"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.—DIS 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 Dis 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 regime, 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



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 pensee"—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



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 meme!" 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: