[Illustration: THE LOVER]
I
LOVERS MEETING
Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life--the thing
which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is
common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in
him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in
any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without
sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general
outlook--more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic
analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his
passion for humanity _as_ humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to
trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let
us take them for granted--let us examine man as a separate phenomenon,
so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest,
next to mankind, was art in all its branches--a correlative aspect, that
is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and
aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in
expression of our subtlest inward life. Man _was_, for him, the proper
study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," and
that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit--differing there from Byron,
almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur
Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature."
Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook;
and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.
In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more
inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for
flabbiness--there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker
ways. After _Pauline_--rejected utterance of his green-sickness--the
wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no
withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up,
"as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For
love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeed
_do all_ for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing
something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That
other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted,
but no _claim_ shall be formulated on either side. This is the true
faith, the true freedom, for both. Meredith has said the same, more
axiomatically than Browning ever said it:
"He learnt how much we gain who make no claims"
--but Browning's whole existence announced that axiom, and triumphantly
proved it true. Almost the historic happy marriage of the world! Such
was _his_ marriage, and such it must have been, for never was man
declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. He
understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!)
conduct--what it may do, and not do, for happiness. That is to say, he
understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far
hinders it--when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when
by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. The whole secret, for
Browning, lay in loving greatly.
Thus, for example, it is notable that, except _The Laboratory_ and
_Fifine at the Fair_, none of his poems of men and women turns upon
jealousy. For him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in
love for it. And even Elvire's demurs (in _Fifine_), even the departure
from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of
insight into Juan's better self. He will never be all that he can be
(she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and
always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be
deep and true as well as brilliant.
For Browning, _how_ love comes is not important. It may be by the
high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely
answered, all is well. Living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our
dearest memory.
"What is he buzzing in my ears?
'Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'
Ah, reverend sir, not I!"
And why not? Because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man
"used to meet." What he viewed in the world then, he now sees again--the
"suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it
were, with the bottles on the bedside table.
"At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, Sir, it's improper,
My poor mind's out of tune."
Nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the
details. . . . She left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle
labelled 'Ether,'"
"And stole from stair to stair,
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!
We loved, Sir--used to meet:
How sad and mad and bad it was--
But then, how it was sweet!"
They did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other
"confession"--if he calls this one! It is the meaning of the man's life:
that is all.
In _Confessions_, the story is done; the man is dying. In _Love among
the Ruins_, we have almost the great moment itself. The lover, alone,
is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before
him. Here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of
"a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful
prince once held his court. There had been a "domed and daring palace,"
a wall with a hundred gates--its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve
men might stand abreast. Now all is pasture-land:
"And such glory and perfection, see, of grass
Never was"
--as here,
"Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold."
Of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. It was part
of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his
minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the
chariot-races. . . . This is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles
as it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes
and rills melt into one grey . . . and he knows
"That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come."
That king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its
temples and colonnades,
"All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts--and then
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each."
A million fighters were sent forth every year from that city; and they
built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet still had a
thousand chariots in reserve--all gold, of course. . . .
"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin.
Shut them in
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best!"
But though love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all;
we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us,
even from our love. The day is long and we must work in it; but we can
meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon can put
off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand
at the other side of the bay:
"Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!"
Yes--we can meet at night. . . . But we must part at morning.
"Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim;
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me."[205:1]
These are plainly not wedded lovers, though some commentators so
describe them; and indeed Browning sings but seldom of wedded love. When
he does so sing, he reaches heights of beauty beyond any in the other
lyrics, but the poems of marriage are not in our survey. In nearly all
his other love-poetry, it is the "trouble of love," in one form or
another, which occupies him--the lovers who meet to part; those who love
"in vain" (as the phrase goes, but never _his_ phrase); those who choose
separation rather than defiance of the "world, and what it fears"; those
who do defy that world, and reckon up their gains.
"Dear, had the world in its caprice
Deigned to proclaim 'I know you both,
Have recognised your plighted troth,
Am sponsor for you: live in peace!'--
How many precious months and years
Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
Before we found it out at last,
The world, and what it fears?
How much of priceless life were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society's true ornament--
Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
And feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss?"
That old quarrel between the ideals of Bohemia and of "respectability"!
They could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the
trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "People
would have talked." . . . Well, people may talk now, but they _have_
gained something. They have gained freedom to live their lives as they
choose--rightly or wrongly, but at any rate it is not "the world" that
sways them. They have learnt how much that good word is worth! What is
happening, this very hour, in that environment--here, for instance, in
the Institute, which they are just passing? "Guizot receives
Montalembert!" The two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly
signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. See the
courtyard all alight for the reception! Let them escape from it all, and
leave respectability to its false standards. _They_ are not
included--they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!"
I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers
had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were
pleased to think. The world still counted for them--as it counts for all
who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they
could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting
it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once
it recognises the true Contemner! To
"Feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss"
--on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the
example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes--we must refuse to be
dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short--they
could not _forget_ the world.
Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn
to the dream-meetings--the great encounters which all of us feel might
be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that
imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so
marvellously uttered in _Mesmerism_. Here, in these breathless
stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or
rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the
actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we
should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in
his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings
his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey":
"Till I seemed to have and hold
In the vacancy
'Twixt the walls and me
From the hair-plait's chestnut-gold
To the foot in its muslin fold--
Have and hold, then and there,
Her, from head to foot,
Breathing and mute,
Passive and yet aware,
In the grasp of my steady stare--
Hold and have, there and then,
All her body and soul
That completes my whole,
All that women add to men,
In the clutch of my steady ken"--
. . . if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of
his hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he _must_ draw
her from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to
suffocate her if she cannot escape from it:
"Out of doors into the night!
On to the maze
Of the wild wood-ways,
Not turning to left nor right
From the pathway, blind with sight--
Swifter and still more swift,
As the crowding peace
Doth to joy increase
In the wild blind eyes uplift
Thro' the darkness and the drift!"
And he _will_ sit so, feeling his soul dilate, and no muscle shall be
relaxed as he sees his belief come true, and more and more she takes
shape for him, so that she shall be, when she does come, altered even
from what she was at his first seeming to "have and hold her"--for the
lips glow, the cheek burns, the hair, from its plait, breaks loose, and
spreads with "a rich outburst, chestnut gold-interspersed," and the
arms open wide "like the doors of a casket-shrine," as she comes, comes,
comes . . .
"'Now--now'--the door is heard!
Hark, the stairs! and near--
Nearer--and here--
'Now!' and at call the third
She enters without a word!"
* * * * *
Could a woman ever forget the man who should do that with her! Would she
not almost be ready, in such an hour, to die as Porphyria died?
But in _Porphyria's Lover_, not so great a spirit speaks. This man, too,
sitting in his room alone, thinks of the woman he loves, and she comes
to him; but here it is her own will that drives through wind and
rain--there is no compelling glory from the man uncertain still of
passion's answering passion.
"The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria." . . .
She glided in and did not speak. She looked round his cottage, then
kneeled and made the dying fire blaze up. When all the place was warm,
she rose and put off her dripping cloak and shawl, the hat, the soiled
gloves; she let her rain-touched hair fall loose,
"And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread o'er all her yellow hair--
Murmuring how she loved me--she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever."
But to-night, at some gay feast in a world all sundered from this man's,
there had seized her
"A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain."
She found him indeed as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart
fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she
was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his
grief--unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it
possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and
it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she
calls to him, and as even then he makes no answer, sits down beside him
and draws his head to her breast.
"Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her." . . .
But he knows that she felt no pain, for in a minute he opened her lids
to see, and the blue eyes laughed back at him "without a stain." He
loosed the tress about her neck, and the colour flashed into her cheek
beneath his burning kiss. Now he propped her head--this time _his_
shoulder bore
"The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!"
