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Title: Browning's Heroines
Author: Mayne, Ethel Colburn
Language: English
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[FRONTISPIECE: Pippa]
BROWNING'S
HEROINES
BY ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE
WITH FRONTISPIECE & DECORATIONS
BY MAXWELL ARMFIELD
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1913
PREFACE
When this book was projected, some one asked, "What is there to say
about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself?"--and the
question, though it could not stay me, did chill momentarily my primal
ardour. Soon, however, the restorative answer presented itself. "If
there were nothing to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said
himself, it would be a bad mark against him." For to _suggest_--to open
magic casements--surely is the office of our artists in every sort:
thus, for them to say all that there is to say about anything is to show
the casement stuck fast, as it were, and themselves battering somewhat
desperately to open it. Saying the things "about" is the other people's
function. It is as if we suddenly saw a princess come out upon her
castle-walls, and hymned that fair emergence, which to herself is
nothing.
+ + + + +
Browning, I think, is "coming back," as stars come back. There has been
the period of obscuration. Seventeen years ago, when the _Yellow Book_
and the _National Observer_ were contending for _les jeunes_, Browning
was, in the more "precious" côterie, king of modern poets. I can
remember the editor of that golden Quarterly reading, declaiming,
quoting, almost breathing, Browning! It was from Henry Harland that this
reader learnt to read _The Ring and the Book_: "Leave out the lawyers
and the Tertium Quid, and all after Guido until the Envoi." It was Henry
Harland who would answer, if one asked him what he was thinking of:
"And thinking too--oh, thinking, if you like,
How utterly dissociated was I. . . ."
--regardless of all aptitude in the allusion, making it simply because
it "burned up in his brain," just as days "struck fierce 'mid many a day
struck calm" were always _his_ days of excitement. . . . A hundred
Browning verses sing themselves around my memories of the flat in
Cromwell Road.
_Misconceptions_ was swung forth with gesture that figured swaying
branches:
"This is a spray the bird clung to. . . ."
You were to notice how the rhythms bent and tossed like boughs in that
first stanza--and to notice, also, how regrettable the second stanza
was. Nor shall I easily let slip the memory of _Apparent Failure_, thus
recited. He would begin at the second verse, the "Doric little Morgue"
verse. You were not to miss the great "phrase" in
"The three men who did most abhor
Their lives in Paris yesterday. . . ."
--but you were to feel, scarce less keenly, the dire descent to bathos
in "So killed themselves." It was almost the show-example, he would tell
you, of Browning's chief defect--over-statement.
"How did it happen, my poor boy?
You wanted to be Bonaparte,
And have the Tuileries for toy,
And could not, so it broke your heart. . . ."
How compassionately he would give that forth! "A screen of glass, you're
thankful for"; "Be quiet, and unclench your fist"; "Poor men God made,
and all for this!"--the phrases (how alert we were for the "phrase" in
those days) would fall grave and vibrant from the voice with its subtle
foreign colouring: you could always infuriate "H. H." by telling him he
had a foreign accent.
Those were Browning days; and now these are, or soon shall be. Two or
three years since, to quote him was, in the opinion of a _Standard_
reviewer, to write yourself down a back-number, as they say. I preserve
the cutting which damns with faint praise some thus antiquated short
stories of 1910. Browning and Wagner were so obsolete! . . . How young
that critic must have been--so young that he had never seen a star
return. Quite differently they come back--or is it quite the same? Soon
we shall be able to judge, for this star is returning, and--oh
wonder!--is trailing clouds of glory of the very newest cut. The stars
always do that, this watcher fancies, and certainly Browning, like the
Jub-jub, was ages ahead of the fashion. His passport for to-day is dated
up to the very hour--for though he could be so many other things
besides, one of his achievements, for us, will prove to have been that
he could be so "ugly." _That_ would not have been reckoned among his
glories in the Yellow Book-room; but the wheel shall come full
circle--we shall be saying all this, one day, the other way round. For,
as Browning consoles, encourages, and warns us by showing in
_Fifine_,[x:1] each age believes--and should believe--that to it alone
the secret of true art has been whispered.
ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE.
FOOTNOTES:
[x:1] I write far from my books, but the passage will be easily found or
recalled.
11 HOLLAND ROAD,
KENSINGTON, W.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PART I
GIRLHOOD
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 3
I. THE GIRL IN "COUNT GISMOND" 15
II. PIPPA PASSES
I. Dawn: Pippa 23
II. Morning: Ottima 36
III. Noon: Phene 51
IV. Evening; Night: The Ending of the Day 67
III. MILDRED TRESHAM 81
IV. BALAUSTION 93
V. POMPILIA 122
PART II
THE GREAT LADY
"MY LAST DUCHESS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS" 165
PART III
THE LOVER
I. LOVERS MEETING 199
II. TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S
I. The Lady in "The Glove" 215
II. Dîs Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron De Nos Jours 224
III. The Laboratory 233
IV. In a Year 237
PART IV
THE WIFE
I. A WOMAN'S LAST WORD 245
II. JAMES LEE'S WIFE 250
I. She Speaks at the Window 254
II. By the Fireside 256
III. In the Doorway 257
IV. Along the Beach 258
V. On the Cliff 261
VI. Reading a Book, under the Cliff 262
VII. Among the Rocks 265
VIII. Beside the Drawing-board 268
IX. On Deck 271
PART V
TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S
I. THE WOMAN UNWON 277
II. THE WOMAN WON 304
PART I
[Illustration: GIRLHOOD]
BROWNING'S HEROINES
INTRODUCTORY
Browning's power of embodying in rhythm the full beauty of girlhood is
unequalled by any other English poet. Heine alone is his peer in this;
but even Heine's imagination dwelt more fondly on the abstract pathos
and purity of a maiden than on her individual gaiety and courage. In
older women, also, these latter qualities were the spells for Browning;
and, with him, a girl sets forth early on her brave career. That is the
just adjective. His girls are as brave as the young knights of other
poets; and in this appreciation of a dauntless gesture in women we see
one of the reasons why he may be called the first "feminist" poet since
Shakespeare. To me, indeed, even Shakespeare's maidens have less of the
peculiar iridescence of their state than Browning's have, and I think
this is because, already in the modern poet's day, girlhood was
beginning to be seen as it had never been seen before--that is, as a
"thing-by-itself." People had perceived--dimly enough, but with eyes
which have since grown clearer-sighted--that there is a stage in woman's
development which ought to be her very own to enjoy, as a man enjoys
_his_ adolescence. This dawning sense is explicit in the earlier verses
of one of Browning's most original utterances, _Evelyn Hope_, which is
the call of a man, many years older, to the mysterious soul of a dead
young girl--
"Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had hardly heard my name;
It was not her time to love; beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir . . ."
Here recognition of the girl's individuality is complete. Not a word in
the stanza hints at Evelyn's possible love for another man. "It was not
her time"; there were quite different joys in life for her. . . . Such a
view is even still something of a novelty, and Browning was the first to
express it thus whole-heartedly. There had been, of course, from all
time the hymning of maiden purity and innocence, but beneath such
celebrations had lurked that predatory instinct which a still more
modern poet has epitomised in a haunting and ambiguous phrase--
"For each man kills the thing he loves."
Thus, even in Shakespeare, the Girl is not so much that transient,
exquisite thing as she is the Woman-in-love; thus, even for Rosalind,
there waits the Emersonian _précis_--
"Whither went the lovely hoyden?
Disappeared in blessèd wife;
Servant to a wooden cradle,
Living in a baby's life."
I confess that this tabloid "story of a woman" has, ever since my first
discovery of it, been a source of anger to me; and I do not think that
such resentment should be reckoned as a manifestation of modern
decadence. The hustling out of sight of that "lovely hoyden" is unworthy
of a poet; poet's eyes should rest longer upon beauty so
irrecoverable--for though the wife and mother be the happiest that ever
was, she can never be a girl again.
In the same way, to me the earliest verses of _Evelyn Hope_ are the
loveliest. As I read on, doubts and questions gather fast--
"But the time will come--at last it will,
When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say)
In the lower earth, in the years long still,
That body and soul so pure and gay?
Why your hair was amber, I shall divine,
And your mouth of your own geranium's red--
And what you would do with me, in fine,
In the new life come in the old one's stead.
I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;
Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope,
Either I missed, or itself missed me:
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!
I loved you, Evelyn, all the while.
My heart seemed full as it could hold?
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.
So, hush--I will give you this leaf to keep:
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand."
* * * * *
Here the average man is revived, the man who can imagine no meaning for
the loveliness of a girl's body and soul but that it shall "do
something" with him. When they meet in the "new life come in the old
one's stead," this is the question he looks forward to asking; and
instinctively, I think, we ask ourselves a different one. _Will_ Evelyn,
on waking, "remember and understand"? Will she not have passed by very
far, in the spirit-world, this unconscious egotist? . . . True, he can
to some extent realise that probability--
"Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, much to forget,
Ere the time be come for taking you."
But Browning has used the wrong word here. She whom the "good stars that
met in her horoscope" had made of "spirit, fire, and dew," must, whether
it be her desire to do so or not, eternally keep part of herself from
the _taking_ of any man. . . . This is a curious lapse in Browning, to
whom women are, in the highest sense of the word, individuals--not
individualists, a less lovable and far more capturable thing. His
heroines are indeed instinct with devotion, but it is devotion that
chooses, not devotion that submits. A world of "gaiety and courage" lies
between the two conceptions--a world, no less, of widened responsibility
and heavier burdens for the devotee. If we compare a Browning heroine
with a Byron one, we shall almost have traversed that new country,
wherein the air grows ever more bracing as we travel onward.
With shrinking and timidity the Browning girl is unacquainted. As
experience grows, these sensations may sadly touch her, but she will not
have been prepared for them; no reason for feeling either had entered
her dream of life. She trusts--
"Trust, that's purer than pearl"--
and how much purer than shrinking! Free from the athletics and the
slang, she is antetype, indeed, of, say, the St. Andrews girl, that
admirable creation of our age; but she soars beyond her sister on the
wings of her more exquisite sensibility, and her deeper restfulness. Not
for her the perpetual pursuit of the india-rubber or the other kinds of
ball; she can conceive of the open air as something better than a place
to play games in. Like Wordsworth's Lucy--
"Hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm,
Of mute insensate things;"
and from such "being" she draws joys more instant and more glancingly
fair than Lucy drew. Among them is the joy of laughter. Of all gifts
that the fulness of time has brought to women, may we not reckon that
almost the best? A woman laughs nowadays, where, before, as an ideal she
smiled, or as a caricature giggled; and I think that the great symphony
of sex has been deepened, heightened wellnigh beyond recognition, by
that confident and delicate wood-note.
* * * * *
"All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:
Breath and bloom, shade and shine--wonder, wealth, and--how far
above them!--
Truth, that's brighter than gem,
Trust, that's purer than pearl--
Brightest truth, purest trust, in the universe, all were for me
In the kiss of one girl."
Nothing there of "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever"! Do
the fortunate girls of to-day get _Summum Bonum_ in their albums (if
they have albums), as we of the past got Kingsley's ineffable pat on the
head? But since even for us to be a girl was bliss, these maidens of a
later day must surely be in paradise. They keep, in the words of our
poet, "much that we resigned"--much, too, that we prized. No girl, in
our day, but dreamed of the lordly lover, and I hazard a guess that the
fantasy persists. It is slower to be realised than even in our own
dream-period, for now it must come through the horn-gate of the maiden's
own judgment. Man has fallen from the self-erected pedestal of
"superiority." He had placed himself badly on it, such as it was--the
pose was ignoble, the balance insecure. One day, he will himself look
back, rejoicing that he is down; and when--or if--he goes up again, it
will be more worthily to stay, since other hands than his own will have
built the pillar, and placed him thereupon. His chief hope of
reinstatement lies in this one, certain fact: No girl will ever thrill
to a lover who cannot answer for her to _A Pearl, A Girl_--
"A simple ring with a single stone,
To the vulgar eye no stone of price:
Whisper the right word, that alone--
Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice,
And lo! you are lord (says an Eastern scroll)
Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole,
Through the power in a pearl.
A woman ('tis I this time that say)
With little the world counts worthy praise,
Utter the true word--out and away
Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze,
Creation's lord, of heaven and earth
Lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth--
Through the love in a girl!"
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be! But observe that
he has to utter the _true_ word.
+ + + + +
This brave and joyous note is the essential Browning, and to me it
supplies an easy explanation for his much-discussed rejection of the
very early poem _Pauline_, for which, despite its manifold beauties, he
never in later life cared at all--more, he wished to suppress it. In
_Pauline_, his deepest sense of woman's spiritual function is falsified.
This might be accounted for by the fact that it was written at
twenty-one, if it were not that at twenty-one most young men are most
"original." Browning, in this as in other things, broke down tradition,
for _Pauline_ is by far the least original of his works in outlook--it
is, indeed, in outlook, of the purest common-place. "It exhibits," says
Mr. Chesterton, "the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general
suggestion that the author is a thousand years old"; and it exhibits too
the entirely un-characteristic mark of a Browning poem, the general
suggestion that the poet has not thought for himself on a subject which
he was, in the issue, almost to make his own--that of the inspiring, as
opposed (for in Browning the antithesis is as marked as that) to the
consoling, power of a beloved woman. From the very first line this
emotional flaccidity is evident--
"Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me--thy soft breast
Shall pant to mine--bend o'er me--thy sweet eyes
And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms
Drawing me to thee--these build up a screen
To shut me in with thee, and from all fear . . ."
And again in the picture of her, lovely to the sense, but, in some
strange fashion, hardly less than nauseating to the mind--
". . . Love looks through--
Whispers--E'en at the last I have her still,
With her delicious eyes as clear as heaven
When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist . . .
How the blood lies upon her cheek, outspread
As thinned by kisses! only in her lips
It wells and pulses like a living thing,
And her neck looks like marble misted o'er
With love-breath--a Pauline from heights above,
Stooping beneath me, looking up--one look
As I might kill her and be loved the more.
So love me--me, Pauline, and nought but me,
Never leave loving! . . ."
Something is there to which not again, not once again, did Browning
stoop; and that something removes, for me, all difficulty in
understanding his rejection, despite its exquisite verbal beauties, of
this work. Moreover, it is interesting to observe the queer
sub-conscious sense of the lover's inferiority betrayed in the prose
note at the end. This is in French, and feigns to be written by Pauline
herself. She is there made to speak of "_mon pauvre ami_." Let any woman
ask herself what that phrase implies, when used by her in speaking of a
lover--"my poor dear friend"! We cannot of course be sure that Browning,
as a man, was versed in this scrap of feminine psychology; but we do
gather with certainty from Pauline's fabled comment that her view of the
confession--for the poem is merely, as Mr. Chesterton says, "the typical
confession of a boy"--was very much less lachrymose than that of _mon
pauvre ami_. Unconsciously, then, here--but in another poem soon to be
discussed, not unconsciously--there sounds the humorous note in regard
to men which dominates so many of women's relations with them. "The big
child"--to some women, as we all know, man presents himself in that
aspect chiefly. Pauline, remarking of her lover's "idea" that it was
perhaps as unintelligible to him as to her, is a tender exponent of this
view; the girl in _Youth and Art_ is gayer and more ironic. Here we have
a woman, successful though (as I read the poem)[12:1] _not_ famous,
recalling to a successful and famous sculptor the days when they lived
opposite one another--she as a young student of singing, he as a budding
statuary--
"We studied hard in our styles,
Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos,
For air looked out on the tiles,
For fun watched each other's windows.
* * * * *
And I--soon managed to find
Weak points in the flower-fence facing,
Was forced to put up a blind
And be safe in my corset-lacing.
* * * * *
No harm! It was not my fault
If you never turned your eyes' tail up
As I shook upon E in alt,
Or ran the chromatic scale up.
* * * * *
Why did you not pinch a flower
In a pellet of clay and fling it?
Why did I not put a power
Of thanks in a look, or sing it?"
* * * * *
I confess that this lyric, except for its penultimate verse, soon to be
quoted, does not seem to me what Mr. Chesterton calls it--"delightful."
Nothing, plainly, did bring these two together; she may have looked
jealously at his models, and he at her piano-tuner (though even this, so
far as "he" is concerned, I question), but they remained uninterested in
one another--and why should they not? When at the end she cries--
"This could but have happened once,
And we missed it, lost it for ever"--
one's impulse surely is (mine is) to ask with some vexation what "this"
was?
"Each life's unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy."
Away from its irritating context, that stanza _is_ delightful; with the
context it is to me wholly meaningless. The boy and girl had not fallen
in love--there is no more to say; and I heartily wish that Browning had
not tried to say it. The whole lyric is based on nothingness, or else on
a self-consciousness peculiarly unappealing. Kate Brown was evidently
quite "safe in her corset-lacing" before she put up a blind. I fear that
this confession of my dislike for _Youth and Art_ is a betrayal of
lacking humour; I can but face it out, and say that unhumorous is
precisely what, despite its levity of manner, rhythm, and rhyme, _Youth
and Art_ seems to my sense. . . . I rejoice that we need not reckon this
Kate among Browning's girls; she is introduced to us as married to her
rich old lord, and queen of _bals-parés_. Thus we may console ourselves
with the hope that life has vulgarised her, and that as a girl she was
far less objectionable than she now represents herself to have been. We
have only to imagine Evelyn Hope putting up a superfluous blind that she
might be safe in her corset-lacing, to sweep the gamut of Kate Brown's
commonness. . . . Let us remove her from a list which now offers us a
figure more definitely and dramatically posed than any of those whom we
have yet considered.
FOOTNOTES:
[12:1] Mr. Chesterton and Mrs. Orr both speak of Kate Brown as having
succeeded in her art. I cannot find any words in the poem which justify
this view. She is "queen at _bals-parés_," and she has married "a rich
old lord," but nothing in either condition predicates the successful
cantatrice.
I
THE GIRL IN "COUNT GISMOND"
It is like a fairy tale, for there are three beautiful princesses, and
the youngest is the heroine. The setting is French--a castle in
Aix-en-Provence; it is the fourteenth century, for tourneys and
hawking-parties are the amusements, and a birthday is celebrated by an
award of crowns to the victors in the lists, when there are ladies in
brave attire, thrones, canopies, false knight and true knight. . . .
Here is the story.
Once upon a time there were three beautiful princesses, and they lived
in a splendid castle. The youngest had neither father nor mother, so she
had come to dwell with her cousins, and they had all been quite happy
together until one day in summer, when there was a great tourney and
prize-giving to celebrate the birthday of the youngest princess. She was
to award the crowns, and her cousins dressed her like a queen for the
ceremony. She was very happy; she laughed and "sang her birthday-song
quite through," while she looked at herself, garlanded with roses, in
the glass before they all three went arm-in-arm down the castle stairs.
The throne and canopy were ready; troops of merry friends had
assembled. These kissed the cheek of the youngest princess, laughing and
calling her queen, and then they helped her to stoop under the canopy,
which was pierced by a long streak of golden sunshine. There, in the
gleam and gloom, she took her seat on the throne. But for all her joy
and pride, there came to her, as she sat there, a great ache of longing
for her dead father and mother; and afterwards she remembered this, and
thought that perhaps if her cousins had guessed that such sorrow was in
her heart, even at her glad moment, they might not have allowed the
thing to happen which did happen.
All eyes were on her, except those of her cousins, which were lowered,
when the moment came for her to stand up and present the victor's crown.
Shy and proud and glad, she stood up, and as she did so, there stalked
forth Count Gauthier--
". . . And he thundered 'Stay!'
And all stayed. 'Bring no crowns, I say!'
'Bring torches! Wind the penance-sheet
About her! Let her shun the chaste,
Or lay herself before their feet!
Shall she whose body I embraced
A night long, queen it in the day?
For Honour's sake no crowns, I say!'"
* * * * *
Some years afterwards she told the story of that birthday to a dear
friend, and when she came to Count Gauthier's accusation, she had to
stop speaking for an instant, because her voice was choked with tears.
Her friend asked her what she had answered, and she replied--
"I? What I answered? As I live
I never fancied such a thing
As answer possible to give;"
--for just as the body is struck dumb, as it were, when some monstrous
engine of torture is directed upon it, so was her soul for one moment.
But only for one moment. For instantly another knight strode out--Count
Gismond. She had never seen him face to face before, but now, so
beholding him, she knew that she was saved. He walked up to Gauthier and
gave him the lie in his throat, then struck him on the mouth with the
back of a hand, so that the blood flowed from it--
". . . North, South,
East, West, I looked. The lie was dead
And damned, and truth stood up instead."
Recalling it now, with her friend Adela, she mused a moment; then said
how her gladdest memory of that hour was that never for an instant had
she felt any doubt of the event.
"God took that on him--I was bid
Watch Gismond for my part: I did.
Did I not watch him while he let
His armourer just brace his greaves,
Rivet his hauberk, on the fret
The while! His foot . . . my memory leaves
No least stamp out, nor how anon
He pulled his ringing gauntlets on."
Before the trumpet's peal had died, the false knight lay, "prone as his
lie," upon the ground; and Gismond flew at him, and drove his sword into
the breast--
"Cleaving till out the truth he clove.
Which done, he dragged him to my feet
And said 'Here die, but end thy breath
In full confession, lest thou fleet
From my first, to God's second death!
Say, hast thou lied?' And, 'I have lied
To God and her,' he said, and died."
Then Gismond knelt and said to her words which even to this dear friend
she could not repeat. She sank on his breast--
"Over my head his arm he flung
Against the world . . ."
--and then and there the two walked forth, amid the shouting multitude,
never more to return. "And so they were married, and lived happy ever
after."
+ + + + +
Gaiety, courage, trust: in this nameless Browning heroine we find the
characteristic marks. On that birthday morning, almost her greatest joy
was in the sense of her cousins' love--
"I thought they loved me, did me grace
To please themselves; 'twas all their deed"
--and never a thought of their jealousy had entered her mind. Both were
beautiful--
". . . Each a queen
By virtue of her brow and breast;
Not needing to be crowned, I mean,
As I do. E'en when I was dressed,
Had either of them spoke, instead
Of glancing sideways with still head!
But no: they let me laugh and sing
My birthday-song quite through . . ."
and so, all trust and gaiety, she had gone down arm-in-arm with them,
and taken her state on the "foolish throne," while everybody applauded
her. Then had come the moment when Gauthier stalked forth; and from the
older mind, now pondering on that infamy, a flash of bitter scorn darts
forth--
"Count Gauthier, when he chose his post,
Chose time and place and company
To suit it . . ."
for with sad experience--"knowledge of the world"--to aid her, she can
see that the whole must have been pre-concerted--
"And doubtlessly ere he could draw
All points to one, he must have schemed!"
* * * * *
Her trust in the swiftly emerging champion and lover is comprehensible
to us of a later day--that, and the joy she feels in watching him
impatiently submit to be armed. Even so might one of us watch and listen
to and keep for ever in memory the stamp of the foot, the sound of the
"ringing gauntlets"--reproduced as that must be for modern maids in some
less heartening music! But, as the tale proceeds, we lose our sense of
sisterhood; we realise that this girl belongs to a different age. When
Gauthier's breast is torn open, when he is dragged to her feet to die,
she knows not any shrinking nor compassion--can apprehend each word in
the dialogue between slayer and slain--can, over the bleeding body,
receive the avowal of his love who but now has killed his fellow-man
like a dog--and, gathered to Gismond's breast, can, unmoved by all
repulsion, feel herself smeared by the dripping sword that hangs beside
him. . . . All this we women of a later day have "resigned"--and I know
not if that word be the right one or the wrong; so many lessons have we
conned since Gismond fought for a slandered maiden. We have learned that
lies refute themselves, that "things come right in the end," that human
life is sacred, that a woman's chastity may be sacred too, but is not
her most inestimable possession--and, if it were, should be "able to
take care of itself." Further doctrines, though not yet fully accepted,
are being passionately taught: such, for example, as that Man--male
Man--is the least protective of animals.
"Over my head his arm he flung
Against the world . . ."
I think we can see the princess, as she spoke those words, aglow and
tremulous like the throbbing fingers in the Northern skies. Well, the
"Northern Lights" recur, in our latitudes, at unexpected moments, at
long intervals; but they do recur.
One thing vexes, yet solaces, me in this tale of Count Gismond. The
Countess, telling Adela the story, has reached the crucial moment of
Gauthier's insult when, choked by tears as we saw, she stops speaking.
While still she struggles with her sob, she sees, at the gate, her
husband with his two boys, and at once is able to go on. She finishes
the tale, prays a perfunctory prayer for Gauthier; then speaks of her
sons, in both of whom, adoring wife that she is, she must declare a
likeness to the father--
"Our elder boy has got the clear
Great brow; tho' when his brother's black
Full eye shows scorn, it . . ."
With that "it" she breaks off; for Gismond has come up to talk with her
and Adela. The first words we hear her speak to that loved husband
are--fibbing words! The broken line is finished thus--
". . . Gismond here?
And have you brought my tercel back?
I just was telling Adela
How many birds it struck since May."
We, who have temporarily lost so many things, have at least gained this
one--that we should not think it necessary to tell that fib. We should
say nothing of what we had been "telling Adela." And some of us,
perhaps, would reject the false rhyme as well as the false words.
II
"PIPPA PASSES"
I. DAWN: PIPPA
The whole of Pippa is emotion. She "passes" alone through the drama,
except for one moment--only indirectly shown us--in which she speaks
with some girls by the way. She does nothing, is nothing, but exquisite
emotion uttering itself in song--quick lyrical outbursts from her joyous
child's heart. The happiness-in-herself which this poor silk-winder
possesses is something deeper than the gaiety of which I earlier spoke.
Gay she can be, and is, but the spell that all unwittingly she
exercises, derives from the profounder depth of which the Eastern poet
thought when he said that "We ourselves are Heaven and Hell." . . .
Innocent but not ignorant, patient, yet capable of a hearty little
grumble at her lot, Pippa is "human to the red-ripe of the heart." She
can threaten fictively her holiday, if it should ill-use her by bringing
rain to spoil her enjoyment; but even this intimidation is of the very
spirit of confiding love, for her threat is that if rain does fall, she
will be sorrowful and depressed, instead of joyous and exhilarated, for
the rest of the year during which she will be bound to her "wearisome
silk-winding, coil on coil." Such a possibility, thinks Pippa's trustful
heart, must surely be enough to cajole the weather into beauty and
serenity.
It is New Year's Day, and sole holiday in all the twelve-month for
silk-winders in the mills of Asolo. An oddly chosen time, one
thinks--the short, cold festival! And it is notable that Browning,
though he acquiesces in the fictive date, yet conveys to us, so
definitely that it must be with intention, the effect of summer weather.
We find ourselves all through imagining mellow warmth and sunshine; nay,
he puts into Pippa's mouth, as she anticipates the treasured outing,
this lovely and assuredly not Janiverian forecast--
"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing. . . ."
Is it not plain from this that his artist's soul rejected the paltry
fact? For "blue" the hours of New Year's Day may be in Italy, but as
"_long_ blue hours" they cannot, even there, be figured. I maintain
that, whatever it may be called, it is really Midsummer's Day on which
Pippa passes from Asolo through Orcana and Possagno, and back to Asolo
again.
+ + + + +
We see her first as she springs out of bed with the dawn's earliest
touch on her "large mean airy chamber" at Asolo[24:1]--the lovely little
town of Northern Italy which Browning loved so well. In that chamber,
made vivid to our imagination by virtue of three consummately placed
adjectives (note the position of "mean"), Pippa prepares for her one
external happiness in the year.
"Oh Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee,
A mite of my twelve hours' treasure,
The least of thy gazes or glances,
* * * * *
One of thy choices or one of thy chances,
* * * * *
--My Day, if I squander such labour or leisure,
Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me!"
I have omitted two lines from this eight-lined stanza, and omitted them
because they illustrate all too forcibly Browning's chief fault as a
lyric--and, in this case, as a dramatic--poet. Both of them are frankly
parenthetic; both parentheses are superfluous; neither has any
incidental beauty to redeem it; and, above all, we may be sure that
Pippa did not think in parentheses. The agility and (it were to follow
an indulgent fashion to add) the "subtlety" of Browning's mind too often
led him into like excesses: I deny the subtlety here, for these clauses
are so wholly uninteresting in thought that even as examples I shall not
cite them. But their crowning distastefulness is in the certitude we
feel that, whatever they had been, they never would have occurred to
this lyrical child. The stanza without them is the stanza as Pippa felt
it. . . . In the same way, the opening rhapsody on dawn which precedes
her invocation to the holiday is out of character--impossible to regard
its lavish and gorgeous images as those (however sub-conscious) of an
unlettered girl.
But all carping is forgotten when we reach
"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing"--
a poet's phrase, it is true, yet in no way incongruous with what we can
imagine Pippa to have thought, if not, certainly, in such lovely diction
to have been able to express. Thenceforward, until the episodical lines
on the Martagon lily, the child and her creator are one. There comes the
darling menace to the holiday--
". . . But thou must treat me not
As prosperous ones are treated . . .
For, Day, my holiday, if thou ill-usest
Me, who am only Pippa--old year's sorrow,
Cast off last night, will come again to-morrow:
Whereas, if thou prove gentle, I shall borrow
Sufficient strength of thee for new-year's sorrow.
All other men and women that this earth
Belongs to, who all days alike possess,
Make general plenty cure particular dearth,[26:1]
Get more joy one way, if another less:
Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven
What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven--
Sole light that helps me through the year, thy sun's!"
Having made her threat and her invocation, she falls to thinking of
those "other men and women," and tells her Day about them, like the
child she is. They, she declares, are "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones." Each
is, in the event, to be vitally influenced by her song, as she "passes"
at Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night; but this she knows not at the
time, nor ever knows.
The first Happy One is "that superb great haughty Ottima," wife of the
old magnate, Luca, who owns the silk-mills. The New Year's morning may
be wet--
". . . Can rain disturb
Her Sebald's homage? all the while thy rain
Beats fiercest on her shrub-house window-pane,
He will but press the closer, breathe more warm
Against her cheek: how should she mind the storm?"
Here we learn what later we are very fully to be shown--that Ottima's
"happiness" is not in her husband.
The second Happy One is Phene, the bride that very day of Jules, the
young French sculptor. They are to come home at noon, and though noon,
like morning, should be wet--
". . . what care bride and groom
Save for their dear selves? 'Tis their marriage day;
* * * * *
Hand clasping hand, within each breast would be
Sunbeams and pleasant weather, spite of thee."
The third Happy One--or Happy Ones, for these two Pippa cannot
separate--are Luigi, the young aristocrat-patriot, and his mother.
Evening is their time, for it is in the dusk that they "commune inside
our turret"--
"The lady and her child, unmatched, forsooth,
She in her age, as Luigi in his youth,
For true content . . ."
Aye--though the evening should be obscured with mist, _they_ will not
grieve--
". . . The cheerful town, warm, close,
And safe, the sooner that thou art morose
Receives them . . ."
That is all the difference bad weather can make to such a pair.
The Fourth Happy One is Monsignor, "that holy and beloved priest," who
is expected this night from Rome,
"To visit Asolo, his brother's home,
And say here masses proper to release
A soul from pain--what storm dares hurt his peace?
Calm would he pray, with his own thoughts to ward
Thy thunder off, nor want the angels' guard."
And now the great Day knows all that the Four Happy Ones possess,
besides its own "blue solemn hours serenely flowing"--for not rain at
morning can hurt Ottima with her Sebald, nor at noon the bridal pair,
nor in the evening Luigi and his mother, nor at night "that holy and
beloved" Bishop . . .
"But Pippa--just one such mischance would spoil
Her day that lightens the next twelvemonth's toil
At wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil."
+ + + + +
All at once she realises that in thus lingering over her toilet, she is
letting some of her precious time slip by for naught, and betakes
herself to washing her face and hands--
"Aha, you foolhardy sunbeam caught
With a single splash from my ewer!
You that would mock the best pursuer,
Was my basin over-deep?
One splash of water ruins you asleep,
And up, up, fleet your brilliant bits.
* * * * *
Now grow together on the ceiling!
That will task your wits."
Here we light on a trait in Browning of which Mr. Chesterton most
happily speaks--his use of "homely and practical images . . . allusions,
bordering on what many would call the commonplace," in which he "is
indeed true to the actual and abiding spirit of love," and by which he
"awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common
and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to
utter." Mr. Chesterton, it is true, speaks of this "astonishing realism"
in relation to Browning's love-poetry, and _Pippa Passes_ is not a
love-poem; but the insight of the comment is no less admirable when we
use it to enhance a passage such as this. Who has not caught the sunbeam
asleep in the mere washhand basin as water was poured out for the mere
daily toilet--and felt that heartening gratitude for the symbol of
captured joy, which made the instant typic and immortal? For these are
the things that all may have, as Pippa had. The ambushing of that beam
and the ordering it, in her sweet wayward imperiousness, to
". . . grow together on the ceiling.
That will task your wits!"
--is one of the most enchanting moments in this lovely poem. The sunbeam
settles by degrees (I wish that she had not been made to term it, with
all too Browningesque agility, "the radiant cripple"), and finally
lights on her Martagon lily, which is a lily with purple flowers. . . .
Here again, for a moment, she ceases to be the lyrical child, and turns
into the Browning (to cite Mr. Chesterton again) to whom Nature really
meant such things as the basket of jelly-fish in _The Englishman in
Italy_, or the stomach-cyst in _Mr. Sludge the Medium_--"the
monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea." To me, these lines on
the purple lily are not only ugly and grotesque--in that kind of
ugliness which "was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a
quite unnecessary luxury, to be enjoyed for its own sake"--but are
monstrously (more than any other instance I can recall) unsuited to the
mind from which they are supposed to come.
"New-blown and ruddy as St. Agnes' nipple,
Plump as the flesh-bunch on some Turk-bird's poll!"
One such example is enough. We have once more been deprived of Pippa,
and got nothing really worth the possession in exchange.
But Pippa is quickly retrieved, with her gleeful claim that _she_ is the
queen of this glowing blossom, for is it not she who has guarded it from
harm? So it may laugh through her window at the tantalised bee (are
there travelling bees in Italy on New-Year's Day? But this is Midsummer
Day!), may tease him as much as it likes, but must
". . . in midst of thy glee,
Love thy Queen, worship me!"
There will be warrant for the worship--
". . . For am I not, this day,
Whate'er I please? What shall I please to-day?
* * * * *
I may fancy all day--and it shall be so--
That I taste of the pleasures, am called by the names,
Of the Happiest Four in our Asolo!"
So, as she winds up her hair (we may fancy), Pippa plays the not yet
relinquished baby-game of Let's-pretend; but is grown-up in this--that
she begins and ends with love, which children give and take
unconsciously.
"Some one shall love me, as the world calls love:
I am no less than Ottima, take warning!
The gardens and the great stone house above,
And other house for shrubs, all glass in front,
Are mine; where Sebald steals, as he is wont,
To court me, while old Luca yet reposes . . ."
But this earliest pretending breaks down quickly. What, after all, is
the sum of those doings in the shrub-house? What would Pippa gain, were
she in truth great haughty Ottima? She would but "give abundant cause
for prate." Ottima, bold, confident, and not fully aware, can face that
out, but Pippa knows, more closely than the woman rich and proud can
know,
"How we talk in the little town below."
So the first dream is over.
"Love, love, love--there's better love, I know!"
--and the next pretending shall "defy the scoffer"; it shall be the love
of Jules and Phene--
"Why should I not be the bride as soon
As Ottima?"
Moreover, last night she had seen the stranger-girl arrive--"if you
call it seeing her," for it had been the merest momentary glimpse--
". . . one flash
Of the pale snow-pure cheek and black bright tresses,
Blacker than all except the black eyelash;
I wonder she contrives those lids no dresses,
So strict was she the veil
Should cover close her pale
Pure cheeks--a bride to look at and scarce touch,
Scarce touch, remember, Jules! For are not such
Used to be tended, flower-like, every feature,
As if one's breath would fray the lily of a creature?
* * * * *
How will she ever grant her Jules a bliss
So startling as her real first infant kiss?
Oh, no--not envy, this!"
For, recalling the virgin dimness of that apparition, the slender gamut
of that exquisite reserve, the little work-girl has a moment's pang of
pity for herself, who has to trip along the streets "all but naked to
the knee."
"Whiteness in us were wonderful indeed,"
she cries, who is pure gold if not pure whiteness, and in an instant
shows herself to be at any rate pure innocence. It could not be envy,
she argues, which pierced her as she thought of that immaculate
girlhood--
". . . for if you gave me
Leave to take or to refuse,
In earnest, do you think I'd choose
That sort of new love to enslave me?
Mine should have lapped me round from the beginning;
As little fear of losing it as winning:
Lovers grow cold, men learn to hate their wives,
And only parents' love can last our lives."
And she turns, thus rejecting the new love, to the "Son and Mother,
gentle pair," who commune at evening in the turret: what prevents her
being Luigi?
"Let me be Luigi! If I only knew
What was my mother's face--my father, too!"
For Pippa has never seen either, knows not who either was, nor whence
each came. And just because, thus ignorant, she cannot truly figure to
herself such love, she now rejects in turn this third pretending--
"Nay, if you come to that, best love of all
Is God's;"
--and she will be Monsignor! To-night he will bless the home of his dead
brother, and God will bless in turn
"That heart which beats, those eyes which mildly burn
With love for all men! I, to-night at least,
Would be that holy and beloved priest."
Now all the weighing of love with love is over; she has chosen, and
already has the proof of having chosen rightly, already seems to share
in God's love, for there comes back to memory an ancient New-Year's
hymn--
"All service ranks the same with God."
No one can work on this earth except as God wills--
". . . God's puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last or first."
And we must not talk of "small events": none exceeds another in
greatness. . . .
The revelation has come to her. Not Ottima nor Phene, not Luigi and his
mother, not even the holy and beloved priest, ranks higher in God's eyes
than she, the little work-girl--
"I will pass each, and see their happiness,
And envy none--being just as great, no doubt,
Useful to men, and dear to God, as they!"
* * * * *
And so, laughing at herself once more because she cares "so mightily"
for her one day, but still insistent that the sun shall shine, she
sketches her outing--
"Down the grass path grey with dew,
Under the pine-wood, blind with boughs,
Where the swallow never flew,
Nor yet cicala dared carouse,
No, dared carouse--"
But breaks off, breathless, in the singing for which through the whole
region she is famed, leaves the "large mean airy chamber," enters the
little street of Asolo--and begins her Day.
