Fiction she read assiduously. Her letters to Robert Browning and to Miss Mitford are full of mention of her invalid's solace and her artist's pleasure in the novels of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Kingsley, Disraeli, Ainsworth, Bulwer-Lytton, the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Stowe, Jane Porter, Mrs. Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Mrs. Shelley and many other English or American writers. More directly influential upon Aurora Leigh were novels by the French writers: Dumas, Balzac, Madame de Staël, George Sand, and dramas by Dumas fils, Scribe and others. We should picture Mrs. Browning in Casa Guidi reading in the long warm afternoons, or in the winter evenings beside the fire, novels and yet more novels. Robert's catholicity of taste did not equal hers, for his critical faculty was much more active, and, too, he evidently did not need the physical or mental relaxation gained from fiction.

Aurora Leigh is the inevitable result of this reading of many novels. Writing to her cousin, John Kenyon, in October, 1844, Miss Barrett had said:

I have a great fancy for writing some day a longer poem, [than Lady Geraldine's Courtship]. . . . a poem comprehending the aspect and manners of modern life, and flinching at nothing of the conventional.... Now I do think that a true poetical novel—modern and on the level of the manners of the day—might be as good a poem as any other, and much more popular besides. Do you not think so?

A glance at the story element of Aurora Leigh will show how, in nine books, not quite eleven thousand lines in all, the author developed a plot. Aurora Leigh, daughter of an English father and an Italian mother, was transferred from Italy to England when as a child she was left an orphan. Under the strict care of her father's spinster sister, she lived in rural England, loving nature and books, but fiercely opposed to becoming a proper Victorian young lady. Having refused to marry her cousin Romney, heir to the Leigh estate, because she found him too laggard a lover, too absorbed in philanthropic projects, she went to London, and there in an incredibly short time achieved success in literature. One day she was visited by Lady Waldemar and told that Romney was about to marry, out of humanitarian motives, a daughter of the people, Marian Earle, a mésalliance for various reasons, but opposed by Lady Waldemar because she was seeking to marry him herself. Rapidly events marched. Aurora made very friendly overtures to Marian, the wedding day arrived, but no bride came to church to wed magnanimous Romney. During the following months Aurora sought tirelessly for Marian and at last discovered the fugitive in Paris supporting herself and her, nameless, son. The story of Marian's flight because of Lady Waldemar's jealous and unscrupulous interference; the account of her being drugged and betrayed, victim of greed and lust; the recital of her efforts to find work for herself before and after the child's birth; the brief suggestion of her sufferings at the hands of employers who penalized her for her misfortune, occupy many spirited and sympathetic pages. Aurora carried Marian and the child to Florence where all three were happily established in a villa on the hillside. Meanwhile Romney solaced himself by supervising the work of conducting Leigh Hall, his ancestral home, as a retreat for poverty-stricken and otherwise wretched men and women of the lower classes, initiating thus an experiment after the ideas of certain French socialists. It is evident, though not a very effectively managed element of the story, that Aurora had always loved Romney, therefore, when he appeared in her garden in Florence on a beautiful summer evening, readers are not surprised to discover that after two books of ardent argument between Romney and Aurora, regarding social problems and their own personal problems, the two confessed their love, but not before Romney had in knightly fashion offered to wed Marian Earle. She, intuitively aware of Aurora's feeling for Romney, sacrificed her own happiness. The conclusion came when Romney, just before his departure, revealed the fact that he had lost his sight as a consequence of the fire which destroyed Leigh Hall, and Aurora with a passionate access of tenderness dedicated herself to him. The poem ends in a symbolic dawn in which the true Aurora is seen at last.

