Bell’s Laureates II 75this Favourite of the Muses” (8 August 1789). A pattern emerges in
the Oracle not just of puffing Laura Maria, but of positioning her as
an emblem of contemporary cultural refinement. Robinson’s second
contribution as Laura Maria, for instance, is, significantly, a poem
called “To Sir Joshua Reynolds,” an oblique reference to her having
been painted by the leading British portraitist of the eighteenth cen-
tury. The aesthetic values celebrated in this tribute to Reynolds further
demonstrate the branding of the Oracle and the Laura Maria avatar.
Again, Robinson demonstrates her facility performing—this time in
heroic couplets—what Barbauld calls “the felicity of expression, rather
than the fullness of thought.” In other words, Laura Maria’s poetry is
meant to have ambiguities that please rather than perplex. The poem
opens with imagery that suggests the ineffability of Reynolds’ genius,
“whose art can trace / The glowing semblance of exterior grace” (1:
60; 1–2). Robinson is working in a poetics of paradox that is meant
to show her sophisticated appreciation of the complexity of artistic
achievement while mimicking that achievement in verse: Reynolds’
“hand, by genius guided, marks the line / Which stamps perfection
on the form divine” (3–4). In the two pairs of opening couplets,
Robinson provides images of the artist’s impossible delimitation of
the ideal—the “tracing” of a “glowing semblance”; the “marking” of
a line that defines a divine shape. These impossible feats force “blush-
ing Nature” to confess “the power of Art.”
Robinson’s experience as an actress no doubt gave her this acute
cognizance of the relationship between nature and art. Laura Maria,
as I suggest above, is herself a paradox, not so much a character as she
is a metaphor for artistic representation. This reconciliation of the
artificial and the natural happens on the stage when the organic body
of an actor yields to the literary directives of the playwright’s text, as
Robinson knew well. She wrote to her friend John Taylor, a drama
critic himself, that “acting must be the perfection of art; nature, rude
and spontaneous, would but ill describe the passions so as to produce
effect in scenes of fictitious sorrow” (7: 304). Years later, in her final
novel, The Natural Daughter, her heroine Martha Morley attempts
a career as an actress and succeeds because she manages the perfec-
tion of making the artificial seem natural. As Robinson writes, “she
was the thing she seemed, while even the perfection of her art was
Nature” (7: 83). This is the very essence of virtuosity and elegance as
Robinson understood her aesthetic to encompass.
Yet Laura Maria is not a character for Robinson the actress to por-
tray. As an avatar, she is a refraction of Robinson’s actual self. The
issue at the heart of the Laura Maria avatar is, as I have suggested, the
relationship between art and nature and how, in the preceding quote,9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 759780230100251_04_ch02.indd 75 12/28/2010 11:08:27 AM12/28/2010 11:08:27 AM
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