II. MORNING: OTTIMA
In the shrub-house on the hill-side are Ottima, the wife of Luca, and
her German lover, Sebald. He is wildly singing and drinking; to him it
still seems night. But Ottima sees a "blood-red beam through the
shutter's chink," which proves that morning is come. Let him open the
lattice and see! He goes to open it, and no movement can he make but
vexes her, as he gropes his way where the "tall, naked geraniums
straggle"; pushes the lattice, which is behind a frame, so awkwardly
that a shower of dust falls on her; fumbles at the slide-bolt, till she
exclaims that "of course it catches!" At last he succeeds in getting the
window opened, and her only direct acknowledgment is to ask him if she
"shall find him something else to spoil." But this imperious petulance,
curiously as it contrasts with the patience which, a little later, she
will display, is native to Ottima; she is not the victim of her nerves
this morning, though now she passes without transition to a mood of
sensuous cajolement--
"Kiss and be friends, my Sebald! Is't full morning?
Oh, don't speak, then!"
--but Sebald does speak, for in this aversion from the light of day he
recognises a trait of hers which long has troubled him.
With _his_ first words we perceive that "nerves" are uppermost, that
the song and drink of the opening moment were bravado--that Sebald, in
short, is close on a breakdown. He turns upon her with a gibe against
her ever-shuttered windows. Though it is she who now has ordered the
unwelcome light to be admitted, he overlooks this in his enervation, and
says how, before ever they met, he had observed that her windows were
always blind till noon. The rest of the little world of Asolo would be
active in the day's employment; but her house "would ope no eye." "And
wisely," he adds bitterly--
"And wisely; you were plotting one thing there,
Nature, another outside. I looked up--
Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars,
Silent as death, blind in a flood of light;
Oh, I remember!--and the peasants laughed
And said, 'The old man sleeps with the young wife.'
This house was his, this chair, this window--his."
The last line gives us the earliest hint of what has been done: "This
house _was_ his. . . ." But Ottima, whether from scorn of Sebald's
mental disarray, or from genuine callousness, answers this first moan of
anguish not at all. She gazes from the open lattice: "How clear the
morning is--she can see St. Mark's! Padua, blue Padua, is plain enough,
but where lies Vicenza? They shall find it, by following her finger that
points at Padua. . . ."
Sebald cannot emulate this detachment. Morning seems to him "a night
with a sun added"; neither dew nor freshness can he feel; nothing is
altered with this dawn--the plant he bruised in getting through the
lattice last night droops as it did then, and still there shows his
elbow's mark on the dusty sill.
She flashes out one instant. "Oh, shut the lattice, pray!"
No: he will lean forth--
". . . I cannot scent blood here,
Foul as the morn may be."
But his mood shifts quickly as her own--
". . . There, shut the world out!
How do you feel now, Ottima? There, curse
The world and all outside!"
and at last he faces her, literally and figuratively, with a wild appeal
to let the truth stand forth between them--
". . . Let us throw off
This mask: how do you bear yourself? Let's out
With all of it."
But no. Her instinct is never to speak of it, while his drives him to
"speak again and yet again," for only so, he feels, will words "cease to
be more than words." _His blood_, for instance--
". . . let those two words mean 'His blood';
And nothing more. Notice, I'll say them now:
'His blood.' . . ."
She answers with phrases, the things that madden him--she speaks of
"the deed," and at once he breaks out again. _The deed_, and _the
event_, and _their passion's fruit_--
". . . the devil take such cant!
Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol,
I am his cut-throat, you are . . ."
With extraordinary patience, though she there, wearily as it were,
interrupts him, Ottima again puts the question by, and offers him wine.
In doing this, she says something which sends a shiver down the reader's
back--
". . . Here's wine!
_I brought it when we left the house above,
And glasses too--wine of both sorts . . ._"
He takes no notice; he reiterates--
"But am I not his cut-throat? What are you?"
Still with that amazing, that almost beautiful, patience--the quality of
her defect of callousness--Ottima leaves this also without comment. She
gazes now from the closed window, sees a Capuchin monk go by, and makes
some trivial remarks on his immobility at church; then once more offers
Sebald the flask--the "black" (or, as we should say, the "red") wine.
Melodramatic and obvious in all he does and says, Sebald refuses the red
wine: "No, the white--the white!"--then drinks ironically to Ottima's
black eyes. He reminds her how he had sworn that the new year should
not rise on them "the ancient shameful way," nor does it.
"Do you remember last damned New Year's Day?"
* * * * *
The characters now are poised for us--in their national, as well as
their individual, traits. Ottima, an Italian, has the racial
matter-of-factness, callousness, and patience; Sebald, a German, the no
less characteristic sentimentality and emotionalism. Her attitude
remains unchanged until the critical moment; his shifts and sways with
every word and action. No sooner has he drunk the white wine than he can
brutally, for an instant, exult in the thought that Luca is not alive to
fondle Ottima before his face; but with her instant answer (rejoicing as
she does to retrieve the atmosphere which alone is native to her
sense)--
". . . Do you
Fondle me, then! Who means to take your life?"
--a new mood seizes on him. They have "one thing to guard against." They
must not make much of one another; there must be no more parade of love
than there was yesterday; for then it would seem as if he supposed she
needed proofs that he loves her--
". . . yes, still love you, love you,
In spite of Luca and what's come to him."
That would be a sure sign that Luca's "white sneering old reproachful
face" was ever in their thoughts. Yes; they must even quarrel at times,
as if they
". . . still could lose each other, were not tied
By this . . ."
but on her responding cry of "Love!" he shudders back again: _Is_ he so
surely for ever hers?
She, in her stubborn patience, answers by a reminiscence of their early
days of love--
". . . That May morning we two stole
Under the green ascent of sycamores"
--and, thinking to reason with him, asks if, that morning, they had
". . . come upon a thing like that,
Suddenly--"
but he interrupts with his old demand for the true word: she shall not
say "a thing" . . . and at last that marvellous patience gives way, and
in a superb flash of ironic rage she answers him--
"Then, Venus' body! had we come upon
My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse
Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close"
--flinging him the "words" he has whimpered for in full measure, that so
at last she may attain to asking if, that morning, he would have "pored
upon it?" She knows he would not; then why pore upon it now? For him,
it is here, as much as in the deserted house; it is everywhere.
". . . For me
(she goes on),
Now he is dead, I hate him worse: I hate . . .
Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold
His two dead hands, and say, 'I hate you worse,
Luca, than----'"
And in her frenzy of reminiscent hatred and loathing for the murdered
man, she goes to Sebald and takes _his_ hands, as if to feign that other
taking.
With the hysteria that has all along been growing in him, Sebald flings
her back--
". . . Take your hands off mine;
'Tis the hot evening--off! oh, morning, is it?"
--and she, restored to her cooler state by this repulse, and with a
perhaps unconscious moving to some revenge for it, points out, with a
profounder depth of callousness than she has yet displayed, that the
body at the house will have to be taken away and buried--
"Come in and help to carry"--
and with ghastly glee she adds--
". . . We may sleep
Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night."
* * * * *
Now the dialogue sways between her deliberate sensuous allurement of the
man and his deepening horror at what they have done. She winds and
unwinds her hair--was it so that he once liked it? But he cannot look;
he would give her neck and her splendid shoulders, "both those breasts
of yours," if this thing could be undone. It is not the mere
killing--though he would "kill the world so Luca lives again," even to
fondle her as before--but the thought that he has eaten the dead man's
bread, worn his clothes, "felt his money swell my purse." . . . _This_
is the intolerable; "there's a recompense in guilt"--
"One must be venturous and fortunate:--
What is one young for else?"
and thus their passion is justified; but to have killed the man who
rescued him from starvation by letting him teach music to his wife . . .
why--
". . . He gave me
Life, nothing less"--
and if he did reproach the perfidy, "and threaten and do more," had he
no right after all--what was there to wonder at?
"He sat by us at table quietly:
_Why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?_"
In that base blaming of her alone we get the measure of Sebald as at
this hour he is. He turns upon her with a demand to know how she now
"feels for him." Her answer, wherein the whole of her nature (as, again,
at this hour it is) reveals itself--callous but courageous, proud and
passionate, cruel in its utter sensuality, yet with the force and
honesty which attend on all simplicity, good or evil--her answer strikes
a truer note than does anything which Sebald yet has said, or is to say.
She replies that she loves him better now than ever--
"And best (_look at me while I speak to you_)
Best for the crime."
She is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off--
". . . this naked crime of ours
May not now be looked over: look it down."
And were not the joys worth it, great as it is? Would he give up the
past?
"Give up that noon I owned my love for you?"
--and as, in her impassioned revocation of the sultry summer's day, she
brings back to him the very sense of the sun-drenched garden, the man at
last is conquered back to memory. The antiphon of sensual love begins,
goes on--the places, aspects, things, sounds, scents, that waited on
their ecstasy, the fire and consuming force of hers, the passive, no
less lustful, receptivity of his--and culminates in a chant to that
"crowning night" in July (and "the day of it too, Sebald!") when all
life seemed smothered up except their life, and, "buried in woods,"
while "heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat," they lay quiescent,
till the storm came--
"Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead . . ."
--while she, in a frenzy of passion--
". . . stretched myself upon you, hands
To hands, my mouth to your hot mouth, and shook
All my locks loose, and covered you with them--
You, Sebald, the same you!"
But the flame of her is scorching the feeble lover; feebly he pleads,
resists, begs pardon for the harsh words he has given her, yields,
struggles . . . yields again at last, for hers is all the force of body
and of soul: it is his part to be consumed in her--
"I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!
This way? Will you forgive me--be once more
My great queen?"
Glorious in her victory, she demands that the hair which she had loosed
in the moment of recalling their wild joys he now shall bind thrice
about her brow--
"Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent in sin. Say that!"
So she bids him; so he crowns her--
"My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent . . ."
--but ere the exacted phrase is said, there sounds without the voice of
a girl singing.
"The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!"
(_Pippa passes._)
* * * * *
Like her own lark on the wing, she has dropped this song to earth,
unknowing and unheeding where its beauty shall alight; it is the impulse
of her glad sweet heart to carol out its joy--no more. She is passing
the great house of the First Happy One, so soon rejected in her game of
make-believe! If now she could know what part the dream-Pippa might have
taken on herself. . . . But she does not know, and, lingering for a
moment by the step, she bends to pick a pansy-blossom.
The pair in the shrub-house have been arrested in full tide of passion
by her song. It strikes on Sebald with the force of a warning from
above--
"God's in his heaven! Do you hear that? Who spoke?
You, you spoke!"--
but she, contemptuously--
". . . Oh, that little ragged girl!
She must have rested on the step: we give them
But this one holiday the whole year round.
Did you ever see our silk-mills--their inside?
_There are ten silk-mills now belong to you!_"
Enervated by the interruption, she calls sharply to the singer to be
quiet--but Pippa does not hear, and Ottima then orders Sebald to call,
for _his_ voice will be sure to carry.
No: her hour is past. He is ruled now by that voice from heaven.
Terribly he turns upon her--
"Go, get your clothes on--dress those shoulders!
. . . Wipe off that paint! I hate you"--
and as she flashes back her "Miserable!" his hideous repulse sinks to a
yet more hideous contemplation of her--
"My God, and she is emptied of it now!
Outright now!--how miraculously gone
All of the grace--had she not strange grace once?
Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes,
No purpose holds the features up together,
Only the cloven brow and puckered chin
Stay in their places: and the very hair
That seemed to have a sort of life in it,
Drops, a dead web!"
Poignant in its authenticity is her sole, piteous answer--
". . . Speak to me--not of me!"
But he relentlessly pursues the dread analysis of baffled passion's
aspect--
"That round great full-orbed face, where not an angle
Broke the delicious indolence--all broken!"
Once more that cry breaks from her--
"To me--not of me!"
but soon the natural anger against his insolence possesses her; she
whelms him with a torrent of recrimination. Coward and ingrate he is,
beggar, her slave--
". . . a fawning, cringing lie,
A lie that walks and eats and drinks!"
--while he, as in some horrible trance, continues his cold dissection--
". . . My God!
Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades--
I should have known there was no blood beneath!"
For though the heaven-song have pierced him, not yet is Sebald reborn,
not yet can aught of generosity involve him. Still he speaks "of her,
not to her," deaf in the old selfishness and baseness. He can cry, amid
his vivid recognition of another's guilt, that "the little peasant's
voice has righted all again"--can be sure that _he_ knows "which is
better, vice or virtue, purity or lust, nature or trick," and in the
high nobility of such repentance as flings the worst of blame upon the
other one, will grant himself lost, it is true, but "proud to feel such
torments," to "pay the price of his deed" (ready with phrases now, he
also!), as, poor weakling, he stabs himself, leaving his final word to
her who had been for him all that she as yet knew how to be, in--
"I hate, hate--curse you! God's in his heaven!"
* * * * *
Now, at this crisis, we are fully shown what, in despite of other
commentators,[49:1] I am convinced that Browning meant us to perceive
from the first--that Ottima's is the nobler spirit of the two. Her lover
has stabbed himself, but she, not yet realising it, flings herself upon
him, wrests the dagger--
". . . Me!
Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself--kill me!
Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me--then
Yourself--then--presently--first hear me speak!
I always meant to kill myself--wait, you!
_Lean on my breast--not as a breast; don't love me
The more because you lean on me, my own
Heart's Sebald!_ There, there, both deaths presently!"
* * * * *
Here at last is the whole woman. "Lean on my breast--not as a breast";
"Mine is the whole crime"; "I always meant to kill myself--wait, you!"
She will relinquish even her sense of womanhood; no word of blame for
him; she would die, that he might live forgetting her, but it is too
late for that, so "There, there, both deaths presently." . . . And now
let us read again the lamentable dying words of Sebald. It is even more
than I have said: not only are we meant to understand that Ottima's is
the nobler spirit, but (I think) that not alone the passing of Pippa
with her song has drawn this wealth of beauty from the broken woman's
soul. Always it was there; it needed but the loved one's need to pour
itself before him. "There, there, both deaths presently"--and in the
dying, each is again revealed. He, all self--
"_My_ brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all _I_ feel"
--and so on; while her sole utterance is--
"Not me--to him, O God, be merciful!"
Pippa's song has, doubtlessly, saved them both, but Sebald as by direct
intervention, Ottima as by the revelation of her truest self. Again, and
yet again and again, we shall find in Browning this passion for "the
courage of the deed"; and we shall find that courage oftenest assigned
to women. For him, it was wellnigh the cardinal virtue to be brave--not
always, as in Ottima, by the help of a native callousness, but assuredly
always, as in her and in the far dearer women, by the help of an
instinctive love for truth--
"Truth is the strong thing--let man's life be true!"
Ottima's and Sebald's lives have not been "true"; but she, who can
accept the retribution and feel no faintest impulse to blame and wound
her lover--_she_ can rise, must rise, to heights forbidden the lame
wings of him who, in his anguish, can turn and strike the
fellow-creature who has but partnered him in sin. Only Pippa, passing,
could in that hour save Sebald; but by the tenderness which underlay her
fierce and lustful passion, and which, in any later relation, some other
need of the man must infallibly have called forth, Ottima would, I
believe, without Pippa have saved herself. _Direct intervention_: not
every soul needs that. And--whether it be intentional or not, I feel
unable to decide, nor does it lose, but rather gain, in interest, if it
be unintentional--one of the most remarkable things in this remarkable
artistic experiment, this drama in which the scenes "have in common only
the appearance of one figure," is that by each of the Four Passings of
Pippa, a man's is the soul rescued.
III. NOON: PHENE
A group of art-students is assembled at Orcana, opposite the house of
Jules, a young French sculptor, who to-day at noon brings home his
bride--that second Happiest One, the pale and shrouded beauty whom Pippa
had seen alight at Asolo, and had envied for her immaculate girlhood.
Very eagerly the youths are awaiting this arrival; there are seven,
including Schramm, the pipe-smoking mystic, and Gottlieb, a new-comer to
the group, who hears the reason for their excitement, and
tender-hearted and imaginative as he is, provides the human element amid
the theorising of Schramm, the flippancy of most of the rest, and the
fiendish malice of the painter, Lutwyche, who has a grudge against
Jules, because Jules (he has been told) had described him and his
intimates as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Very soon
after the bridal pair shall have alighted and gone in (so Lutwyche tells
Gottlieb), something remarkable will happen; it is this which they are
awaiting--Lutwyche, as the moving spirit, close under the window of the
studio, that he may lose no word of the anticipated drama. But they must
all keep well within call; everybody may be needed.
At noon the married pair arrive--the bridegroom radiant, his hair "half
in storm and half in calm--patted down over the left temple--like a
frothy cup one blows on to cool it; and the same old blouse that he
murders the marble in."[52:1] The bride is--"how magnificently pale!"
Most of these young men have seen her before, and always it has been her
pallor which has struck them, as it struck Pippa on seeing her alight at
Asolo. She is a Greek girl from Malamocco,[52:2] fourteen years old at
most, "white and quiet as an apparition," with "hair like sea-moss"; her
name is Phene, which, as Lutwyche explains, means sea-eagle. . . . "How
magnificently pale"--and how Jules gazes on her! To Gottlieb that gaze
of the young, rapturous husband is torture. "Pity--pity!" he
exclaims--but he alone of them all is moved to this: Schramm, ever ready
with his theories of mysticism and beauty and the immortal idealism of
the soul, is unconcerned with practice--theories and his pipe bound all
for Schramm; while Lutwyche is close-set as any predatory beast upon his
prey; and the rank and file are but the foolish, heartless boys of all
time, all place, the "students," mere and transient, who may turn into
decent men as they grow older.
Well, they pass in, the bridegroom and his snowflake bride, and we pass
in with them--but not, like them, forget the group that lurked and
loitered about the house as they arrived.
+ + + + +
The girl is silent as she is pale, and she is so pale that the first
words her husband speaks are as the utterance of a fear awakened by her
aspect--
"Do not die, Phene! I am yours now, you
Are mine now; let fate reach me how she likes,
If you'll not die: so, never die!"
He leads her to the one seat in his workroom, then bends over her in
worshipping love, while she, still speechless, lifts her white face
slowly to him. He lays his own upon it for an instant, then draws back
to gaze again, while she still looks into his eyes, until he feels that
her soul is drawing his to such communion that--
". . . I could
Change into you, beloved! You by me,
And I by you; this is your hand in mine,
And side by side we sit: all's true. Thank God!"
But her silence is unbroken, and now he needs her voice--
"I have spoken: speak you!"
--yet though he thus claims her utterance, his own bliss drives him
onward in eager speech. "O my life to come"--the life with her . . . and
yet, how shall he work!
"Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth--
The live truth, passing and re-passing me,
Sitting beside me?"
Still she is silent; he cries again "Now speak!"--but in a new access of
joy accepts again that silence, for she must see the hiding-place he had
contrived for her letters--in the fold of his Psyche's robe, "next her
skin"; and now, which of them all will drop out first?
"Ah--this that swam down like a first moonbeam
Into my world!"
In his gladness he turns to her with that first treasure in his hand.
She is not looking. . . . But there is nothing strange in that--all the
rest is new to her; naturally she is more interested in the new things,
and adoringly he watches her as--
". . . Again those eyes complete
Their melancholy survey, sweet and slow,
Of all my room holds; to return and rest
On me, with pity, yet some wonder too . . ."
But pity and wonder are natural in her--is she not an angel from heaven?
Yet he would bring her a little closer to the earth she now inhabits;
so--
"What gaze you at? Those? Books I told you of;
Let your first word to me rejoice them too."
Eagerly he displays them, but soon reproves himself: he has shown first
a tiny Greek volume, and of course Homer's should be the Greek--
"First breathed me from the lips of my Greek girl!"
So out comes the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to
read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon
their search." Well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must
be--and _they_ will surely bring the word he increasingly longs for.
That of the "Almaign Kaiser," one day to be cast in bronze, is not worth
lingering at in its present stage, but this--_this_? She will recognise
this of Hippolyta--
"Naked upon her bright Numidian horse,"
for this is an imagined likeness, before he saw her, of herself. But no,
it is unrecognised; so they move to the next, which she cannot mistake,
for was it not done by her command? She had said he was to carve,
against she came, this Greek, "feasting in Athens, as our fashion was,"
and she had given him many details, and he had laboured ardently to
express her thought. . . . But still no word from her--no least, least
word; and, tenderly, at last he reproaches her--
"But you must say a 'well' to that--say 'well'!"
--for alarm is growing in him, though he strives to think it only
fantasy; she gazes too like his marble, she is too like marble in her
silence--marble is indeed to him his "very life's-stuff," but now he has
found "the real flesh Phene . . ." and as he rhapsodises a while, hardly
able to sever this breathing vision from the wonders of his glowing
stone, he turns to her afresh and beholds her whiter than before, her
eyes more wide and dark, and the first fear seizes him again--
"Ah, you will die--I knew that you would die!"--
and after that, there falls a long silence.
Then she speaks. "Now the end's coming"--that is what she says for her
first bridal words.
"Now the end's coming: to be sure it must
Have ended some time!"
--and while he listens in the silence dreadfully transferred from her to
him, the tale of Lutwyche's revenge is told at last.
We know it before Phene speaks, for Lutwyche, telling Gottlieb, has
told us; but Jules must glean it from her puzzled, broken utterance,
filled with allusions that mean nothing until semi-comprehension comes
through the sighs of tortured soul and heart from her who still is, as
it were, in a trance. And this dream-like state causes her, now and
then, to say the wrong words--the words _he_ spoke--instead of those
which had "cost such pains to learn . . ."
This is the story she tries to tell. Lutwyche had hated Jules for long.
There were many reasons, but the chief was that reported judgment of the
"crowd of us," as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Greatly,
and above all else, had Jules despised their dissoluteness: how could
they be other than the poor devils they were, with those debasing habits
which they cherished? "He could never," had said Lutwyche to Gottlieb,
"be supercilious enough on that matter. . . . _He_ was not to wallow in
the mire: _he_ would wait, and love only at the proper time, and
meanwhile put up with statuary." So Lutwyche had resolved that precisely
"on that matter" should his malice concentrate. He happened to hear of a
young Greek girl at Malamocco, "white and quiet as an apparition, and
fourteen years old at farthest." She was said to be a daughter of the
"hag Natalia"--said, that is, by the hag herself to be so, but Natalia
was, in plain words, a procuress. "We selected," said Lutwyche, "this
girl as the heroine of our jest"; and he and his gang set to work at
once. Jules received, first, a mysterious perfumed letter from somebody
who had seen his work at the Academy and profoundly admired it: she
would make herself known to him ere long. . . . "Paolina, my little
friend of the Fenice," who could transcribe divinely, had copied this
letter--"the first moonbeam!"--for Lutwyche; and she copied many more
for him, the letters which Psyche, at the studio, was to keep in the
fold of her robe.
In his very earliest answer, Jules had proposed marriage to the unknown
writer. . . . How they had laughed! But Gottlieb, hearing, could not
laugh. "I say," cried he, "you wipe off the very dew of his youth."
Schramm, however, had had his pipe forcibly taken from his mouth, and
then had pronounced that "nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this
world"; so, Gottlieb silenced, Lutwyche went on with the story. The
letters had gone to Jules, and the answers had come from him, two, three
times a day; Lutwyche himself had concocted nearly all the mysterious
lady's, which had said she was in thrall to relatives, that secrecy must
be observed--in short, that Jules must wed her on trust, and only speak
to her when they were indissolubly united.
But that, when accomplished, was not the whole of Lutwyche's revenge,
nor of his activity. To get the full savour of his malice, the victim
must be undeceived in such a way that there could be no mistaking the
hand which had struck; and this could best be achieved by writing a copy
of verses which should reveal their author at the end. Nor should these
be given Phene to hand Jules, for so Lutwyche would lose the delicious
actual instant of the revelation. No; they should be taught her, line by
line and word by word (since she could not read), and taught her by the
hag Natalia, that not a subtle pang be spared the "strutting
stone-squarer." Thus, listening beneath the window, Lutwyche could enjoy
each word, each moan, and when Jules should burst out on them in a fury
(but he must not be suffered to hurt his bride: she was too valuable a
model), they would all declare, with one voice, that this was their
revenge for his insults, they would shout their great shout of laughter;
and, next day, Jules would depart alone--"oh, alone indubitably!"--for
Rome and Florence, and they would be quits with him and his "coxcombry."
* * * * *
That is the plan, but Phene does not know it. All she knows is that
Natalia said that harm would come unless she spoke their lesson to the
end. Yet, despite this threat, when Jules has fallen silent in his
terror at her "whitening cheek and still dilating eyes," she feels at
first that that foolish speech need not be spoken. She has forgotten
half of it; she does not care now for Natalia or any of them; above all,
she wants to stay where Jules' voice has lifted her, by just letting it
go on. "But can it?" she asks piteously--for with that transferring of
silence a change had come; the music once let fall, even Jules does not
seem able to take up its life again--"no, or you would!" . . . So trust,
we see, is born in her: if Jules could do what she desires, Phene knows
he would. But since he cannot, they'll stay as they are--"above the
world."
"Oh, you--what are you?" cries the child, who never till to-day has
heard such words or seen such looks as his. But she has heard other
words, seen other looks--
"The same smile girls like me are used to bear,
But never men, men cannot stoop so low . . ."
Yet, watching those friends of Jules who came with the lesson she was to
learn, the strangest thing of all had been to see how, speaking of him,
they had used _that_ smile--
"But still Natalia said they were your friends,
And they assented though they smiled the more,
And all came round me--that thin Englishman
With light lank hair, seemed leader of the rest;
He held a paper"
--and from that paper he read what Phene had got by heart.
But oh, if she need not say it! if she could look up for ever to those
eyes, as now Jules lets her!
". . . I believe all sin,
All memory of wrong done, suffering borne,
Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth
Whence all that's low comes, and there touch and stay
--Never to overtake the rest of me,
All that, unspotted, reaches up to you,
Drawn by those eyes!"
But even as she gazes, she sees that the eyes "are altering--altered!"
She knows not why, she never has understood this sudden, wondrous
happening of her marriage, but the eyes to which she trusts are
altering--altered--and what can she do? . . . With heartrending pathos,
what she does is to clutch at his words to her, the music which had
lifted her, and now perhaps will lift him too by its mere sound. "I love
you, love" . . . but what does love mean? She knows not, and her "music"
is but ignorant echo; if she did know, she could prevent this change,
but the change is not prevented, so it cannot have been just the
words--it must have been in the tone that his power lay to lift her, and
_that_ she cannot find, not understanding. So in the desperate need to
see and hear him as he was at first, she turns to her last device--
". . . Or stay! I will repeat
Their speech, if that contents you. Only change
No more"--
and thus to him, but half aware as yet, sure only that she is not the
dream-lady from afar, Phene speaks the words that Lutwyche wrote, and
now waits outside to hear.
"I am a painter who cannot paint;
In my life, a devil rather than saint;
In my brain, as poor a creature too;
No end to all I cannot do!
Yet do one thing at least I can--
Love a man or hate a man
Supremely: thus my lore began . . ."
The timid voice goes on, saying the lines by rote as Phene had learned
them--and hard indeed they must have been to learn! For, as Lutwyche had
told his friends, it must be "something slow, involved, and mystical,"
it must hold Jules long in doubt, and lure him on until at innermost--
"Where he seeks sweetness' soul, he may find--this!"
And truly it is so "involved," that, in the lessons at Natalia's, it had
been thought well to tutor Phene in the probable interruptions from her
audience of one. There was an allusion to "the peerless bride with her
black eyes," and _here_ Jules was almost certain to break in, saying
that assuredly the bride was Phene herself, and so, could she not tell
him what it all meant?
"And I am to go on without a word."
She goes on--on to the analysis, utterly incomprehensible to her, of
Lutwyche's plan for intertwining love and hate; and with every word the
malice deepens, becomes directer in its address. If any one should ask
this painter who can hate supremely, _how_ his hate can "grin through
Love's rose-braided mask," and _how_, hating another and having sought,
long and painfully, to reach his victim's heart and pierce to the quick
of it, he might chance to have succeeded in that aim--
"Ask this, my Jules, and be answered straight,
By thy bride--how the painter Lutwyche can hate!"
* * * * *
Phene has said her lesson, but it too has failed. He still is changed.
He is not even thinking of her as she ceases. The name upon his lips is
Lutwyche, not her own. He mutters of "Lutwyche" and "all of them," and
"Venice"; yes, them he will meet at Venice, and it will be their turn.
But with that word--"meet"--he remembers her; he speaks to her--
". . . You I shall not meet:
If I dreamed, saying this would wake me."
Now Phene is again the silent one. We figure to ourselves the dark bent
head, the eyes that dare no more look up, the dreadful acquiescence as
he gives her money. So many others had done that; she had not thought
_he_ would, but she has never understood, and if to give her money is
his pleasure--why, she must take it, as she had taken that of the
others. But he goes on. He speaks of selling all his casts and books and
medals, that the produce may keep her "out of Natalia's clutches"; and
if he survives the meeting with the gang in Venice, there is just one
hope, for dimly she hears him say--
"We might meet somewhere, since the world is wide . . ."
Just that one vague, far hope, and for her _how_ wide the world is, how
very hard to compass! But she stands silent, in her well-learnt
patience; and he is about to speak again, when suddenly from outside a
girl's voice is heard, singing.
"Give her but a least excuse to love me!
When--where--
How--can this arm establish her above me,
If fortune fixed her as my lady there,
There already, to eternally reprove me?"
It is the song the peasants sing of "Kate the Queen"[64:1] and the page
who loved her, and pined "for the grace of her so far above his power of
doing good to"--
"'She never could be wronged, be poor,' he sighed,
'Need him to help her!' . . ."
Pippa, going back towards Asolo, carols it out as she passes; and Jules
listens to the end. It was bitter for the page to know that his lady was
above all need of him; yet men are wont to love so. But why should they
always choose the page's part? _He_ had not, in his dreams of
love. . . . And all at once, as he vaguely ponders the song, the deep
mysterious import of its sounding in this hour dawns on him.
"Here is a woman with utter need of me--
I find myself queen here, it seems! How strange!"
He turns and looks again at the white, quiet child who stands awaiting
her dismissal. Her soul is on her silent lips--
"Look at the woman here with the new soul . . .
This new soul is mine!"
And then, musing aloud, he comes upon the truth of it--
"Scatter all this, my Phene--this mad dream!
What's the whole world except our love, my own!"
To-night (he told her so, did he not?), aye, even before to-night, they
will travel for her land, "some isle with the sea's silence on it"; but
first he must break up these paltry attempts of his, that he may begin
art, as well as life, afresh. . . .
"Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!
* * * * *
And you are ever by me while I gaze,
--Are in my arms as now--as now--as now!
Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!
Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!"
That is what Lutwyche, under the window, hears for his revenge.
In this Passing of Pippa, silence and song have met and mingled into
one another, for Phene is silence, as Pippa is song. Phene will speak
more when Jules and she are in their isle together--but never will she
speak much: she _is_ silence. Her need of him indeed was utter--she had
no soul until he touched her into life: it is the very Pygmalion and
Galatea. But Jules' soul, no less, had needed Pippa's song to waken to
its truest self: once more the man is the one moved by the direct
intervention. Not that Phene, like Ottima, could have saved herself;
there _was_ no self to save--she had that awful, piercing selflessness
of the used flesh and ignored soul. If Pippa had not passed, if Jules
had gone, leaving money in her hand . . . I think that Phene would have
killed herself--like Ottima, yet how unlike! For Phene (but one step
upon the way) would have died for her own self's sake only, because till
now she had never known it, but in that strangest, dreadfullest, that
least, most, sacred of offerings-up, had "lived for others"--the others
of the smile which girls like her are used to bear,
"But never men, men cannot stoop so low."
Were ever scorn and irony more blasting, was ever pity more profound,
than in that line which Browning sets in the mouth of silence?
IV. EVENING; NIGHT: THE ENDING OF THE DAY
Our interest now centres again upon Pippa--partly because the Evening
and Night episodes are little touched by other feminine influence, but
also (and far more significantly) because the dramatic aspect of the
work here loses nearly all of its peculiar beauty. The story, till now
so slight yet so consummately sufficient, henceforth is involved with
"plot"--that natural enemy of spontaneity and unity, and here most
eminently successful in blighting both. Indeed, the lovely simplicity of
the earlier plan seems actually to aid the foe in the work of
destruction, by cutting, as it were, the poem into two or even three
divisions: first, the purely lyric portions--those at the beginning and
the end--where Pippa is alone in her room; second, the Morning and Noon
episodes, where the dramas are absolutely unconnected with the passing
girl; third, these Evening and Night scenes, where, on the contrary, all
is forced into more or less direct relation with the little figure whose
most exquisite magic has hitherto resided in the fusion of her complete
personal loneliness with her potent influence upon the lives and
characters of those who hear her sing.
Mr. Chesterton claims to have been the first to point out "this gross
falsification of the whole beauty of _Pippa Passes_"--a glaring
instance, as he says, of the definite literary blunders which Browning
could make. But though that searching criticism were earliest in
declaring this, I think that few of us can have read the poem without
being vaguely and discomfortably aware of it. From the moment of the
direct introduction of Bluphocks[68:1] (whose very name, with its dull
and pointless punning, is an offence), that sense of over-ingenuity, of
"tiresomeness," which is the prime stumbling-block to whole-hearted
Browning worship, becomes perceptible, and acts increasingly upon our
nerves until the Day is over, and Pippa re-enters her "large, mean, airy
chamber."
+ + + + +
On her return to Asolo from Orcana, she passes the ruined turret wherein
Luigi and his mother--those Third Happiest Ones whom in her thoughts she
had not been able to separate--are wont to talk at evening. Some of the
Austrian police are loitering near, and with them is an Englishman,
"lusty, blue-eyed, florid-complexioned"--one Bluphocks, who is on the
watch in a double capacity. He is to point out Luigi to the police, in
whose pay he is, and to make acquaintance with Pippa in return for money
already given by a private employer--for Bluphocks is the creature of
anyone's purse.
As Pippa reaches the turret, a thought of days long, long before it
fell to ruin makes her choose from her store of songs that which tells
how--
"A king lived long ago,
In the morning of the world
When earth was nigher heaven than now;"
and coming to be very old, was so serene in his sleepy mood, "so safe
from all decrepitude," and so beloved of the gods--
"That, having lived thus long, there seemed
No need the king should ever die."
Her clear note penetrates to the spot where Luigi and his mother are
talking, as so often before. He is bound this night for Vienna, there to
kill the hated Emperor of Austria, who holds his Italy in thrall; for
Luigi is a Carbonarist, and has been chosen for this "lesser task" by
his leaders. His mother is urging him not to go. First she had tried the
direct appeal, but this had failed; then argument, but this failed too;
and as she stood at end of her own resources, the one hope that remained
was her son's delight in living--that sense of the beauty and glory of
the world which was so strong in him that he felt
"God must be glad one loves his world so much."
This joy breaks out at each turn of the mother's discourse. While Luigi
is striving to make plain to her the "grounds for killing," he thinks to
hear the cuckoo, and forgets all his array of facts; for April and June
are coming! The mother seizes at once on this, and joins to it a still
more powerful persuasion. In June, not only summer's loveliness, but
Chiara, the girl he is to marry, is coming: she who gazes at the stars
as he does--and how her blue eyes lift to them
"As if life were one long and sweet surprise!"
In June she comes--and with the reiteration, Luigi falters, for he
recollects that in this June they were to see together "the Titian at
Treviso." . . . His mother has almost won, when a "low noise" outside,
which Luigi has first mistaken for the cuckoo, next for the renowned
echo in the turret . . . that low noise is heard again--"the voice of
Pippa, singing."
And, listening to the song which tells what kings were in the morning of
the world, Luigi cries--
"No need that sort of king should ever die!"
And she begins again--
"Among the rocks his city was:
Before his palace, in the sun,
He sat to see his people pass,
And judge them every one"
--and as she tells the manner of his judging, Luigi again exclaims:
"That king should still judge, sitting in the sun!"
But the song goes on--
"His councillors, to left and right,
Looked anxious up--but no surprise
Disturbed the king's old smiling eyes,
Where the very blue had turned to white";
and those eyes kept their tranquillity even when, as legend tells, a
Python one day "scared the breathless city," but coming, "with forked
tongue and eyes on flame," to where the king sat, and seeing the sweet
venerable goodness of him, did not dare
"Approach that threshold in the sun,
Assault the old king smiling there . . .
Such grace had kings when the world begun!"
"And such grace have they, now that the world ends!"
cries Luigi bitterly, for at Vienna the Python _is_ the king, and brave
men lurk in corners "lest they fall his prey." . . . He hesitates no
more--
"'Tis God's voice calls: how could I stay? Farewell!"
and rushes from the turret, resolute for Vienna.
By going he escapes the police, for it had been decided that if he
stayed at Asolo that night he should be arrested at once. He still may
lose his life, for he will try to kill the Emperor; but he will then
have been true to his deepest convictions--and thus Pippa's passing,
Pippa's song, have for the third time helped a soul to know itself.
+ + + + +
Unwitting as before, she goes on to the house near the Duomo Santa
Maria, where the Fourth Happiest One, the Monsignor of her final
choice, "that holy and beloved priest," is to stay to-night. And now,
for the first time, we are to see her, though only for the barest
instant, come into actual contact with some fellow-creatures.
Four "poor girls" are sitting on the steps of the Santa Maria. We hear
them talk with one another before Pippa reaches them: they are playing a
"wishing game," originated by one who, watching the swallows fly towards
Venice, yearns for their wings. She is not long from the country; her
dreams are still of new milk and apples, and
". . . the farm among
The cherry-orchards, and how April snowed
White blossom on her as she ran."
So says one of her comrades scornfully, and tells her how of course the
home-folk have been careful to blot out all memories of one who has come
to the town to lead the life _she_ leads. She may be sure the old people
have rubbed out the mark showing how tall she was on the door, and have
"Twisted her starling's neck, broken his cage,
Made a dung-hill of her garden!"
She acquiesces mournfully, but loses herself again in memories: of her
fig-tree that curled out of the cottage wall--
"They called it mine, I have forgotten why"
--and the noise the wasps made, eating the long papers that were strung
there to keep off birds in fruit-time. . . . As she murmurs thus to
herself, her mouth twitches, and the same girl who had laughed before,
laughs now again: "Would I be such a fool!"--and tells _her_ wish. The
country-goose wants milk and apples, and another girl could think of
nothing better than to wish "the sunset would finish"; but Zanze has a
real desire, something worth talking about! It is that somebody she
knows, somebody "greyer and older than her grandfather," would give her
the same treat he gave last week--
"Feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers,
Lampreys and red Breganze wine;"
while she had stained her fingers red by
"Dipping them in the wine to write bad words with
On the bright table: how he laughed!"
And as she recalls that night, she sees a burnished beetle on the ground
before her, sparkling along the dust as it makes its slow way to a tuft
of maize, and puts out her foot and kills it. The country girl recalls a
superstition connected with these bright beetles--that if one was
killed, the sun, "his friend up there," would not shine for two days.
They said it in her country "when she was young"; and one of the others
scoffs at the phrase, but looking at her, exclaims that indeed she _is_
no longer young: how thin her plump arms have got--does Cecco beat her
still? But Cecco doesn't matter, nor the loss of her young freshness,
so long as she keeps her "curious hair"--
"I wish they'd find a way to dye our hair
Your colour . . .