* * * * *
This poem was first published as the second of two headed "Madhouse
Cells"; and though the classifying title was afterwards rejected, that
it should ever have been used is something of a clue to the meaning. But
only "something," for even so, we wonder if the dream were all a dream,
if Porphyria ever came, and, if she did, was this the issue? What truly
happened on that night of wind and rain?--that night which _is_ real,
whatever else is not . . . I ask, we all ask; but does it greatly
matter? Enough that we can grasp the deeper meaning--the sanity in the
madness. As Porphyria, with her lover's head on her breast, sat in the
little cottage on that stormy night, the world at last rejected, the
love at last accepted, she was at her highest pulse of being: she was
_herself_. When in all the rest of life would such another moment
come? . . . How many lovers have mutually murmured that: "If we could
die _now_!"--nothing impaired, nothing gone or to go from them: the
sanity in the madness, the courage in the cowardice. . . . So this lover
felt, brooding in the "madhouse cell" on what had been, or might have
been:
"And thus we sit together now,
And yet God has not said a word!"
Six poems of exultant love--and a man speaks in each! With Browning, the
woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even
_he_ puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. From the
nameless girl in _Count Gismond_ and from Balaustion--these only--do we
get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as I have just
now shown. . . . Always the tear assigned to woman! It may be "true"; I
think it is not at least _so_ true, but true in some degree it must be,
since all legend will thus have it. What then shall a woman say? That
the time has come to alter this? That woman cries "for nothing," like
the children? That she does not understand so well as man the ends of
love? Or that she understands them better? . . . Perhaps all of these
things; perhaps some others also. Let us study now, at all events, the
"tear"; let us see in what, as Browning saw her, the Trouble of Love
consists for woman.
FOOTNOTES:
[205:1] Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the
minds of some. In Berdoe's _Browning Cyclopædia_ the difficulty is
frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He interprets the
last line of _Parting at Morning_ as meaning that the woman "desires
more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is the _man_ who
speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a
misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him."
Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him"
refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . Here is
an instance of making obscurity where none really exists.
[208:1] Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen
stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break
in sense or sound."
II
TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S
I.--THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE"
Writing of the unnamed heroine of _Count Gismond_, I said that she had
one of the characteristic Browning marks--that of trust in the sincerity
of others. Here, in _The Glove_, we find a figure who resembles her in
two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady--a lady of the
Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training:
_dis_-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the
earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very
prize-bloom of legend--that famous incident of the glove thrown into the
lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . Does this
interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of
it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which,
till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but
the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis--vanity! All the world
knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned
alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried:
". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
Not love, set that task to humanity!"
But Browning, who could detect the Court-grown, found excuse for her in
that lamentable gardening. The weed had been sown, as it was sown (so
much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are
told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this
alone, to be older. _She had been longer at Court_; its lesson had
penetrated her being. Day after day she had watched, day after day had
listened; then arrived De Lorge with fervent words of love, and now she
watched _him_, hearkened _him_ . . . and more and more misdoubted,
hesitated, half-inclined and half-afraid; until at last, "one day struck
fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," she gathered all her hesitation,
yielding, courage, into one quick impulse--and flung her glove to the
lions! With the result which we know--of an instant and a fearless
answer to the test; but, as well, an instant confirmation of the worst
she had dreaded.
+ + + + +
It was at the Court of King Francis I of France that it happened--the
most brilliant Court, perhaps, in history, where the flower of French
knighthood bloomed around the gayest, falsest of kings. Romance was in
the air, and so was corruption; poets, artists, worked in every corner,
and so did intrigue and baseness and lust. Round the King was gathered
the _Petite Bande_, the clique within a clique--"that troop of pretty
women who hunted with him, dined with him, talked with him"--led by his
powerful mistress, the Duchesse d'Étampes, friend of the Dauphin's
neglected wife, the Florentine Catherine de Médicis--foe of that wife's
so silently detested rival, "Madame Dame Diane de Poitiers, Grande
Sénéschale de Normandie."
The two great mistresses had each her darling poet: the Duchesse
d'Étampes had chosen Clement Marot, who could turn so gracefully the
Psalms of David into verse; La Grande Sénéschale, always supreme in
taste, patronised Pierre Ronsard--and this was why Pierre sometimes
found that when he "talked fine to King Francis," the King would yawn in
his face, or whistle and move off to some better amusement.
That was what Francis did one day after the Peace of Cambray had been
signed by France and Spain. He had grown weary of leisure:
"Here we've got peace, and aghast I'm
Caught thinking war the true pastime.