The story is a readable and fairly well-sustained narrative, though delayed by frequent digressions on artistic or social topics. Told in the form of an autobiography, with some elements that are obviously drawn from Mrs. Browning's own life, this would-be novel has not sufficient projection and artistic escape from the author's controlling hand; she did not show adequate skill in developing either situation or characters. Moreover, the plot has a tendency toward melodrama in its exaggeration of both good and evil and in the suddenness of certain events. Thus, the death of Aurora's aunt, the quick success of Aurora the author, the extreme perfidy of Lady Waldemar, the unnecessary blinding of Romney undermine the naturalness of the tale.

However, if digressions and over-stimulation take turns in bewildering the seeker for a story, they are balanced for the more tolerant reader by elements that do not appear in some excellent narratives. A turn for epigram, sometimes philosophical truth, sometimes a satiric thrust, gives Aurora Leigh a challenging tone. There is an almost constant liveliness, a play of humor in the poem giving it a lightness of touch which redeems the work from being a novel with a purpose. Mrs. Browning had read to good purpose Dryden, Pope, Byron, the best of Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, and, early in her life, Piers Plowman, because of her residence in the Malvern Hills. Her instinctive humor, developed and trained by her reading, served as an effective aid in Aurora Leigh. Mrs. Browning's humor has been too much ignored in the solemn efforts to appreciate her sensibility and her spirituelle exaltation. She has been sentimentalized as a spectacle, on her invalid's couch; her dog, her husband, her son, have been made melodramatic properties, and she has been robbed of her real personality and vigor. Few letters of the nineteenth century are comparable with hers in lambent flashing appreciation of little incongruities, such shrewd and piercing thrusts at weakness, or hypocrisy, or mistaken opinion. Her letters to Robert Browning are delightfully full of little flippancies and tart, well-directed shafts at books or persons deserving a bit of ridicule. And many of the more personal passages have playful, teasing elements, passages which show how a poetess in love may be whimsical, tender, irreverent, and bewildering to her more ceremonious and intensely serious lover.

Almost every page of Aurora Leigh gleams with some humorously turned comment, some piquant phrase, some pointed satire, charmingly urbane. The smugness of the Victorian, or, as she dubbed it, "the Pewter Age," is exposed, and illusions of various sorts are mercilessly pilloried in a neat style. Detached samples of her humor will serve no purpose, for it is always the context which sets off the flash, but one or two specimens will serve, such as the gibe at Romney's preö ccupation with the lower classes:

Had I any chance
With Mister Leigh, who am Lady Waldemar
And never committed felony?

or, more objectively:

The world's male chivalry has perished out,
But women are knights-errant to the last;
And if Cervantes had been Shakespeare too,
He had made his Don a Donna.

or a brief generalization:

Humility's so good
When pride's impossible.

or an ironic thrust at vague idealists:

Recipes for .... ..
.... ..acting heroism without a scratch. . . . .

or, even more pictorially:

He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf,
To keep them at the grand millennial height,
He has to mount a stool to get at them.

Contrasted with her playful humor, the overflow of her own happy, full, and thoughtful days in Florence, is the high stern note of an idealism, artistic, social, religious. A certain sympathy with the mood of Victorian Evangelicalism turned her into a presumptive teacher and preacher. In a letter to Ruskin about Miss Mitford, Mrs. Browning wrote, November, 1855:

She never taught me anything but a very limited admiration of Miss Austen, whose people struck me as wanting souls, even more than is necessary for men and women of the world. The novels are perfect as far as they go—that's certain. Only they don't go far enough, I think. It may be my fault.

There is perhaps too much soul in Aurora Leigh, too much accent on abstract issues when more concrete details are needed for the reader's imagination to work upon, if he is to get pleasure in a work of fiction.