. . . The men say they are sick of black."
A girl who now speaks for the first and last time retorts upon this one
that very likely "the men" are sick of _her_ hair, and does she pretend
that _she_ has tasted lampreys and ortolans . . . but in the midst of
this new speaker's railing, the girl with wine-stained fingers
exclaims--
"Why there! Is not that Pippa
We are to talk to, under the window--quick-- . . ."
The country girl thinks that if it were Pippa, she would be singing, as
they had been told.
"Oh, you sing first," retorts the other--
"Then if she listens and comes close . . . I'll tell you,
Sing that song the young English noble made
Who took you for the purest of the pure,
And meant to leave the world for you--what fun!"
So, not the country girl, but she whose black hair discontents her,
sings, and Pippa "listens and comes close," for the song has words as
sweet as any of her own . . . and the red-fingered one calls to her to
come closer still, they won't eat her--why, she seems to be "the very
person the great rich handsome Englishman has fallen so violently in
love with." She shall hear all about it; and on the steps of the church
Pippa is told by this creature, Zanze, how a foreigner, "with blue eyes
and thick rings of raw silk-coloured hair," had gone to the mills at
Asolo a month ago and fallen in love with Pippa. Pippa, however, will
not keep him in love with her, unless she takes more care of her
personal appearance--she must "pare her nails pearlwise," and buy shoes
"less like canoes" for her small feet; _then_ she may hope to feast upon
lampreys and drink Breganze, as Zanze does. . . . And now Pippa sings
one of her songs, and it might have been chosen expressly to please the
country girl. It begins--
"Overhead the tree-tops meet,
Flowers and grass spring 'neath our feet;
There was nought above me, and nought below
My childhood had not learned to know"
--a little story of an innocent girl's way of making out for herself
only the sweetness of the world, the majesty of the heavens . . . and
just when all seemed on the verge of growing clear, and out of the "soft
fifty changes" of the moon, "no unfamiliar face" could look, the sweet
life was cut short--
"Suddenly God took me . . ."
As Pippa sang those words, she passed on. She had heard enough of the
four girls' talk, even were they not now interrupted by a sudden clatter
inside Monsignor's house--a sound of calling, of quick heavy feet, of
cries and the flinging down of a man, and then a noise as of dragging a
bound prisoner out. . . . Monsignor appeared for an instant at the window
as she, coming from the Duomo, passed his house. His aspect disappointed
her--
"No mere mortal has a right
To carry that exalted air;
Best people are not angels quite . . ."
and with that one look at him, she passed on to Asolo.
+ + + + +
What was the noise that broke out as Pippa finished her song? The loud
call which came first was Monsignor's, summoning his guards from an
outer chamber to gag and bind his steward. This steward had been supping
alone with the Bishop, who had come not only (as Pippa said in the
morning, choosing him as the ideal person for her pretending) "to bless
the home of his dead brother," but also to take possession of that
brother's estate. . . . He knows the steward to be a rascal; but he
himself, the "holy and beloved priest," is a good deal of a rascal too;
he has connived at his brother's death, and had connived at his mode of
life. Now the steward is preparing to blackmail the Bishop, as he had
blackmailed the Bishop's brother. Both are aware that the dead man had a
child; Monsignor believes that this child was murdered by the steward at
the instigation of a younger brother, who wished to succeed to the
estates. He urges the man to confess; otherwise he shall be arrested by
Monsignor's people who are in the outer room. "Did you throttle or stab
my brother's infant--come now?"[77:1]
But the steward has yet another card to play; moreover, so many enemies
now surround him that his life is probably forfeited anyhow, so he will
tell the truth. And the truth is that the child was not murdered by him
or anyone else. The child--the girl--is close at hand; he sees her every
day, he saw her this morning. Now, shall he make away with her for
Monsignor? Not "the stupid obvious sort of killing . . . of course there
is to be no killing; but at Rome the courtesans perish off every three
years, and he can entice her thither, has begun operations
already"--making use of a certain Bluphocks, an Englishman. Monsignor
will not _formally_ assent, of course . . . but will he give the steward
time to cross the Alps? The girl is "but a little black-eyed pretty
singing Felippa,[77:2] gay silk-winding girl"; some women are to pass
off Bluphocks as a somebody, and once Pippa entangled--it will be best
accomplished through her singing. . . . Well, Monsignor has listened;
Monsignor conceives--is it a bargain?
It was precisely as the steward asked that question that Pippa finished
her song of a maiden's lesson and its ending, and Monsignor leaped up
and shouted to his guards. . . . The singing by which "little black-eyed
pretty Felippa" was to be entangled had rescued instead the soul of her
Fourth Happiest One from this deep infamy.
+ + + + +
The great Day is over. Pippa, back in her room, finds horribly uppermost
among her memories the talk of those lamentable four girls. It had
spoilt the sweetness of her day; it spoils now, for a while, her own
sweetness. Her comments on it have none of the wayward charm of her
morning fancies, for Pippa is very human--she can envy and decry,
swinging loose from the central steadiness of her nature like many
another of us, obsessed like her by some vile happening of the hours.
Just as we might find our whole remembrance of a festival thus overlaid
by malice and ugliness, _she_ finds it; she can only think "how pert
that girl was," and how glad she is not to be like her. Yet, all the
same, she does not see why she should not have been told who it was that
"passed that jest upon her" of the Englishman in love--no foreigner had
come to the mills that she recollects. . . . And perhaps, after all, if
Luca raises the wage, she may be able to buy shoes next year, and not
look any worse than Zanze.
But gradually the atmosphere of her mind seems restored; the fogs of
envy and curiosity begin to clear off--she goes over the game of
make-believe, how she was in turn each of the Four . . . but no! the
miasma is still in the air, and she's "tired of fooling," and New Year's
Day is over, and ill or well, _she_ must be content. . . . Even her
lily's asleep, but she will wake it up, and show it the friend she has
plucked for it--the flower she gathered as she passed the house on the
hill. . . . Alas! even the flower seems infected. She compares it, "this
pampered thing," this double hearts-ease of the garden, with the wild
growth, and once more Zanze comes to mind--isn't she like the pampered
blossom? And if there were a king of the flowers, "and a girl-show held
in his bowers," which would he like best, the Zanze or the Pippa? . . .
No: nothing will conquer her dejection; fancies will not do, awakening
sleepy lilies will not do--
"Oh what a drear dark close to my poor day!
How could that red sun drop in that black cloud?"
and despairingly she accepts the one truth that seems to confront her:
"Day's turn is over, now arrives the night's;" the larks and thrushes
and blackbirds have had their hour; owls and bats and such-like things
rule now . . . and listlessly she begins to undress herself. She is so
alone; she has nothing but fancies to play with--this morning's, for
instance, of being anyone she liked. She had played her game, had kept
it up loyally with herself all day--what was the good?
"Now, one thing I should like to really know:
How near I ever might approach all those
I only fancied being, this long day:
Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, so
As to . . . in some way . . . move them--if you please,
Do good or evil to them some slight way.
For instance, if I wind
Silk to-morrow, my silk may bind
And border Ottima's cloak's hem . . ."
Sitting on her bed, undressed, the solitary child thus broods. No nearer
than that can she get--her silk might border Ottima's cloak's hem. . . .
But she cannot endure this dejection: back to her centre of gaiety,
trust, and courage Pippa must somehow swing--and how shall she achieve
it? There floats into her memory the hymn which she had murmured in the
morning--
"All service ranks the same with God."
But even this can help her only a little--
"True in some sense or other, I suppose . . ."
She lies down; she can pray no more than that; the hymn no doubt is
right, "some way or other," and with its message thus almost mocking in
her ears, she falls asleep--the lonely little girl who has saved four
souls to-day, and does not know, will never know; but will be again,
to-morrow perhaps, when that sad talk on the church steps is faded from
her memory, the gay, brave, trustful spirit who, by merely being that,
had sung her Four Happiest Ones up toward "God in his heaven."
FOOTNOTES:
[24:1] Asolo, in the Trevisan, is a very picturesque mediæval fortified
town, the ancient Acelum. It lies at the foot of a hill which is
surrounded by the ruins of an old castle; before it stretches the great
plain of the rivers Brenta and Piave, where Treviso, Vicenza, and Padua
may be clearly recognised. The Alps encircle it, and in the distance
rise the Euganean Hills. Venice can be discerned on the extreme eastern
horizon, which ends in the blue line of the Adriatic. The village of
Asolo is surrounded by a wall with mediæval turrets.--BERDOE, _Browning
Cyclopædia_, p. 50.
[26:1] Another line that I should like to omit, for the following words,
wholly in character, say all that the ugly ones have boomed at us so
incredibly. But here the rhyme-scheme provides a sort of unpardonable
excuse.
[49:1] Dr. Berdoe and Mrs. Orr.
[52:1] All the talk between the students is in prose.
[52:2] The long shoaly island in the Lagoon, immediately opposite
Venice.
[64:1] This song refers to Catherine of Cornaro, the last Queen of
Cyprus, who came to her castle at Asolo when forced to resign her
kingdom to the Venetians in 1489. "She lived for her people's welfare,
and won their love by her goodness and grace."
[68:1] "The name means _Blue-Fox_, and is a skit on the _Edinburgh
Review_, which is bound in blue and fox" (Dr. Furnivall).
[77:1] The dialogue between Monsignor and the steward is in prose.
[77:2] Having made her Monsignor's niece, observes Mr. Chesterton,
"Browning might just as well have made Sebald her long-lost brother, and
Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married."
III
MILDRED TRESHAM
IN "A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON"
I have said that, to my perception, the most characteristic mark in
Browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and
individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which I
constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence"
(as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The
type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to
show; and Browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own
person hymned it, found words for its delineation which lift the soul as
it were to morning skies. But when words are further called upon for its
_expression_, when such a woman, in short, has to speak for herself, he
rarely makes her do so without a certain consciousness of that especial
trait in her--and hence her speech must of necessity ring false, for
innocence knows nothing of itself.
So marked is this failure, to my sense, that I cannot refuse the
implication which comes along with it: that only theoretically, only as
it were by deference to others, did the attribute, in that particular
apprehension of it, move him to admiration. I do not, of course, mean
anything so inconceivable as that he questioned the loveliness of the
"pure in heart"; I mean merely that he questioned the artificial value
which has been set upon physical chastity--and that when departure from
this was the _circumstance_ through which he had to show the more
essential purity, his instinctive scepticism drove him to the forcing of
a note which was not really native to his voice. For always (to my
sense) when he presents dramatically a girl or woman in the grip of this
circumstance, he gives her words, and feelings to express through them,
which only the French _mièvre_ can justly describe. He does not, in
short, reveal her as she is, but only as others see her--and, among
those others, not himself.
In Browning this might seem the stranger because he was so wholly
untouched by cynicism; but here we light upon a curious paradox--the
fact that the more "worldly" the writer, the better can he (as a general
rule and other things being equal) display this type. It may be that
such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements
which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the
idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration--that his
fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted,"
thus becomes inclined to mawkishness . . . it _may_ be, I say, but at
the bottom of my heart I do not feel that that is the explanation. One
with which I am better satisfied emerges from a line of verse already
quoted:
"For each man kills the thing he loves";
and the man most apt for such "killing" is precisely he who appraises
most shrewdly the thing he kills. As the cool practised libertine is
oftenest attracted by the immature girl, so the ardent inexperienced man
of any age will be drawn to the older woman; and the psychology of this
matter of everyday experience is closely akin to the paradox in artistic
creation of which I now speak.
Browning, who saw woman so clearly as a creature with her definite and
justified demand upon life, saw, by inevitable consequence, that for
woman to "depart from innocence" (again, in the conventional sense of
the words) is not her most significant error; and this conviction
necessarily reacted upon his presentment of those in whom such purity is
the most salient quality--a type of which, as I have said, the poet is
bound to attempt the portrayal. Browning's instinctive questioning of
the "man-made" value then betrays itself--he exaggerates, he loses
grasp, for he is singing in a mode not native to his temperament.
+ + + + +
The character of Mildred in _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is a striking
example of this. She is a young girl who has been drawn by her innocent
passion into complete surrender to her lover. He, after this surrender,
seeks her in marriage from her brother, who stands in the place of both
parents to the orphan girl. The brother consents, unknowing; but after
his consent, learns from a servant that Mildred has yielded herself to a
man--he learns not _whom_. She, accused, makes no denial, gives no name,
and to her brother's consternation, proposes thus to marry her suitor,
whom Tresham thinks to be in ignorance of her error. Tresham violently
repudiates her; then, meeting beneath her window the cloaked lover,
attacks him, forces him to reveal himself, learns that he and the
accepted suitor are one and the same, and kills him--Mertoun (the lover)
making no defence. Tresham goes to Mildred and tells her what he has
done; she dies of the hearing, and he, having taken poison after the
revelation of Mertoun's identity, dies also.
The defects in this story are so obvious that I need hardly point them
out. Most prominent of all is the difficulty of reconciling Earl
Mertoun's conduct with that of a rational being. He is all that in
Mildred's suitor might be demanded, yet, loving her deeply and so loved
by her, he has feared to ask her brother for her hand, because of his
reverence for this Earl Tresham.
". . . I was young,
And your surpassing reputation kept me
So far aloof . . ."
Thus he explains himself. He feared to ask for her hand, yet did not
fear to seduce her! The thing is so absurd that it vitiates all the
play, which indeed but once or twice approaches aught that we can figure
to ourselves of reality in any period of history. "Mediæval" is a
strange adjective, used by Mrs. Orr to characterise a work of which the
date is placed by Browning himself in the eighteenth century.
Mildred is but fourteen: an age at which, with our modern sense of
girlhood as, happily, in this land we now know it, we find ourselves
unable to apprehend her at all. Instinctively we assign to her at least
five years more, since even these would leave her still a child--though
not at any moment in the play does she actually so affect us, for
Mildred is never a child, never even a young girl. Immature indeed she
is, but it is with the immaturity which will not develop, which has
nothing to do with length of years. To me, the failure here is absolute;
she never comes to life. Every student of Browning knows of the
enthusiasm which Dickens expressed for this piece and this character:
"Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of
sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what
is lovely, true, deeply affecting . . . is to say that there is
no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. . . . I know
nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever
read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young--I had
no mother.'"
Such ardour well might stir us to agreement, were it not that Dickens
chose for its warmest expression the very centre of our disbelief:
Mildred's _recurrence_ to that cry. . . . The cry itself--I cannot be
alone in thinking--rings false, and the recurrence, therefore, but heaps
error upon error. When I imagine an ardent girl in such a situation,
almost anything she could have been made to say would to me seem more
authentic than this. The first utterance, moreover, occurs before she
knows that Tresham has learnt the truth--it occurs, in soliloquy,
immediately after an interview with her lover.
"I was so young, I loved him so, I had
No mother, God forgot me, and I fell."
_I fell_ . . . No woman, in any extremity, says that; that is what is
said by others of her. And _God forgot me_--is this the thought of one
who "loves him so"? . . . The truth is that we have here the very
commonplace of the theatre: the wish to have it both ways, to show, yet
not to reveal--the "dramatic situation," in short, set out because it
_is_ dramatic, not because it is true. We cannot suppose that Browning
meant Earl Mertoun for a mere seducer, ravishing from a maiden that
which she did not desire to give--yet the words he here puts in
Mildred's mouth bear no other interpretation. Either she is capable of
passion, or she is not. If she _is_, sorrow for the sorrow that her
recklessness may cause to others will indeed put pain and terror in her
soul, but she will not, can not, say that "God forgot her": those words
are alien to the passionate. If she is _not_, if Mertoun is the mere
seducer . . . but the suggestion is absurd. We know that he is like
herself, as herself should have been shown us, young love incarnate,
rushing to its end mistakenly--wrong, high, and pure. These errors are
the errors of quick souls, of souls that, too late realising all, yet
feel themselves unstained, and know that not God forgot them, but they
this world in which we dwell.
In her interview with Tresham after the servant's revelation, I find the
same untruth. He delivers a long rhapsody on brothers' love, saying that
it exceeds all other in its unselfishness. Her sole rejoinder--and here
she does for one second attain to authenticity--is the question: "What
is this for?" He, after some hesitation, tells her what he knows, calls
upon her to confess, she standing silent until, at end of the
arraignment, he demands the lover's name. Listen to her answer:
". . . Thorold, do you devise
Fit expiation for my guilt, if fit
There be! 'Tis nought to say that I'll endure
And bless you--that my spirit yearns to purge
Her stains off in the fierce renewing fire:
But do not plunge me into other guilt!
Oh, guilt enough . . ."
She of course refuses the name. He tells her to pronounce, then, her own
punishment.
Again her answer, in the utter falseness to all truth of its abasement,
well-nigh sickens the soul:
"Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!
To die here in this chamber, by that sword,
Would seem like punishment; so should I glide
Like an arch-cheat, into extremest bliss!"
Comment upon that seems to me simply impossible. This is the woman to
whom, but a page or two back, young Mertoun has sung the exquisite song,
known to most readers of Browning's lyrics:
"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest,
And her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the
surest" . . .
Already in that hour with her, Mertoun must have learnt that some of
those high words were turned to slighter uses when they sang of Mildred
Tresham. In that hour he has spoken of the "meeting that appalled us
both" (namely, the meeting with her brother, when he was to ask for her
hand), saying that it is over and happiness begins, "such as the world
contains not." When Mildred answers him with, "This will not be," we
could accept, believingly, were only the sense of doom what her reply
brought with it. But "this will not be," because they do not "deserve
the whole world's best of blisses."
"Sin has surprised us, so will punishment."
And how strange, how sad for a woman is it, to see with what truth and
courage Browning can make Mertoun speak! Each word that _he_ says can be
brave and clear for all its recognition of their error; no word that
_she_ says. . . . Her creator does not understand her; almost, thus, we
do feel Mildred to be real, so quick is our resentment of the
unrealities heaped on her. Imagining beforehand the moment when she
shall receive in presence of them all "the partner of my guilty love"
(is not here the theatre in full blast?), the deception she must
practise--called by her, in the vein so cruelly assigned her, "this
planned piece of deliberate wickedness" . . . imagining all this, she
foresees herself unable to pretend, pouring forth "all our woeful
story," and pictures them aghast, "as round some cursed fount that
should spirt water and spouts blood." . . . "I'll not!" she cries--
". . . 'I'll not affect a grace
That's gone from me--gone once, and gone for ever!'"
"Gone once, and gone for ever." True, when the grace _is_ gone; but
surely not from her, in any real sense, had it gone--and would she not,
in the deep knowledge of herself which comes with revelation to the
world, have felt that passionately? There are accusations of ourselves
which indeed arraign ourselves, yet leave us our best pride. To me, not
the error which made her prey to penitence was Mildred Tresham's
"fall," but those crude cries of shame.
We take refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her
brother--that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and
conventional morality,"[90:1] Thorold, Earl Tresham; but not thus can we
solace ourselves for Browning's failure. What a girl he might have given
us in Mildred, had he listened only to himself! But, not yet in full
possession of that self, he set up as an ideal the ideal of others,
trying dutifully to see it as they see it, denying dutifully his deepest
instinct; and, thus apostate, piled insincerity on insincerity, until at
last no truth is anywhere, and we read on with growing alienation as
each figure loses all of such reality as it ever had, and even
Gwendolen, the "golden creature"--his own dauntless, individual woman,
seeing and feeling truly through every fibre of her being--is lost amid
the fog, is stifled in the stifling atmosphere, and only at the last,
when Mildred and her brother are both dead, can once more say the word
which lights us back to truth:
"Ah, Thorold, we can but--remember you!"
It was indeed all _they_ could do; but we, more fortunate, can forget
him, imaging to ourselves the Mildred that Browning could have given
us--the Mildred of whom her brother is made to say:
"You cannot know the good and tender heart,
Its girl's trust and its woman's constancy,
How pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind,
How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free
As light where friends are . . ."
There she is, as Browning might have shown her! "Control's not for this
lady," Tresham adds--the sign-manual of a Browning woman. As I have
said, he can display this lovely type through others, can sing it in his
own person, as in the exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak
for herself--he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth
departs from him; we have the Mildred Tresham of the theatre, of "the
partner of my guilty love," of "Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me
thus!" of (in a later scene) "I think I might have urged some little
point in my defence to Thorold"; of that last worst unreality of all,
when Thorold has told her of his murder of her lover, and she cries:
". . . I--forgive not,
But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls!
There! Do not think too much upon the past!
The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud
While it stood up between my friend and you;
You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that
So past retrieve? I have his heart, you know;
I may dispose of it: I give it you!
It loves you as mine loves!"
True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined,
will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient claim
for Thorold's deed--Thorold who dies with these words on his lips:
". . . You hold our 'scutcheon up.
Austin, no blot on it! You see how blood
Must wash one blot away; the first blot came
And the first blood came. To the vain world's eye
All's gules again: no care to the vain world
From whence the red was drawn!"
And on Austin's cry that "no blot shall come!" he answers:
"I said that: yet it did come. Should it come,
Vengeance is God's, not man's. Remember me!"
_Vengeance_: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard
that word, that "God"?
FOOTNOTES:
[90:1] Berdoe. _Browning Cyclopædia._
IV
BALAUSTION
IN "BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE" AND "ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY"
To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women--nay, I am tempted to
proclaim her queen of every poet's women. For in her meet all
lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ
(what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the
other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose--"enmisted by the scent
it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual
context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence
on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb,
statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the
long, close argument of the _Apology_. In that piece, the Bald Bard
himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes,
the _Adventure_, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric
phrases our queen before we crown her.
He comes to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that
her adored Euripides is dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are
"sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the
tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door,
and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1] bids!"--and, heralded
by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there
enters, "stands in person, Aristophanes." Balaustion had never seen him
till that moment, nor he her:
"Forward he stepped: I rose and fronted him";
and as thus for the first time they meet, he breaks into a pæan of
admiration:
"'You, lady? What, the Rhodian? Form and face,
Victory's self upsoaring to receive
The poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name,
Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants,
Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched
By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end
In _ion_' . . ."
and trying to recall that name "in _ion_," he guesses two or three at
random, seizing thus the occasion to express her effect on him:
"'Phibalion, for the mouth split red-fig-wise,
Korakinidion, for the coal-black hair,
Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness?'"
But none of these is right; "it was some fruit-flower"; and at last it
comes: _Balaustion_, Wild-Pomegranate-Bloom, and he exclaims in ecstasy,
"Thanks, Rhodes!"--for her fellow-countrymen had found this name for
her, so apt in every way that her real name was forgotten, and as
Balaustion she shall live and die.
"Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness"; and for all her intellect and
ardour, it is greatly _this_ that makes Balaustion queen--the lovely
eager sweetness, the tenderness, the "darlingness": Aristophanes guessed
almost right!
+ + + + +
How did she win the name of Wild-Pomegranate-Flower? We learn it from
herself in the _Adventure_. Let us hear: let us feign ourselves members
of the little band of friends, all girls, with their charming, chiming
names: "Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion"--to whom she cries in the
delightful opening:
"About that strangest, saddest, sweetest song
I, when a girl, heard in Kameiros once,
And after, saved my life by? Oh, so glad
To tell you the adventure!"
Part of the adventure is historical. In the second stage of the
Peloponnesian War (that famous contention between the Athenians and the
inhabitants of Peloponnesus which began on May 7, 431 B.C. and lasted
twenty-seven years), the Athenian General, Nikias, had suffered disaster
at Syracuse, and had given himself up, with all his army, to the
Sicilians. But the assurances of safety which he had received were
quickly proved false. He was no sooner in the hands of the enemy than he
was shamefully put to death with his naval ally, Demosthenes; and his
troops were sent to the quarries, where the plague and the hard labour
lessened their numbers and increased their miseries. When this bad news
reached Rhodes, the islanders rose in revolt against the supremacy of
Athens, and resolved to side with Sparta. Balaustion[96:1] was there,
and she passionately protested against this decision, crying to "who
would hear, and those who loved me at Kameiros"[96:2]:
". . . No!
Never throw Athens off for Sparta's sake--
Never disloyal to the life and light
Of the whole world worth calling world at all!
* * * * *
To Athens, all of us that have a soul,
Follow me!"
and thus she drew together a little band, "and found a ship at Kaunos,"
and they turned
"The glad prow westward, soon were out at sea,
Pushing, brave ship with the vermilion cheek,
Proud for our heart's true harbour."
But they were pursued by pirates, and, fleeing from these, drove
unawares into the harbour of that very Syracuse where Nikias and
Demosthenes had perished, and in whose quarries their countrymen were
slaves. The inhabitants refused them admission, for they had heard, as
the ship came into harbour, Balaustion singing "that song of ours which
saved at Salamis." She had sprung upon the altar by the mast, and
carolled it forth to encourage the oarsmen; and now it was vain to tell
the Sicilians that these were Rhodians who had cast in their lot with
the Spartan League, for the Captain of Syracuse answered:
"Ay, but we heard all Athens in one ode . . .
You bring a boatful of Athenians here";
and Athenians they would not have at Syracuse, "with memories of
Salamis" to stir up the slaves in the quarry.
No prayers, no blandishments, availed the Rhodians; they were just about
to turn away and face the pirates in despair, when somebody raised a
question, and
". . . 'Wait!'
Cried they (and wait we did, you may be sure).
'That song was veritable Aischulos,
Familiar to the mouth of man and boy,
Old glory: how about Euripides?
Might you know any of his verses too?'"
Browning here makes use of the historical fact that Euripides was
reverenced far more by foreigners and the non-Athenian Greeks than by
the Athenians--for Balaustion, "the Rhodian," had been brought up in his
worship, though she knew and loved the other great Greek poets also; and
already it was known to our voyagers that the captives in the quarries
had found that those who could "teach Euripides to Syracuse" gained
indulgence far beyond what any of the others could obtain. Thus, when
the question sounded, "Might you know any of his verses too?" the
captain of the vessel cried:
"Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands,
Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl!
* * * * *
Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through,
Has she been falling thick in flakes of him,
* * * * *
And so, although she has some other name,
We only call her Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,
Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns
* * * * *
You shall find food, drink, odour all at once."
He called upon her to save their little band by singing a strophe. But
she could do better than that--she could recite a whole play:
"That strangest, saddest, sweetest song of his,
ALKESTIS!"
Only that very year had it reached "Our Isle o' the Rose"; she had seen
it, at Kameiros, played just as it was played at Athens, and had learnt
by heart "the perfect piece." Now, quick and subtle for all her
enthusiasm, she remembers to tell the Sicilians how, besides "its beauty
and the way it makes you weep," it does much honour to their own loved
deity:
"Herakles, whom you house i' the city here
Nobly, the Temple wide Greece talks about;
I come a suppliant to your Herakles!
Take me and put me on his temple-steps
To tell you his achievement as I may."
"Then," she continues, in a passage which rings out again in the
_Apology_:
"Then, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,
And poetry is power--they all outbroke
In a great joyous laughter with much love:
'Thank Herakles for the good holiday!
Make for the harbour! Row, and let voice ring:
_In we row bringing in Euripides!_'"
So did the Rhodians land at Syracuse. And the whole city, hearing the
cry "In we row," which was taken up by the crowd around the
harbour-quays, came rushing out to meet them, and Balaustion, standing
on the topmost step of the Temple of Herakles, told the play:
"Told it, and, two days more, repeated it,
Until they sent us on our way again
With good words and great wishes."
That was her Adventure. Three things happened in it "for herself": a
rich Syracusan brought her a whole talent as a gift, and she left it on
the tripod as thank-offering to Herakles; a band of the captives--"whom
their lords grew kinder to, Because they called the poet
countryman"--sent her a crown of wild-pomegranate-flower; and the third
thing . . . Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion, hear of this also--of
the youth who, all the three days that she spoke the play, was found in
the gazing, listening audience; and who, when they sailed away, was
found in the ship too, "having a hunger to see Athens"; and when they
reached Piræus, once again was found, as Balaustion landed, beside her.
February's moon is just a-bud when she tells her comrades of this youth;
and when that moon rounds full:
"We are to marry. O Euripides!"
* * * * *
Everyone who speaks of _Balaustion's Adventure_ will quote to you that
ringing line, for it sums up the high, ardent girl who, even in the
exultation of her love, must call upon the worshipped Master. It is this
passion for intellectual beauty which sets Balaustion so apart, which
makes her so complete and stimulating. She has a mind as well as a heart
and soul; she is priestess as well as goddess--Euthukles will have a
wife indeed! Every word she speaks is stamped with the Browning marks of
gaiety, courage, trust, and with how many others also: those of
high-heartedness, deep-heartedness, the true patriotism that cherishes
most closely the soul of its country; and then generosity, pride,
ardour--all enhanced by woman's more peculiar gifts of gentleness,
modesty, tenderness, insight, gravity . . . for Balaustion is like many
women in having, for all her gaiety, more sense of happiness than sense
of humour. It often comes to me as debatable if this be not the most
attractive of deficiencies! Certainly Balaustion persuades us of its
power; for in the _Apology_, her refusal of the Aristophanic Comedy is
firm-based upon that imputed lack in women. No man, thus poised, could
have convinced us of his reality; while she convinces us not only of her
reality, but of her rightness. Again, we must applaud our poet's wisdom
in choosing woman for the Bald Bard's accuser; she is as potent in this
part as in that of Euripides' interpreter.
But what a girl Balaustion is, as well as what a woman! Let us see her
with the little band of friends about her, as in the exquisite
revocation (in the _Apology_) of the first adventure's telling:
". . . O that Spring,
That eve I told the earlier[101:1] to my friends!
Where are the four now, with each red-ripe mouth
I wonder, does the streamlet ripple still,
Outsmoothing galingale and watermint?
* * * * *
Under the grape-vines, by the streamlet-side,
Close to Baccheion; till the cool increase,
And other stars steal on the evening star,
And so, we homeward flock i' the dusk, we five!"
Then, in the _Adventure_, comes the translation by Browning of the
_Alkestis_ of Euripides, which Balaustion is feigned to have spoken upon
the temple steps at Syracuse. With this we have here no business, though
so entire is his "lyric girl," so fully and perfectly by him conceived,
that not a word of the play but might have been Balaustion's own. This
surely is a triumph of art--to imagine such a speaker for such a piece,
and to blend them both so utterly that the supreme Greek dramatist and
this girl are indivisible. What a woman was demanded for such a feat,
and what a poet for both! May we not indeed say now that Browning was
our singer? Whom but he would have done this--so crowned, so trusted,
us, and so persuaded men that women can be great?
"Its beauty, and the way it makes you weep": yes--and the way it makes
you thrill with love for Herakles, never before so god-like, because
always before too much the apotheosis of mere physical power. But read
of him in the _Alkestis_ of Euripides, and you shall feel him indeed
divine--"this grand benevolence." . . . We can hear the voice of
Balaustion deepen, quiver, and grow grave with gladdened love, as
Herakles is fashioned for us by these two men's noble minds.
+ + + + +
When she had told the "perfect piece" to her girl-friends, a sudden
inspiration came to her:
"I think I see how . . .
You, I, or anyone might mould a new
Admetos, new Alkestis";
and saying this, a flood of gratitude for the great gift of poetry comes
full tide across her soul:
". . . Ah, that brave
Bounty of poets, the one royal race
That ever was, or will be, in this world!
They give no gift that bounds itself and ends
I' the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds
I' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes
The man who only was a man before,
That he grows god-like in his turn, can give--
He also; share the poet's privilege,
Bring forth new good, new beauty from the old.
. . . So with me:
For I have drunk this poem, quenched my thirst,
Satisfied heart and soul--yet more remains!
Could we too make a poem? Try at least,
Inside the head, what shape the rose-mists take!"
And, trying thus, Balaustion, Feminist, portrays the perfect marriage.
Admetos, in Balaustion's and Browning's _Alkestis_, will not let his
wife be sacrificed for him:
"Never, by that true word Apollon spoke!
All the unwise wish is unwished, oh wife!"
and he speaks, as in a vision, of the purpose of Zeus in himself.
"This purpose--that, throughout my earthly life,
Mine should be mingled and made up with thine--
And we two prove one force and play one part
And do one thing. Since death divides the pair,
'Tis well that I depart and thou remain
Who wast to me as spirit is to flesh:
Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more,
So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh,
Bend yet awhile, a very flame above
The rift I drop into the darkness by--
And bid remember, flesh and spirit once
Worked in the world, one body, for man's sake.
Never be that abominable show
Of passive death without a quickening life--
Admetos only, no Alkestis now!"
It is so that the man speaks to and of the woman, in Balaustion's and
Browning's _Alkestis_.
And the woman, answering, declares that the reality of their joint
existence lies not in her, but in him:
". . . 'What! thou soundest in my soul
To depths below the deepest, reachest good
By evil, that makes evil good again,
And so allottest to me that I live,
And not die--letting die, not thee alone,
But all true life that lived in both of us?
Look at me once ere thou decree the lot!'
* * * * *
Therewith her whole soul entered into his,
He looked the look back, and Alkestis died."
But when she reaches the nether world--"the downward-dwelling
people"--she is rejected as a deceiver: "This is not to die," says the
Queen of Hades, for her death is a mockery, since it doubles the life of
him she has left behind:
"'Two souls in one were formidable odds:
Admetos must not be himself and thou!'
* * * * *
And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,
The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;
And lo, Alkestis was alive again."
How do our little squabbles--the "Sex-War"--look to us after this?
+ + + + +
When next we meet with Balaustion, in _Aristophanes' Apology_, she is
married to her Euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the
waters--this time back to Rhodes, from Athens which has fallen.
Many things have happened in the meantime, and Balaustion, leaving her
adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present
and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites
the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of Athens, she may free
herself from anguish. Euthukles shall write it down for her, and they
will go back to the night they heard Euripides was dead: "One year ago,
Athenai still herself." Together she and Euthukles had mused, together
glorified their poet. Euthukles had met the audience flocking homeward
from the theatre, where Aristophanes had that night won the prize which
Euripides had so seldom won. They had stopped him to hear news of the
other poet's death: "Balaustion's husband, the right man to ask"--but he
had refused them all satisfaction, and scornfully rated them for the
crown but now awarded. "Appraise no poetry," he had cried: "price
cuttlefish!"
Balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in Athens, but one work
of Aristophanes, the _Lysistrata_; and now, in breathless reminiscent
anger, recalls the experience. It had so appalled her, "that bestiality
so beyond all brute-beast imagining," that she would never see again a
play by him who in the crowned achievement of this evening had drawn
himself as Virtue laughingly reproving Vice, and Vice . . . Euripides!
Such a piece it was which had "gained the prize that day we heard the
death."
Yet, musing on that death, her wrath had fallen from her.
"I thought, 'How thoroughly death alters things!
Where is the wrong now, done our dead and great?'"
Euthukles, divining her thought, told her that the mob had repented when
they learnt the news. He had heard them cry: "Honour him!" and "A statue
in the theatre!" and "Bring his body back,[106:1] bury him in
Piræus--Thucydides shall make his epitaph!"
But she was not moved to sympathy with the general cry.
"Our tribute should not be the same, my friend.
Statue? Within our hearts he stood, he stands!"
and, for his mere mortal body:
"Why, let it fade, mix with the elements
There where it, falling, freed Euripides!"
_She_ knew, that night, a better way to hail his soul's new freedom.
This, by
"Singing, we two, its own song back again
Up to that face from which flowed beauty--face
Now abler to see triumph and take love
Than when it glorified Athenai once."
Yes: they two would read together _Herakles_, the play of which
Euripides himself had given her the tablets, in commemoration of the
Adventure at Syracuse. After that, on her first arrival in Athens, she
had gone to see him, "held the sacred hand of him, and laid it to my
lips"; she had told him "how Alkestis helped," and he, on bidding her
farewell, had given her these tablets, with the stylos pendant from them
still, and given her, too, his own psalterion, that she might, to its
assisting music, "croon the ode bewailing age."
All was prepared for the reading, when (as we earlier learnt) there came
the torch-light and the knocking at their door, and Aristophanes, fresh
from his triumph, entered with the banquet-band, to hail the "house,
friendly to Euripides."
He knew, declared Aristophanes, that the Rhodian hated him most of
mortals, but he would not blench. The others blenched--no word could
they utter, nor one laugh laugh. . . . So he drove them out, and stood
alone confronting
"Statuesque Balaustion pedestalled
On much disapprobation and mistake."
He babbled on for a while, defiantly and incoherently, and at length she
turned in dumb rebuke, which he at once understood.
"True, lady, I am tolerably drunk";
for it was the triumph-night, and merriment had reigned at the banquet,
reigned and increased
"'Till something happened' . . .
Here he strangely paused";
but soon went on to tell the way in which the news had reached them
there. . . . While Aristophanes spoke, Balaustion searched his face; and
now (recalling, on the way to Rhodes, that hour to Euthukles), she
likens the change which she then saw in it to that made by a black cloud
suddenly sailing over a stretch of sparkling sea--such a change as they
are in this very moment beholding.
"Just so, some overshadow, some new care
Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face,
And left there only such a dark surmise--
No wonder if the revel disappeared,
So did his face shed silence every side!
I recognised a new man fronting me."
At once he perceived her insight, and answered it: "So you see myself?
Your fixed regard can strip me of my 'accidents,' as the sophists say?"
But neither should this disconcert him:
"Thank your eyes' searching; undisguised I stand:
The merest female child may question me.
Spare not, speak bold, Balaustion!"
She, searching thus his face, had learnt already that "what she had
disbelieved most proved most true." Drunk though he was,
"There was a mind here, mind a-wantoning
At ease of undisputed mastery
Over the body's brood, those appetites.
Oh, but he grasped them grandly!"
It was no "ignoble presence": the broad bald brow, the flushed cheek,
great imperious fiery eyes, wide nostrils, full aggressive mouth, all
the pillared head:
"These made a glory, of such insolence--
I thought--such domineering deity . . .
Impudent and majestic . . ."
Instantly on her speaking face the involuntary homage had shown; and it
was to this that Aristophanes, keen of sight as she, had confidently
addressed himself when he told her to speak boldly. And in the very
spirit of her face she did speak:
"Bold speech be--welcome to this honoured hearth,
Good Genius!"
Here sounds the essential note of generous natures. Proved mistaken,
their instant impulse is to rejoice in defeat, if defeat means victory
for the better thing. Thus, as Balaustion speaks, her ardour grows with
every word. He is greater than she had supposed, and so she must even
rhapsodise--she must crowd praise on praise, until she ends with the
exultant cry:
"O light, light, light, I hail light everywhere!
No matter for the murk that was--perchance
That will be--certes, never should have been
Such orb's associate!"
Mark that Aristophanes has not yet _said_ anything to justify her change
of attitude: the seeing of him is enough to draw from her this
recantation--for she trusts her own quick insight, and so, henceforth
trusts him.
Now begins the long, close argument between them which constitutes
_Aristophanes' Apology_. It is (from him) the defence of comedy as he
understands and practises it--broad and coarse when necessary; violent
and satiric against those who in any way condemn it. Euripides had been
one of these, and Balaustion now stands for him. . . . In the long run,
it is the defence of "realism" against "idealism," and, as such,
involves a whole philosophy of life. We cannot follow it here; all we
may do is to indicate the points at which it reveals, as she speaks in
it, the character of Balaustion, and the growing charm which such
revelation has for her opponent.
At every turn of his argument, Aristophanes is sure of her
comprehension. He knows that he need not adapt himself to a feebler
mind: "You understand," he says again and again. At length he comes, in
his narration, to the end of their feast that night, and tells how,
rising from the banquet interrupted by the entrance of Sophocles with
tidings of Euripides dead, he had cried to his friends that they must go
and see
"The Rhodian rosy with Euripides! . . .
And here you stand with those warm golden eyes!
Maybe, such eyes must strike conviction, turn
One's nature bottom-upwards, show the base . . .
Anyhow, I have followed happily
The impulse, pledged my genius with effect,
Since, come to see you, I am shown--myself!"
She instantly bids him, as she has honoured him, that he do honour to
Euripides. But, seized by perversity, he declares that if she will give
him the _Herakles_ tablets (which he has discerned, lying with the other
gifts of Euripides), he will prove to her, by this play alone, the "main
mistake" of her worshipped Master.
She warmly interrupts, reproving him. Their house _is_ the shrine of
that genius, and he has entered it, "fresh from his worst infamy"--yet
she has withheld the words she longs to speak, she has inclined, nay
yearned, to reverence him:
"So you but suffer that I see the blaze
And not the bolt--the splendid fancy-fling,
Not the cold iron malice, the launched lie."
If he does _this_, if he shows her
"A mere man's hand ignobly clenched against
Yon supreme calmness,"
she will interpose:
"Such as you see me! Silk breaks lightning's blow!"
But Aristophanes, at that word of "calmness," exclaims vehemently. Death
is the great unfairness! Once a man dead, the survivors croak, "Respect
him." And so one must--it is the formidable claim, "immunity of
faultiness from fault's punishment." That is why _he_, Aristophanes, has
always attacked the living; he knew how they would hide their heads,
once dead! Euripides had chosen the other way; "men pelted him, but got
no pellet back"; and it was not magnanimity but arrogance that prompted
him to such silence. Those at whom Aristophanes or he should fling mud
were by that alone immortalised--and Euripides, "that calm cold
sagacity," knew better than to do them such service.
As he speaks thus, Balaustion's "heart burns up within her to her
tongue." She exclaims that the baseness of Aristophanes' attack, of his
"mud-volleying" at Euripides, consists in the fact that both men had, at
bottom, the same ideals; they both extended the limitations of art,
both were desirous from their hearts that truth should triumph--yet
Aristophanes, thus desiring, poured out his supremacy of power against
the very creature who loved all that _he_ loved! And she declares that
such shame cuts through all his glory. Comedy is in the dust, laid low
by him:
"Balaustion pities Aristophanes!"
Now she has gone too far--she has spoken too boldly.
"Blood burnt the cheek-bone, each black eye flashed fierce:
'But this exceeds our license!'"
--so he exclaims; but then, seizing his native weapon, stops ironically
to search out an excuse for her. He finds it soon. She and her husband
are but foreigners; they are "uninstructed"; the born and bred Athenian
needs must smile at them, if he do not think a frown more fitting for
such ignorance. But strangers are privileged: Aristophanes will condone.
They want to impose their squeamishness on sturdy health: that is at the
bottom of it all. Their Euripides had cried "Death!"--deeming death the
better life; he, Aristophanes, cries "Life!" If the Euripideans
condescend to happiness at all, they merely "talk, talk, talk about the
empty name," while the thing itself lies neglected beneath their noses;
they
"think out thoroughly how youth should pass--
Just as if youth stops passing, all the same!"
* * * * *
As he proceeds, in the superb defence of his own methods, he sees
Balaustion grow ever more indignant. But he conjures her to wait a
moment ere she "looses his doom" on him--and at last, drawing to an end,
declares that after all the ground of difference between him and her is
slight. In so far as it does exist, however, he claims to have won.
Euripides, for whom she stands, is beaten in this contest, yet he,
Aristophanes, has not even put forth all his power! If she will not
acknowledge final defeat:
"Help him, Balaustion! Use the rosy strength!"
--and he urges her to use it all, to "let the whole rage burst in brave
attack."
It is evident how he has been moved, despite his boasting--how eagerly
he awaits her use of the rosy strength. . . . But she begins meekly
enough. She is a woman, she says, and claims no quality "beside the love
of all things lovable"; in _that_, she does claim to stand pre-eminent.
But men may use, justifiably, different methods from those which women
most admire, and so far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds
her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers,
will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they
find Aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to
put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not
invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his
aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides also; and has
Aristophanes yet written anything like the glorious Song to Peace in the
_Cresphontes_?
"Come, for the heart within me dies away,
So long dost thou delay!"
She gives this forth, in the old "Syracusan" manner, and is well aware
that he can have no answer for her. Again (she proceeds), Euripides
discredited war by showing how it outrages the higher feelings: by what
method has Aristophanes discredited it? By the obscene allurements of
the _Lysistrata_! . . . Thus she takes him through his works, and
finally declares that only in "more audaciously lying" has he improved
upon the earlier writers of comedy. He has genius--she gladly grants it;
but he has debased his genius. The mob indeed has awarded him the
crowns: is such crowning the true guerdon?
"Tell him, my other poet--where thou walk'st
Some rarer world than e'er Ilissos washed!"
But as to the immortality of either, who shall say? And is even _that_
the question? No: the question is--did both men wish to waft the white
sail of good and beauty on its way? Assuredly. . . . And so she cries at
the last: "Your nature too is kingly"; and this is for her the sole
source of ardour--she "trusts truth's inherent kingliness"; and the
poets are of all men most royal. She never would have dared approach
this poet so:
"But that the other king stands suddenly,
In all the grand investiture of death,
Bowing your knee beside my lowly head
--Equals one moment!
--Now arise and go.
Both have done homage to Euripides!"
But he insists that her defence has been oblique--it has been merely an
attack on himself. She must defend her poet more directly, or
Aristophanes will do no homage. At once she answers that she will, that
she has the best, the only, defence at hand. She will read him the
_Herakles_, read it as, at Syracuse, she spoke the _Alkestis_.
"Accordingly I read the perfect piece."
It ends with the lament of the Chorus for the departure of Herakles:
"The greatest of all our friends of yore
We have lost for evermore!"
and when Balaustion has chanted forth that strophe, there falls a long
silence, on this night of losing a friend.
Aristophanes breaks it musingly. "'Our best friend'--who has been the
best friend to Athens, Euripides or I?" And he answers that it is
himself, for he has done what he knew he _could_ do, and thus has
charmed "the Violet-Crowned"; while Euripides had challenged failure,
and had failed. Euripides, he cries, remembering an instance, has been
like Thamyris of Thrace, who was blinded by the Muses for daring to
contend with them in song; _he_, Aristophanes, "stands heart-whole, no
Thamyris!" He seizes the psalterion--Balaustion must let him use it for
once--and sings the song, from Sophocles, of Thamyris marching to his
doom.
He gives some verses,[117:1] then breaks off in laughter, having, as he
says, "sung content back to himself," since he is _not_ Thamyris, but
Aristophanes. . . . They shall both be pleased with his next play; it
shall be serious, "no word more of the old fun," for "death defends,"
and moreover, Balaustion has delivered her admonition so soundly! Thus
he departs, in all friendliness:
"Farewell, brave couple! Next year, welcome me!"
It is "next year," and Balaustion and Euthukles are fleeing across the
water to Rhodes from Athens. This year has seen the death of Sophocles;
and the greatest of all the Aristophanic triumphs in the _Frogs_. It
was all _him_, Balaustion says:
"There blazed the glory, there shot black the shame"
--it showed every facet of his genius, and in it Bacchos himself was
"duly dragged through the mire," and Euripides, after all the promises,
was more vilely treated than ever before.
"So, Aristophanes obtained the prize,
And so Athenai felt she had a friend
Far better than her 'best friend,' lost last year."
But then, what happened? The great battle of Ægos Potamos was fought and
lost, and Athens fell into the hands of the Spartans. The conqueror's
first words were, "Down with the Piræus! Peace needs no bulwarks." At
first the stupefied Athenians had been ready to obey--but when the next
decree came forth, "No more democratic government; _we_ shall appoint
your oligarchs!" the dreamers were stung awake by horror; they started
up a-stare, their hands refused their office.
"Three days they stood, stared--stonier than their walls."
Lysander, the Spartan general, angered by the dumb delay, called a
conference, issued decree. Not the Piræus only, but all Athens should be
destroyed; every inch of the "mad marble arrogance" should go, and so at
last should peace dwell there.
* * * * *
Balaustion stands, recalling this to Euthukles, who writes her
words . . . and now, though she does not name it so, she tells the third
"supreme adventure" of her life. When that decree had sounded, and the
Spartans' shout of acquiescence had died away:
"Then did a man of Phokis rise--O heart! . . .
_Who_ was the man of Phokis rose and flung
A flower i' the way of that fierce foot's advance"
--the "choric flower" of the _Elektra_, full in the face of the foe?
"You flung that choric flower, my Euthukles!"
--and, gazing down on him from her proud rosy height, while he sits
gazing up at her, she chants again the words she spoke to her
girl-friends at the Baccheion:
"So, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,
And poetry is power, and Euthukles
Had faith therein to, full-face, fling the same--
Sudden, the ice-thaw! The assembled foe,
Heaving and swaying with strange friendliness,
Cried 'Reverence Elektra!'--cried
. . . 'Let stand
Athenai'! . . ."
--and Athens was saved through Euripides,
"Through Euthukles, through--more than ever--me,
Balaustion, me, who, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,
Felt my fruit triumph, and fade proudly so!"
* * * * *
But next day, Sparta woke from the spell. Harsh Lysander decreed that
though Athens might be saved, the Piræus should not. Comedy should
destroy the Long Walls: the flute-girls should lead off in the dance,
should time the strokes of spade and pickaxe, till the pride of the
Violet-Crowned lay in the dust. "Done that day!" mourns Balaustion:
"The very day Euripides was born."
But _they_ would not see the passing of Athenai; they would go, fleeing
the sights and sounds,
"And press to other earth, new heaven, by sea
That somehow ever prompts to 'scape despair"
--and wonderfully, at the harbour-side they found that old grey mariner,
whose ship she had saved in the first Adventure! The ship was still
weather-wise: it should
"'Convey Balaustion back to Rhodes, for sake
Of her and her Euripides!' laughed he,"
--and they embarked. It should be Rhodes indeed: to Rhodes they now are
sailing.
Euripides lies buried in the little valley "laughed and moaned about by
streams,"
"Boiling and freezing, like the love and hate
Which helped or harmed him through his earthly course.
They mix in Arethusa by his grave."
But, just as she had known, this revocation _has_ consoled her. Now she
will be able to forget. Never again will her eyes behold Athenai, nor in
imagination see "the ghastly mirth that mocked her overthrow"; but she
and Euthukles are exiles from the dead, not from the living, Athens:
"That's in the cloud there, with the new-born star!"
There is no despair, there can be none; for does not the soul anticipate
its heaven here on earth:
"Above all crowding, crystal silentness,
Above all noise, a silver solitude . . .
Hatred and cark and care, what place have they
In yon blue liberality of heaven?
How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise
Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!"
They are entering Rhodes now, and every wave and wind seems singing out
the same:
"All in one chorus--what the master-word
They take up? Hark! 'There are no gods, no gods!
Glory to GOD--who saves Euripides!'"
. . . There she is, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower, Balaustion--and Triumphant
Woman. What other man has given us this?--and even Browning only here.
Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she
must suffer ere he can adore. But Balaustion triumphs, and we hail
her--and we hail her poet too, who dared to make her great not only in
her love, but in her own deep-hearted, ardent self.
"This mortal shall put on individuality." Of all men Browning most
wished women to do that.
FOOTNOTES:
[94:1] I follow Browning's spellings throughout.
[96:1] The character of Balaustion is wholly imaginary.
[96:2] A town of the island of Rhodes.
[101:1] In the _Apology_, she tells "the second supreme adventure": her
interview with Aristophanes, and the recital to him of the _Herakles_ of
Euripides.
[106:1] Euripides died at the Court of Archelaus, King of Macedonia.
[117:1] Browning never finished his translation of this splendid song.
V
POMPILIA
IN "THE RING AND THE BOOK"
I said, in writing of Balaustion: "Nearly always, for man's homage,
woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore."
I should have said that this _has been_ so: for the tendency to-day is
to demonstrate rather the power than the weakness of woman. True that in
the "victim," that weakness was usually shown to be the very source of
that power: through her suffering not only she, but they who stood
around and saw the anguish, were made perfect. That this theory of the
outcome of suffering is an eternal verity I am not desirous to deny; but
I do deplore that, in literature, women should be made so
disproportionately its exemplars; and I deplore it not for feminist
reasons alone. Once we regard suffering in this light of a supreme
uplifting influence, we turn, as it were, our weapons against
ourselves--we exclaim that men too suffer in this world and display the
highest powers of endurance: why, then, do they so frequently, in their
imaginative works, present themselves as makers of women's woes? For
women make men suffer often; yet how relatively seldom men show this!
Thus, paradoxically enough, we may come to declare that it is to
themselves that men are harsh, and to us generous. "Chivalry from
women!"--how would that sound as a war-cry?
Not all in jest do I so speak, though such recognition of male
generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which assails
me--and if me, then probably many another--when I find myself reading of
the immemorial "victim." It is this which makes Balaustion supreme for
my delight. There is a woman with every noble attribute of womanhood at
its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the Great Fates, as
one might say--the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn
now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering--we turn to
Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of
the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and
last, for the paltriest of motives--money. And money in no large,
imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be at
all conceived as a theme for tragedy. A dowry, and a tiny one: _this_
created "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us in _The
Ring and the Book_.
"Another day that finds her living yet,
Little Pompilia, with the patient brow
And lamentable smile on those poor lips,
And, under the white hospital-array,
A flower-like body, to frighten at a bruise
You'd think, yet now, stabbed through and through again,
Alive i' the ruins. 'Tis a miracle.
It seems that when her husband struck her first,
She prayed Madonna just that she might live
So long as to confess and be absolved;
And whether it was that, all her sad life long
Never before successful in a prayer,
This prayer rose with authority too dread--
Or whether because earth was hell to her,
By compensation when the blackness broke,
She got one glimpse of quiet and the cool blue,
To show her for a moment such things were,"
--the prayer was granted her.
So, musing on the murder of the Countess Franceschini by her husband;
and her four days' survival of her wounds, does one half of Rome express
itself--"The Other Half" in contrast to the earliest commentator on the
crime: "Half-Rome." This Other-Half is wholly sympathetic to the
seventeen-yeared child who lies in the hospital-ward at St. Anna's. "Why
was she made to learn what Guido Franceschini's heart could hold?"
demands the imagined spokesman; and, summing up, he exclaims:
"Who did it shall account to Christ--
Having no pity on the harmless life
And gentle face and girlish form he found,
And thus flings back. Go practise if you please
With men and women. Leave a child alone
For Christ's particular love's sake!"
Then, burning with pity and indignation, he proceeds to tell the story
of Pompilia as he sees it, feels it--and as Browning, in the issue,
makes us see and feel it too.
In _The Ring and the Book_, Browning tells us this story--this "pure
crude fact" (for fact it actually is)--_ten times over_, through nine
different persons, Guido Franceschini, the husband, speaking twice.
Stated thus baldly, the plan may sound almost absurd, and the prospect
of reading the work appear a tedious one; but once begin it, and neither
impression survives for a moment. Each telling is at once the same and
new--for in each the speaker's point of view is altered. We get, first
of all, Browning's own summary of the "pure crude fact"; then the
appearance of that fact to:
1. Half-Rome, antagonistic to Pompilia.
2. The Other Half, sympathetic to her.
3. "Tertium Quid," neutral.
4. Count Guido Franceschini, at his trial.
5. Giuseppe Caponsacchi (the priest with whom Pompilia fled),
at the trial.
6. Pompilia, on her death-bed.
7. Count Guido's counsel, preparing his speech for the
defence.
8. The Public Prosecutor's speech.
9. The Pope, considering his decision on Guido's appeal to him
after the trial.
10. Guido, at the last interview with his spiritual advisers
before execution.
Only the speeches of the two lawyers are wholly tedious; the rest of the
survey is absorbing. Not a point which can be urged on any side is
omitted, as that side presents itself; yet in the event, as I have said,
one overmastering effect stands forth--the utter loveliness and purity
of Pompilia. "She is the heroine," says Mr. Arthur Symons,[126:1] "as
neither Guido nor Caponsacchi can be called the hero. . . . With hardly
[any] consciousness of herself, [she] makes and unmakes the lives and
characters of those about her"; and in this way he compares her story
with Pippa's: "the mere passing of an innocent child."
And so, here, have we not indeed the victim? But though I spoke of
weariness, I must take back the words; for here too we have indeed the
beauty and the glory of suffering, and here the beauty and the glory of
manhood. Guido, like all evil things, is Nothingness: he serves but to
show forth what purity and love, in Pompilia, could be; what bravery and
love, in Caponsacchi, the "warrior-priest," could do. This girl has not
the Browning-mark of gaiety, but she has both the others--this "lady
young, tall, beautiful, strange, and sad," who answered without fear the
call of the unborn life within her, and trusted without question "the
appointed man."
The "pure crude fact," detailed by Browning, was found in the authentic
legal documents bound together in an old, square, yellow
parchment-covered volume, picked up by him, "one day struck fierce 'mid
many a day struck calm," on a stall in the Piazza San Lorenzo of
Florence. He bought the pamphlet for eightpence, and it gave to him and
us the great, unique achievement of this wonderful poem:
"Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore,
Prime nature with an added artistry."
+ + + + +
Pompilia, called Comparini, was in reality "nobody's child." This, which
at first sight may seem of minor importance to the issue, is actually at
the heart of all; for, as I have said, it was the question of her dowry
which set the entire drama in motion. The old Comparini couple,
childless, of mediocre class and fortunes, had through silly
extravagance run into debt, and in 1679 were hard pressed by creditors.
They could not draw on their capital, for it was tied up in favour of
the legal heir, an unknown cousin. But if they had a child, that
disability would be removed. Violante Comparini, seeing this, resolved
upon a plan. She bought beforehand for a small sum the expected baby of
a disreputable woman, giving herself out to her husband, Pietro, and
their friends as almost miraculously pregnant--for she was past fifty.
In due time she became the apparent mother of a girl, Pompilia. This
girl was married at thirteen to Count Guido Franceschini, an
impoverished nobleman, fifty years old, of Arezzo. He married her for
her reported dowry, and she was sold to him for the sake of his rank.
Both parties to the bargain found themselves deceived (Pompilia was, of
course, a mere chattel in the business), for there was no dowry, and
Guido, though he _had_ the rank, had none of the appurtenances thereof
which had dazzled the fancy of Violante. Pietro too was tricked, and the
marriage carried through against his will. The old couple, reduced to
destitution by extracted payment of a part of the dowry, were taken to
the miserable Franceschini castle at Arezzo, and there lived wretchedly,
in every sense, for a while; but soon fled back to Rome, leaving the
girl-wife behind to aggravated woes. About three years afterwards she
also fled, intending to rejoin the Comparini at Rome. She was about to
become a mother. The organiser and companion of her flight was a young
priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, who was a canon at Arezzo. Guido followed
them, caught them at Castelnuovo, a village on the outskirts of Rome,
and caused both to be arrested. They were confined in the "New Prisons"
at Rome, and tried for adultery. The result was a compromise--they were
pronounced guilty, but a merely nominal punishment ("the jocular piece
of punishment," as the young priest called it) was inflicted on each.
Pompilia was relegated for a time to a convent; Caponsacchi was
banished for three years to Civita Vecchia. As the time for Pompilia's
confinement drew near, she was permitted to go to her reputed parents'
home, which was a villa just outside the walls of the city. A few months
after her removal there, she became the mother of a son, whom the old
people quickly removed to a place of concealment and safety. A fortnight
later--on the second day of the New Year--Count Guido, with four hired
assassins, came to the villa, and all three occupants were killed:
Pietro and Violante Comparini, and Pompilia his wife. For these murders,
Guido and his hirelings were hanged at Rome on February 22, 1698.
But now we must return upon our steps, if we would know "the truth of
this."
When the old Comparini reached Rome, after their flight from Arezzo, the
Pope had just proclaimed jubilee in honour of his eightieth year, and
absolution for any sin was to be had for the asking--atonement, however,
necessarily preceding. Violante, remorseful for the sacrifice of their
darling, and regarding the woe as retribution for her original lie about
the birth, resolved to confess; but since absolution was granted only if
atonement preceded it, she must be ready to restore to the rightful heir
that which her pretended motherhood had taken from him. She therefore
confessed to Pietro first, and he instantly seized the occasion for
revenge on Guido, though that was not (or at any rate, according to the
Other Half-Rome, may not have been) his only motive.
"What? All that used to be, may be again?
* * * * *
What, the girl's dowry never was the girl's,
And unpaid yet, is never now to pay?
Then the girl's self, my pale Pompilia child
That used to be my own with her great eyes--
Will she come back, with nothing changed at all?"
He repudiated Pompilia publicly, and with her, of course, all claims
from her husband. Taken into Court, the case (also bound up in the
square yellow book) was, after appeals and counter-appeals, left
undecided.
It was this which loosed all Guido's fury on Pompilia. He had already
learned to hate her for her shrinking from him; now, while he still
controlled her person, and wreaked the vilest cruelties and basenesses
upon it, he at the same time resolved to rid himself of her in any
fashion whatsoever which should leave him still a legal claimant to the
disputed dowry.[130:1] There was only one way thus to rid himself, and
that was to prove her guilty of adultery. He concentrated on it. First,
his brother, the young Canon Girolamo, who lived at the castle, was
incited to pursue her with vile solicitations. She fled to the
Archbishop of Arezzo and implored his succour. He gave none. Then she
went to the Governor: he also "pushed her back." She sought out a poor
friar, and confessed her "despair in God"; he promised to write to her
parents for her, but afterwards flinched, and did nothing. . . . Guido's
plan was nevertheless hanging fire; a supplementary system of
persecution must be set up. She was hourly accused of "looking
love-lures at theatre and church, in walk, at window"; but this, in the
apathy which was descending on her, she baffled by "a new game of giving
up the game."[131:1] She abandoned theatre, church, walk, and window;
she "confounded him with her gentleness and worth," he "saw the same
stone strength of white despair":
"How does it differ in aught, save degree,
From the terrible patience of God?"
--and more and more he hated her.
But at last, at the theatre one night, Pompilia--
"Brought there I knew not why, but now know well"[131:2]
--saw, for the first time, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, "the young frank
personable priest"[131:3]--and seeing him as rapt he gazed at her, felt
". . . Had there been a man like that,
To lift me with his strength out of all strife
Into the calm! . . .
Suppose that man had been instead of this?"
* * * * *
Caponsacchi had hitherto been very much "the courtly spiritual Cupid"
that Browning calls him. His family, the oldest in Arezzo and once the
greatest, had wide interest in the Church, and he had always known that
he was to be a priest. But when the time came for "just a vow to read!"
he stopped awestruck. Could he keep such a promise? He knew himself too
weak. But the Bishop smiled. There were two ways of taking that vow, and
a man like Caponsacchi, with "that superior gift of making madrigals,"
need not choose the harder one.
"Renounce the world? Nay, keep and give it us!"
He was good enough for _that_, thought Caponsacchi, and in this spirit
he took the vows. He did his formal duties, and was equally diligent "at
his post where beauty and fashion rule"--a fribble and a coxcomb, in
short, as he described himself to the judges at the murder-trial. . . .
After three or four years of this, he found himself, "in prosecution of
his calling," at the theatre one night with fat little Canon Conti, a
kinsman of the Franceschini. He was in the mood proper enough for the
place, amused or no . . .
"When I saw enter, stand, and seat herself
A lady young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad"
--and it was (he remembered) like seeing a burden carried to the Altar
in his church one day, while he "got yawningly through Matin-Song." The
burden was unpacked, and left--
"Lofty and lone: and lo, when next I looked
There was the Rafael!"
Fat little Conti noticed his rapt gaze, and exclaimed that he would make
the lady respond to it. He tossed a paper of comfits into her lap; she
turned,
"Looked our way, smiled the beautiful sad strange smile;"
and thought the thought that we have learned--for instinctively and
surely she felt that whoever had thrown the comfits, it was not "that
man":
". . . Silent, grave,
Solemn almost, he saw me, as I saw him."
Conti told Caponsacchi who she was, and warned him to look away; but
promised to take him to the castle if he could. At Vespers, next day,
Caponsacchi heard from Conti that the husband had seen that gaze. _He_
would not signify, but there was Pompilia:
"Spare her, because he beats her as it is,
She's breaking her heart quite fast enough."
It was the turning-point in Caponsacchi's life. He had no thought of
pursuing her; wholly the contrary was his impulse--he felt that he must
leave Arezzo. All that hitherto had charmed him there was done
with--the social successes, the intrigue, song-making; and his patron
was already displeased. These things were what he was there to do, and
he was going to church instead! "Are you turning Molinist?" the patron
asked. "I answered quick" (says Caponsacchi in his narrative)
"Sir, what if I turned Christian?"
--and at once announced his resolve to go to Rome as soon as Lent was
over. One evening, before he went, he was sitting thinking how his life
"had shaken under him"; and
"Thinking moreover . . . oh, thinking, if you like,
How utterly dissociated was I
A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife
Of Guido . . .
. . . I had a whole store of strengths
Eating into my heart, which craved employ,
And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help--
And yet there was no way in the wide world
To stretch out mine."
Her smile kept glowing out of the devotional book he was trying to read,
and he sat thus--when suddenly there came a tap at the door, and on his
summons, there glided in "a masked muffled mystery," who laid a letter
on the open book, and stood back demurely waiting.
It was Margherita, the "kind of maid" of Count Guido, and the letter
purported to be from Pompilia, offering her love. Caponsacchi saw
through the trick at once: the letter was written by Guido. He answered
it in such a way that it would save _her_ from all anger, and at the
same time infuriate the "jealous miscreant" who had written it:
". . . What made you--may one ask?--
Marry your hideous husband?"
But henceforth such letters came thick and fast. Caponsacchi was met in
the street, signed to in church; slips were found in his prayer-book,
they dropped from the window if he passed. . . . At length there arrived
a note in a different manner. This warned him _not_ to come, to avoid
the window for his life. At once he answered that the street was
free--he should go to the window if he chose, and he would go that
evening at the Ave. His conviction was that he should find the husband
there, not the wife--for though he had seen through the trick, it did
not occur to him that it was more than a device of jealousy to trap
them, already suspected after that mutual gaze at the theatre. What it
really was, he never guessed at all.
Meanwhile--turning now to Pompilia's dying speech to the nuns who nursed
her--the companion persecution had been going on at the castle. Day
after day, Margherita had dinned the name of Caponsacchi into the wife's
ears. How he loved her, what a paragon he was, how little she owed
fidelity to the Count who used _her_, Margherita, as his pastime--ought
she not at least to see the priest and warn him, if nothing more? Guido
might kill him! Here was a letter from him; and she began to impart it:
"I know you cannot read--therefore, let me!
'_My idol_'" . . .
The letter was not from Caponsacchi, and Pompilia, divining this as
surely as she had divined that he did not throw the comfits, took it
from the woman's hands and tore it into shreds. . . . Day after day such
moments added themselves to all the rest of the misery, and at last, at
end of her strength, she swooned away. As she was coming to again,
Margherita stooped and whispered _Caponsacchi_. But still, though the
sound of his name was to the broken girl as if, drowning, she had looked
up through the waves and seen a star . . . still she repudiated the
servant's report of him: had she not that once beheld him?
"Therefore while you profess to show him me,
I ever see his own face. Get you gone!"
But the swoon had portended something; and on "one vivid daybreak," half
through April, Pompilia learned what that something was. . . . Going to
bed the previous night, the last sound in her ears had been Margherita's
prattle. "Easter was over; everyone was on the wing for Rome--even
Caponsacchi, out of heart and hope, was going there." Pompilia had heard
it, as she might have heard rain drop, thinking only that another day
was done:
"How good to sleep and so get nearer death!"
But with the daybreak, what was the clear summons that seemed to pierce
her slumber?
". . . Up I sprang alive,
Light in me, light without me, everywhere
Change!"
The exquisite morning was there--the broad yellow sunbeams with their
"myriad merry motes," the glittering leaves of the wet weeds against the
lattice-panes, the birds--
"Always with one voice--where are two such joys?--
The blessed building-sparrow! I stepped forth,
Stood on the terrace--o'er the roofs such sky!
My heart sang, 'I too am to go away,
I too have something I must care about,
Carry away with me to Rome, to Rome!
* * * * *
Not to live now would be the wickedness.'"[137:1]
Pope Innocent XII--"the great good old Pope," as Browning calls him in
the summary of Book I--when in his turn he speaks to us, gives his
highest praise, "where all he praises," to this trait in her whom he
calls "My rose, I gather for the breast of God."
"Oh child, that didst despise thy life so much
When it seemed only thine to keep or lose,
How the fine ear felt fall the first low word
'Value life, and preserve life for My sake!'
* * * * *
Thou, at first prompting of what I call God,
And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,
Accept the obligation laid on thee,
Mother elect, to save the unborn child.
. . . Go past me,
And get thy praise--and be not far to seek
Presently when I follow if I may!"
"Now" (says the sympathetic Other Half-Rome), "begins the tenebrific
passage of the tale." As we have seen, Pompilia had tried all other
means of escape, even before the great call came to her. Her last appeal
had been made to two of Guido's kinsmen, on the wing for Rome like
everyone else--Conti being one. Both had refused, but Conti had referred
her to Caponsacchi--not evilly like Margherita, but jestingly,
flippantly. Nevertheless, that name had come to take a half-fateful
sense to her ears . . . and the Other Half-Rome thus images the moment
in which she resolved to appeal to him.
"If then, all outlets thus secured save one,
At last she took to the open, stood and stared
With her wan face to see where God might wait--
And there found Caponsacchi wait as well
For the precious something at perdition's edge,
He only was predestinate to save . . .
* * * * *
Whatever way in this strange world it was,
Pompilia and Caponsacchi met, in fine,
She at her window, he i' the street beneath,
And understood each other at first look."
For suddenly (she tells us) on that morning of Annunciation, she turned
on Margherita, ever at her ear, and said, "Tell Caponsacchi he may
come!" "How plainly" (says Pompilia)--
"How plainly I perceived hell flash and fade
O' the face of her--the doubt that first paled joy,
Then final reassurance I indeed
Was caught now, never to be free again!"
But she cared not; she felt herself strong for everything.
"After the Ave Maria, at first dark,
I will be standing on the terrace, say!"
She knew he would come, and prayed to God all day. At "an intense throe
of the dusk" she started up--she "dared to say," in her dying speech,
that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace--and there he waited
her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to save me."
+ + + + +
He had come, as he defiantly had said, and not the husband met him, but,
at the window, with a lamp in her hand, "Our Lady of all the Sorrows."
He knelt, but even as he knelt she vanished, only to reappear on the
terrace, so close above him that she could almost touch his head if she
bent down--"and she did bend, while I stood still as stone, all eye, all
ear."
First she told him that she could neither read nor write, but that the
letters said to be from him had been read to her, and seemed to say that
he loved her. She did not believe that he meant that as Margherita meant
it; but "good true love would help me now so much" that at last she had
resolved to see him. Her whole life was so strange that this but
belonged to the rest: that an utter stranger should be able to help
her--he, and he alone! She told him her story. There was a reason now at
last why she must fly from "this fell house of hate," and she would take
from Caponsacchi's love what she needed: enough to save her life with--
". . . Take me to Rome!
Take me as you would take a dog, I think,
Masterless left for strangers to maltreat:
Take me home like that--leave me in the house
Where the father and mother are" . . .
She tells his answer thus:
"He replied--
The first word I heard ever from his lips,
All himself in it--an eternity
Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth
O' the soul that then broke silence--'I am yours.'"
* * * * *
But when he had left her, irresolution swept over him. First, the Church
seemed to rebuke--the Church who had smiled on his silly intrigues! Now
she changed her tone, it appeared:--
"Now, when I found out first that life and death
Are means to an end, that passion uses both,
Indisputably mistress of the man
Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice."
But that soon passed: the word was God's; this was the true
self-sacrifice. . . . But might it not injure her--scandal would hiss
about her name. Would not God choose His own way to save her? And _he_
might pray. . . . Two days passed thus. But he must go to counsel and to
comfort her--was he not a priest? He went. She was there, leaning over
the terrace; she reproached him: why did he delay the help his heart
yearned to give? He answered with his fears for her, but she broke in,
never doubting him though he should doubt himself:
"'I know you: when is it that you will come?'"
"To-morrow at the day's dawn," he replied; and all was arranged--the
place, the time; she came, she did not speak, but glided into the
carriage, while he cried to the driver:
". . . 'By San Spirito,
To Rome, as if the road burned underneath!'"
When she was dying of Guido's twenty-two dagger-thrusts, this was how
Pompilia thought of that long flight:
"I did pray, do pray, in the prayer shall die:
'Oh, to have Caponsacchi for my guide!'
Ever the face upturned to mine, the hand
Holding my hand across the world . . ."
And he, telling the judges of it at the murder-trial, cried that he
never could lie quiet in his grave unless he "mirrored them plain the
perfect soul Pompilia."
"You must know that a man gets drunk with truth
Stagnant inside him. Oh, they've killed her, Sirs!
Can I be calm?"
But he must be calm: he must show them that soul.
"The glory of life, the beauty of the world,
The splendour of heaven . . . well, Sirs, does no one move?
Do I speak ambiguously? The glory, I say,
And the beauty, I say, and splendour, still say I" . . .
--for thus he flings defiance at them. Why do they not smile as they
smiled at the earlier adultery-trial, when they gave him "the jocular
piece of punishment," now that he stands before them "in this sudden
smoke from hell"?
"Men, for the last time, what do you want with me?"
For if they had but seen _then_ what Guido Franceschini was! If they
would but have been serious! Pompilia would not now be
"Gasping away the latest breath of all,
This minute, while I talk--not while you laugh?"
How can the end of this deed surprise them? Pompilia and he had shown
them what its beginning meant--but all in vain. He, the priest, had left
her to "law's watch and ward," and now she is dying--"there and thus she
lies!" Do they understand _now_ that he was not unworthy of Christ when
he tried to save her? His part is done--all that he had been able to do;
he wants no more with earth, except to "show Pompilia who was true"--
"The snow-white soul that angels fear to take
Untenderly . . . Sirs,
Only seventeen!"
Then he begins his story of
". . . Our flight from dusk to clear,
Through day and night and day again to night
Once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all."
Thinking how they sat in silence, both so fearless and so safe, waking
but now and then to consciousness of the wonder of it, he cries:
"You know this is not love, Sirs--it is faith,
The feeling that there's God."
By morning they had passed Perugia; Assisi was opposite. He met her look
for the first time since they had started. . . . At Foligno he urged her
to take a brief rest, but with eyes like a fawn's,
"Tired to death in the thicket, when she feels
The probing spear o' the huntsman,"
she had cried, "On, on to Rome, on, on"--and they went on. During the
night she had a troubled dream, waving away something with wild arms;
and Caponsacchi prayed (thinking "Why, in my life I never prayed
before!") that the dream might go, and soon she slept peacefully. . . .
When she woke, he answered her first look with the assurance that Rome
was within twelve hours; no more of the terrible journey. But she
answered that she wished it could last for ever: to be "with no dread"--
"Never to see a face nor hear a voice--
Yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb;
Nor face, I see it in the dark" . . .
--such tranquillity was such heaven to her!
"This one heart" (she said on her death-bed):
"This one heart gave me all the spring!
I could believe himself by his strong will
Had woven around me what I thought the world
We went along in . . .
For, through the journey, was it natural
Such comfort should arise from first to last?"
As she looks back, new stars bud even while she seeks for old, and all
is Caponsacchi:
"Him I now see make the shine everywhere."
Best of all her memories--"oh, the heart in that!"--was the descent at a
little wayside inn. He tells of it thus. When the day was broad, he
begged her to descend at the post-house of a village. He told the woman
of the house that Pompilia was his sister, married and unhappy--would
she comfort her as women can? And then he left them together:
"I spent a good half-hour, paced to and fro
The garden; just to leave her free awhile . . .
I might have sat beside her on the bench
Where the children were: I wish the thing had been,
Indeed: the event could not be worse, you know:
One more half-hour of her saved! She's dead now, Sirs!"
As they again drove forward, she asked him if, supposing she were to die
now, he would account it to be in sin? The woman at the inn had told her
about the trees that turn away from the north wind with the nests they
hold; she thought she might be like those trees. . . . But soon,
half-sleeping again, and restless now with returning fears, she seemed
to wander in her mind; once she addressed him as "Gaetano." . . .
Afterwards he knew that this name (the name of a newly-made saint) was
that which she destined for her child, if she was given a son:
"One who has only been made a saint--how long?
Twenty-five years: so, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time--see my own five saints!"[146:1]
For "little Pompilia" had been given five names by her pretended
parents:
". . . so many names for one poor child
--Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela
Pompilia Comparini--laughable!"[146:1] . . .
But now Caponsacchi himself grew restless, nervous: here was
Castelnuovo, as good as Rome:
"Say you are saved, sweet lady!"
She awoke. The sky was fierce with the sunset colours--suddenly she
cried out that she must not die:
"'Take me no farther, I should die: stay here!
I have more life to save than mine!' She swooned.
We seemed safe: what was it foreboded so?"
He carried her,
"Against my heart, beneath my head bowed low,
As we priests carry the paten,"
into the little inn and to a couch, where he laid her, sleeping deeply.
The host urged him to leave her in peace till morn.
"Oh, my foreboding! But I could not choose."
All night he paced the passage, throbbing with fear from head to foot,
"filled with a sense of such impending woe" . . . and at the first pause
of night went to the courtyard, ordered the horses--the last moment
came, he must awaken her--he turned to go:
". . . And there
Faced me Count Guido."
Oh, if he had killed him then! if he had taken the throat in "one great
good satisfying gripe," and abolished Guido with his lie! . . . But
while he mused on the irony of such a miscreant calling _her_ his wife,
"The minute, oh the misery, was gone;"
--two police-officers stood beside, and Guido was ordering them to take
her.
Caponsacchi insisted that _he_ should lead them to the room where she
was sleeping. He was a priest and privileged; when they came there, if
the officer should detect
"Guilt on her face when it meets mine, then judge
Between us and the mad dog howling there!"