There is abundant concreteness of detail in the setting of the poem, for Mrs. Browning's acquaintance with England, Italy, and France were such as to make it possible for her to place her story in scenes faithfully described,—rural England and London, Paris, Northern Italy, and Florence. The following passage, describing the approach to Genoa, by sea, shows the nature artist's power in word and phrase and image, catching the very look of the Italian shore, in a description, charming and memorable:

Peak pushing peak
They stood. I watched, beyond that Tyrian belt
Of intense sea betwixt them and the ship,
Down all their sides the misty olive-woods
Dissolving in the weak, congenial moon,
And still disclosing some brown convent-tower
That seems as if it grew from some brown rock,
Or many a little lighted village, dropt
Like a fallen star upon so high a point,
You wonder what can keep it in its place
From sliding headlong with the waterfalls
Which powder all the myrtle and orange groves
With spray of silver. Thus my Italy
Was stealing on us. Genoa broke with day,
The Doria's long pale palace striking out,
From green hills in advance of the white town,
A marble finger dominant to ships,
Seen glimmering through the uncertain grey of dawn.

The better known description of the Florentine villa,in part Villa Briochion on Bellosguardo, where Isa Blagden, the Brownings' friend, lived, need not be quoted in full, though a few lines demand acknowledgment—such as the vignette of Florence, seen from Bellosguardo:

I found a house at Florence on the hill
Of Bellosguardo. 'Tis a tower which keeps
A post of double-observation o'er
That valley of Arno (holding as a hand
The outspread city) straight towards Fiesole.
And Mount Morello and the setting sun,
The Vallombrosan mountains opposite,

From the outer wall
Of the garden drops the mystic floating grey
Of olive trees (with interruptions green
From maize and vine), until 'tis caught and torn
Upon the abrupt black line of cypresses
Which signs the way to Florence. Beautiful
The city lies 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.

The setting is made very real, both in locale and in general conditions of social background, adding to the realism of the dramatis personae. The author pictured Victorian life in the drawing-room, in the studio, in the slums of London, and in the beautiful Florentine villa; we see class distinctions and prejudices sharply contrasted, we hear the soft drawl of the sophisticated gentleman as well as the harsh voice of poverty and squalor. Moreover, she presented both sides of the Victorian era, emphasizing its humanitarianism, its simplicity, its essential efforts after justice and happiness for all, its untiring zeal for finding truth in science and religion; but she also exposed the irresponsibility of many well-fed, over-dressed persons, inclined to fatuous trust in a Providence that had, for all time, created a distinction between rich and poor, a Providence that relieves the pious from any need of struggle to defeat chaos and chance in economic life.

Mrs. Browning was essentially a Romantic, and also, hers was one of the clearest voices crying out in the second half of the nineteenth century for liberty, equality, and fraternity, continuing and echoing strains she had heard in the works of the great Revolutionary poets. But her special plea was for the liberty of women, a plea particularized in the histories of Aurora Leigh and Marian Earle who from different classes of society, one the leader, the other, led, illustrate many (but not all!) of Mrs. Browning's doctrines in regard to women's rights, women's duties, women's sufferings, and women's potential capabilities. This passionate desire for the liberation of womankind and the equally passionate sympathy with victims of injustice and tyranny must have been defined very early in Mrs. Browning's life, or she would not have chosen, from all the Greek tragedies, Prometheus Bound, for translation. Here in the work of Æschylus, she found portrayed two chief figures who illustrate the bitterness and almost helpless pain of bondage and persecution,—Prometheus and Io. Io is one of the most interesting characters in Greek myth, the prototype of helpless womanhood victimized by masculine power. Is there not a direct relationship between Marian Earle's fate and wanderings and Io's? The innocence, the helplessness, the prolonged and bitter suffering of Marian Earle, treacherously betrayed through the greed of Lady Waldemar's maid-servant to "carniverous" man, are depicted by a courageous, sympathetic woman, a champion of the defenceless. Moreover, Mrs. Browning lived in an era when gifted women were winning high regard. Not only Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Staël, and George Sand, pioneers, but lesser persons well-known and admired by her: Miss Mitford, with whom Mrs. Browning had been long associated in an intimate friendship; Mrs. Jameson, the "Mona Nina" addressed in many letters; Harriet Martineau, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Hosmer, sculptress; Fanny Kemble, the actress, Mrs. Siddon's niece; Frances Power Cobbe, social reformer, and, slightly, Florence Nightingale.