They all went up together. There she lay,
"O' the couch, still breathless, motionless, sleep's self,
Wax-white, seraphic, saturate with the sun
That filled the window with a light like blood."
At Guido's loud order to the officers, she started up, and stood erect,
face to face with the husband: "the opprobrious blur against all peace
and joy and light and life"--for he was standing against the window
a-flame with morning. But in her terror, that seemed to her the flame
from hell, since _he_ was in it--and she cried to him to stand away, she
chose hell rather than "embracing any more."
Caponsacchi tried to go to her, but now the room was full of the rabble
pouring in at the noise--he was caught--"they heaped themselves upon
me." . . . Then, when she saw "my angel helplessly held back," then
"Came all the strength back in a sudden swell,"
--and she sprang at her husband, seized the sword that hung beside him,
"Drew, brandished it, the sunrise burned for joy
O' the blade. 'Die,' cried she, 'devil, in God's name!'
Ah, but they all closed round her, twelve to one
. . . Dead-white and disarmed she lay."
She said, dying, that this, her first and last resistance, had been
invincible, for she had struck at the lie in Guido; and thus not "the
vain sword nor weak speech" had saved her, but Caponsacchi's truth:--
"You see, I will not have the service fail!
I say the angel saved me: I am safe! . . .
What o' the way to the end?--the end crowns all"
--for even though she now was dying, there had been the time at the
convent with the quiet nuns, and then the safety with her parents, and
then:
"My babe was given me! Yes, he saved my babe:
It would not have peeped forth, the bird-like thing,
Through that Arezzo noise and trouble . . .
But the sweet peace cured all, and let me live
And give my bird the life among the leaves
God meant him! Weeks and months of quietude,
I could lie in such peace and learn so much,
Know life a little, I should leave so soon.
Therefore, because this man restored my soul
All has been right . . .
For as the weakness of my time drew nigh,
Nobody did me one disservice more,
Spoke coldly or looked strangely, broke the love
I lay in the arms of, till my boy was born,
Born all in love, with nought to spoil the bliss
A whole long fortnight: in a life like mine
A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much."
For, thinking of her happy childhood before the marriage, already she
has said that only that childhood, and the prayer that brought her
Caponsacchi, and the "great fortnight" remain as real: the four bad
years between
"Vanish--one quarter of my life, you know."
In that room in the inn they parted. They were borne off to separate
cells of the same ignoble prison, and, separate, thence to Rome.
"Pompilia's face, then and thus, looked on me
The last time in this life: not one sight more,
Never another sight to be! And yet
I thought I had saved her . . .
It seems I simply sent her to her death.
You tell me she is dying now, or dead."
But then it flashes to his mind that this may be a trick to make him
confess--it would be worthy of them; and the great cry breaks forth:
"No, Sirs, I cannot have the lady dead!
That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,
That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)
That vision in the blood-red daybreak--that
Leap to life of the pale electric sword
Angels go armed with--that was not the last
O' the lady! Come, I see through it, you find--
Know the manoeuvre! . . .
Let me see for myself if it be so!"
* * * * *
But it is true. Twenty-two dagger-thrusts--
"Two days ago, when Guido, with the right,
Hacked her to pieces" . . .
Oh, should they not have seen at first? That very flight proved the
innocence of the pair who thus fled: these judges should have recognised
the accepted man, the exceptional conduct that rightly claims to be
judged by exceptional rules. . . . But it is all over. She is
dying--dead perhaps. He has done with being judged--he is guiltless in
thought, word, and deed; and she . . .
". . . For Pompilia--be advised,
Build churches, go pray! You will find me there,
I know, if you come--and you will come, I know.
Why, there's a judge weeping! Did not I say
You were good and true at bottom? You see the truth--
I am glad I helped you: she helped me just so."
Once more he flashes forth in her defence, in rage against Guido--but
the image of her, "so sweet and true and pure and beautiful," comes back
to him:
"Sirs, I am quiet again. You see we are
So very pitiable, she and I,
Who had conceivably been otherwise"
--and at the thought of _how_ "otherwise," of what life with such a
woman were for a free man, and of his life henceforth, a priest, "on
earth, as good as out of it," with the memory of her, only the
memory . . . for she is dying, dead perhaps . . . the whole man breaks
down, and he goes from the place with one wild, anguished call to
heaven:
"Oh, great, just, good God! Miserable me!"
I have chosen to reveal Pompilia chiefly through Caponsacchi's speech
for two reasons. First, because there is nothing grander in our
literature than that passionate and throbbing monologue; second,
because to show this type of woman _through_ another speaker is the way
in which Browning always shows her best. As I said when writing of
Mildred Tresham, directly such a woman speaks for herself, in Browning's
work, he forces the note, he takes from her (unconsciously) a part of
the beauty which those other speakers have shown forth. So with
Pompilia, though not in the same degree as with Mildred, for here the
truth _is_ with us--Pompilia is a living soul, not a puppet of the
theatre. Yet even here the same strange errors recur. She has words
indeed that reach the inmost heart--poignant, overpowering in tenderness
and pathos; but she has, also, words that cause the brows to draw
together, the mind to pause uneasily, then to cry "Not so!" Of such is
the analysis of her own blank ignorance with regard to the
marriage-state. This, wholly acceptable while left unexplained, loses
its verisimilitude when comparisons are found in her mouth with which to
delineate it; and the particular one chosen--of marriage as a coin, "a
dirty piece would purchase me the praise of those I loved"--is actually
inept, since the essence of her is that she does not know anything at
all about the "coin," so certainly does not know that it is or may be
"dirty."
Again, here is an ignorant child, whose deep insight has come to her
through love alone. She feels, in the weakness of her nearing death, and
the bliss of spiritual tranquillity, that all the past with Guido is a
terrific dream: "It is the good of dreams--so soon they go!" Beautiful:
but Browning could not leave it in that beautiful and true simplicity.
She must philosophise:
"This is the note of evil: for good lasts" . . .
Pompilia was incapable of that: she could "say" the thing, as she says
it in that image of the dream--but she would have left it alone, she
would have made no maxim out of it. And the maxim, when it _is_ made,
says no more than the image had said.
Once again: her plea for Guido. That she should forgive him was
essential, but the pardon should have been blind pardon. No reason can
confirm it; and we should but have loved her more for seeking none. To
put in her mouth the plea that Guido had been deceived in his hope of
enrichment by marriage, and that his anger, thus to some extent
justified, was aggravated by her "blindness," by her not knowing
"whither he sought to drive" her with his charges of light conduct,
"So unaware, I only made things worse" . . .
--this is bad through and through; this is the excess of ingenuity which
misled Browning so frequently. There is no loveliness of pardon here;
but something that we cannot suffer for its gross humility. The aim of
Guido, in these charges, was filthiest evil: it revolts to hear the
victim, now fully aware--for the plea is based on her awareness--blame
herself for not "apprehending his drift" (could _she_ have used that
phrase?), and thus, in the madness of magnanimity, seem to lose all
sense of good and evil. It is over-subtle; it is not true; it has no
beauty of any kind. But Browning could not "leave things alone"; he had
to analyse, to subtilise--and this, which comes so well when it is
analytic and subtle minds that address us, makes the defect of his work
whenever an innocent and ignorant girl is made to speak in her own
person.
I shall not multiply instances; my aim is not destructive. But I think
the unmeasured praise of Browning by some of his admirers has worked
against, not for, him. It irritates to read of the "perfection" of this
speech--which has beauties so many and so great that the faults may be
confessed, and leave it still among the lovely things of our literature.
I turn now gladly to those beauties. Chief is the pride and love of the
new-made mother--never more exquisitely shown, and here the more
poignantly shown because she is on her death-bed, and has not seen her
little son again since the "great fortnight." She thinks how well it was
that he had been taken from her before that awful night at the Villa:
"He was too young to smile and save himself;"
--for she does not dream, not then remembering the "money" which was at
the heart of all her woe, that _he_ would have been spared for that
money's sake. . . . But she had not seen him again, and now will never
see him. And when he grows up and comes to be her age, he will ask what
his mother was like, and people will say, "Like girls of seventeen," and
he will think of some girl he knows who titters and blushes when he
looks at her. . . . That is not the way for a mother!
"Therefore I wish someone will please to say
I looked already old, though I was young;"
--and she begs to be told that she looks "nearer twenty." Her name too
is not a common one--that may help to keep apart
"A little the thing I am from what girls are."
But how hard for him to find out anything about her:
"No father that he ever knew at all,
Nor never had--no, never had, I say!"
--and a mother who only lived two weeks, and Pietro and Violante gone!
Only his saint to guard him--that was why she chose the new one; _he_
would not be tired of guarding namesakes. . . . After all, she hopes her
boy will come to disbelieve her history, as herself almost does. It is
dwindling fast to that:
"Sheer dreaming and impossibility--
Just in four days too! All the seventeen years,
Not once did a suspicion visit me
How very different a lot is mine
From any other woman's in the world.
The reason must be, 'twas by step and step
It got to grow so terrible and strange.
These strange woes stole on tip-toe, as it were . . .
Sat down where I sat, laid them where I lay,
And I was found familiarised with fear."
First there was the amazement of finding herself disowned by Pietro and
Violante. Then:
"So with my husband--just such a surprise,
Such a mistake, in that relationship!
Everyone says that husbands love their wives,
Guard them and guide them, give them happiness;
'Tis duty, law, pleasure, religion: well--
You see how much of this comes true with me!"
Next, "there is the friend." . . . People will not ask her about him;
they smile and give him nicknames, and call him her lover. "Most
surprise of all!" It is always that word: how he loves her, how she
loves him . . . yet he is a priest, and she is married. It all seems
unreal, like the childish game in which she and her little friend Tisbe
would pretend to be the figures on the tapestry:--
"You know the figures never were ourselves.
. . . Thus all my life."
Her life is like a "fairy thing that fades and fades."
"--Even to my babe! I thought when he was born,
Something began for me that would not end,
Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay
For evermore, eternally, quite mine."
And hers he is, but he is gone, and it is all so confused that even
_he_ "withdraws into a dream as the rest do." She fancies him grown big,
"Strong, stern, a tall young man who tutors me,
Frowns with the others: 'Poor imprudent child!
Why did you venture out of the safe street?
Why go so far from help to that lone house?
Why open at the whisper and the knock?'"
* * * * *
That New Year's Day, when she had been allowed to get up for the first
time, and they had sat round the fire and talked of him, and what he
should do when he was big--
"Oh, what a happy, friendly eve was that!"
And next day, old Pietro had been packed off to church, because he was
so happy and would talk so much, and Violante thought he would tire her.
And then he came back, and was telling them about the Christmas altars
at the churches--none was so fine as San Giovanni--
". . . When, at the door,
A tap: we started up: you know the rest."
Pietro had done no harm; Violante had erred in telling the lie about her
birth--certainly that was wrong, but it was done with love in it, and
even the giving her to Guido had had love in it . . . and at any rate it
is all over now, and Pompilia has just been absolved, and thus there
"seems not so much pain":
"Being right now, I am happy and colour things.
Yes, everybody that leaves life sees all
Softened and bettered; so with other sights:
_To me at least was never evening yet_
_But seemed far beautifuller than its day_,[158:1]
For past is past."
Then she falls to thinking of that real mother, who had sold her before
she was born. Violante had told her of it when she came back from the
nuns, and was waiting for her boy to come. That mother died at her
birth:
"I shall believe she hoped in her poor heart
That I at least might try be good and pure . . .
And oh, my mother, it all came to this?"
Now she too is dying, and leaving her little one behind. But _she_ is
leaving him "outright to God":
"All human plans and projects come to nought:
My life, and what I know of other lives
Prove that: no plan nor project! God shall care!"
She will lay him with God. And her last breath, for gratitude, shall
spend itself in showing, now that they will really listen and not say
"he was your lover" . . . her last breath shall disperse the stain
around the name of Caponsacchi.
". . . There,
Strength comes already with the utterance!"
* * * * *
Now she tells what we know; some of it we have learnt already from her
lips. She goes back over the years in "that fell house of hate"; then,
the seeing of him at the theatre, the persecution with the false
letters, the Annunciation-morning, the summons to him, the meeting, the
escape:
"No pause i' the leading and the light!
* * * * *
And this man, men call sinner? Jesus Christ!"
But once more, mother-like, she reverts to her boy:
". . . We poor
Weak souls, how we endeavour to be strong!
I was already using up my life--
This portion, now, should do him such a good,
This other go to keep off such an ill.
The great life: see, a breath, and it is gone!"
Still, all will be well: "Let us leave God alone." And now she will
"withdraw from earth and man to her own soul," will "compose herself for
God" . . . but even as she speaks, the flood of gratitude to her one
friend again sweeps back, and she exclaims,
"Well, and there is more! Yes, my end of breath
Shall bear away my soul in being true![159:1]
He is still here, not outside with the world,
Here, here, I have him in his rightful place!
* * * * *
I feel for what I verily find--again
The face, again the eyes, again, through all,
The heart and its immeasurable love
Of my one friend, my only, all my own,
Who put his breast between the spears and me.
Ever with Caponsacchi! . . .
O lover of my life, O soldier-saint,
No work begun shall ever pause for death!
Love will be helpful to me more and more
I' the coming course, the new path I must tread--
My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that!
* * * * *
Not one faint fleck of failure! Why explain?
What I see, oh, he sees, and how much more!
* * * * *
Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God?
Say--I am all in flowers from head to foot!
Say--not one flower of all he said and did,
But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree
Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place
At this supreme of moments!"
She has recognised the truth. This _is_ love--but how different from the
love of the smilings and the whisperings, the "He is your lover!" He is
a priest, and could not marry; but she thinks he would not have married
if he could:
"Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,
* * * * *
In heaven we have the real and true and sure."
In heaven, where the angels "know themselves into one"; and are never
married, no, nor given in marriage:
". . . They are man and wife at once
When the true time is . . .
So, let him wait God's instant men call years;
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty! Through such souls alone
God, stooping, shows sufficient of his light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise."
* * * * *
Who would analyse this child would tear a flower to pieces. Pompilia is
no heroine, no character; but indeed a "rose gathered for the breast of
God":
"Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses,
L'espace d'un matin."
FOOTNOTES:
[126:1] _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, 1886, p. 152.
[130:1] Abandoning for the moment intermediate events, it was _this_
which moved Guido to the triple murder: for once the old couple and
Pompilia dead, with the question of his claim to the dowry still
undecided as it was, his child, the new-born babe, might inherit all.
[131:1] Guido's second speech, wherein he tells the truth, in the hope
that his "impenitence" may defer his execution.
[131:2] Her dying speech.
[131:3] Browning's summary. Book I.
[137:1] Mrs. Orr, commenting on this passage, says: "The sudden
rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the case,
becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and culture;
it was not suggested by the facts"--for Mrs. Orr, who had read the
documents from which Browning made the poem, says: "Unless my memory
much deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the historical
defence of her flight. . . . The real Pompilia was a simple child, who
lived in bodily terror of her husband, and had made repeated efforts to
escape from him." And, as she later adds, though for many readers this
character is, in its haunting pathos, the most exquisite of Browning's
creations, "for others, it fails in impressiveness because it lacks the
reality which habitually marks them." But (she goes on) "it was only in
an idealised Pompilia that the material for poetical creation, in this
'murder story,' could have been found." These remarks will be seen
partly to agree with some of my own.
[146:1] Her dying speech.
[158:1] How wonderfully is the wistful nature of the girl summed up in
these two lines!
[159:1] Caponsacchi uses almost the same words of her: he will "burn his
soul out in showing you the truth."
PART II
[Illustration: THE GREAT LADY]
THE GREAT LADY
"MY LAST DUCHESS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS"
For a mind so subtle, frank, and generous as that of Browning, the
perfume which pervades the atmosphere of "high life" was no less obvious
than the miasma. His imagination needed not to free itself of all things
adventitious to its object ere it could soar; in a word, for Browning,
even a "lady" could be a woman--and remain a woman, even though she be
turned to a "great" lady, that figure once so gracious, now so hunted
from the realm of things that may be loved! Of narrowness like this our
poet was incapable. He could indeed transcend the class-distinction, but
that was not, with him, the same as trampling it under foot. And
especially he loved to set a young girl in those regions where material
cares prevail not--where, moving as in an upper air, she joys or suffers
"not for bread alone."
"Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red--
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance, where a man might base his
head?"
He could grant her to be "such a lady," yet grant, too, that her soul
existed. True, that in _A Toccata of Galuppi's_,[166:1] the soul _is_
questioned:
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice
earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."
But this is not our crude modern refusal of "reality" in any lives but
those of toil and privation. It is rather the sad vision of an entire
social epoch--the eighteenth century; and the eighteenth century in
Venice, who was then at the final stage of her moral death. And despite
the denial of soul in these Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile
"simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature,
since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! The sadness
is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted,
brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid its folly.
"Well, and it was graceful of them--they'd break talk off and
afford
--She, to bite her mask's black velvet, he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord."
The music trickled then through the room, as it trickles now for the
listening poet: with its minor cadences, the "lesser thirds so
plaintive," the "diminished sixths," the suspensions, the solutions:
"Must we die?"--
"Those commiserating sevenths--'Life might last! we can but try!'"
The question of questions, even for "ladies and gentlemen"! And then
come the other questions: "Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must
be answered to."
"So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
'Brave Galuppi, that was music! Good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play.'
Then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by
one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well
undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun."
. . . The "cold music" has seemed to the modern listener to say that
_he_, learned and wise, shall not pass away like these:
". . . You know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction--you'll not die, it cannot be!
As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the
crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to
stop?" . . .
Yet while it seems to say this, the saying brings him no solace. What,
"creaking like a ghostly cricket," it intends, he must perceive, since
he is neither deaf nor blind:
"But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy
mind! . . .
'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."
After all, the pageant of life has value! We need not _only_ the wise
men. And even the wise man creeps through every nerve when he listens to
that music. "Here's all the good it brings!"
+ + + + +
None the less, there is trouble other than that of its passing in this
pageant. Itself has the seed of death within it. All that beauty,
riches, ease, can do, shall leave some souls unsatisfied--nay, shall
kill some souls. . . . This too Browning could perceive and show; and
once more, loved to show in the person of a girl. There is something in
true womanhood which transcends all _morgue_: it seems almost his foible
to say that, so often does he say it! In Colombe, in the Queen of _In a
Balcony_ (so wondrously contrasted with Constance, scarcely less noble,
yet half-corroded by this very rust of state and semblance); above all,
in the exquisite imagining of that "Duchess," the girl-wife who twice is
given us, and in two widely different environments--yet is (to my
feeling) _one_ loved incarnation of eager sweetness. He touched her
first to life when she was dead, if one may speak so paradoxically;
then, unsatisfied with that posthumous awaking, brought her resolutely
back to earth--in _My Last Duchess_ and _The Flight of the Duchess_
respectively. Let us examine the two poems, and I think we shall agree,
in reading the second, that Browning, like Caponsacchi, could not have
the lady dead.
First, then, comes a picture--the mere portrait, "painted on the wall,"
of a dead Italian girl.
"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said
Frà Pandolf by design: for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus."
The Duke, a Duke of Ferrara, owner of "a nine-hundred-years-old name,"
is showing the portrait, with an intention in the display, to the envoy
from a Count whose daughter he designs to make his next Duchess. He is a
connoisseur and collector of the first rank, but his pride is deeplier
rooted than in artistic knowledge and possessions. Thanks to that
nine-hundred-years-old name, he is something more than the passionless
art-lover: he is a man who has killed a woman by his egotism. But even
now that she is dead, he does not know that it was he who killed
her--nor, if he did, could feel remorse. For it is not possible that
_he_ could have been wrong. This Duchess--it would have been idle to
"make his will clear" to such an one; the imposition, not the
exposition, of that will was all that he could show to her (or any other
lesser being) without stooping--"and I choose never to stoop." Her error
had been precisely the "depth and passion of that earnest glance" which
Frà Pandolf had so wonderfully caught. Does the envoy suppose that it
was only her husband's presence which called that "spot of joy" into her
cheek? It had _not_ been so. The mere painting-man, the mere Frà
Pandolf, may have paid her some tribute of the artist--may have said,
for instance, that her mantle hid too much of her wrist, or that the
"faint half-flush that died along her throat" was beyond the power of
paint to reproduce.
". . . Such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy."
As the envoy still seems strangely unenlightened, the Duke is forced to
the "stooping" implied in a more explicit statement:
". . . She had
A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere."
Even now it does not seem that the listener is in full possession and
accord; more stooping, then, is necessary, for the hint must be clearly
conveyed:
"Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the west,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace--all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. . . ."
+ + + + +
We, like the envoy, sit in mute amazement and repulsion, listening to
the Duke, looking at the Duchess. We can see the quivering, glad, tender
creature as though we also were at gaze on Frà Pandolf's picture. . . .
I call _this_ piece a wonder, now! Scarce one of the monologues is so
packed with significance; yet it is by far the most lucid, the most
"simple"--even the rhymes are managed with such consummate art that they
are, as Mr. Arthur Symons has said, "scarcely appreciable." Two lives
are summed up in fifty-six lines. First, the ghastly Duke's; then,
hers--but hers, indeed, is finally gathered into one. . . . Everything
that came to her was transmuted into her own dearness--even his favour
at her breast. We can figure to ourselves the giving of that
"favour"--the high proprietary air, the loftily anticipated gratitude:
Sir Willoughby Patterne by intelligent anticipation. But then, though
the approving speech and blush were duly paid, would come the fool with
his bough of cherries--and speech and blush were given again! Absurder
still, the spot of joy would light for the sunset, the white mule . . .
"Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling?"
Even if he had been able to make clear to "such an one" the crime of
ranking his gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name "with anybody's
gift"--even if he had plainly said that this or that in her "disgusted"
him, and she had allowed herself to be thus lessoned (but she might not
have allowed it; she might have set her wits to his, forsooth, and made
excuse) . . . even so (this must be impressed upon the envoy), it would
have meant some stooping, and the Duke "chooses never to stoop."
Still the envoy listens, with a thought of his own, perhaps, for the
next Duchess! . . . More and more raptly he gazes; his eyes are glued
upon that "pictured countenance"; and still the peevish voice is
sounding in his ear--
". . . Oh, Sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together."
There falls a curious, throbbing silence. The envoy still sits gazing.
There she stands, _looking as if she were alive_. . . . And almost he
starts to hear the voice echo his thought, but with so different a
meaning--
". . . There she stands
As if alive"
--the picture is a wonder!
Still the visitor sits dumb. Was it from human lips that those words had
just now sounded: "_Then all smiles stopped together_"?
She stands there--smiling . . . But the Duke grows weary of this pause
before Frà Pandolf's piece. It is a wonder; but he has other wonders.
Moreover, the due hint has been given, and no doubt, though necessarily
in silence, taken: the next Duchess will be instructed beforehand in
the proper way to "thank men." He intimates his will to move away:
"Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then."
The envoy rises, but not shakes off that horror of repulsion. Somewhere,
as he stands up and steps aside, a voice seems prating of "the Count his
master's known munificence," of "just pretence to dowry," of the "fair
daughter's self" being nevertheless the object. . . . But in a hot
resistless impulse, he turns off; one must remove one's self from such
proximity. Same air shall not be breathed, nor same ground trod. . . .
Still the voice pursues him, sharply a little now for his lack of the
due deference:
". . . Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir,"
--and slowly (since a rupture must not be brought about by _him_) the
envoy acquiesces. They begin to descend the staircase. But the visitor
has no eyes for "wonders" now--he has seen the wonder, has heard the
horror. . . . His host is all unwitting. Strange, that the guest can
pass these glories, but everybody is not a connoisseur. One of them,
however, must be pointed out:
". . . Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me."
. . . Something else getting "stopped"! The envoy looks.
+ + + + +
But lo, she is alive again! This time she is in distant Northern lands,
or _was_, for now (and, strangely, we thank Heaven for it) we know not
where she is. Wherever it is, she is happy. She has been saved, as by
flame; has been snatched from _her_ Duke, and borne away to joy and
love--by an old gipsy-woman! No lover came for her: it was Love that
came, and because she knew Love at first sight and sound, she saved
herself.
The old huntsman of her husband's Court tells the story to a traveller
whom he calls his friend.
"What a thing friendship is, world without end!"
It happened thirty years ago; the huntsman and the Duke and the Duchess
all were young--if the Duke was ever young! He had not been brought up
at the Northern castle, for his father, the rough hardy warrior, had
been summoned to the Kaiser's court as soon as his heir was born, and
died there,
"At next year's end, in a velvet suit . . .
Petticoated like a herald,
In a chamber next to an ante-room
Where he breathed the breath of page and groom,
What he called stink, and they perfume."
The "sick tall yellow Duchess" soon took the boy to Paris, where she
belonged, being (says our huntsman) "the daughter of God knows who." So
the hall was left empty, the fire was extinguished, and the people were
railing and gibing. But in vain they railed and gibed until long years
were past, "and back came our Duke and his mother again."
"And he came back the pertest little ape
That ever affronted human shape;
Full of his travel, struck at himself.
You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways?
--Not he!"
--for in Paris it happened that a cult of the Middle Ages was in vogue,
and the Duke had been told there that the rough North land was the one
good thing left in these evil days:
"So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it."
It was a renaissance in full blast! All the "thoroughly worn-out" usages
were revived:
"The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out."
The "chase" was inevitably one thing that must be reconstructed from its
origins; and the Duke selected for his own mount a lathy horse, all legs
and length, all speed, no strength:
"They should have set him on red Berold,
Mad with pride, like fire to manage! . . .
With the red eye slow consuming in fire,
And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!"
Thus he lost for ever any chance of esteem from our huntsman. He
preferred "a slim four-year-old to the big-boned stock of mighty
Berold"; he drank "weak French wine for strong Cotnar" . . . anything in
the way of futility might be expected after these two manifestations.
"Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:
And out of a convent, at the word,
Came the lady in time of spring.
--Oh, old thoughts, they cling, they cling!"
Spring though it was, the retainers must cut a figure, so they were clad
in thick hunting-clothes, fit for the chase of wild bulls or buffalo:
"And so we saw the lady arrive;
My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!
She was the smallest lady alive,
Made in a piece of Nature's madness,
Too small, almost, for the life and gladness
That over-filled her."
She rode along, the retinue forming as it were a lane to the castle,
where the Duke awaited her.
"Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead,
Straight at the castle, that's best indeed
To look at from outside the walls"
--and her eager sweetness lavished itself already on the "serfs and
thralls," as of course they were styled. She gave our huntsman a look of
gratitude because he patted her horse as he led it; she asked Max, who
rode on her other hand, the name of every bird that flew past: "Was
that an eagle? and was the green-and-grey bird on the field a plover?"
Thus happily hearing, happily looking (how like the Italian duchess--but
she _is_ the same!), the little lady rode forward:
"When suddenly appeared the Duke."
She sprang down, her small foot pointed on the huntsman's hand. But the
Duke, stiffly and as though rebuking her impetuosity, "stepped rather
aside than forward, and welcomed her with his grandest smile." The sick
tall yellow Duchess, his mother, stood like a north wind in the
background; the rusty portcullis went up with a shriek, and, like a sky
sullied by a chill wind,
"The lady's face stopped its play,
As if her first hair had grown grey;
For such things must begin some one day."
But the brave spirit survived. In a day or two she was well again, as if
she could not believe that God did not mean her to be content and glad
in His sight. "So, smiling as at first went she." She was filled to the
brim with energy; there never was such a wife as she would have made for
a shepherd, a miner, a huntsman--and this huntsman, who has _had_ a
beloved wife, knows what he is saying.
"She was active, stirring, all fire--
Could not rest, could not tire--
To a stone she might have given life! . . .
And here was plenty to be done,
And she that could do it, great or small,
She was to do nothing at all."
For the castle was crammed with retainers, and the Duke's plan permitted
a wife, at most, to meet his eye with the other trophies in the hall and
out of it:
"To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen
At the proper place, in the proper minute,
And die away the life between."
The little Duchess, with her warm heart and her smile like the Italian
girl's that "went everywhere," broke every rule at first. It was amusing
enough (the old huntsman remembers)--but for the grief that followed
after. For she did not submit easily. Having broken the rules, she would
find fault with them! She would advise and criticise, and "being a
fool," instruct the wise, and deal out praise or blame like a child. But
"the wise" only smiled. It was as if a little mechanical toy should be
contrived to make the motion of striking, and brilliantly _make_ it.
Thus, as a mechanical toy, was the only way to treat this minute critic,
for like the Duke at Ferrara, this Duke (and his mother) did not choose
to stoop. _He_ would merely wear his "cursed smirk" as he nodded
applause, but he had some trouble in keeping off the "old mother-cat's
claws."
"So the little lady grew silent and thin,
Paling and ever paling."
_Then all smiles stopped together_ . . . And the Duke, perceiving, said
to himself that it was done to spite him, but that he would find the way
to deal with it.
Like the envoy, our huntsman's friend is beginning to find the tale a
little more than he can stand--but, unlike the envoy, he can express
himself. The old man soothes him down: "Don't swear, friend!" and goes
on to solace him by telling how the "old one" has been in hell for many
a year,
"And the Duke's self . . . you shall hear."
+ + + + +
"Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning,
When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,
A drinking-hole out of the fresh, tender ice,"
it chanced that the Duke, asking himself what pleasures were in season
(he would never have known, unless "the calendar bade him be hearty"),
found that a hunting party was indicated:
"Always provided, old books showed the way of it!"
Poetry, painting, tapestries, woodcraft, all were consulted: how it was
properest to encourage your dog, how best to pray to St. Hubert, patron
saint of hunters. The serfs and thralls were duly dressed up,
"And oh, the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't!"
But when all "the first dizziness of flap-hats and buff-coats and
jack-boots" had subsided, the Duke turned his attention to the Duchess's
part in the business, and, after much cogitation, somebody triumphantly
announced that he had discovered her function. An old book stated it:
"When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege,
Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet,
And with water to wash the hands of her liege
In a clean ewer with a fair toweling,
Let her preside at the disemboweling."
All was accordingly got ready: the towel, the most antique ewer, even
the jennet, piebald, black-barred, cream-coated, pink-eyed--and only
then, on the day before the party, was the Duke's pleasure signified to
his lady.
And the little Duchess--paler and paler every day--said she would not
go! Her eyes, that used to leap wide in flashes, now just lifted their
long lashes, as if too weary even for _him_ to light them; and she duly
acknowledged his forethought for her,
"But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught,
Of the weight by day and the watch by night,
And much wrong now that used to be right;"
and, in short, utterly declined the "disemboweling."
But everything was arranged! The Duke was nettled. Still she persisted:
it was hardly the time . . .
The huntsman knew what took place that day in the Duchess's room,
because Jacynth, who was her tire-woman, was waiting within call outside
on the balcony, and since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, the
casement that Jacynth could peep through, an adorer of roses could peep
through also.
Well, the Duke "stood for a while in a sultry smother," and then "with a
smile that partook of the awful," turned the Duchess over to his mother
to learn her duty, and hear the truth. She learned it all, she heard it
all; but somehow or other it ended at last; the old woman, "licking her
whiskers," passed out, and the Duke, who had waited to hear the lecture,
passed out after her, making (he hoped) a face like Nero or Saladin--at
any rate, he showed a very stiff back.
However, next day the company mustered. The weather was execrable--fog
that you might cut with an axe; and the Duke rode out "in a perfect
sulkiness." But suddenly, as he looked round, the sun ploughed up the
woolly mass, and drove it in all directions, and looking through the
courtyard arch, he saw a troop of Gipsies on their march, coming with
the annual gifts to the castle. For every year, in this North land, the
Gipsies come to give "presents" to the Dukes--presents for which an
equivalent is always understood to be forthcoming.
And marvellous the "presents" are! These Gipsies can do anything with
the earth, the ore, the sand. Snaffles, whose side-bars no brute can
baffle, locks that would puzzle a locksmith, horseshoes that turn on a
swivel, bells for the sheep . . . all these are good, but what they can
do with sand!
"Glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear,
Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear,
As if in pure water you dropped and let die
A bruised black-blooded mulberry."
And then that other sort, "their crowning pride, with long white threads
distinct inside."
These are the things they bring, when you see them trooping to the
castle from the valley. So they trooped this morning; and when they
reached the fosse, all stopped but one:
"The oldest Gipsy then above ground."
This witch had been coming to the castle for years; the huntsman knew
her well. Every autumn she would swear must prove her last visit--yet
here she was again, with "her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes, of no
use now but to gather brine."
She sidled up to the Duke and touched his bridle, so that the horse
reared; then produced her presents, and awaited the annual
acknowledgment. But the Duke, still sulky, would scarcely speak to her;
in vain she fingered her fur-pouch. At last she said in her "level
whine," that as well as to bring the presents, she had come to pay her
duty to "the new Duchess, the youthful beauty." As she said that, an
idea came to the Duke, and the smirk returned to his sulky face.
Supposing he set _this_ old woman to teach her, as the other had failed?
What could show forth better the flower-like and delicate life his
fortunate Duchess led, than the loathsome squalor of this sordid crone?
He turned and beckoned the huntsman out of the throng, and, as he was
approaching, bent and spoke mysteriously into the Gipsy's ear. The
huntsman divined that he was telling of the frowardness and ingratitude
of the "new Duchess." And the Gipsy listened submissively. Her mouth
tightened, her brow brightened--it was as if she were promising to give
the lady a thorough frightening. The Duke just showed her a purse--and
then bade the huntsman take her to the "lady left alone in her bower,"
that she might wile away an hour for her:
"Whose mind and body craved exertion,
And yet shrank from all better diversion."
And then the Duke rode off.
+ + + + +
Now begins "the tenebrific passage of the tale." Or rather, now begins
what we can make into such a passage if we will, but need not. We can
read a thousand transcendental meanings into what now happens, or we can
simply accept and understand it--leaving the rest to the
"Browningites," of whom Browning declared that _he_ was not.
The huntsman, turning round sharply to bid the old woman follow him--a
little distrustful of her since that interview with the Duke--saw
something that not only restored his trust, but afterwards made him sure
that she had planned beforehand the wonders that now happened. She
looked a head taller, to begin with, and she kept pace with him easily,
no stooping nor hobbling--above all, no cringing! She was wholly
changed, in short, and the change, "whatever the change meant," had
extended to her very clothes. The shabby wolf-skin cloak she wore seemed
edged with gold coins. Under its shrouding disguise, she was wearing (we
may conjecture), for this foreseen occasion, her dress of tribal Queen.
But most wonderful of all was the change in her "eye-holes." When first
he saw her that morning, they had been, as it were, empty of all but
brine; now, two unmistakable eye-points, live and aware, looked out from
their places--as a snail's horns come out after rain. . . . He accepted
all this, "quick and surprising" as it was, without spoken comment; and
took the Gipsy to Jacynth, standing duty at the lady's chamber-door.
"And Jacynth rejoiced, she said, to admit any one,
For since last night, by the same token,
Not a single word had the lady spoken."
The two women went in, and our friend, on the balcony, "watched the
weather."
Jacynth never could tell him afterwards _how_ she came to fall soundly
asleep all of a sudden. But she did so fall asleep, and so remained the
whole time through. He, on the balcony, was following the hunt across
the open country--for in those days he had a falcon eye--when, all in a
moment, his ear was arrested by
"Was it singing, or was it saying,
Or a strange musical instrument playing?"
It came from the lady's room; and, pricked by curiosity, he pushed the
lattice, pulled the curtain, and--first--saw Jacynth "in a rosy sleep
along the floor with her head against the door." And in the middle of
the room, on the seat of state,
"Was a queen--the Gipsy woman late!"
She was bending down over the lady, who, coiled up like a child, sat
between her knees, clasping her hands over them, and with her chin set
on those hands, was gazing up into the face of the old woman. That old
woman now showed large and radiant eyes, which were bent full on the
lady's, and seemed with every instant to grow wider and more shining.
She was slowly fanning with her hands, in an odd measured motion--and
the huntsman, puzzled and alarmed, was just about to spring to the
rescue, when he was stopped by perceiving the expression on the lady's
face.
"For it was life her eyes were drinking . . .
Life's pure fire, received without shrinking,
Into the heart and breast whose heaving
Told you no single drop they were leaving."
The life had passed into her very hair, which was thrown back, loose
over each shoulder,
"And the very tresses shared in the pleasure,
Moving to the mystic measure,
Bounding as the bosom bounded."
He stopped short, perplexed, "as she listened and she listened." But all
at once he felt himself struck by the self-same contagion:
"And I kept time to the wondrous chime,
Making out words and prose and rhyme,
Till it seemed that the music furled
Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped
From under the words it first had propped."
He could hear and understand, "word took word as hand takes hand"--and
the Gipsy said:
"And so at last we find my tribe,
And so I set thee in the midst . . .
I trace them the vein and the other vein
That meet on thy brow and part again,
Making our rapid mystic mark;
And I bid my people prove and probe
Each eye's profound and glorious globe
Till they detect the kindred spark
In those depths so dear and dark . . .
And on that round young cheek of thine
I make them recognise the tinge . . .
For so I prove thee, to one and all,
Fit, when my people ope their breast,
To see the sign, and hear the call,
And take the vow, and stand the test
Which adds one more child to the rest--
When the breast is bare and the arms are wide,
And the world is left outside."
There would be probation (said the Gipsy), and many trials for the lady
if she joined the tribe; but, like the jewel-finder's "fierce assay" of
the stone he finds, like the "vindicating ray" that leaps from it:
"So, trial after trial past,
Wilt thou fall at the very last
Breathless, half in trance
With the thrill of the great deliverance,
Into our arms for evermore;
And thou shalt know, those arms once curled
About thee, what we knew before,
_How love is the only good in the world_.
Henceforth be loved as heart can love,
Or brain devise, or hand approve!
Stand up, look below,
It is our life at thy feet we throw
To step with into light and joy;
Not a power of life but we employ
To satisfy thy nature's want."
The Gipsy said much more; she showed what perfect mutual love and
understanding can do, for "if any two creatures grow into one, they will
do more than the world has done"--and the tribe will at least approach
that end with this beloved woman. She says not _how_--whether by one
man's loving her to utter devotion of himself, or by _her_ giving "her
wondrous self away," and taking the stronger nature's sway. . . .
"I foresee and I could foretell
Thy future portion, sure and well;
But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,
Let them say what thou shalt do!"
But whatever she does, the eyes of her tribe will be upon her, with
their blame, their praise:
"Our shame to feel, our pride to show,
Glad, angry--but indifferent, no!"
And so at last the girl who now sits gazing up at her will come to old
age--will retire apart with the hoarded memories of her heart, and
reconstruct the past until the whole "grandly fronts for once her soul"
. . . and then, the gleam of yet another morning shall break; it will be
like the ending of a dream, when
"Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes."
With that great utterance her voice changed like a bird's. The music
began again, the words grew indistinguishable . . . with a snap the
charm broke, and the huntsman, "starting as if from a nap," realised
afresh that the lady was being bewitched, sprang from the balcony to the
ground, and hurried round to the portal. . . . In another minute he
would have entered:
"When the door opened, and more than mortal
Stood, with a face where to my mind centred
All beauties I ever saw or shall see,
The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy.