With high-hearted enthusiasm and genuine knowledge of her subject Mrs. Browning portrayed Aurora Leigh, succeeding in that portrait much better than in those of the other dramatis personae of the poem. The girl, Aurora, ardent, generous, intellectual, and painfully lonely, rebelled against her conventional aunt's efforts to instil into the young mind the ideals proper for a Victorian woman, namely, a weak and timid view of life, a deference to rank and money, a distinctly "fugitive and cloistered virtue," and an acquiescent will. Bent on self-expression, eager for life and for the world of ideal values, she found expression and satisfaction in Art, spurning marriage as proposed by Romney and interpreted by her Aunt. She pictured wifehood in lurid colors, but, fortunately for her, only in soliloquy!

Love, to him, was made
A simple law-clause. If I married him.
I should not dare to call my soul my own
Which so he had bought and paid for: every thought
And every heart-beat down there in the bill;
Not one found honestly deductible
From any use that pleased him! He might cut
My body into coins to give away
Among his other paupers; change my sons,
While I stood dumb as Griseld, for black babes
Or piteous foundlings; might unquestioned set
My right hand teaching in the Ragged Schools,
My left hand washing in the Public Baths,
What time my angel of the Ideal stretched
Both his to me in vain.

Certain dangers, certain tendencies in the feminine attitude towards life are suggested in one early debate between Aurora and Romney, when Romney's spontaneous scepticism about her "art" is an irritant to the ambitious and self-confident Aurora. With a frankness almost suicidal in a writer, Mrs. Browning expounds the fact that women, as artists, and as individuals, take things too personally, lack the generous objectivity of the large, free, tolerant and genuinely artistic imagination:

The human race
To you means, such a child, or such a man,
You saw one morning waiting in the cold,
Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up
A few such cases, and when strong sometimes
Will write of factories and of slaves, as if
Your father were a negro, and your son
A spinner in the mills. All's yours and you,
All, colored with your blood, or otherwise
Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard
To general suffering.

It is obvious that Aurora's compassion for Marian Earle is in part prompted by the unrealized, unconfessed love of Aurora for Romney, though unselfish, untiring energy are shown in Aurora's search for the lost Marian, and in Aurora's beautiful and successful efforts to atone to Marian for evils wrought by the lustful cruelty of man, by the indifference of society to such outrages, and by persecution on the part of self-righteous virtue. Little by little Aurora approaches a state where she begins to reject worldly, egotistical success, and dreams of life made perfect by love.

The portrait of Romney is not as vivid as is that of Aurora; it is too earnest a tract. We see him unquestionably kind, wholly virtuous, intelligent, and almost mechanically self-sacrificing. But like the characters in the dramas of Joanna Baillie (regarded by Mrs. Browning "as the first female poet in all senses in England"), Romney is characterized too entirely by one "passion,"—philanthropy. He is a sort of humanitarian chimera, bloodless, it would seem, and one wonders why Lady Waldemar sought his love:

Have you heard of Romney Leigh,
Beyond what's said of him in newspapers,
His phalansteries there, his speeches here,
His pamphlets, pleas, and statements, everywhere?

Beginning badly in his too abstract wooing of Aurora, he went on to worse by planning a marriage with Marian Earle, based on a desire to solve a social problem rather than on a legitimate desire for love and congenial companionship. But he had courage, stubborn tenacity of purpose, for in this project of marriage he defied a society with deep-rooted, archaic ideas regarding the inviolability of class. When, after her tragedy, he again asked Marian to marry him he was sincerely performing an atonement to one of the many victims of evil, ground down to tragedy by misfortunes of birth, economic forces, and the brutal rapacity of certain individuals.

Founding a "phalanstery" in Leigh Hall, he tested theories promulgated in France and in England by philosophical socialists. In the middle of that century there was much study of the doctrines of Fourier, Comte, Proudhon, Le Blanc, and Cabet. Romney's hostelry was modeled after Fourier's phalanstère, founded in 1830, at Condé-sur-Vire. A phalanstère, technically the residence of a phalange or about 1,800 persons, was "to include all aspects of human capacity, to give life either common or solitary." This institution was planned by a "thinker" who recognized in man "twelve radical passions out of whose free play harmony would be educed." Romney, however, gathered together poor and broken spirits suffering from various forms of ignorance and sin, and he regulated his establishment by autocratic fiat, seeking to coerce his men and women to redemption and happiness. By "trying to do good without the church or even the squire" he offended the county; the peasants were vaguely displeased by his innovations and by his reception of London thieves and dissolutes. Finally between the peasants and the joyous help of the ungrateful inmates of the phalanstery Leigh Hall was set on fire and thoroughly destroyed.

The fire which ended this social experiment brought a blinding flash of light to Romney, showing him how priggish and arbitrary he had been, in a situation where only the brotherhood and humor of a Saint Francis could really prevail. The story was slowly unfolded, in that Florentine garden, by Romney who, with caustic irony, at his own expense, exposed his futile efforts to predate the millennium, bestowing liberty, equality, fraternity, soup, and virtue by a careful schedule. His terse summary and neat anti-climax in the following verses, present in miniature the fine ideals and the faulty methods of his program:

So much he has to teach! so good a world!
The same the whole creation's groaning for!
No rich nor poor, no gain nor loss nor stint;
No pottage in it able to exclude
A brother's birthright, and no right of birth
The pottage—both secured to every man,
And perfect virtue dealt out like the rest
Gratuitously, with the soup at six,
To whoso does not seek it.

Relentlessly he pointed out the poetic justice which rewarded his patronizing, theoretical, yet autocratic methods:

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.

In a debate, growing more and more dramatic, drawing more and more to harmony of opinion, these two persons, Aurora and Romney, discussed the causes of his failure and, inclusively, the failures of many socialistic theories, fashioning a somewhat Platonic dialogue, in which Mrs. Browning had a chance to express her ideas on certain social problems. Romney, penitent, satirized the materialism, the mechanical and mathematical program to which he had subscribed:

We talk by aggregates,
And think by systems, and, being used to face
Our evils in statistics, are inclined
To cap them with unreal remedies
Drawn out in haste on the other side of the slate.

Aurora added:

If we give,
Our cup of water is not tendered till
We lay down pipes and found a Company
With Branches.

The conclusion reached by Romney was that:

. . . men who work can only work for men,
And, not to work in vain, must comprehend
Humanity and so work humanly,
And raise men's bodies still by raising souls,
As God did first.

Romney stands for many good men and women of the Age, who had inherited Rousseau's doctrines regarding Return to Nature, innate virtue, instinctive love, and good will, but who had failed to understand Rousseau's plea for individualism. These people expected to see evil traits translated into virtue by waving the magician's wand called "good will." Romney found to his surprise and pain that the passions of the crafty, mean, and cruel have a terrible tenacity. Aurora, the artist, had been wiser than he, and had warned him long before, against externalism in reforms:

I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet's individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul
To move a body: It takes a high-souled man
To move the masses, even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's breadth off
The dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.

Shaken by his failure, sardonically distrustful of the single individual's effort, Romney tended to lapse into a sort oflaissez-faire mood:

I stood myself there worthier of contempt,
Self-rated in disastrous arrogance,
As competent to sorrow for mankind,
And even their odds. A man may well despair,
Who counts himself so needful to success.

To this Aurora:

And yet take heed, I answered, lest we lean
Too dangerously on the other side,
And so fail twice. Be sure, no earnest work
Of any honest creature, however weak,
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much,
It is not gathered as a grain of sand
To enlarge the sum of human action used
For carrying out God's end. No creature works
So ill, observe, that therefore he's cashiered.