She was so different, happy and beautiful,
I felt at once that all was best" . . .
And he felt, too, that he must do whatever she commanded. But there was,
in fact, no commanding. Looking on the beauty that had invested her,
"the brow's height and the breast's expanding," he knew that he was hers
to live and die, and so he needed not words to find what she
wanted--like a wild creature, he knew by instinct what this freed wild
creature's bidding was. . . . He went before her to the stable; she
followed; the old woman, silent and alone, came last--sunk back into her
former self,
"Like a blade sent home to its scabbard."
He saddled the very palfrey that had brought the little Duchess to the
castle--the palfrey he had patted as he had led it, thus winning a smile
from her. And he couldn't help thinking that she remembered it too, and
knew that he would do anything in the world for her. But when he began
to saddle his own nag ("of Berold's begetting")--not meaning to be
obtrusive--she stopped him by a finger's lifting, and a small shake of
the head. . . . Well, he lifted her on the palfrey and set the Gipsy
behind her--and then, in a broken voice, he murmured that he was ready
whenever God should please that she needed him. . . . And she looked
down
"With a look, a look that placed a crown on me,"
and felt in her bosom and dropped into his hand . . . not a purse! If it
had been a purse of silver ("or gold that's worse") he would have gone
home, kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned himself--but it was not a
purse; it was a little plait of hair, such as friends make for each
other in a convent:
"This, see, which at my breast I wear,
Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment)
And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment.
And then--and then--to cut short--this is idle,
These are feelings it is not good to foster.
I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle,
And the palfrey bounded--and so we lost her."
+ + + + +
There is the story of the Flight of the Duchess; and it seems to me to
need no "explanation" at all. The Gipsy can be anyone or anything we
like that _saves_ us; the Duke and his mother anyone or anything that
crushes love.
"Love is the only good in the world."
And the love (though it _may_ be) _need_ not be the love of man for
woman, and woman for man; but simply love. The quick warm impulse which
made this girl look round so eagerly as she approached her future home,
and thank the man who led her horse for patting it, and want to hear the
name of every bird--the impulse from the heart "too soon made glad, too
easily impressed"; the sweet, rich nature of her who "liked whate'er she
looked on, and her looks went everywhere" . . . what was all this but
love? The tiny lady was one great pulse of it; without love she must
die; to give it, take it, was the meaning of her being. And love was
neither given nor accepted from her. Worse, it was scorned; it was not
"fitting." All she had to do was to be "on show"; nothing, nothing,
nothing else--
"And die away the life between."
And then came the time when, like Pompilia, she had "something she must
care about"; and the office asked of her was to "assist at the
disemboweling" of a noble, harried stag! Not even when she pleaded the
hour that awaited her was pity shown, was love shown, for herself or for
the coming child. And then the long, spiteful lecture. . . . That night,
even to Jacynth, not a word could she utter. Here was a world without
love, a world that did not want her--and _she_ was here, and she must
stay, until, until . . . Which would the coming child be--herself again,
or _him_ again? Scarce she knew which would be the sadder happening.
And then Love walked in upon her. She was "of their tribe"--they wanted
her; they wanted all she was. Just what she was; she would not have to
change; they wanted her. They liked her eyes, and the colour on her
cheek--they liked _her_. Her eyes might look at them, and "speak true,"
for they wanted just that truth from just those eyes.
It is any escape, any finding of our "tribe"! It is the self-realisation
of a nature that can love. And this is but one way of telling the great
tale. Browning told it thus, because for years a song had jingled in his
ears of "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!"--and to all of us, the
Gipsies stand for freedom, for knowledge of the great earth-secrets, for
nourishment of heart and soul. But we need not follow only them to
compass "the thrill of the great deliverance." We need but know, as the
little Duchess knew, what it is that we want, and trust it. _She_ placed
the old woman at once upon her own "seat of state": from the moment she
beheld her, love leaped forth and crowned the messenger of love.
"And so at last we find my tribe,
And so I set thee in the midst . . .
Henceforth be loved as heart can love. . . .
It is our life at thy feet we throw
To step with into light and joy."
The Duchess heard, and knew, and was saved. It needed courage--needed
swift decision--needed even some small abandonment of "duty." But she
saw what she must do, and did it. Duty has two voices often; the Duchess
heard the true voice. If she was bewitched, it was by the spell that was
ordained to save her, could she hear it. . . . And that she heard
aright, that, leaving the castle, she left the hell where love lives
not, we know from the old huntsman:
"For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery;
So they made no search and small inquiry";
and Gipsies thenceforth were hustled across the frontier.
Even the Duchess could not make love valid there. Reality was out of
them. . . . True, the huntsman, after thirty years, is still her sworn
adorer. He had stayed at the castle:
"I must see this fellow his sad life through--
He is our Duke, after all,
And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall";
--but, as soon as the Duke is dead, our friend intends to "go
journeying" to the land of the Gipsies, and there find his lady or hear
the last news of her:
"And when that's told me, what's remaining?"
For Jacynth is dead and all their children, and the world is too hard
for his explaining, and so he hopes to find a snug corner under some
hedge, and turn himself round and bid the world good-night, and sleep
soundly until he is waked to another world, where pearls will no longer
be cast before swine that can't value them. "_Amen._"
But at any rate this talk with his friend has made him see his little
lady again, and everything that they did since "seems such child's
play," with her away! So her love did one thing even there--just as one
likes to think that the unhappier Duchess, the Italian one, left
precisely such a memory in the heart of that officious fool who broke
the bough of cherries for her in the orchard.
And is it not good to think that almost immediately after _The Flight of
the Duchess_ was published, Browning was to meet the passionate-hearted
woman whom _he_ snatched almost from the actual death-bed that had been
prepared for her with as much of pomp and circumstance as was the
Duchess's life-in-death! With this in mind, it gives one a queer thrill
to read those lines of silenced prophecy:
"I foresee and I could foretell
Thy future portion, sure and well:
But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,
Let them say what thou shalt do!"
FOOTNOTES:
[166:1] The "Toccata" which awakens these reflections in the poet is by
a Venetian composer, Baldassare Galuppi, who was born in 1706, and died
in 1785. He lived and worked in London from 1741 to 1744. "He abounded"
(says Vernon Lee, in her _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_)
"in melody, tender, pathetic, and brilliant, which in its extreme
simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty."
PART III
[Illustration: THE LOVER]
I
LOVERS MEETING
Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life--the thing
which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is
common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in
him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in
any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without
sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general
outlook--more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic
analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his
passion for humanity _as_ humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to
trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let
us take them for granted--let us examine man as a separate phenomenon,
so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest,
next to mankind, was art in all its branches--a correlative aspect, that
is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and
aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in
expression of our subtlest inward life. Man _was_, for him, the proper
study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," and
that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit--differing there from Byron,
almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur
Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature."
Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook;
and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.
In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more
inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for
flabbiness--there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker
ways. After _Pauline_--rejected utterance of his green-sickness--the
wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no
withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up,
"as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For
love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeed
_do all_ for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing
something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That
other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted,
but no _claim_ shall be formulated on either side. This is the true
faith, the true freedom, for both. Meredith has said the same, more
axiomatically than Browning ever said it:
"He learnt how much we gain who make no claims"
--but Browning's whole existence announced that axiom, and triumphantly
proved it true. Almost the historic happy marriage of the world! Such
was _his_ marriage, and such it must have been, for never was man
declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. He
understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!)
conduct--what it may do, and not do, for happiness. That is to say, he
understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far
hinders it--when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when
by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. The whole secret, for
Browning, lay in loving greatly.
Thus, for example, it is notable that, except _The Laboratory_ and
_Fifine at the Fair_, none of his poems of men and women turns upon
jealousy. For him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in
love for it. And even Elvire's demurs (in _Fifine_), even the departure
from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of
insight into Juan's better self. He will never be all that he can be
(she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and
always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be
deep and true as well as brilliant.
For Browning, _how_ love comes is not important. It may be by the
high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely
answered, all is well. Living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our
dearest memory.
"What is he buzzing in my ears?
'Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'
Ah, reverend sir, not I!"
And why not? Because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man
"used to meet." What he viewed in the world then, he now sees again--the
"suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it
were, with the bottles on the bedside table.
"At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, Sir, it's improper,
My poor mind's out of tune."
Nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the
details. . . . She left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle
labelled 'Ether,'"
"And stole from stair to stair,
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!
We loved, Sir--used to meet:
How sad and mad and bad it was--
But then, how it was sweet!"
They did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other
"confession"--if he calls this one! It is the meaning of the man's life:
that is all.
In _Confessions_, the story is done; the man is dying. In _Love among
the Ruins_, we have almost the great moment itself. The lover, alone,
is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before
him. Here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of
"a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful
prince once held his court. There had been a "domed and daring palace,"
a wall with a hundred gates--its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve
men might stand abreast. Now all is pasture-land:
"And such glory and perfection, see, of grass
Never was"
--as here,
"Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold."
Of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. It was part
of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his
minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the
chariot-races. . . . This is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles
as it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes
and rills melt into one grey . . . and he knows
"That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come."
That king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its
temples and colonnades,
"All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts--and then
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each."
A million fighters were sent forth every year from that city; and they
built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet still had a
thousand chariots in reserve--all gold, of course. . . .
"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin.
Shut them in
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best!"
But though love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all;
we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us,
even from our love. The day is long and we must work in it; but we can
meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon can put
off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand
at the other side of the bay:
"Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!"
Yes--we can meet at night. . . . But we must part at morning.
"Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim;
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me."[205:1]
These are plainly not wedded lovers, though some commentators so
describe them; and indeed Browning sings but seldom of wedded love. When
he does so sing, he reaches heights of beauty beyond any in the other
lyrics, but the poems of marriage are not in our survey. In nearly all
his other love-poetry, it is the "trouble of love," in one form or
another, which occupies him--the lovers who meet to part; those who love
"in vain" (as the phrase goes, but never _his_ phrase); those who choose
separation rather than defiance of the "world, and what it fears"; those
who do defy that world, and reckon up their gains.
"Dear, had the world in its caprice
Deigned to proclaim 'I know you both,
Have recognised your plighted troth,
Am sponsor for you: live in peace!'--
How many precious months and years
Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
Before we found it out at last,
The world, and what it fears?
How much of priceless life were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society's true ornament--
Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
And feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss?"
That old quarrel between the ideals of Bohemia and of "respectability"!
They could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the
trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "People
would have talked." . . . Well, people may talk now, but they _have_
gained something. They have gained freedom to live their lives as they
choose--rightly or wrongly, but at any rate it is not "the world" that
sways them. They have learnt how much that good word is worth! What is
happening, this very hour, in that environment--here, for instance, in
the Institute, which they are just passing? "Guizot receives
Montalembert!" The two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly
signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. See the
courtyard all alight for the reception! Let them escape from it all, and
leave respectability to its false standards. _They_ are not
included--they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!"
I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers
had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were
pleased to think. The world still counted for them--as it counts for all
who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they
could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting
it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once
it recognises the true Contemner! To
"Feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss"
--on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the
example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes--we must refuse to be
dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short--they
could not _forget_ the world.
Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn
to the dream-meetings--the great encounters which all of us feel might
be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that
imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so
marvellously uttered in _Mesmerism_. Here, in these breathless
stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or
rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the
actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we
should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in
his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings
his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey":
"Till I seemed to have and hold
In the vacancy
'Twixt the walls and me
From the hair-plait's chestnut-gold
To the foot in its muslin fold--
Have and hold, then and there,
Her, from head to foot,
Breathing and mute,
Passive and yet aware,
In the grasp of my steady stare--
Hold and have, there and then,
All her body and soul
That completes my whole,
All that women add to men,
In the clutch of my steady ken"--
. . . if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of
his hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he _must_ draw
her from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to
suffocate her if she cannot escape from it:
"Out of doors into the night!
On to the maze
Of the wild wood-ways,
Not turning to left nor right
From the pathway, blind with sight--
Swifter and still more swift,
As the crowding peace
Doth to joy increase
In the wild blind eyes uplift
Thro' the darkness and the drift!"
And he _will_ sit so, feeling his soul dilate, and no muscle shall be
relaxed as he sees his belief come true, and more and more she takes
shape for him, so that she shall be, when she does come, altered even
from what she was at his first seeming to "have and hold her"--for the
lips glow, the cheek burns, the hair, from its plait, breaks loose, and
spreads with "a rich outburst, chestnut gold-interspersed," and the
arms open wide "like the doors of a casket-shrine," as she comes, comes,
comes . . .
"'Now--now'--the door is heard!
Hark, the stairs! and near--
Nearer--and here--
'Now!' and at call the third
She enters without a word!"
* * * * *
Could a woman ever forget the man who should do that with her! Would she
not almost be ready, in such an hour, to die as Porphyria died?
But in _Porphyria's Lover_, not so great a spirit speaks. This man, too,
sitting in his room alone, thinks of the woman he loves, and she comes
to him; but here it is her own will that drives through wind and
rain--there is no compelling glory from the man uncertain still of
passion's answering passion.
"The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria." . . .
She glided in and did not speak. She looked round his cottage, then
kneeled and made the dying fire blaze up. When all the place was warm,
she rose and put off her dripping cloak and shawl, the hat, the soiled
gloves; she let her rain-touched hair fall loose,
"And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread o'er all her yellow hair--
Murmuring how she loved me--she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever."
But to-night, at some gay feast in a world all sundered from this man's,
there had seized her
"A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain."
She found him indeed as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart
fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she
was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his
grief--unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it
possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and
it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she
calls to him, and as even then he makes no answer, sits down beside him
and draws his head to her breast.
"Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her." . . .
But he knows that she felt no pain, for in a minute he opened her lids
to see, and the blue eyes laughed back at him "without a stain." He
loosed the tress about her neck, and the colour flashed into her cheek
beneath his burning kiss. Now he propped her head--this time _his_
shoulder bore
"The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!"
* * * * *
This poem was first published as the second of two headed "Madhouse
Cells"; and though the classifying title was afterwards rejected, that
it should ever have been used is something of a clue to the meaning. But
only "something," for even so, we wonder if the dream were all a dream,
if Porphyria ever came, and, if she did, was this the issue? What truly
happened on that night of wind and rain?--that night which _is_ real,
whatever else is not . . . I ask, we all ask; but does it greatly
matter? Enough that we can grasp the deeper meaning--the sanity in the
madness. As Porphyria, with her lover's head on her breast, sat in the
little cottage on that stormy night, the world at last rejected, the
love at last accepted, she was at her highest pulse of being: she was
_herself_. When in all the rest of life would such another moment
come? . . . How many lovers have mutually murmured that: "If we could
die _now_!"--nothing impaired, nothing gone or to go from them: the
sanity in the madness, the courage in the cowardice. . . . So this lover
felt, brooding in the "madhouse cell" on what had been, or might have
been:
"And thus we sit together now,
And yet God has not said a word!"
Six poems of exultant love--and a man speaks in each! With Browning, the
woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even
_he_ puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. From the
nameless girl in _Count Gismond_ and from Balaustion--these only--do we
get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as I have just
now shown. . . . Always the tear assigned to woman! It may be "true"; I
think it is not at least _so_ true, but true in some degree it must be,
since all legend will thus have it. What then shall a woman say? That
the time has come to alter this? That woman cries "for nothing," like
the children? That she does not understand so well as man the ends of
love? Or that she understands them better? . . . Perhaps all of these
things; perhaps some others also. Let us study now, at all events, the
"tear"; let us see in what, as Browning saw her, the Trouble of Love
consists for woman.
FOOTNOTES:
[205:1] Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the
minds of some. In Berdoe's _Browning Cyclopædia_ the difficulty is
frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He interprets the
last line of _Parting at Morning_ as meaning that the woman "desires
more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is the _man_ who
speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a
misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him."
Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him"
refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . Here is
an instance of making obscurity where none really exists.
[208:1] Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen
stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break
in sense or sound."
II
TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S
I.--THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE"
Writing of the unnamed heroine of _Count Gismond_, I said that she had
one of the characteristic Browning marks--that of trust in the sincerity
of others. Here, in _The Glove_, we find a figure who resembles her in
two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady--a lady of the
Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training:
_dis_-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the
earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very
prize-bloom of legend--that famous incident of the glove thrown into the
lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . Does this
interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of
it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which,
till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but
the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis--vanity! All the world
knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned
alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried:
". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
Not love, set that task to humanity!"
But Browning, who could detect the Court-grown, found excuse for her in
that lamentable gardening. The weed had been sown, as it was sown (so
much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are
told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this
alone, to be older. _She had been longer at Court_; its lesson had
penetrated her being. Day after day she had watched, day after day had
listened; then arrived De Lorge with fervent words of love, and now she
watched _him_, hearkened _him_ . . . and more and more misdoubted,
hesitated, half-inclined and half-afraid; until at last, "one day struck
fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," she gathered all her hesitation,
yielding, courage, into one quick impulse--and flung her glove to the
lions! With the result which we know--of an instant and a fearless
answer to the test; but, as well, an instant confirmation of the worst
she had dreaded.
+ + + + +
It was at the Court of King Francis I of France that it happened--the
most brilliant Court, perhaps, in history, where the flower of French
knighthood bloomed around the gayest, falsest of kings. Romance was in
the air, and so was corruption; poets, artists, worked in every corner,
and so did intrigue and baseness and lust. Round the King was gathered
the _Petite Bande_, the clique within a clique--"that troop of pretty
women who hunted with him, dined with him, talked with him"--led by his
powerful mistress, the Duchesse d'Étampes, friend of the Dauphin's
neglected wife, the Florentine Catherine de Médicis--foe of that wife's
so silently detested rival, "Madame Dame Diane de Poitiers, Grande
Sénéschale de Normandie."
The two great mistresses had each her darling poet: the Duchesse
d'Étampes had chosen Clement Marot, who could turn so gracefully the
Psalms of David into verse; La Grande Sénéschale, always supreme in
taste, patronised Pierre Ronsard--and this was why Pierre sometimes
found that when he "talked fine to King Francis," the King would yawn in
his face, or whistle and move off to some better amusement.
That was what Francis did one day after the Peace of Cambray had been
signed by France and Spain. He had grown weary of leisure:
"Here we've got peace, and aghast I'm
Caught thinking war the true pastime.
Is there a reason in metre?
Give us your speech, master Peter!"
Peter obediently began, but he had hardly spoken half a dozen words
before the King whistled aloud: "Let's go and look at our lions!"
They went to the courtyard, and as they went, the throng of courtiers
mustered--lords and ladies came as thick as coloured clouds at sunset.
Foremost among them (relates Ronsard in Browning's poem) were De Lorge
and the lady he was "adoring."
"Oh, what a face! One by fits eyed
Her, and the horrible pitside"
--for they were now all sitting above the arena round which the lions'
dens were placed. The black Arab keeper was told to stir up the great
beast, Bluebeard. A firework was accordingly dropped into the den, whose
door had been opened . . . they all waited breathless, with beating
hearts . . .
"Then earth in a sudden contortion
Gave out to our gaze her abortion.
Such a brute! . . .
One's whole blood grew curdling and creepy
To see the black mane, vast and heapy,
The tail in the air stiff and straining,
The wide eyes nor waxing nor waning."
And the poet, watching him, thought how perhaps in that eruption of
noise and light, the lion had dreamed that his shackles were shivered,
and he was free again.
"Ay, that was the open sky o'erhead!
And you saw by the flash on his forehead,
By the hope in those eyes wide and steady,
He was leagues in the desert already."
The King laughed: "Was there a man among them all who would brave
Bluebeard?" Not as a challenge did he say this--he knew well that it
were almost certain death:
"Once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold!"
But Francis had scarcely finished speaking when (as all the world knows)
a glove fluttered down into the arena and fell close to the lion. It was
the glove of De Lorge's lady. They were sitting together, and he had
been, as Ronsard could see, "weighing out fine speeches like gold from a
balance." . . . He now delayed not an instant, but leaped over the
barrier and walked straight up to the glove. The lion never moved; he
was still staring (as all of us, with aching hearts, have seen such an
one stare from his cage) at the far, unseen, remembered land. . . . De
Lorge picked up the glove, calmly; calmly he walked back to the place
where he had leaped the barrier before, leaped it again, and (once more,
as all the world knows) dashed the glove in the lady's face. Every eye
was on them. The King cried out in applause that _he_ would have done
the same:
". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
Not love, set that task to humanity!"
--and, having the royal word for it, all the lords and ladies turned
with loathing from De Lorge's "queen dethroned."
All but Peter Ronsard. _He_ noticed that she retained undisturbed her
self-possession amid the Court's mockery.
"As if from no pleasing experiment
She rose, yet of pain not much heedful,
So long as the process was needful.
* * * * *
She went out 'mid hooting and laughter;
Clement Marot stayed; I followed after."
Catching her up, he asked what it had all meant. "I'm a poet," he added;
"I must know human nature."
"She told me, 'Too long had I heard
Of the deed proved alone by the word:
For my love--what De Lorge would not dare!
With my scorn--what De Lorge could compare!
And the endless descriptions of death
He would brave when my lip formed a breath,
I must reckon as braved'" . . .
--and for these great gifts, must give in return her love, as love was
understood at the Court of King Francis. But to-day, looking at the
lion, she had mused on all the dangers affronted to get that beast to
that den: his capture by some poor slave whom no lady's love was to
reward, no King or Court to applaud, but only the joy of the sport, and
the delight of his children's wonder at the glorious creature. . . . And
at this very Court, the other day, did not they tell of a page who for
mere boyish bravado had dropped his cap over the barrier and leaped
across, pretending that he must get it back? Why should she not test De
Lorge here and now? For _now_ she was still free; now she could find out
what "death for her sake" really meant; otherwise, he might yet break
down her doubts, she might yield, still unassured, and only then
discover that it did not mean anything at all! So--she had thrown the
glove.
"'The blow a glove gives is but weak:
Does the mark yet discolour my cheek?
But when the heart suffers a blow,
Will the pain pass so soon, do you know?'"
* * * * *
De Lorge, indeed, had braved "death for her sake"; but he had then been
capable of the public insult. The pain of _that_, had she loved him,
must quite have broken her heart. And not only had he been capable of
this, but he had not understood her, he too had thought it "mere
vanity." Love then was nowhere--neither in his heart nor in hers. . . .
Ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a
youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would
pass. He was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as
that of the brilliant De Lorge (thus Ronsard ironically remarks); but
there was no doubt what _he_ would have done, "had our brute been
Nemean." He would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought it
right that he should earn what he so ardently desired.
"And when, shortly after, she carried
Her shame from the Court, and they married,
To that marriage some happiness, maugre
The voice of the Court, I dared augur."
De Lorge led for some time the most brilliant of envied careers, and
finally married a beauty who had been the King's mistress for a week.
Thenceforth he fetched her gloves very diligently, at the hours when the
King desired her presence and his absence--and never did he set off on
that errand (looking daggers at her) but Francis took occasion to tell
the Court the story of the other glove. And she would smile and say that
he brought _hers_ with no murmur.
+ + + + +
Was the first lady right or wrong? She was right to hesitate in
accepting De Lorge's "devotion"--not because De Lorge was worthless, but
because she did not love him. The King spoke truly when he said that not
love set that task to humanity. Neither did mere vanity set it, as we
now perceive; but _only_ love could excuse the test which love could
never have imposed. De Lorge was worthless--no matter; the lady held no
right over him, whatever he was, for she did not love him. And not alone
her "test" was the proof of this: her hesitation had already proved it.
But, it may be said, the age was different: women still believed that
love could come to them through "wooing." Nowadays, to be sure, so
subtle a woman as this would know that her own heart lay passive, and
that women's hearts do not lie passive when they love. . . . But I think
there were few things about love that women did not know in the days of
King Francis! We have only to read the discourses of Marguerite de
Valois, sister of the King--we have only to consider the story of Diane
de Poitiers, seventeen years older than her Dauphin, to realise _that_
most fully. Women's hearts were the same; and a woman's heart, when it
loves truly, will make no test for very pride-in-love's dear sake. It
scorns tests--too much scorns them, it may be, and yet I know not. Again
it is the Meredithian axiom which arrests me: "He learnt how much we
gain who make no claims." Our lovers then may be, should be, prepared to
plunge among the lions for our gloves--but we should not be able to send
them! And if so, a De Lorge here and there should win a "hand" he merits
not, we may reflect that the new, no more than the old, De Lorge will
have won the _heart_ which doubts--and, doubting, flings (or keeps) the
glove.
"Utter the true word--out and away
Escapes her soul." . . .
Gloves flung to lions are not the answer which that enfranchised soul
will give! And so the Lady thought right and did wrong: 'twas _not_ love
set that task to humanity. Even Browning cannot win her our full
pardon; we devote not many kerchiefs to drying this "tear."
II.--DÎS ALITER VISUM; OR, LE BYRON DE NOS JOURS
"The gods saw it otherwise." Thus we may translate the first clause of
the title; the second, the reference to Byron, I have never understood,
and I think shall never understand. Of all the accusations which stand
against him, that of letting opportunity in this sort slip by is
assuredly not one. Such "poor pretty thoughtful things" as the lady of
this poem played their parts most notably in Byron's life--to their own
disaster, it is true, but never because he weighed their worth in the
spirit of this French poet, so bitterly at last accused, who meets
again, ten years after the day of his cogitations, the subject of them
in a Paris drawing-room--married, and as dissatisfied as he, who still
is free. Reading the poem, indeed, with Byron in mind, the fancy comes
to me that if it had been by any other man but Browning, it might almost
be regarded as a sidelong vindication of the Frenchman for having
rejected the "poor pretty thoughtful thing." For Byron married
her[224:1]--and in what did it result? . . . But that Browning should in
any fashion, however sidelong, acknowledge Byron as anything but the
most despicable of mortals, cannot for a moment be imagined; he who
understood so many complex beings failed entirely here. Thus, ever in
perplexity, I must abjure the theory of Byronic merit. There lurks in
this poem no hidden plea for abstention, for the "man who
doesn't"--hinted at through compassionate use of his name who made one
of the great disastrous marriages of the world.
+ + + + +
Ten years before this meeting in Paris, the two of the poem had known
one another, though not with any high degree of intimacy, for only twice
had they "walked and talked" together. He was even then "bent, wigged,
and lamed":
"Famous, however, for verse and worse,
Sure of the Fortieth spare Arm-chair"
--that is, the next vacancy at the French Academy, for so illustrious
was he that his secondary reputation would not injure him.
She who now accuses him was then a "young beauty, round and sound as a
mountain-apple," ingenuous, ardent, wealthy--the typical "poor pretty
thoughtful thing" with aspirations, for she tried to sing and draw, read
verse and thought she understood--at any rate, loved the Great, the
Good, and the Beautiful. But to him her "culture" seemed pitifully
amateurish--him who took the arts in his stride, as it were, who could
float wide and free over the whole province of them, as the sea-gull
floats over the waters. Nevertheless he had walked and talked with her
"twice" at the little remote, unspoilt seaside resort where they had
chanced to meet. It was strange that more people had not discovered it,
so fine were the air and scenery--but it remained unvisited, and thus
the two were thrown together. One scorching noon they met; he invited
her to a stroll on the cliff-road. She took his arm, and (looking back
upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and
made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt
that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . Now, recalling the
episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she
asks him what effect his divination of her trembling heart had had on
him that day.
"Did you determine, as we stepped
O'er the lone stone fence, 'Let me get
Her for myself, and what's the earth
With all its art, verse, music, worth--
Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?'"
For she knows, and she knew that _he_ knew, the prompt reply which would
come if he "blurted out" a certain question--come in her instant
silence, her downward look, the rush of colour to her cheek and brow.
They would have returned from that walk as plighted lovers--he, old,
famous, weary; she with her youth and beauty, her ardour and her
wealth, all rapturously given, and with the happy prospect added to all
other joys of being certain of applause for the distinction shown in her
choice! . . . A perfect hour for both--while it lasted.
But (so she now reads his gone-by cogitations for him) it would not
last. The daily life would reclaim them; Paris would follow, with full
time for both to reason and reflect. . . . And thus (still interpreting
to him the imagined outcome of his musings) she would regret that choice
which had seemed to show her of the elect--for after all a poet _need_
not be fifty! Young men can be poets too, and though they blunder, there
is something endearing in their blunders; moreover, one day they will be
as "firm, quiet, and gay" as he, as expert in deceiving the world, which
is all, in the last analysis, that such a man does.
For, if he _had_ spoken to her that day, what would he have said? (She
is still expounding to him the situation of this potential married pair,
as she has divined in her long musings that he then foresaw it.) He
would not have said, like a boy, "Love me or I die." But neither would
he have said the truth, which was simply that he wished to use her young
ardour and vitality to help his age. Such was the demand which she (as,
according to her, he then reasoned it out) would in time have accused
him, tacitly or not, of having made upon her. . . . And what would his
own reflections have been? She is ready to use her disconcerting
clairvoyance for these also; nay, she can do more, she can tell him the
very moment at which he acted upon them in advance! For as they
foreshadowed themselves, he had ceased to press gently her arm to his
side--she remembers well the stopping of that tender pressure, and now
can connect the action with its mental source. _His_ reflection, then,
would have been simply that he had thrown himself away, had bartered all
he was and had been and might be--all his culture, knowledge of the
world, guerdons of gold and great renown--for what? For "two cheeks
freshened by youth and sea": a mere nosegay. _Him_, in exchange for a
nosegay!
"That ended me." . . .
They duly admired the "grey sad church," on the cliff-top, with its
scattered graveyard crosses, its garlands where the swallows perched;
they "took their look" at the sea and sky, wondering afresh at the
general ignorance of so attractive a little hole; then, finding the sun
really too scorching, they descended, got back to the baths, to such
civilisation as there was:
"And then, good-bye! Ten years since then:
Ten years! We meet: you tell me, now,
By a window-seat for that cliff-brow,
On carpet-stripes for those sand-paths."
Ten years. He has a notorious liaison with a dancer at the Opera; she
has married lovelessly. They have met again, and, in sentimental mood,
he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love
to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually
interesting, for the whole monologue proves that she can no longer be
patronisingly summed up in "poor pretty thoughtful thing." And she has
cried, in the words which open the poem:
"Stop, let me have the truth of that!
Is that all true?"
--and at first, between jest and bitterness, has given him the sum of
her musings on that moment when he decided to drop the nosegay.
For ten years he has had, tacitly, the last word: his decision has stood
unchallenged. Nor shall it now be altered--he has begun to "tell" her,
to meander sentimentally around that episode, but she will have nothing
less than the truth; they will talk of it, yes, since he has so pleased,
but they will talk of it in _her_ way. So she cuts him short, and draws
this acid, witty little sketch for him. . . . Has she not matured? might
it not have "done," after all? The nosegay was not so insipid! . . . But
suddenly, while she mocks, the deeper "truth of that" invades her soul,
and she must cease from cynic gibes, and yield the word to something
greater in herself.
"Now I may speak: you fool, for all
Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?
What was the sea for? What, the grey
Sad church, that solitary day,
Crosses and graves and swallows' call?
Was there nought better than to enjoy?
No feat which, done, would make time break,
And let us pent-up creatures through
Into eternity, our due?
No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?
No grasping at love, gaining a share
O' the sole spark from God's life at strife
With death . . . ?"
He calls his decision wisdom? It is one kind of wisdom only, and that
the least--"worldly" wisdom. He was old, and she was raw and
sentimental--true; each might have missed something in the other; but
completeness is not for our existence here, we await heaven for that.
Only earthbound creatures--like the star-fish, for instance--become all
they _can_ become in this sphere; man's soul must evolve. Have their
souls evolved? And she cries that they have not:
"The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!"
Of course he "did not know" (as he now seems feebly to interpolate); she
can well believe that, for if he had known, he would have saved two
souls--nay, four. What of his Stephanie, who danced vilely last night,
they say--will he not soon, like the public, abandon her now that "her
vogue has had its day"? . . . And what of the speaker herself? It takes
but half a dozen words to indicate _her_ lot:
"Here comes my husband from his whist."
What is "the truth of that"?
Again, I think, something of what I said in writing of _Youth and Art_:
again not quite what Browning seems to wish us to accept. Love is the
fulfilling of the law--with all my heart; but was love here? Does love
weigh worth, as the poet did? does love marry the next comer, as the
lady did? Mrs. Orr, devouter votary than I, explains that Browning meant
"that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a
vital impulse to the soul." Did one wish merely to be humorous, one
might say that this was the most optimistic view of unsuccessful
marriage which has yet found expression! But merely to be humorous is
not what I wish: we must consider this belief, which Mrs. Orr further
declares to be the expression of Browning's "poetic self." Assuredly it
is true that stereotyped monotony, even if happy, does leave the soul
unstirred to deepest depth. We may hesitate, nevertheless, to embrace
the view that "only our mistakes are our experience"; and this is the
view which seems to prevail in Mrs. Orr's interpretation of _Dîs Aliter
Visum_. Mr. Symons says that the woman points out to the man "his fatal
mistake." . . . But was it really a mistake at all? I do not, in urging
that question, commit myself to the crass commonplace of Berdoe, who
argues that "a more unreasonable match could hardly be imagined than
this one would have been"! The "match" standpoint is not here our
standpoint. _That_ is, simply, that love is the fulfilling of the law,
and that these two people did not love. They were in the sentimental
state which frequently results from pleasant chance encounters--and the
experienced, subtle man of the world was able to perceive that, and to
act upon it. That he has pursued his wonted way of life, and that she
has married lovelessly (for a husband who plays whist is, by the
unwritten law of romance, a husband who can by no possibility be
loved!), proves merely that each has fallen away in the pursuit of any
ideal which may then have urged itself--not that both would certainly
have "saved their souls" if they had married one another. Speaking
elsewhere in this book of Browning's theory of love, I said: "Love can
do all, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something
too"--but even love can do nothing if it is not there! Ideals need not
be abandoned because they are not full-realised; and, were we in stern
mood, it would be possible to declare that this lady had abandoned them
more definitely than her poet had, since he at all times was frankly a
worldling. Witty as she has become, there still remain in her, I fear,
some traces of the poor pretty thoughtful thing. . . . To sum up, for
this "tear" also we have but semi-sympathy; and Browning is again not at
his best when he makes the Victim speak for herself.
III.--THE LABORATORY
Now let us see how he can make a woman speak when she suffers, but is
not, and will not be, a victim.
At once she is a completely realised human creature, uttering herself in
such abandonment of all pretence as never fails to compass majesty. Into
the soul of this woman in _The Laboratory_, Browning has penetrated till
he seems to breathe with her breath. I question if there is another
fictive utterance to surpass this one in authenticity. It bears the
Great Seal. Not Shakespeare has outdone it in power and concentration.
Every word counts, almost every comma--for, like Browning, we too seem
to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the
very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech
is _our_ pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression
of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant
and civilised consciousness, is at any rate effectively inhibited.
+ + + + +
She is a Court lady of the _ancien régime_, in the great Brinvilliers
poisoning-period, and she is buying from an old alchemist in his
laboratory the draught which is to kill her triumphant rival. Small,
gorgeous, and intense, she sits in the strange den and watches the old
wizard set about his work. She is due to dance at the King's, but there
is no hurry: he may take as long as he chooses. . . . Now she must put
on a glass mask like his, the old man tells her, for these "faint smokes
that curl whitely" are themselves poisonous--and she submits, and with
all her intensity at work, ties it on "tightly"; then sits again, to
peer through the fumes of the devil's-smithy. But she cannot be silent;
even to him--and after all, is such an one as he quite truly a man!--she
must pour forth the anguish of her soul. Questions relieve her now and
then:
"Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?"
--but not long can she be merely curious; every minute there breaks out
a cry:
"He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do . . ."
--the pitiful self-consciousness of such torment, unable to believe in
the oblivion (familiar as it has been in past good hours) which sweeps
through lovers in their bliss. They could not forget _me_, she thinks,
as all her sister-sufferers think. . . . Yet even in this hell, there is
some solace. They must be remembering her, and
". . . they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."
Yes, here--where the old man works for her: grinding, moistening, and
mashing his paste, pounding at his powder. It is better to sit here and
watch him than go dance at the King's; and she looks round in her
restless, nervous anguish--the dagger in her heart, but this way, _this_
way, to stanch the wound it makes!
"That in the mortar--you call it a gum?
Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come!
And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,
Sure to taste sweetly--is that poison too?"
But, maddened by the deadlier drug of wretchedness, she loses for a
moment the single vision of her rival: it were good to have _all_ the
old man's treasures, for the joy of dealing death around her at that
hateful Court where each knows of her misery.
"To carry pure death in an earring, a casket,
A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!"
She need but give a lozenge "at the King's," and Pauline should die in
half an hour; or light a pastille, and Elise, "with her head and her
breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead." . . . But he is
taking too long.
"Quick--is it finished? The colour's too grim!
Why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim?"
For if it were, she could watch that other stir it into her drink, and
dally with "the exquisite blue," and then, great glowing creature, lift
the goblet to her lips, and taste. . . . But one must be content: the
old man knows--this grim drug is the deadly drug; only, as she bends to
the vessel again, a new doubt assails her.
"What a drop! She's not little, no minion like me--
That's why she ensnared him: this never will free
The soul from those masculine eyes--say, 'No!'
To that pulse's magnificent come-and-go.
For only last night, as they whispered, I brought
My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought
Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall,
Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all!"
* * * * *
But it is not painless in its working? She does not desire that: she
wants the other to _feel_ death; more--she wants the proof of death to
remain,
"Brand, burn up, bite into its grace[236:1]--
He is sure to remember her dying face!"
Is it done? Then he must take off her mask; he must--nay, he need not
look morose about it:
"It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close."
She is not afraid to dispense with the protecting vizor:
"_If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?_"
There it lies--there. . . .
"Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill,
You may kiss me, old man, on the mouth if you will!"
--and, looking her last look round the den, she prepares to go; but what
is that mark on her gorgeous gown? Brush it off! Brush off that dust! It
might bring horror down on her in an instant, before she knows or
thinks, and she is going straight from here to dance at the
King's. . . . She is gone, with her jealousy and her anguish and her
passion, and, clutched to her heart, the phial that shall end but one of
those torments.
+ + + + +
She is gone, and she remains for ever. Her age is past, but not the
hearts that ached in it. We curb those hearts to-day; we do not poison
now; but have we forgotten the mood for poisoning?
"If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?"
Such fiercenesses are silenced now; but, silent, they have still their
utterance, and it is here.
IV.--IN A YEAR
Nay--here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the
"dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can
even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of _The
Laboratory_ may have known, like the girl here, only dim, aching wonder
at her lover's mutability.
"Was it something said,
Something done,
Vexed him? was it touch of hand,
Turn of head?