Later, in a happy mood, Romney formulated his new faith:

Fewer programmes, we who have no prescience.
Fewer systems, we who are held and do not hold.
Less mapping out of masses to be saved,
By nations or by sexes. Fourier's void,
And Comte absurd, and Cabet, puerile.
Subsist no rules of life outside of life,
No perfect manners, without Christian souls;
The Christ Himself had been no Lawgiver
Unless he had given the life, too, with the law.

But Aurora added one deeper idea, growth through love:

The man, most man,
Works best for men, and, if most man indeed,
He gets his manhood plainest from his soul:
While obviously this stringent soul itself
Obeys the old law of development,
The Spirit ever witnessing in ours,
And Love, the soul of soul, within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely.

This pronouncement of Aurora is the key to Mrs. Browning's belief, and is the theme of the poem,—growth through love, a doctrine enunciated by many thinkers, especially by Plato, Christ, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Browning, inParacelsus. Stead-fastly holding to this doctrine she had tested by it certain modern schemes and found them wanting. Reading, pondering and often discussing with her husband the progress of various moderns she had arrived at very clear cut judgments regarding Socialism. Her Letters offer keen comments on the subject. About 1850, she wrote to Isa Blagden (Letters, I: 467):

Christian Socialists are by no means a new sect, the Moravians representing the theory with as little offence and absurdity as may be. What is it, after all, but an out-of-door extension of the monastic system? The religious principle, more or less apprehended, may bind men together so, absorbing their individualities, and presenting an aim beyond the world; but upon merely human and earthly principles no system can stand, I feel persuaded, and I thank God for it. If Fourierism could be realized (which it surely cannot) out of a dream, the destinies of our race would shrivel up under the unnatural heat, and human nature would, to my mind, be desecrated and dishonored—because I do not believe in purification without suffering, in progress without struggle, in virtue without temptation. Least of all do I consider happiness the end of man's life. We look to higher things, have nobler ambitions.

Also, in every advancement of the world hitherto, the individual has led the masses. Thus, to elicit individuality has been the object of the best political institutions and governments. Now, in these new theories, the individual is ground down to the multitude, and society must be "moving all together if it moves at all"—restricting the very possibility of progress by the use of the lights of genius. Genius is always individual.

Possibly her stand was based somewhat upon Margaret Fuller's reports of the failure of the American experiment at Brook Farm, for it was in 1848 and 1849 that Margaret Fuller, after her marriage to Count D'Ossoli, saw much of the Brownings. In 1852 Mrs. Browning wrote to Mrs. Martin:(Letters, II: 61):

As for the socialists, I quite agree with you that various of them, yes, and some of their chief men, are full of pure and noble aspiration, the most virtuous of men, the most benevolent. Still, they hold in their hands, in their clean hands, ideas that kill, ideas which defile, ideas which, if carried out, would be the worst and most crushing kind of despotism. I would rather live under the feet of the Czar than in those stages of perfectibility imagined by Fourier and Cabet, if I might choose my "pis aller"! All these speculators (even Louis Blanc, who is one of the most rational) would revolutionize, not merely countries, but the elemental conditions of humanity, it seems to me; none of them seeing that antagonism is necessary to all progress. A man in walking, must set one foot before another, and in climbing (as Dante observed long ago) the foot behind "é sempre il piu basso." Only the gods (Plato tells us) keep both feet joined together in moving onward. It is not so, and cannot be so, with men.

Mrs. Browning's conception of good included liberty for the masses as well as for the classes, not merely political enfranchisement but the liberty to grow through individual effort, error, blunder. What Mrs. Browning thought important for the future of the race is,—freedom from the consciousness of being directed, supervised from above, in a fashion which implied authority rather than persuasion, suggestion, guidance. Leaders she did believe in, most certainly, but such leaders as will coö perate, not coerce. Progress comes through strange, miserable, passionate experience, often through mistakes, or through a driving need for understanding; there must be some lure held out to each person, some desire awakened, some power quickened, some motive crystallized whereby self activity may be stirred to more and more complete self-guidance.

Her attitude towards these social questions is an application of Mrs. Browning's theory of Art, involving her philosophy of the beautiful, whether in specific creation of poem or painting, or in the harmonies achieved by human souls in their mortal lives. There are many discussions short and long in Aurora Leigh regarding art, all of which help us to understand better her conceptions of "the principle of beauty," her idealistic faith that in life as in art man can

feel

The spiritual significance burn through
The hieroglyphic of material shows.

The following quotation summarizes very well the composite nature of her sources, and enunciates her ideas regarding the origin, the method, the purpose, and the influence of poetry as one of the several arts. Aristotle and Plato, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley are surely remembered here:

Art's the witness of what is
Behind this show. If this world's show were all,
Then imitation would be all in art;
There, Jove's hand gripes us!—For we stand here, we,
—If genuine artists, witnessing for God's
Complete, consummate, undivided work;
—That every natural flower which grows on earth
Implies a flower upon the spiritual side,
Substantial, archetypal, all a-glow
With blossoming causes,—not so far away,
But we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared,

May catch at something of the bloom and breath,—
Too vaguely apprehended, though indeed
Still apprehended, consciously or not,
And still transferred to picture, music, verse,
For thrilling audient and beholding souls
By signs and touches which are known to souls.

Social science should be an art, and the construction of a social cosmos should be an imaginative achievement, a harmony. In the passage by this "memorable lady" referred to in Meredith's sonnet, The World's Advance, she had made Aurora say:

What is art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art's life,—and where we live, we suffer and toil.

Among the influences noted in Aurora Leigh three seem to be of chief importance: Madame de Staël, George Sand, Robert Browning, influences affecting both thought and form. Little has been said regarding Madame de Staël's place in Mrs. Browning's pantheon. Surely this cosmopolitan woman's life and prestige affected the portrait of Aurora, and the novel Corinne seems to have contributed to the plot. Corinne half English and half Italian was born in Italy and brought up by an Aunt, until Corinne was taken to England to spend a lonely girlhood under the guardianship of a frigid unsympathetic English step-mother. Escaping at length, Corinne went to Italy where she became famous as an improvisatrice, possessing brilliant poetic gifts, scholarship, and great personal charm. By her beauty she won the love of Lord Nevil, a cold English noble. Though Aurora Leigh is the most decorous of rebels she seems to be kin to the intense Corinne whose letter (Book XIV) to Lord Nevil has some interesting ideas in common with Aurora. Between Romney and Albert, the hero of George Sand's Consuelo and The Countess of Rudolstadt there are some parallels, also, for the two men are similar in their priggish virtue, in their absorbed devotion to humanitarian causes, in their inability to take life joyously. Both are deeply concerned with schemes carefully thought out for a social Utopia.

More than suggestions for plot and characters came from Madame de Staël and George Sand; certain attitudes and opinions were probably deepened, especially by careful reading of the works of George Sand. I do not know if anyone has suggested that George Sand's name, Aurore Dudevant, may have influenced the christening of Mrs. Browning's ardent heroine, Aurora Leigh. The admiration Mrs. Browning felt for George Sand was of early growth, vividly and often expressed. Two sonnets (1844) as well as various allusions in her letters show her unbounded and daring enthusiasm for the Frenchwoman's gifts. To Mr. Chorley, of The Athenaeum, she wrote, in 1845:

I am more of a latitudinarian in literature than it is generally thought expedient for women to be; and I have that admiration for genius which dear Mr. Kenyon calls my "immoral sympathy with power"; and if Madame Dudevant is not the first female genius of any country or age, I really do not know who is. And then she has certain noblenesses—granting all the evil and "perilous stuff"—noblenesses and royalnesses which make me loyal.