Strange! that very way
Love begun:
I as little understand
Love's decay."[238:1]
Here, again, is full authenticity. Girl-like, she sits and broods upon
it all--not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is
abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. So
greatly that still, still, she can dream:
"Would he loved me yet,
On and on,
While I found some way undreamed
--Paid my debt!
Gave more life and more,
Till, all gone,
He should smile, 'She never seemed
Mine before.'"
But this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over"
too, though not yet ended. How will it end for her?
"Well, this cold clay clod
Was man's heart:
Crumble it, and what comes next?
Is it God ?" . . .
The dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child!
"'Dying for my sake--
White and pink!
Can't we touch these bubbles then
But they break?'"
That is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he
hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done
since the world began, and will do till it ends.[239:1]
Then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has
been between them, clearly he has not known that yet. . . . Again, the
supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly _all_ the love,
can never turn away from it. Most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams--yet
after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who
loves truly?
Yet indeed (she now muses) _has_ she enough loved him?
"I had wealth and ease,
Beauty, youth:
Since my lover gave me love,
I gave these.
That was all I meant
--To be just,
And the passion I had raised
To content.
Since he chose to change
Gold for dust,
If I gave him what he praised,
Was it strange?"
And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of
herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that
"way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . .
I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted
above:
"_And the passion I had raised
To content._"
From Browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl
cries:
"I, too, at love's brim
Touched the sweet:
I would die if death bequeathed
Sweet to him."
This is more than to "content" the "passion she had raised." Let us
regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not
express either the girl or her poet.
The rest comes right and true--and more than all, perhaps, the second
verse, where the mystery of passion in its coming no less than in its
going is so subtly indicated.
"Strange! that very way
Love begun:
I _as little understand_
Love's decay."
We hear to-day of love that aims at reason. Love forbid that I should
say love knows not reason--but love and God forbid that it should _aim_
at reason! Leave us that unwisdom at least: we are so wise to-day.
+ + + + +
This ardent, gentle girl must suffer, and will suffer long--but will not
die. She will live and she will grow. Shall she then look back with
scorn upon that earlier self? . . . We talk much now of
"re-incarnation," and always by our talk we seem to mean the coming-back
to earth of a spirit which at some time has left it. But are there not
re-incarnations of the still embodied spirit--is not re-incarnation,
like eternity, with us here and now, as we "in this body" live and
suffer and despair, and lift our hearts again to hope and faith? How
many of us--grown, not changed--can pityingly look back at ourselves in
some such dying moment as this poem shows us; for death it is to that
"ourself." Hearts do not break, but hearts do die--_that_ heart, _that_
self: we pass into a Hades.
"Well, this cold clay clod
Was man's heart:
Crumble it, and what comes next?
Is it God?"
Or is it new heart, new self, new life? We come forth enfranchised from
our Hades. The evil days, the cruel days--we call them back (a little,
it may be, ashamed of our escape!) and still the blest remoteness will
endure: it was wonderful how it could suffer, the poor heart. . . .
Surely this is re-incarnation; surely no returning spirit witnesses more
clearly to a transition-state? We _have been_ dead; but this "us" who
comes back to the world we knew is still the same--the heart will answer
as it once could answer, the spirit thrill as once it thrilled.
Only--this is the proof--both heart and spirit are _further on_; both
have, as it were, gone past the earlier summons and the earlier sense of
love; and so, evoking such an hour as this, when we could dream of
"dying for his sake, white and pink," we smile in tender, not in
scornful, pity--knowing now that "way undreamed" of our girl's dream,
and knowing that that way is not to die, but live and grow, since love
that changes "in a year" is not the love to die, or live, for.
FOOTNOTES:
[224:1] The descriptive phrase above might really, at a pinch, be
applied to Annabella Milbanke.
[236:1] Note the fierceness achieved by the shortening and the
alliteration in this line.
[238:1] Mark how the deferred rhymes paint the groping thoughts. Only
after much questioning can the answer come, as it were, in the "chime of
the rhyme."
[239:1] And men also, I hasten to add, that there may be no pluming of
male feathers--if indeed this be an occasion for pluming on either side.
PART IV
[Illustration: THE WIFE]
I
A WOMAN'S LAST WORD
They are married, and they have come to a spiritual crisis. She does
not, cannot, think as _he_ thinks. But does thinking signify? She
loves--is not that enough? Can she not have done with thinking, or at
all events with talking about thinking? Perhaps, with every striving,
she shall achieve no more than that: to _say_ nothing, to use no
influence, to yield the sanctioned woman's trophy of the "last
word." . . . Shall she, then, be yielding aught of value, if she
contends no more?
"What so wild as words are?"
--and that _they_ should strive and argue! Why, it is as when birds
debate about some tiny marvel of those marvellous tiny lives, while the
hawk spies from a bough above.
"See the creature stalking
While we speak!
Hush and hide the talking,
Cheek on cheek!"
For that hawk is ever watching life: it stands for the mysterious
effluence which falls on joy and kills it; and that may just as well be
"talking" as aught else! He shall have his own way--or no: that is a
paltry yielding. There shall _be_ no way but his.
"What so false as truth is,
False to thee?"
She abandons then the cold abstraction; she does not even wish to
"know":
"Where the apple reddens
Never pry--
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I.
Be a god and hold me
With a charm!
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm!
Teach me, only teach, Love!
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought--
Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands."
* * * * *
But even as she measures and exults in the abjection of herself, a voice
whispers in her soul that this is not the way. Something is wrong. She
hears, but cannot heed. It must be so, since he desires it--since he can
desire it. Since he _can_ . . .
"That shall be to-morrow,
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight:
--Must a little weep, Love,
(Foolish me!)
And so fall asleep, Love,
Loved by thee."
He does not wish to know the real Herself. Then the real herself shall
"sleep"; all shall be as before.
+ + + + +
Will this endure? All depends upon the woman: upon how strong _she_ is.
For is not this the sheer denial of her husband's moral force? By her
silence, her abjection, her suppression, he shall prevail: not
otherwise. And so, _if_ this endure, what shall the issue prove? Not the
highest good of married life for either, and still less for the man than
for the woman.
By implication, Browning shows us that in _By the Fireside_, one of his
three great songs of wedded love:
"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!"
Once more we can trace there his development from _Pauline_. She,
looking up "as I might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the
lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as
the wife in the _Last Word_ resolves to do. . . . As the poet grew, so
grew the man in Browning: we reach _By the Fireside_ from these. For the
woman in the _Last Word_, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his
thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring _that_ husband
to the place where stands the man in _By the Fireside_, when the "long
dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads
back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which
they found each other once for all.
"My perfect wife, my Leonor,
Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path grey heads abhor?
* * * * *
My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?"
And now read again:
"Meet, _if thou require it_,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands."
A lower note there, is it not? And shall he so require, and she so
yield, that backward-treading path is not for them--never shall _they_
say to one another:
"Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again,
Let us now forget and now recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
And gather what we let fall!"
Too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary--the wife who had begun
so soon to know that Edens shall be lost by thinking Eves!
But let me not enforce a moral. The mood is one that women know, and
often wisely use. "Talking" _is_ to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from
the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is
not the sum of individuality's expression. She can teach him--learning
from him all the while--_not_ to "require it": she, this same sweet,
strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her
sure indenture of freedom.
"That shall be to-morrow,
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight."
The "sorrow" is for him, not for herself: he has fallen below his
highest in the tyranny of to-night. Then be sure that she, so loving and
so seeing, shall lift him up to-morrow! _This_ tear shall be dried.
II
JAMES LEE'S WIFE
In this song-cycle of nine poems we are shown the death of a woman's
heart. James Lee's wife sums up in herself, as it were, all those
"troubles of love" which we have considered in the earlier monologues.
The man has failed her--as De Lorge failed his lady, as the poet the
"poor, pretty thoughtful thing"; love has left her--as it left the woman
of _The Laboratory_ and the girl of _In a Year_; she and her husband are
at variance in the great things of life--like the couple, in _A Woman's
last Word_. But even the complete surrender of individuality resolved
upon by the wife in that poem would not now avail, if indeed it ever
would have availed, the wife of James Lee. All is over, and, as she
gradually realises, over with such finality that there is only one thing
she can do, and that is to leave him--"set him free."
We learn the mournful story from the wife's lips only; the husband never
speaks, and is but once present. All we actually see are the moods of
nine separate days--spread over what precise period of time we are not
clearly shown, but it was certainly a year. These nine revealings show
us every stage from the first faint pang of apprehension to the accepted
woe; then the battle with _that_--the hope that love may yet prevail;
the clutch at some high stoicism drawn from the laws of nature, or from
"old earth's" genial wisdom; next, the less exalted plan to be "of use,"
since there is nothing else for her to be--and finally the flight, the
whole renunciation. Echoes hover from all sad women's stories elsewhere
studied: the Tear reigns supreme, the Victim is _in excelsis_--for
hardly did Pompilia suffer such excess of misery, since she at least
could die, remembering Caponsacchi. James Lee's wife will live,
remembering James Lee.
Into the chosen commonplace of the man's name[251:1] we may read a
symbolism. "This is every-day's news," the poet seems to say; "you may
watch the drama for yourselves whenever you so please." And only indeed
in the depth of the woman's passion is there aught unusual. _That_, as
uttered in the final poem, seems more than normal--since she knows her
husband for (as she so strangely says of him) "mere ignoble earth"; yet
still can claim that he "set down to her"
"Love that was life, life that was love,
A tenure of breath at your lips' decree,
A passion to stand as your thoughts approve,
A rapture to fall where your foot might be."
More--or less--than dog-like is such love, for dogs are unaware of
"mere ignoble earth," dogs do not judge and analyse and patronise, and
resolve to "make the low nature better for their throes." Never has the
mistaken idea, the inept conduct, of passion been so subtly shown us,
with so much at once of pity and of irony.
James Lee's wife is a plain woman.
"Why, fade you might to a thing like me,
And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair,
Your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree" . . .
So she cries in the painful concluding poem. Faded, coarse-haired,
coarse-skinned . . . is all said? But he had married her. In what, do we
find the word of that enigma? In the beauties of her heart and mind--the
passionate, devoted heart, the subtle, brooding mind. These had done the
first work; and alas! they have done the second also. The heart was
passionate and devoted, but it analysed too closely, and then clung too
closely; the mind was subtle and intense, but it could not rest, it
could not "take for granted"--male synonym for married bliss! And of
course we shall not dare deny James Lee his trustiest, sturdiest weapon:
_she had no sense of humour!_ . . . If he was incomplete, so too was
she; and her incompleteness was of the kind that, in this relation,
never fails to fail--his, of the kind that more often than not succeeds.
Thus she sums him:
"With much in you waste, with many a weed,
And plenty of passions run to seed,
But a little good grain too."
This man, who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding
type in woman may, needs--not tyrannically, because unconsciously--a
mate who far excels him in all that makes nobility; and, nine times out
of ten, obtains her. "Mrs. James Lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to
realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might
almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. Perhaps she _has_
none. Perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must
alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the _Last
Word_--who was not of it! For here is the very heart of the problem: can
or cannot character be altered? James Lee's wife is of the morbid, the
unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn
the lore of self-suppression. Not for them exactingness, caprice, the
gay or grave analysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in
lovely women, and even in _them_ bring risks along. The Mrs. Lees must
curb them wholly. As the whims of unwedded love, they may perchance
amuse or interest; marriage, for such, comports them not at all.
Let us trace, compassionately if ironically, the mistakes of this sad
woman.
I.--SHE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW
He is coming back to their seaside home at Sainte-Marie, near
Pornic--the Breton "wild little place" which Browning knew and loved so
well. "Close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly
lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.
I feel out of the earth sometimes as I sit here at the window."[254:1]
And at the window _she_ sits, watching for James Lee's return. Yesterday
it was summer, but the strange sudden "stop" has come, eerily, as it
always seems to come.
"Ah, Love, but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun's away,
And the bird estranged;
The wind has dropped,
And the sky's deranged:
Summer has stopped."
We can picture him as he arrives and listens to her: is there already a
faint annoyance? Need she so drearily depict the passing of summer? It
is bad enough that it _should_ pass--we need not talk about it! Such
annoyance we all have felt with the relentless chroniclers of change.
Enough, enough; since summer is gone and we cannot bring it back, let us
think of something else. . . . But she goes on, and now we shall not\
doubt that he is enervated, for this is what she says:
"Look in my eyes!
Wilt thou change too?
Should I fear surprise?
Shall I find aught new
In the old and dear,
In the good and true,
With the changing year?"
The questions have come to her--come on what cold blast from heaven, or
him? But in pity for herself, let her not ask them! We seem to see the
man turn from her, not "looking in her eyes," and seem to catch the
thought, so puerile yet so instinctive, that flashes through his mind.
"I never meant to 'change'; why does she put it into my head." . . . And
then, doomed blunderer, she goes on:
"Thou art a man,
But I am thy love.
For the lake, its swan;
For the dell, its dove;
And for thee (oh, haste!)
Me, to bend above,
Me, to hold embraced."
She does not _say_, "oh, haste!"--that is the silent comment (we must
think) on her not instantly answered plea for his embrace. . . . And
when the embrace does come--the claimed embrace--we can figure to
ourselves the all it lacks.
II.--BY THE FIRESIDE
Summer now indeed is gone; they are sitting by their fire of wood. The
blue and purple flames leap up and die and leap again, and she sits
watching them. The wood that makes those coloured flames is shipwreck
wood. . . .
"Oh, for the ills half-understood,
The dim dead woe
Long ago
Befallen this bitter coast of France!"
And then, ever the morbid analogy, the fixed idea:
"Well, poor sailors took their chance;
I take mine."
Out there on the sea even now, some of those "poor sailors" may be
eyeing the ruddy casement and gnashing their teeth for envy and hate,
"O' the warm safe house and happy freight
--Thee and me."
The irony of it seizes her. Those sailors need not curse them! Ships
safe in port have their own perils of rot and rust and worms in the wood
that gnaw the heart to dust. . . . "That is worse."
And how long the house has stood here, to anger the drenched, stark men
on the sea! Who lived here before this couple came? Did another woman
before herself watch the man "with whom began love's voyage full-sail"
. . . watch him and see the planks of love's ship start, and hell open
beneath?
_This_ mood she speaks not, only sits and broods upon. And he? Men too
can watch, and struggle with themselves, and feel that little help is
given them. Some sailors come safe home, and these would have been
lighted by the ruddy casement. But she thinks only of the sailors
drowning, and gnashing their teeth for hate of the "warm safe house."
That melancholy brooding--and if she but looked lovely while she
broods. . . .
III.--IN THE DOORWAY
She stands alone in the doorway, and looks out upon the dreary autumn
landscape.[257:1] It is a grey October day; the sea is in "stripes like
a snake"--olive-pale near the land, black and "spotted white with the
wind" in the distance. How ominous it shows: good fortune is surely on
the wing.
"Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!"
As she gazes, her heart dies within her. Their fig-tree has lost all the
golden glint of summer; the vines "writhe in rows, each impaled on its
stake"--and like the leaves of the tree, and like the vines, her heart
"shrivels up and her spirit shrinks curled."
But courage, courage! Winter comes to all--not to them alone. And have
they not love, and a house big enough to hold them, with its four rooms,
and the field there, red and rough, not yielding now, but again to
yield? Rabbits and magpies, though now they find no food there (the
magpies already have well-nigh deserted it; when one _does_ alight, it
seems an event), yet will again find food. But November--the chill month
with its "rebuff"--will see both rabbits and magpies quite
departed. . . . No! This shall not be her mood. Winter comes indeed to
mere material nature; God means precisely that the spirit shall inherit
His power to put life into the darkness and the cold. The spirit defies
external change:
"Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange!"
And she turns to go in, for the hour at rest and solaced. They have the
house, and the field . . . and love.
IV.--ALONG THE BEACH
Rest and solace have departed: winter is come--to all. She walks alone
on the beach; one may do that, "on the edge of the low rocks by the sea,
for miles";[258:1] and broods once more. She figures him beside her;
they are speaking frankly of her pain. She "will be quiet." . . .
Piteous phrase of all unquiet women! She will be quiet; she will "reason
why he is wrong." Well for her that the talk is but a fancied one; she
would not win far with such a preamble, were it real! It is thus that in
almost every word we can trace the destined failure of this loving
woman. . . . She begins her "reasoning."
"You wanted my love--is that much true?
And so I did love, so I do:
What has come of it all along?
I took you--how could I otherwise?
For a world to me, and more;
For all, love greatens and glorifies
Till God's aglow, to the loving eyes,
In what was mere earth before.
Yes, earth--yes, mere ignoble earth!
Now do I mis-state, mistake?
Do I wrong your weakness and call it worth?
Expect all harvest, dread no dearth,
Seal my sense up for your sake?
Oh, Love, Love, no, Love! Not so, indeed!
You were just weak earth, I knew":
--and then, pursuing, she sums him up as we saw at the beginning of our
study.
Well for her, I say again, that this is but a fancied talk! And since it
is, we can accord her a measure of wisdom. For she _has_ been wise in
one thing: she has not "wronged his weakness and called it worth"--that
memorable phrase, so Browningesque!
She has "seen through" him, yet she loves him. Thus far, then, kind and
wise in her great passion. . . . But she should _forget_ that she has
seen through him--she should keep that vision in the background, not
hold it ever in her sight. And now herself begins to see that this is
where she has not been wise. She took him for hers, just as he was--and
did not he, thus accepted, find her his? Has she not watched all that
was as yet developed in him, and waited patiently, wonderingly, for the
more to come?
"Well, and if none of these good things came,
What did the failure prove?
The man was my whole world, all the same."
_That_ is the fault in her:
"That I do love, watch too long,
And wait too well, and weary and wear;
And 'tis all an old story, and my despair
Fit subject for some new song."
She has shown him too much love and indulgence and hope implied in the
indulgence: this was the wrong way. The "bond" has been felt--and such
"light, light love" as his has wings to fly at the mere suspicion of a
bond. He has grown weary of her "wisdom"; pleasure is his aim in life,
and _that_ is always ready to "turn up next in a laughing eye." . . . So
the songs have said and will say for all time--the new songs for the old
despair.
But though she knows all this (we seem to see), she will not be able to
act upon it. Always she will watch too long, and wait too well. Hers is
a nature as simple as it is intense. No sort of subterfuge is within her
means--neither the gay deception nor the grave. What she knows that he
resents, she still must do immutably--bound upon the wheel of her true
self. For only one "self" she has, and that the wrong one.
She turns back, she walks homeward along the beach--"on the edge of the
low rocks by the sea, for miles."
V.--ON THE CLIFF
But still love is a power! Love can move mountains, for is not love the
same as faith? And not a mountain is here, but a mere man's
heart--already "moved," for he _has_ loved her.
It is summer again. She sits on the cliff, leaning back on the short dry
grass--if one still can call it grass, so "deep was done the work of the
summer sun." And there near by is the rock, baked dry as the grass, and
flat as an anvil's face. "No iron like that!" Not a weed nor a shell:
"death's altar by the lone shore." The drear analogies succeed one
another; she sees them everywhere, in everything. The dead grass, the
dead rock. . . . But now, what is this on the turf? A gay blue cricket!
A cricket--only that? Nay, a war-horse, a magic little steed, a "real
fairy, with wings all right." And there too on the rock, like a drop of
fire, that gorgeous-coloured butterfly.
"No turf, no rock: in their ugly stead,
See, wonderful blue and red!"
Shall there not then be other analogies? May not the minds of men,
though burnt and bare as the turf and the rock, be changed like them,
transfigured like them:
"With such a blue-and-red grace, not theirs--
Love settling unawares!"
It was almost a miracle, was it not? the way they changed. Such miracles
happen every day.
VI.--READING A BOOK, UNDER THE CLIFF
These clever young men! She is reading a poem of the wind.[262:1] The
singer asks what the wind wants of him--so instant does it seem in its
appeal.
"'Art thou a dumb wronged thing that would be righted,
Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!
No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith requited
With falsehood--love, at last aware
Of scorn--hopes, early blighted--
'We have them; but I know not any tone
So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow;
Dost think men would go mad without a moan,
If they knew any way to borrow
A pathos like thine own?'"
The splendid lines assail her.[263:1] In her anguish of response she
turns from them at last--they are too much. This power of perception is
almost a baseness! And bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can
thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, _at last aware_
of scorn," she flings the volume from her--rejecting him, detesting him,
and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who
has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. He is
wrong: the wind does _not_ mean what he fancies by its moaning. He thus
interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the
suffering of others--failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment--is but
the example for his use, the help to his path untried! Such agonies as
her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a
phrase--like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to
woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. How
dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words,
how dare he know--and now her irony turns cruel:
"Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest!
Himself the undefeated that shall be:
Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test--
His triumph in eternity
Too plainly manifest!"
Of course he does not know! The wind means something else. And as the
pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. How _could_ "the
happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? Only
"the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the
mind. This young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day--on a
midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign
country," at its height of gloom and gloss. At its height--next minute
must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the
earliest sign? That very wind beginning among the vines:
"So low, so low, what shall it say but this?
'Here is the change beginning, here the lines
Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
The limit time assigns.'" . . .
Change is the law of life: _that_ is what the wind says.
"Nothing can be as it has been before;
Better, so call it, only not the same.
To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,
And keep it changeless! Such our claim;
So answered: Never more!
Simple? Why, this is the old woe of the world;
Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.
Rise with it then! Rejoice that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His soul's wings never furled!"
* * * * *
Her rejection of the "young man's pride" has raised her for an instant
above her own suffering. Flinging back his interpretation in his
face--that interpretation which had pierced her to the quick with its
intensity of vision--she has found a better one; and for a while she
rests in this. "The laws of nature": shall not that be the formula to
still her pain? . . . Not yet, not yet; the heart was numbed but for a
moment. Stung to such fresh life as it has been but now, it cries
imperiously again. The laws of nature?
"That's a new question; still replies the fact,
Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;
We moan in acquiescence."
Only to acquiescence can we attain.
"God knows: endure his act!"
But the human loss, the human anguish. . . . Formulas touch not these,
nor does acquiescence mitigate. Tell ourselves as wisely as we may that
mutability must be--we yet discern where the woe lies. We cannot fix the
"one fair good wise thing" just as we grasped it--cannot engrave it, as
it were, on our souls. And then we die--and it is gone for ever, and we
would have sunk beneath death's wave, as we sink now, to save it--but
time washed over it ere death mercifully came. It was abolished even
while we lived: the wind had begun "so low, so low" . . . and carried
it away on its moaning voice. Change is the very essence of life; and
life may be probation for a better life--who knows? But if she could
have engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband
loved her. . . .
VII.--AMONG THE ROCKS
Such anguish must, at least, "change" with the rest! And now that autumn
is fully come, the loss of summer is more bearable. It is while we hope
that summer still may stay that we are tortured.
"Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,
This autumn morning!"
She will forget the "laws of nature": she will unreflectingly watch
earth. That is best.
". . . How he sets his bones
To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet."
The geniality of earth! She will sink her troubled soul into the vast
tranquillity. No science, no "cosmic whole"--just this: the brown old
earth.
But soon the analogy-hunting begins: that soul of hers can never rest.
What does "this," then, show forth? Her love in its tide can flow over
the lower nature, as the waves flow over the basking rocks. "Old earth
smiles and knows":
"If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
Make the low nature better by your throes!
Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!"
I confess that I cannot follow this analogy. The lesson may be clear--of
that later; the analogy escapes me. Who says that rocks are of lower
nature than the sea which washes them? But if it does not mean this,
what does it mean? Mrs. Orr interprets thus: "As earth blesses her
smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those
less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it." That seems to me to touch
this instance not at all. It is the earth who has set "himself" (in the
unusual personification) to bask in the sun; the earth, _here_, is
getting, not giving. Or rather, all is one: each element wholly joys in
the other. And watching this, the woman wrings from it "the doctrine
simple, ancient, true," that love is self-sacrifice. Let that be true, I
still cannot see how the symbol aids the doctrine.
And the doctrine? Grant that love is self-sacrifice (I had rather say
that self-sacrifice is a part, and but a part, of love): is love also
self-sufficiency?
"Make the low nature better by your throes."
It is a strange love, surely, which so speaks? Shall a man live,
despised, in harmony with her who despises him? James Lee's wife may
call this love, but we absolve James Lee, I think, if he does not! For
human beings feel most subtly when scorn dwells near them; they may
indeed have caused that scorn--but let there be no talk of love where it
subsists.
Even bitterness were less destructive to the woman's hope than this
strange counting of the cost, this self-sufficiency. Our sympathy must
leave her at this phase; and sympathy for her was surely Browning's aim?
But possibly it was not; and _if_ not, this indeed is subtle.
VIII.--BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD
She had turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of
a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da
Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been
happily working. She has failed; but that has not clouded joy nor damped
ardour.
"Its beauty mounted into my brain,"
and, effacing the failures, she has yielded to a fancy--has taken the
chalk between her lips, instead of her fingers:
"With soul to help if the mere lips failed,
I kissed all right where the drawing ailed,
Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips
Still from one's soulless finger-tips."
This hand was that of a worshipped woman. Her fancy sets the ring on
it, by which one knows
"That here at length a master found
His match, a proud lone soul its mate."
Not even Da Vinci's pencil had been able to trace all the beauty--
". . . how free, how fine
To fear almost!--of the limit-line."
_He_, like her, had suffered some defeat. But think of the minutes in
which, with her he worshipped, he "looked and loved, learned and drew,
Drew and learned and loved again!" Such moments are not for such as she.
She will go back to the household cares--she has her lesson, and it is
not the same as Da Vinci's.
"Little girl with the poor coarse hand"
. . . this is _her_ model, from whom she had turned to a cold clay cast.
Her business is to understand, not the almost fearful beauty of a thing
like this, but "the worth of flesh and blood."
But was not that Da Vinci's business too? Would he not, could she speak
with him, proudly tell her so? "Nothing but beauty in a hand." Would the
Master have turned from this peasant one? No: she hears him condemn her,
laugh her woes to scorn.
"The fool forsooth is all forlorn
Because the beauty she thinks best
Lived long ago or was never born,
Because no beauty bears the test
In this rough peasant hand!"
It was not long before Da Vinci threw aside the faulty pencil, and spent
years instead of hours in studying, not the mere external loveliness,
but the anatomy of the hand, learning the veritable use
"Of flesh and bone and nerve that make
The poorest coarsest human hand
An object worthy to be scanned
A whole life long for their sole sake."
Just the hand--and all the body still to learn. Is not this the lesson
of life--this incompleteness?
"Now the parts and then the whole!"
And here is she, declaring that if she is not loved, she must die--she,
with her stinted soul and stunted body! Look again at the peasant hand.
No beauty is there--but it can spin the wool and bake the bread:
"'What use survives the beauty?'"
Yes: Da Vinci would proclaim her fool.
Then _this_ shall be the new formula. She will be of use; will do the
daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. She cannot keep her
husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she
will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. She will be useful;
she will gain cheer _that_ way, since all the others fail her.
"Go, little girl with the poor coarse hand!
I have my lesson, shall understand."
This is the last hope--to be of humble use; this the last formula for
survival.
IX.--ON DECK
And this has failed like the rest. She is on board the boat that carries
her away from him, she has found the last formula: _set him free_. Well,
it in its turn has been followed: she is gone. Gone--in every sense.
"There is nothing to remember in me,
Nothing I ever said with a grace,
Nothing I did that you care to see,
Nothing I was that deserves a place
In your mind, now I leave you, set you free."
No "_petite fleur dans la pensée_"--none, none: she grants him all her
dis-grace. But will he not grant her something too--now that she is
gone? Will he not grant that men have loved such women, when the women
have loved them so utterly? It _has_ been: she knows that, and the more
certainly now that she has yielded finally her claim to a like miracle.
His soul is locked fast; but, "love for a key" (if he could but have
loved her!), what might not have happened? She might have grown the same
in his eyes as he is in hers!
So strange it is to think of _that_. . . . She can think anything when
such imagining is once possible to her. She can think of _him_ as the
"harsh, ill-favoured one!" For what would it have mattered--her
ugliness--if he had loved her? They would have been "like as pea and
pea." Ever since the world began, love has worked such spells--that is
so true that she has warrant to work out this strange, new dream.
Imagine it. . . . If he had all her in his heart, as she has all him in
hers! He, whose least word brought gloom or glee, who never lifted his
hand in vain--that hand which will hold hers still, from over the
sea . . . if, when _he_ thinks of her, a face as beautiful as his own
should rise to his imagination--with eyes as dear, a mouth like that, as
bright a brow. . . .
"Till you saw yourself, while you cried ''Tis she!'"
But it will not be--and if it could be, she would not know or care, for
the joy would have killed her.
Or turn it again the converse way. Supposing he could "fade to a thing
like her," with the coarse hair and skin . . .
"You might turn myself!--should I know or care
When I should be dead of joy, James Lee?"
Either way it would kill her, so she may as well be gone, with her
"Love that was life, life that was love";
and there is nothing at all to remember in her. As long as she lives
his words and looks will circle round _her_ memory. If she could fancy
one touch of love for her once coming in those words and looks
again. . . . But the boat moves on, farther, ever farther from the
little house with its four rooms and its field and fig-tree and
vines--from the window, the fireside, the doorway, from the beach and
cliff and rocks. All the formulas have failed but this one. This one
will not fail. He is set free.
+ + + + +
She had to go; and neither him nor her can we condemn. "One near one is
too far." She saw and loved too well: one or the other she should have
been wise enough to hide from him. But she could not. Character is fate;
and two characters are two fates. Neither, with that other, could be
different; each might, with another "other," have been all that each was
meant to be.
FOOTNOTES:
[251:1] The poems were first called _James Lee_ only.
[254:1] _Life_, Mrs. Orr, p. 266.
[257:1] "The little church, a field, a few houses, and the sea . . .
Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"--_Life_, p. 266.
[258:1] _Life_, p. 266.
[262:1] These lines were published by Browning, separately, in 1836,
when he was twenty-six. _James Lee's Wife_ was published in 1864.
[263:1] Nettleship well says: "The difference between the first and
second parts of this section is that, while the plaint of the wind was
enough to make Browning write in 1836, he must have the plaint of a soul
in 1863. . . . And yet, something is lost."
PART V
[Illustration: THE TROUBLE OF LOVE]
TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S
I
THE WOMAN UNWON
In the section entitled "Lovers Meeting" we saw the exultant mood of
love in man, and I there pointed out how seldom even Browning has
assigned that mood to woman. But he does not show her as alone in
suffering love's pain. The lyrics we are now to consider give us woman
as the maker of love's pain for man; we learn her in this character
through the utterances of men--and these are noble utterances, every
one. Mr. J. T. Nettleship, in his _Essays and Thoughts_, well remarks
that man's passion shows, in Browning's work, "a greater width of view
and intellectual power" than woman's does; that in the feminine
utterances "little beyond the actual love of this life is
imagined";[277:1] and that in such utterances "we notice . . . an
absolute want of originality and of power to look at the passion of love
in an abstract sense outside the woman herself and her lover."
I too have, by implication, found this fault with Browning; but Mr.
Nettleship differs from me in that he apparently delights to dwell on
the idea of woman's accepted inferiority--her "tender, unaspiring
love . . . type of that perfection which looks to one superior." It will
be seen from this how little he is involved by feminism. That woman
should be the glad inferior quarrels not at all with his vision of
things as they should be. Man, indeed, he grants, "must firmly establish
his purity and constancy before he dares to assert supremacy over
Nature": woman, we may suppose, being--as if she were not quite
certainly _a person_--included in Nature. That a devotee of Browning
should retain this attitude may well surprise us, since nothing in his
"teaching" is clearer than that woman is the great inspiring influence
for man. But the curious fact which has struck both Mr. Nettleship and
myself--that, in Browning's work, woman does so frequently, _when
expressing herself_, fail in breadth and imagination--may very well
account for the obsolete gesture in this interpreter. . . . Can it be,
then, that Browning was (as has frequently been said of him) very much
less dramatic a writer than he wished to believe himself? Or, more aptly
for our purpose to frame the question, was he dramatic only for men? Did
he merely guess at, and not grasp, the deepest emotions and thoughts of
women? This, if it be affirmed, will rob him of some glory--yet I think
that affirmed it must be. It leaves him all nobility of mind and heart
with regard to us; the glory of which he is robbed is after all but that
of thaumaturgic power--it is but to say that he could not turn himself
into a woman!
+ + + + +
In what ways does Browning show us as the makers of "love's trouble" for
man? First, of course, as loved and unwon. But though this be the most
obvious of the ways, not obvious is Browning's treatment of it. To love
"in vain" is a phrase contemned of him. No love is in vain. Grief,
anguish even, may attend it, but never can its issue be futility. Nor is
this merely the already familiar view that somehow, though rejected,
love benignly works for the beloved. "That may be, that _is_" (he seems
to say), "but it is not the truth which most inspires me." The glory of
love for Browning resides most radiantly in what it does for the lover's
own soul. It is "God's secret": one who loves is initiate.
"Such am I: the secret's mine now! She has lost me, I have gained
her;
Her soul's mine: and thus, grown perfect, I shall pass my life's
remainder.
Life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and
blended:
And then, come next life quickly! This world's use will have been
ended."
That is the concluding stanza of _Cristina_, which might be called the
companion-piece to _Porphyria's Lover_; for in each the woman belongs to
a social world remote from her adorer's; in each she has, nevertheless,
perceived him and been drawn to him--but in _Cristina_ is caught back
into the vortex, while in _Porphyria's Lover_ the passion prevails, for
the man, by killing her, has kept her folded in "God's secret" with
himself.
"She should never have looked at me if she meant I should not love
her!
There are plenty . . . men, you call such, I suppose . . . she may
discover
All her soul to, if she pleases, and yet leave much as she found
them:
But I'm not so, and she knew it, when she fixed me, glancing round
them."
That is the lover's first impulsive cry on finding himself "thrown
over." Why did she not leave him alone? Others tell him that that
"fixing" of hers means nothing--that she is, simply, a coquette. But he
"can't tell what her look said." Certainly not any "vile cant" about
giving her heart to him because she saw him sad and solitary, about
lavishing all that she was on him because he was obscure, and she the
queen of women. Not _that_, whatever else!
And now, so sure of this that he grows sure of other things as well, he
declares that it was a moment of true revelation for her also--she
_did_ perceive in him the man she wanted.
"Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! but not quite so sunk that
moments,
Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing."
That was what she had felt--the queen of women! A coquette, if they
will, for others, but not for him; and, though cruel to him also in the
event, not because she had not recognised him. She _had_ recognised him,
and more--she had recognised the great truth, had deeply felt that the
soul "stops here" for but one end, the true end, sole and single: "this
love-way."
If the soul miss that way, it goes wrong. There may be better ends,
there may even be deeper blisses, but that is the essential--that is the
significant thing in life.
But they need not smile at his fatuity! He sees that she "knew," but he
can see the issue also.
"Oh, observe! of course, next moment, the world's honours, in
derision,
Trampled out the light for ever. Never fear but there's provision
Of the devil's to quench knowledge, lest we walk the earth in
rapture" . . .
_That_ must be reckoned with; but all it does to those who "catch God's
secret" is simply to make them prize their capture so much the more:
"Such am I: the secret's mine now! She has lost me, I have gained
her;"
--for though she has cast him off, he has grasped her soul, and will
retain it. He has prevailed, and all the rest of his life shall prove
him the victorious one--the one who has two souls to work with! He will
prove all that such a pair can accomplish; and then death can come
quickly: "this world's use will have been ended." She also knew this,
but would not follow it to its issue. Thus she lost him--but he gained
her, and that shall do as well.
+ + + + +
No loving "in vain" there! But this poem is the high-water mark of
unsuccessful love exultant. Browning was too true a humanist to keep us
always on so shining a peak; he knew that there are lower levels, where
the wounded wings must rest--that mood, for instance, of wistful
looking-back to things undreamed-of and now gone, yet once experienced:
"This is a spray the bird clung to,
Making it blossom with pleasure,
Ere the high tree-top she sprung to,
Fit for her nest and her treasure.
Oh, what a hope beyond measure
Was the poor spray's, which the flying feet hung to--
So to be singled out, built in, and sung to!
This is a heart the Queen leant on" . . .
--and in a stanza far less lovely than that of the bird, he shows forth
the analogy. The Queen "went on"; but what a moment that heart had
had! . . . Gratitude, we see always, for the gift of love in the heart,
for God's secret. The lover was left alone, but he had known the thrill.
"Better to have loved and lost"--nay, but "lost," for Browning, is not
in the scheme. She is there, in the world, whether his or another's.
Sometimes she has never been his at all, has never cared:
"All June I bound the rose in sheaves.
Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves
And strew them where Pauline may pass.
She will not turn aside? Alas!
Let them lie. Suppose they die?
The chance was, they might take her eye."
And then, for many a month, he tried to learn the lute to please her.
"To-day I venture all I know.
She will not hear my music? So!
Break the string; fold music's wing:
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"
Thus we gradually see that all his life he has been learning to love
her. Now he has resolved to speak. . . . Heaven or hell?
"She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!
Lose who may--I still can say
Those who win heaven, blest are they!"
Here again is Browning's typical lover. Never does he whine, never
resent: she was free to choose, and she has not chosen _him_. That is
pain; but of the "humiliation" commonly assigned to unsuccessful love,
he never dreams: where can be humiliation in having caught God's
secret? . . . And even if she have half-inclined to him, but found that
not all herself can give herself--more pain in that, a nearer approach
to "failure," perhaps--even so, he understands.
"I said--Then dearest, since 'tis so,
Since now at length my fate I know,
Since nothing all my love avails,
Since all, my life seemed meant for, fails,
Since this was written and needs must be--
My whole heart rises up to bless
Your name in pride and thankfulness!
Take back the hope you gave--I claim
Only a memory of the same
--And this beside, if you will not blame,
Your leave for one more last ride with me."
The girl hesitates. Her proud dark eyes, half-pitiful, dwell on him for
a moment--"with life or death in the balance," thinks he.
". . . Right!
The blood replenished me again;
My last thought was at least not vain;
I and my mistress, side by side
Shall be together, breathe and ride;
So, one day more am I deified.
_Who knows but the world may end to-night?_"[285:1]
Now the moment comes in which he lifts her to the saddle. It is as if he
had drawn down upon his breast the fairest, most celestial cloud in
evening-skies . . . a cloud touched gloriously at once by setting sun
and rising moon and evening-star.
"Down on you, near and yet more near,
Till flesh must fade for heaven was here--
Thus leant she and lingered--joy and fear!
Thus lay she a moment on my breast."
And then they begin to ride. His soul smooths itself out--there shall be
no repining, no questioning: he will take the whole of his hour.
"Had I said that, had I done this,
So might I gain, so might I miss.
Might she have loved me? just as well
She might have hated, who can tell!
* * * * *
And here we are riding, she and I."