In spite of George Sand's defiance of moral and civil law, Mrs. Browning was able to admire the humanitarian and the artist, and to agree with Matthew Arnold in tribute to George Sand's intense feeling for nature, and for humble life, her passionate plea for greater naturalness and sincerity in social life, her desire for justice, her faith in individualism as opposed to the rule of class or creed. But Robert, less fascinated by the robust, not to say wilful and passionate, woman, had not his wife's tolerance, and some of Mrs. Browning's Letters give playful glimpses of Robert's stiff efforts to be courteous to this lady whose "terrestrial lavendars and supercelestial blues," were symbolically offensive to him. Mrs. Browning, however, far outstripped both George Sand and Madame de Staël in her conception of the depth and potential power of character, in her conception of the fundamental significances of life and death. She has a far steadier, saner, more understandable view of humanity than do these other two women who present too exalted and impossible portraits of feminine character.

The most dominant influence—felt all through the poem in technique of verse as well as in thought and feeling—was, as we know, that of Robert Browning. One or two selected instances may stand for several. Fra Lippo Lippi had expressed the doctrine in the last two verses:

The rising painter, Vincent Carrington,
Whom men judge hardly as bee-bonneted,
Because he holds that, paint a body well,
You paint a soul by implication.

Many lines from Browning come to mind as one reads the following on "success and failure":

All success
Proves partial failure: all advance implies
What's left behind; all triumph, something crushed
At the chariot wheels, all government something wrong.

And rich men make the poor, who curse the rich.

Possibly she recalled in One Word More:

Where the heart lies let the brain lie also;

Life means, be sure,
Both heart and head,—both active, both complete
And both in earnest.

And here is a glowingly frank tribute to her husband, the author of Pippa Passes and of Saul:

"There's nothing great
Nor small," has said a poet of our day,
Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve,
And not be thrown out by the matin's bell:
And truly, I reiterate, nothing's small!
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere.

Inevitably Aurora Leigh (1857) must be paralleled with The Ring and the Book (1868), for each represents its author's most mature thought and art. Both poems have Italian settings, both present the problem of the dependent woman, in one case Marian Earle, in the other, Pompilia, and we see the rescue of each one, her evolution of soul under stress. Romney a highly magnanimous but professional philanthropist is an interesting contrast to Caponsacchi, a priest suddenly become a liberator and a soldier saint. The development of each of these characters out of immaturity into a strong and sensitive understanding of the purpose of life is traced with compelling power. Aurora Leigh herself epitomizes the ideas of Mrs. Browning regarding love and marriage, who draws her romantic tale to a close with a happy marriage. The Ring and the Book is of sterner import, it is a tragedy wherein the chief characters suffer irrevocably, but possess forever, Browning says, the principle of love and life. A deeper knowledge of The Ring and the Book can be gained through study of Aurora Leigh written a dozen years earlier in the complete happiness of the Casa Guidi. The unanimity of thought and feeling between husband and wife is evident, and evident also are the differences in their imaginative power, their conceptions of feeling. Because Mrs. Browning had a more trusting, simpler faith in divine providence she sometimes begs the question regarding evil and sorrow, being able to endure all things, through religious fervor. Browning's faith equally convinced, threw upon man a greater burden of responsibility, and also a greater need of initiative, of speculation and experiment and defiance of convention. An interesting comparison may be made between the Pope's monologue in The Ring and the Book and the dialogue between Aurora and Romney in the last two books of Aurora Leigh.

The following passage, presenting liberal views, social and deeply religious, expresses the philosophy of progress, shared by Elizabeth and Robert Browning:

What height we know not,—but the way we know,
And how by mounting ever, we attain,
And so climb on. It is the hour for souls,
That bodies, leavened by the will and love,
Be lightened to redemption. The world's old,
But the old world waits the time to be renewed,
Toward which, new hearts in individual growth
Must quicken, and increase to multitude
In new dynasties of the race of men;
Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously
New churches, new economies, new laws,
Admitting freedom, new societies
Excluding falsehood: He shall make all new.