_He_ is not the only man who has failed. All men strive--who succeeds?
His enfranchised spirit seems to range the universe--everywhere the
_done_ is petty, the undone vast; everywhere men dream beyond their
powers:
"I hoped she would love me; here we ride!"
No one gains all. Hand and brain are never equal; hearts, when they can
greatly conceive, fail in the greatest courage; nothing we do is just
what we dreamed it might be. We are hedged in everywhere by the fleshly
screen. But _they_ two ride, and he sees her bosom lift and fall. . . .
To the rest, then, their crowns! To the statesman, ten lines, perhaps,
which contain the fruit of all his life; to a soldier, a flag stuck on a
heap of bones--and as guerdon for each, a name scratched on the Abbey
stones.
"My riding is better, by their leave!"
Even our artists! The poet says the thing, but we feel it. Not one of us
can express it like him; but has he _had_ it? When he dies, will he have
been a whit nearer his own sublimities than the lesser spirits who have
never turned a line?
"Sing, riding's a joy! For me, I ride."
(Note the fine irony here. The poet shall sing the joy of riding; this
man _rides_.)
The great sculptor, too, with his twenty years' slavery to Art:
"And that's your Venus, whence we turn
To yonder girl that fords the burn!"
But the sculptor, with his insight, acquiesces, so this man need not
pity him. The musician fares even worse. After _his_ life's labours,
they say (even his friends say) that the opera is great in intention,
but fashions change so quickly in music--he is out-of-date. He gave his
youth? Well--
"I gave my youth; but we ride, in fine."
Supposing we could know perfect bliss in this world, what should we have
for which to strive? We must lead some life beyond, we must have a bliss
to die for! If _he_ had this glory-garland round his soul, what other
joy could he ever so dimly descry?
"Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?
Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride."
* * * * *
Thus he has mused, riding beside her, to the horses' rhythmic stretching
pace. It shall be best as she decrees. She rejects him: he will not
whine; what she does shall somehow have its good for him--_she_ shall
not be wrong! He has the thought of her in his soul, and the memory of
her--and there will be, as well, the memory of this ride. That moment he
has, whole and perfect:
"Who knows but the world may end to-night!"
Yes; they ride on--the sights, the sounds, the thoughts, encompass them;
they are together. His soul, all hers, has yet been half-withdrawn from
her, so deeply has he mused on what she is to him: it is the great
paradox--almost one forgets that she is there, so intimate the union,
and so silent. . . . But is she _not_ there? and, being there, does she
not now seem to give him something strange and wonderful to take from
her? She _is_ there--
"And yet--she has not spoke so long!"
She is as silent as he. They might both be in a trance. He knows what
his trance is--can it be that hers is the same? Then what would it
mean? . . . And the hope so manfully resigned floods back on him. What
if this _be_ heaven--what if she has found, caught up like him, that she
does love?
Can it mean that, gazing both, now in this glorious moment, at life's
flower of love, they both are fixed so, ever shall so abide--she with
him, as he with her? Can it mean that the instant is made eternity--
"And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"
* * * * *
Despite the transcendental interpretations of this glorious
love-song--surpassed, I think and many others think, by none in the
world--I believe that the concluding stanza means just that. Hope has
rushed on him again from her twin-silence--can she be at one with him in
all, as she is in this? Will the proud dark eyes have forgotten the
pity--and the pride? . . . The wrong that has been done to Browning by
his too-subtle "interpreters" is, in my view, incalculable. Always he
must be, for them, the teacher. But he is the _poet_! He "sings,
riding's a joy"--and such joy brings hope along with it, hope for the
"obvious human bliss." People seem to forget that it was Browning who
made that phrase[289:1]--which might almost be his protest against the
transcendentalists.
Much of his finest work has been thus falsified, thus strained to
meanings so "profound" as to be none at all. Mr. Nettleship's gloss upon
this stanza of _The Last Ride_ is a case in point. "[The lover] buoys
himself with the hope that the highest bliss _may_ be the change from
the minute's joy to an eternal fulfilment of joy." Does this mean
anything? And if it did, does that stanza mean _it_? I declare that it
means nothing, and that the stanza means what instinctively (I feel and
know) each reader, reading it--not "studying" it--accepts as its best
meaning: the human one, the true following of the so subtly-induced
mood. And that is, simply, the invigoration, the joy, of riding; and the
hope which comes along with that invigoration and that joy.
+ + + + +
In the strange _Numpholeptos_ we find, by implication, the heart of
Browning's "message" for women. "The nympholepts of old," explains Mr.
Augustine Birrell in one of the volumes of _Obiter Dicta_, "were those
unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling among sylvan shades,
caught a hasty glimpse of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose
pursuit their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent."
The man here has fallen in love with "an angelically pure and inhumanly
cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate
purity and complete experience of life."[290:1]
She does not reject his love, but will wholly accept it only on these
impossible terms. Herself dwells in some "magic hall" whence ray forth
shafts of coloured light--crimson, purple, yellow; and along these
shafts, which symbolise experience, her lover is to travel--coming back
to her at close of each wayfaring, for the rays end before her feet,
beneath her eyes and smile, as they began. He goes forth in obedience;
he comes back. Ever the issue is the same: he comes back smirched. And
she--forgives him, but not loves him.
"What means the sad slow silver smile above
My clay but pity, pardon?--at the best
But acquiescence that I take my rest,
Contented to be clay?"
She "smiles him slow forgiveness"--nothing more; he is dismissed, must
travel forth again. _This_ time he may return, untinged by the ray which
he is to traverse. She sends him, deliberately; he must break through
the quintessential whiteness that surrounds her--but he is to come back
unsmirched. So she pitilessly, for all her "pity," has decreed.
And patient, mute, obedient, always he has gone--until this day. This
day his patience fails him, and he speaks. Once more he had come
back--once more been "pardoned." But the pity was so gentle--like a
moon-beam. He had almost hoped the smile would pass the "pallid moonbeam
limit," be "transformed at last to sunlight and salvation." If she could
pass that goal and "gain love's birth," he scarce would know his clay
from gold's own self; "for gold means love." . . . But no; the "sad slow
silver smile" had meant, as ever, naught but pity, pardon, acquiescence
in his lesserness for _him_. _She_ acquiesced not; she keeps her love
for the "spirit-seven" before God's throne.[291:1]
He then made one supreme appeal for
"Love, the love sole and whole without alloy."
Vainly! Such an appeal "must be felt, not heard." Her calm regard was
unchanged--nay, rather it had grown harsh and hard, had seemed to imply
disdain, repulsion, and he could not face those things; he rose from his
kissing of her feet--he _did_ go forth again. This time he might return,
immaculate, from the path of that "lambent flamelet." . . . He knew he
could not, but--he _might_! She promises that he can: should he not
trust her?
* * * * *
And now, to-day, once more he is returned. Still she stands, still she
listens, still she smiles! But he protests at last:
"Surely I had your sanction when I faced,
Fared forth upon that untried yellow ray
Whence I retrack my steps?"
The crimson, the purple had been explored; from them he had come back
deep-stained. How has the yellow used him? He has placed himself again
for judgment before her "blank pure soul, alike the source and tomb of
that prismatic glow." To this yellow he has subjected himself utterly:
she _had_ ordained it! He was to "bathe, to burnish himself, soul and
body, to swim and swathe in yellow licence." And here he is: "absurd and
frightful," "suffused with crocus, saffron, orange"--just as he had been
with crimson, purple!
She willed it so: he was to track the yellow ray. He pleads once more
her own permission--nay, command! And, as before, she shows
"Scarce recognition, no approval, some
Mistrust, more wonder at a man become
Monstrous in garb, nay--flesh-disguised as well,
Through his adventure."
But she had said that, if he were worthily to retain her love, he must
share the knowledge shrined in her supernal eyes. And this was the one
way for _man_ to gain that knowledge. Well, it is as before:
"I pass into your presence, I receive
Your smile of pity, pardon, and I leave."
But no! This time he will not leave, he will not dumbly bend to his
penance. Hitherto he has trusted her word that the feat can be achieved,
the ray trod to its edge, yet he return unsmirched. He has tried the
experiment--and returned, "absurd as frightful." This is his last word.
". . . No, I say:
No fresh adventure! No more seeking love
At end of toil, and finding, calm above
My passion, the old statuesque regard,
The sad petrific smile!"
And he turns upon her with a violent invective. She is not so much hard
and hateful as mistaken and obtuse.
"You very woman with the pert pretence
To match the male achievement!"
_Who_ could not be victorious when all is made easy, when the rough
effaces itself to smooth, the gruff "grinds down and grows a whisper";
when man's truth subdues its rapier-edge to suit the bulrush spear that
womanly falsehood fights with? Oh woman's ears that will not hear the
truth! oh woman's "thrice-superfine feminity of sense," that ignores, as
by right divine, the process, and takes the spotless result from out the
very muck that made it!
But he breaks off. "Ah me!" he cries,
"The true slave's querulous outbreak!"
And forth again, all slavishly, at her behest he fares. Who knows but
_this_ time the "crimson quest" may deepen to a sunrise, not decay to
that cold sad sweet smile--which he obeys?
+ + + + +
Such a being as this, said Browning himself, "is imaginary, not real; a
nymph and no woman"; but the poem is "an allegory of an impossible ideal
of love, accepted conventionally." _How_ impossible he has shown not
only here but everywhere--_how_ conventionally accepted. This is not
woman's mission! And in the lover's querulous outbreak--the "true
slave's" outbreak--we may read the innermost meaning of the allegory. If
women will set up "the pert pretence to match the male achievement,"
they must consent to take the world as men are forced to take it. There
must be no unfairness, no claim on the chivalry which has sought to
shield them: in the homely phrase, they must "take the rough with the
smooth"--not the stainless result alone, with a revolted shudder for the
marrings which have made it possible.
But having flung these truths at her, observe that the man rues them. He
accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this passage) to what
is _true_ in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of
the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a
she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man
could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays--of
all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but if he could
explore, and not return "absurd as frightful." . . . He cannot.
Experience is not whole without "some wonder linked with fear"--the
colours! The shafts ray from her "midmost home"; she "dwells there,
hearted." True, but this is not _experience_, and she shall not conceit
herself into believing it to be. She shall not set up the "pert pretence
to match the male achievement": she shall learn that men make women
"easy victors," when their rough effaces itself to smooth for woman's
sake. One or the other she must choose: knowledge and the right to
judge, or ignorance and the duty to refrain from judgment. . . . And
yet--he goes again; he obeys the silver smile! For the "crimson-quest
may deepen to a sunrise"; he _may_ come back and find her waiting,
"sunlight and salvation," because she understands at last; and both
shall look for stains from those long shafts, and see none there. . . .
Maybe, maybe: he goes--will come again one day; and _that_ at last may
prove itself the day when "men are pure, and women brave."
+ + + + +
We pass from the unearthly atmosphere of _Numpholeptos_--well-nigh the
most abstract of all Browning's poems--to the vivid, astonishing realism
of _Too Late_.
Edith is dead, and the man who loved her and failed to win her, is
musing upon the transmutation of all values in his picture of life which
has been made by the tidings. Not till now had he fully realised his
absorption in the thought of her: "the woman I loved so well, who
married the other." He had been wont to "sit and look at his life." That
life, until he met her, had rippled and run like a river. But he met her
and loved her and lost her--and it was as if a great stone had been cast
by a devil into his life's mid-current. The waves strove about it--the
waves that had "come for their joy, and found this horrible stone
full-tide."
The stone thwarted God. But the lover has had two ways of thinking about
it. Though the waves, in all their strength and fullness, could not win
past, a thread of water might escape and run through the
"evening-country," safe, untormented, silent, until it reached the sea.
This would be his tender, acquiescent brooding on all she is to him, and
the hope that still they may be united at the last, though time shall
then have stilled his passion.
The second way was better!
"Or else I would think, 'Perhaps some night
When new things happen, a meteor-ball
May slip through the sky in a line of light,
And earth breathe hard, and landmarks fall,
And my waves no longer champ nor chafe,
Since a stone will have rolled from its place: let be!'"
For the husband might die, and he, still young and vigorous, might try
again to win her. . . . That was how he had been wont to "sit and look
at his life."
"But, Edith dead! No doubting more!"
All the dreams are over; all the brooding days have been lived in vain.
"But, dead! All's done with: wait who may,
Watch and wear and wonder who will.
Oh, my whole life that ends to-day!
Oh, my soul's sentence, sounding still,
'The woman is dead that was none of his;
And the man that was none of hers may go!'
There's only the past left: worry that!" . . .
All that he was or could have been, she should have had for a word, a
"want put into a look." She had not given that look; now she can never
give it--and perhaps she _does_ want him. He feels that she does--a
"pulse in his cheek that stabs and stops" assures him that she "needs
help in her grave, and finds none near"--that from his heart, precisely
_his_, she now at last wants warmth. And he can only send it--so! . . .
His acquiescence then had been his error.
"I ought to have done more: once my speech,
And once your answer, and there, the end,
And Edith was henceforth out of reach!
Why, men do more to deserve a friend,
Be rid of a foe, get rich, grow wise,
Nor, folding their arms, stare fate in the face.
Why, better even have burst like a thief
_And borne you away to a rock for us two,
In a moment's horror, bright, bloody and brief_" . . .
Well, _he_ had not done this. But--
"What did the other do? You be judge!
Look at us, Edith! Here are we both!
Give him his six whole years: I grudge
None of the life with you, nay, loathe
Myself that I grudged his start in advance
Of me who could overtake and pass.
But, as if he loved you! No, not he,
Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain" . . .
--for he who speaks, though he so loved and loves her, knows that he is
and was alone in his worship. He knows even that such worship of her
was among unaccountable things. That _he_, young, prosperous, sane, and
free, as he was and is, should have poured his life out, as it were, and
held it forth to _her_, and said, "Half a glance, and I drop the
glass!" . . . For--and now we come to those amazing stanzas which place
this passionate love-song by itself in the world--
"Handsome, were you? 'Tis more than they held,
More than they said; I was 'ware and watched:
* * * * *
The others? No head that was turned, no heart
Broken, my lady, assure yourself!"
Her admirers had quickly recovered: one married a dancer, others stole a
friend's wife, or stagnated or maundered, or else, unmarried, strove to
believe that the peace of singleness _was_ peace, and not--what they
were finding it! But whatever these rejected suitors did, the truth
about her was simply that
"On the whole, you were let alone, I think."
And laid so, on the shelf, she had "looked to the other, who
acquiesced." He was a poet, was he not?
"He rhymed you his rubbish nobody read,
Loved you and doved you--did not I laugh?"
Oh, what a prize! Had she appreciated adequately her pink of
poets? . . . But, after all, she had chosen him, before _this_ lover:
they had both been tried.
"Oh, heart of mine, marked broad with her mark,
_Tekel_, found wanting, set aside,
Scorned! See, I bleed these tears in the dark
Till comfort come, and the last be bled:
He? He is tagging your epitaph."
And now sounds that cry of the girl of _In a Year_.
"If it could only come over again!"
She _must_ have loved him best. If there had been time. . . . She would
have probed his heart and found what blood is; then would have twitched
the robe from her lay-figure of a poet, and pricked that leathern heart,
to find that only verses could spurt from it. . . .
"And late it was easy; late, you walked
Where a friend might meet you; Edith's name
Arose to one's lip if one laughed or talked;
If I heard good news, you heard the same;
When I woke, I knew that your breath escaped;
I could bide my time, keep alive, alert."
Now she is dead: "no doubting more." . . . But somehow he will get his
good of it! He will keep alive--and long, she shall see; but not like
the others; there shall be no turning aside, and he will begin at once
as he means to end. Those others may go on with the world--get gold,
get women, betray their wives and their husbands and their friends.
"There are two who decline, a woman and I,
And enjoy our death in the darkness here."[301:1]
And he recurs to her cherished, her dwelt-on, adored defects. Only _he_
could have loved her so, in despite of them. The most complex mood of
lovers, this! Humility and pride are mingled; one knows not which is
which--the pride of love, humility of self. Only so could the loved one
have declined to our level; only so could our love acquire value in
those eyes--and yet "the others" did not love so, the defects _were_
valid: there should be some recognition: "_I_ loved, _quand même_!" Why,
it was almost the defects that brought the thrill:
"I liked that way you had with your curls,
Wound to a ball in a net behind:
Your cheek was chaste as a quaker-girl's,
And your mouth--there was never, to my mind,
Such a funny mouth, for it would not shut;
And the dented chin, too--what a chin!
There were certain ways when you spoke, some words
That you know you never could pronounce:
You were thin, however; like a bird's
Your hand seemed--some would say, the pounce
Of a scaly-footed hawk--all but!
The world was right when it called you thin.
But I turn my back on the world: I take
Your hand, and kneel, and lay to my lips.
Bid me live, Edith!"
--and she shall be queen indeed, shall have high observance, courtship
made perfect. He seems to see her stand there--
"Warm too, and white too: would this wine
Had washed all over that body of yours,
Ere I drank it, and you down with it, thus!"
. . . The wine of his life, that she would not take--but she shall take
it now! He will "slake thirst at her presence" by pouring it away, by
drinking it down with her, as long ago he yearned to do. Edith needs
help in her grave and finds none near--wants warmth from his heart? He
sends it--so.
+ + + + +
Assuredly this is the meaning; yet none of the commentators says so. She
was the man's whole life, and she has died. Then he dies too, that he
may live.
"There are two who decline, a woman and I,
And enjoy our death in the darkness here."
Yet even in this we have no sense of failure, of "giving-in": it is for
intenser life that he dies, and she shall be his queen "while his soul
endures."
This is the last of my "women unwon." In none of all these poems does
courage fail; love is ever God's secret. It comes and goes: the heart
has had its moment. It does not come at all: the heart has known the
loved one's loveliness. It has but hoped to come: the heart hoped with
it. It has set a price upon itself, a cruel crushing price: the heart
will pay it, if it can be paid. It has waked too late--it calls from the
grave: the heart will follow it there. No love is in vain:
"For God above creates the love to reward the love."
FOOTNOTES:
[277:1] He excepts, of course, all through this passage, _Any Wife to
any Husband_--a poem which has not fallen into my scheme.
[285:1] No line which Browning has written is more characteristic than
this--nor more famous.
[289:1] In _By the Fireside_.
[290:1] Arthur Symons, _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, p. 198.
[291:1] Browning himself, asked by Dr. Furnivall, on behalf of the
Browning Society, to explain this allusion, answered in the fashion
which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits'
are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common
image." . . . "I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify
wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the,
after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that _Numpholeptos_ is
"an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted
conventionally as such by a man who all the while" (as I have once or
twice had occasion to say of himself!) "cannot quite blind himself to
the fact that" (to put it more concisely than he) knowledge and purity
are best obtained by achievement. Still more concisely:
"Innocence--sin--virtue"--in the Hegelian chord of experience.
[301:1] Here is a clear echo of Heine, in one of his most renowned
lyrics:--
"The dead stand up, 'tis the midnight bell,
In crazy dances they're leaping:
We two in the grave lie well, lie well,
And I in thine arms am sleeping.
The dead stand up, 'tis the Judgment Day,
To Heaven or Hell they're hieing:
We two care nothing, we two will stay
Together quietly lying."
II
THE WOMAN WON
Love is not static. We may not sit down and say, "It cannot be more than
now; it will not be less. Henceforth I take it for granted." Though she
be won, there still is more to do. I say "she" (and Browning says it),
because the taking-for-granted ideal is essentially man's--woman has
never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is _because_ men feel so
keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the
real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it.
Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if
love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come
to an end of it--and, if we were wise, should not desire so to do.
But is she in truth so elusive? Are not women far simpler than they are
accounted? "The First Reader in another language," I have elsewhere said
of them; but doubtless a woman cannot be the judge. Let us see what
Browning, subtle as few other men, thought of our lucidity.
"Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her--
Next time, herself!--not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew;
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather."
So elusive, says this man, is the real Herself! But (I maintain) she
does not know it. She goes her way, unconscious--or, if conscious, blind
to its deepest implication. Caprice, mood, whim: these indeed she uses,
_for fun_, as it were, but of "the trouble behind her" she knows
nothing. Just to rise from a couch, pull a curtain, pass through a room!
How should she dream that the cornice-wreath blossomed anew? And when
she tossed her hat off, or carefully put it on before the mirror . . .
if the glass did gleam, it was a trick of light; _she_ did not produce
it! For, conscious of this magic, she would lose it; her very
inapprehensiveness it is which "brings it off." Yet she loves to hear
her lover tell of such imaginings, and the more he tells, the more there
seem to be for him.
"Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune--
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares?
But 'tis twilight, you see--with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!"
Listening, she begins to understand how deeply he means "herself." It is
not only the spell that she leaves behind her in the mere, actual rooms:
it is the mystery residing in her "house of flesh." What does _that_
house contain--where is _she_? He seems to hold her, yet she "goes out
as he enters"; he seems to have found her, yet it is like hide-and-seek
at twilight, and half-a-hundred hiders in a hundred rooms!
She listens, puzzled; perhaps a little frightened to be so much of a
secret. For she never meant to be--she cannot feel that she _is_; and
thus, how shall she help him to "find" her? Perhaps she must always
elude? She does not desire that: he must not let her escape him! And he
quickly answers:
"Escape me?
Never--
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue."
But she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. She wants him to find
her. And this, in its turn, scares _him_.
"My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed."
It is the trouble of love. He may never reach her. . . . They look at
one another, and he takes heart again.
"But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again--
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all."
But she is now almost repelled. She is not this enigma: she _wants_ him
to grasp her. Well, then, she can help him, he says:
"Look but once from your farthest bound
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me--
Ever
Removed!"
Is not this the meaning? The two poems seem to me supplementary of each
other. First, the sense of her elusiveness; then the dim resentment and
fear which this knowledge of mystery awakes in her. She does not (as I
have seemed to make her) _speak_ in either of these poems; but the
thoughts are those which she must have, and so far, surely, her lover
can divine her? The explanation given both by Mrs. Orr and Berdoe of
_Love in a Life_ (the first lyric), that the lover is "inhabiting the
same house with his love," seems to me simply inept. Is it not clear
that no material house[308:1] is meant? They are both inhabiting the
_body_; and she, passing through this sphere, touching it at various
points, leaves the spell of her mere being everywhere--on the curtain,
the couch, the cornice-wreath, the mirror. But through _her_ house he
cannot range, as she through actualities. And though ever she eludes
him, this is not what she sets out to do; she needs his comprehension;
she does not desire to "escape" him.
The old enigma that is no enigma--the sphinx with the answer to the
riddle ever trembling on her lips! But if she were understood, she might
be taken for granted. . . . So the lips may tremble, but the answer is
kept back:
"While the one eludes must the other pursue."
"The desire of the man is for the woman; the desire of the woman is for
the desire of the man."
In those two poems the lovers are almost gay; they can turn and smile at
one another 'mid the perplexity. The man is eager, resolute, humorous;
the woman, if not acquiescent, is at least apprehending. The heart
shall find her some day: "next time herself, not the trouble behind
her!" She feels that she can aid him to that finding; it depends, in the
last resort, on _her_.
But in _Two in the Campagna_ a different lover is to deal with. What he
wants is more than this. He wants to pass the limits of personality, to
forget the search in the oneness. There is more than "finding" to be
done: finding is not the secret. He tries to tell her--and he cannot
tell her, for he does not himself fully know.
"I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?"
His thought escapes him ever. Like a spider's silvery thread it mocks
and eludes; he seeks to catch it, to hang his rhymes upon it. . . . No;
it escapes, escapes.
"Help me to hold it! First it left
The yellowing fennel. . . ."
What does the fennel mean? Something, but he cannot grasp it--and the
thread now seems to float upon that weed with the orange cup, where five
green beetles are groping--but not there either does it rest . . . it is
all about him: entangling, eluding:
"Everywhere on the grassy slope,
I traced it. Hold it fast!"
The grassy slope may be the secret! That infinity of passion and
peace--the Roman Campagna:
"The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air--
Rome's ghost since her decease."
And think of all that that plain even now stands for:
"Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers!"
They love one another: why cannot they be like that plain, why cannot
_they_ "let nature have her way"? Does she understand?
"How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?"
But always they stop short of one another. That is the dread mystery:
"I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
O' the wound, since wound must be?"
He longs to yield his will, his whole being--to see with her eyes, set
his heart beating by hers, drink his fill from her soul; make her part
his--_be_ her. . . .
"No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul's warmth--I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak--
Then the good minute goes."
Goes--with such swiftness! Already he is "far out of it." And shall this
never be different?
". . . Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow?"
He must indeed, for already he is "off again":
"Just when I seemed about to learn!"
Even the letting nature have her way is not the secret. The thread is
lost again:
"The old trick! Only I discern--
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."
_No_ contact is close enough. The passion is infinite, the hearts are
finite. The deepest love must suffer this doom of isolation: plunged as
they may be in one another, body and soul, in the very rapture is the
sentence. The good minute goes. It shall be theirs again--again they
shall trust it, again the thread be lost: "the old trick!"
For it is the very trick of life, as here we know it. The Campagna
itself says that--
"Rome's ghost since her decease."
Mutability, mutability! Though the flowers are the primal, naked forms,
they are not the same flowers; though love is ever new, it is ever old.
_New as to-day is new: old as to-day is old_; and all the lovers have
discerned, like him,
"Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."
For has she helped him to hold the thread? No; she too has been the
sport of "the old trick." And even of that he cannot be wholly sure:
"I _wonder_ do you feel to-day
As I have felt . . . ?"
+ + + + +
In the enchanting _Lovers' Quarrel_ we find a less metaphysical pair
than those whom we have followed in their quest. This man has not taken
her for granted, but neither has he frightened her with the mystery of
her own and his elusiveness. No; these two have just had, very humanly
and gladly, the "time of their lives"! All through the winter they have
frolicked: there never was a more enchanting love than she, and plainly
he has charmed her just as much. The same sort of fun appealed to them
both at the same moment--games out of straws of their own devising;
drawing one another's faces in the ashes of the hearth:
"Free on each other's flaws,
How we chattered like two church daws!"
And then the _Times_ would come in--and the Emperor has married his
Mlle. de Montijo!
"There they sit ermine-stoled,
And she powders her hair with gold."
Or a travel-book arrives from the library--and the two heads are close
together over the pictures.
"Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
Miles and miles of gold and green
Where the sunflowers blow
In a solid glow,
And to break now and then the screen--
Black neck and eyeballs keen,
Up a wild horse leaps between!"
. . . No picture in the book like that--what a genius he is! The book is
pushed away; and there lies the table bare:
"Try, will our table turn?
Lay your hands there light, and yearn
Till the yearning slips
Thro' the finger-tips
In a fire which a few discern,
And a very few feel burn,
And the rest, they may live and learn!
Then we would up and pace,
For a change, about the place,
Each with arm o'er neck:
'Tis our quarter-deck,
We are seamen in woeful case.
Help in the ocean-space!
Or, if no help, we'll embrace."
The next play must be "dressing-up"; for the sailor-game had ended in
that nonsense of a kiss because they had not thought of dressing
properly the parts:
"See how she looks now, dressed
In a sledging-cap and vest!
'Tis a huge fur cloak--
Like a reindeer's zoke
Falls the lappet along the breast:
Sleeves for her arms to rest,
Or to hang, as my Love likes best."
Now it is _his_ turn; he must learn to "flirt a fan as the Spanish
ladies can"--but she must pretend too, so he makes her a burnt-cork
moustache, and she "turns into such a man!" . . .
All this was three months ago, when the snow first mesmerised the earth
and put it to sleep. Snow-time is love-time--for hearts can then show
all:
"How is earth to know
Neath the mute hand's to-and-fro?"
* * * * *
Three months ago--and now it is spring, and such a dawn of day! The
March sun feels like May. He looks out upon it:
"All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey."
Yes--she is gone; they have quarrelled. Or rather, since it does not
take two to do that wretched deed, _she_ has quarrelled. It was some
little thing that he said--neither sneer nor vaunt, nor reproach nor
taunt:
"And the friends were friend and foe!"
She went away, and she has not come back, and it is three months ago.
One cannot help suspecting that the little thing he said, which was
_not_ so many things, must then have been something peculiarly tactless!
This girl was not, like some of us, devoid of humour--that much is
clear: laughter lived in her as in its home. What _had_ he said?
Whatever it was, he "did not mean it." But that is frequently the sting
of stings. Spontaneity which hurts us hurts far more than malice
can--for it is more evidently sincere in what it has of the too-much, or
the too-little. . . . Well, angry exceedingly, or wounded exceedingly,
she had gone, and still is gone--and he sits marvelling. Three months!
Is she going to stay away for ever? Is she going to cast him off for a
word, a "bubble born of breath"? Why, they had been _one_ person!
"Me, do you leave aghast
With the memories We amassed?"
Just for "a moment's spite." . . . She ought to have understood.
"Love, if you knew the light
That your soul casts in my sight,
How I look to you
For the pure and true,
And the beauteous and the right--"
But so had she looked to _him_, and he had shown her "a moment's
spite." . . . Yet he cannot believe that a hasty word can do all this
against the other memories. Things like that are indeed for ever
happening; trivialities thus can mar immensities. The eye can be blurred
by a fly's foot; a straw can stop all the wondrous mechanism of the ear.
But that is only the external world; endurance is easy there. It is
different with love.
"Wrong in the one thing rare--
Oh, it is hard to bear!"
And especially hard now, in this "dawn of day." Little brooks must be
dancing down the dell,
"Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love but attend as well."
But as she cannot, he will not. . . . Only, things will get lovelier
every day, for the spring is back, or at any rate close at hand--the
spring, when the almond-blossom blows.
"We shall have the word
In a minor third
There is none but the cuckoo knows:
Heaps of the guelder rose!
I must bear with it, I suppose."
For he would choose, if he could choose, that November should come back.
Then there would be nothing for her to love but love! In such a world as
spring and summer make, heart can dispense with heart; the sun is there,
and the "flowers unnipped"; but in winter, freezing in the crypt, the
heart cries: "Why should I freeze? Another heart, as chill as mine is
now, would quiver back to life at the touch of this one":
"Heart, shall we live or die?
The rest . . . settle by-and-bye!"
Three months ago they were so happy! They lived blocked up with snow,
the wind edged in and in, as far as it could get:
"Not to our ingle, though,
Where we loved each the other so!"
If it were but winter now again, instead of the terrible, lovely spring,
when she will have the blue sky and the hawthorn-spray and the brooks to
love--and the almond-blossom and the cuckoo, and that guelder-rose
which he will have to bear with . . .
But, after all, it _is_ November for their hearts! Hers is chill as his;
she cannot live without him, as he cannot without her. If it were
winter, "she'd efface the score and forgive him _as before_" (thus we
perceive that this is not the first quarrel, that he has offended her
before with that word which was _not_ so many things!)--and what else is
it but winter for their shivering hearts? So he begins to hope. In
March, too, there are storms--here is one beginning now, at noon, which
shows that it will last. . . . Not yet, then, the too lovely spring!
"It is twelve o'clock:
I shall hear her knock
In the worst of a storm's uproar:
I shall pull her through the door,
I shall have her for evermore!"
. . . I think she came back. She would want to see how well he
understood the spring--he who could make that picture of the Pampas'
sheen and the wild horse. Why should spring's news unfold itself, and he
not "say things" about it to her, like those he could say about the mere
_Times_ news? And it _is_ impossible to bear with the guelder-rose--the
guelder-rose must be adored. They will adore it together; she will
efface the score, and forgive him as before. What fun it will be, in the
worst of the storm, to feel him pull her through the door!
In _The Lost Mistress_ it is really finished: she has dismissed him. We
are not told why. It cannot be because he has not loved her--he who so
tenderly, if so whimsically, accepts her decree. He will not let her see
how much he suffers--he still can say the "little things" she liked.
"All's over, then: does truth sound bitter
As one at first believes?
Hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter
About your cottage eaves!
And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
I noticed that, to-day;
One day more breaks them open fully
--You know the red turns grey."
That is what his life has turned, but he will not maunder about it.
"To-morrow we meet the same then, dearest?
May I take your hand in mine?
Mere friends are we--well, friends the merest
Keep much that I resign."
He is no more "he" for her: he is a friend like the rest. _He_ resigns.
But the friends do not know what "he" knew.
"For each glance of the eye so bright and black
Though I keep with heart's endeavour--
Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
Though it stay in my soul for ever--"
. . . Is this like a friend? But he accepts her bidding--very nearly.
There are some things, perhaps, that he may fail in, but she need not
fear--he will try.
"Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
Or only a thought stronger;
I will hold your hand but as long as all may,
Or so very little longer!"
Again we have the typical Browning lover, who will not reproach nor
scorn nor whine. But I think that this one had perhaps a little excess
of whimsical humour. She would herself have needed a good deal of such
humour to take this farewell just as it was offered. "_Does truth sound
bitter, as one at first believes?_" Somewhat puzzling to her, it may be,
that very philosophical reflection! . . . This has been called a noble,
tender, an heroic, song of loss. For me there lurks a smile in it. I do
not say that the smile makes the dismissal explicable; rather I a little
wonder how she could have sent him away. But is it certain that she will
not call him back, as she called the snowdrops? He means to hold her
hand a little longer than the others do!
+ + + + +
_The Worst of It_ is the cry of a man whose young, beautiful wife has
left him for a lover. He cares for nothing else in the world; his whole
heart and soul, even now, are set on discovering how he may help her.
But there is no way, for him. And the "worst of it" is that all has
happened _through_ him. She had given him herself, she had bound her
soul by the "vows that damn"--and then had found that she must break
them. And he proclaims her right to break them: no angel set them down!
But _she_--the pride of the day, the swan with no fleck on her wonder of
white; she, with "the brow that looked like marble and smelt like
myrrh," with the eyes and the grace and the glory! Is there to be no
heaven for her--no crown for that brow? Shall other women be sainted,
and not she, graced here beyond all saints?
"Hardly! That must be understood!
The earth is your place of penance, then."
But even the earthly punishment will be heavy for her to bear. . . . If
it had only been he that was false, not she! _He_ could have borne all
easily; speckled as he is, a spot or two would have made little
difference. And he is nothing, while she is all.
Too monstrously the magnanimity of this man weights the scale against
the woman. Instinctively we seek a different "excuse" for her from that
which he makes--though indeed there scarce is one at which he does not
catch.
"And I to have tempted you"--
. . . that is, tempted her to snap her gold ring and break her promise:
"I to have tempted you! I, who tired
Your soul, no doubt, till it sank! Unwise,
I loved and was lowly, loved and aspired,
Loved, grieving or glad, till I made you mad,
And you meant to have hated and despised--
Whereas, you deceived me nor inquired!"
This is the too-much of magnanimity. Browning tends to exaggerate the
beauty of that virtue, as already we have seen in Pompilia; and
assuredly this husband has, like her, the defect of his quality. Tender,
generous, high-hearted he is, but without the "sinew of the soul," as
some old writer called _anger_. All these wonderful and subtle reasons
for the tragic issue, all this apprehensive forecasting of the blow that
awaits the woman "at the end of life," and the magnanimity which even
then she shall find dreadfully awaiting her . . . all this is noble
enough to read of, but imagine its atmosphere in daily life! The truth
is that such natures are but wasted if they do not suffer--almost they
might be called responsible for others' misdoings. We read the ringing
stanzas of _The Worst of It_, and feel that no one should be doomed to
suffer such forgiveness. What chance had _her_ soul? At every turn it
found itself forestalled, and shall so find itself, he tells her, to all
eternity.
"I knew you once; but in Paradise,
If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."
No: this with me is not a favourite poem. The wife, beautiful and
passionate, was never given a chance, in this world, to be "placed" at
all in virtue; and she felt, no doubt, with a woman's intuition, that
even in the last of all encounters she should still be baffled. Already
that faultless husband is planning to be crushingly right on the Day of
Judgment. And he _is_ so crushingly right! He is not a prig, he is not a
Pharisee; he is only perfectly magnanimous--perfectly right. . . . And
sometimes, she must have thought vaguely, with a pucker on the glorious
brow,--sometimes, to love lovably, we must yield a little of our virtue,
we must be willing to be perfectly wrong.
+ + + + +
But his suffering is genuine. She has twisted all his world out of
shape. He believes no more in truth or beauty or life.
"We take our own method, the devil and I,
With pleasant and fair and wise and rare:
And the best we wish to what lives, is--death."
_She_ is better off; she has committed a fault and has done . . . now
she can begin again. But most likely she does not repent at all, he goes
on to reflect--most likely she is glad she deceived him. She had endured
too long:--
"[You] have done no evil and want no aid,
Will live the old life out and chance the new.
And your sentence is written all the same,
And I can do nothing--pray, perhaps:
But somehow the word pursues its game--
If I pray, if I curse--for better or worse:
And my faith is torn to a thousand scraps,
And my heart feels ice while my words breathe flame.
Dear, I look from my hiding-place.
Are you still so fair? Have you still the eyes?
Be happy! Add but the other grace,
Be good! Why want what the angels vaunt?
I knew you once: but in Paradise,
If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."
I think the saddest thing in this poem is its last stanza; for we feel,
do we not? that _now_ she is having her first opportunity to be both
happy and good--free from the intolerable magnanimity of this husband.
And so, by making a male utterance too "noble," Browning has almost
redressed the balance. The tear had been too frequently assigned to
woman; exultation too often had sounded from man. We have seen that many
of the feminine "tears" were supererogatory; and now, in this chapter of
the Woman Won, we see that she can tap the source of those salt drops in
man. But not in _James Lee's Wife_ is the top-note of magnanimity more
strained than in _The Worst of It_. Moral gymnastics should not be
practised at the expense of others. No one knew that better than
Browning, but too often he allowed his subtle intellect to confute his
warm, wise heart--too often he fell to the lure of "situation," and
forgot the truth. "A man and woman _might_ feel so," he sometimes seems
to have said; "it does not matter that no man and woman ever have so
felt."
And thus, now and then, he gave both men and women--the worst of it. But
oftener he gave them such a best of it that I hardly can imagine a
reader of Browning who has not love and courage in the heart, and trust
and looking-forward in the soul; who does not, in the words of the great
Epilogue:--
"Greet the unseen with a cheer."
FOOTNOTES:
[308:1] Compare this passage with one in a letter to E. B. B.: "In this
House of Life, where I go, you go--when I ascend, you run before--when I
descend, it is after you."
THE END
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
at Paul's Work, Edinburgh
Transcriber's Notes:
This text uses a unique type of ellipsis to represent where material has
been left out of poetry quotations and out of the story line of a poem.
They are indicated here by five asterisks:
* * * * *
The number of periods in ellipses match the original.
Thought breaks in the text are indicated by the following:
+ + + + +
The word manoeuvre used an ae ligature in the original.
Words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_.
The following words appear in the original with and without hyphens:
commonplace/common-place
disgrace/dis-grace
moonbeam/moon-beam
wellnigh/well-nigh
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Browning's Heroines" ***
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