Is there a reason in metre?
Give us your speech, master Peter!"
Peter obediently began, but he had hardly spoken half a dozen words
before the King whistled aloud: "Let's go and look at our lions!"
They went to the courtyard, and as they went, the throng of courtiers
mustered--lords and ladies came as thick as coloured clouds at sunset.
Foremost among them (relates Ronsard in Browning's poem) were De Lorge
and the lady he was "adoring."
"Oh, what a face! One by fits eyed
Her, and the horrible pitside"
--for they were now all sitting above the arena round which the lions'
dens were placed. The black Arab keeper was told to stir up the great
beast, Bluebeard. A firework was accordingly dropped into the den, whose
door had been opened . . . they all waited breathless, with beating
hearts . . .
"Then earth in a sudden contortion
Gave out to our gaze her abortion.
Such a brute! . . .
One's whole blood grew curdling and creepy
To see the black mane, vast and heapy,
The tail in the air stiff and straining,
The wide eyes nor waxing nor waning."
And the poet, watching him, thought how perhaps in that eruption of
noise and light, the lion had dreamed that his shackles were shivered,
and he was free again.
"Ay, that was the open sky o'erhead!
And you saw by the flash on his forehead,
By the hope in those eyes wide and steady,
He was leagues in the desert already."
The King laughed: "Was there a man among them all who would brave
Bluebeard?" Not as a challenge did he say this--he knew well that it
were almost certain death:
"Once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold!"
But Francis had scarcely finished speaking when (as all the world knows)
a glove fluttered down into the arena and fell close to the lion. It was
the glove of De Lorge's lady. They were sitting together, and he had
been, as Ronsard could see, "weighing out fine speeches like gold from a
balance." . . . He now delayed not an instant, but leaped over the
barrier and walked straight up to the glove. The lion never moved; he
was still staring (as all of us, with aching hearts, have seen such an
one stare from his cage) at the far, unseen, remembered land. . . . De
Lorge picked up the glove, calmly; calmly he walked back to the place
where he had leaped the barrier before, leaped it again, and (once more,
as all the world knows) dashed the glove in the lady's face. Every eye
was on them. The King cried out in applause that _he_ would have done
the same:
". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
Not love, set that task to humanity!"
--and, having the royal word for it, all the lords and ladies turned
with loathing from De Lorge's "queen dethroned."
All but Peter Ronsard. _He_ noticed that she retained undisturbed her
self-possession amid the Court's mockery.
"As if from no pleasing experiment
She rose, yet of pain not much heedful,
So long as the process was needful.
* * * * *
She went out 'mid hooting and laughter;
Clement Marot stayed; I followed after."
Catching her up, he asked what it had all meant. "I'm a poet," he added;
"I must know human nature."
"She told me, 'Too long had I heard
Of the deed proved alone by the word:
For my love--what De Lorge would not dare!
With my scorn--what De Lorge could compare!
And the endless descriptions of death
He would brave when my lip formed a breath,
I must reckon as braved'" . . .
--and for these great gifts, must give in return her love, as love was
understood at the Court of King Francis. But to-day, looking at the
lion, she had mused on all the dangers affronted to get that beast to
that den: his capture by some poor slave whom no lady's love was to
reward, no King or Court to applaud, but only the joy of the sport, and
the delight of his children's wonder at the glorious creature. . . . And
at this very Court, the other day, did not they tell of a page who for
mere boyish bravado had dropped his cap over the barrier and leaped
across, pretending that he must get it back? Why should she not test De
Lorge here and now? For _now_ she was still free; now she could find out
what "death for her sake" really meant; otherwise, he might yet break
down her doubts, she might yield, still unassured, and only then
discover that it did not mean anything at all! So--she had thrown the
glove.
"'The blow a glove gives is but weak:
Does the mark yet discolour my cheek?
But when the heart suffers a blow,
Will the pain pass so soon, do you know?'"
* * * * *
De Lorge, indeed, had braved "death for her sake"; but he had then been
capable of the public insult. The pain of _that_, had she loved him,
must quite have broken her heart. And not only had he been capable of
this, but he had not understood her, he too had thought it "mere
vanity." Love then was nowhere--neither in his heart nor in hers. . . .
Ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a
youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would
pass. He was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as
that of the brilliant De Lorge (thus Ronsard ironically remarks); but
there was no doubt what _he_ would have done, "had our brute been
Nemean." He would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought it
right that he should earn what he so ardently desired.
"And when, shortly after, she carried
Her shame from the Court, and they married,
To that marriage some happiness, maugre
The voice of the Court, I dared augur."
De Lorge led for some time the most brilliant of envied careers, and
finally married a beauty who had been the King's mistress for a week.
Thenceforth he fetched her gloves very diligently, at the hours when the
King desired her presence and his absence--and never did he set off on
that errand (looking daggers at her) but Francis took occasion to tell
the Court the story of the other glove. And she would smile and say that
he brought _hers_ with no murmur.
+ + + + +
Was the first lady right or wrong? She was right to hesitate in
accepting De Lorge's "devotion"--not because De Lorge was worthless, but
because she did not love him. The King spoke truly when he said that not
love set that task to humanity. Neither did mere vanity set it, as we
now perceive; but _only_ love could excuse the test which love could
never have imposed. De Lorge was worthless--no matter; the lady held no
right over him, whatever he was, for she did not love him. And not alone
her "test" was the proof of this: her hesitation had already proved it.
But, it may be said, the age was different: women still believed that
love could come to them through "wooing." Nowadays, to be sure, so
subtle a woman as this would know that her own heart lay passive, and
that women's hearts do not lie passive when they love. . . . But I think
there were few things about love that women did not know in the days of
King Francis! We have only to read the discourses of Marguerite de
Valois, sister of the King--we have only to consider the story of Diane
de Poitiers, seventeen years older than her Dauphin, to realise _that_
most fully. Women's hearts were the same; and a woman's heart, when it
loves truly, will make no test for very pride-in-love's dear sake. It
scorns tests--too much scorns them, it may be, and yet I know not. Again
it is the Meredithian axiom which arrests me: "He learnt how much we
gain who make no claims." Our lovers then may be, should be, prepared to
plunge among the lions for our gloves--but we should not be able to send
them! And if so, a De Lorge here and there should win a "hand" he merits
not, we may reflect that the new, no more than the old, De Lorge will
have won the _heart_ which doubts--and, doubting, flings (or keeps) the
glove.
"Utter the true word--out and away
Escapes her soul." . . .
Gloves flung to lions are not the answer which that enfranchised soul
will give! And so the Lady thought right and did wrong: 'twas _not_ love
set that task to humanity. Even Browning cannot win her our full
pardon; we devote not many kerchiefs to drying this "tear."
II.--DÎS ALITER VISUM; OR, LE BYRON DE NOS JOURS
"The gods saw it otherwise." Thus we may translate the first clause of
the title; the second, the reference to Byron, I have never understood,
and I think shall never understand. Of all the accusations which stand
against him, that of letting opportunity in this sort slip by is
assuredly not one. Such "poor pretty thoughtful things" as the lady of
this poem played their parts most notably in Byron's life--to their own
disaster, it is true, but never because he weighed their worth in the
spirit of this French poet, so bitterly at last accused, who meets
again, ten years after the day of his cogitations, the subject of them
in a Paris drawing-room--married, and as dissatisfied as he, who still
is free. Reading the poem, indeed, with Byron in mind, the fancy comes
to me that if it had been by any other man but Browning, it might almost
be regarded as a sidelong vindication of the Frenchman for having
rejected the "poor pretty thoughtful thing." For Byron married
her[224:1]--and in what did it result? . . . But that Browning should in
any fashion, however sidelong, acknowledge Byron as anything but the
most despicable of mortals, cannot for a moment be imagined; he who
understood so many complex beings failed entirely here. Thus, ever in
perplexity, I must abjure the theory of Byronic merit. There lurks in
this poem no hidden plea for abstention, for the "man who
doesn't"--hinted at through compassionate use of his name who made one
of the great disastrous marriages of the world.
+ + + + +
Ten years before this meeting in Paris, the two of the poem had known
one another, though not with any high degree of intimacy, for only twice
had they "walked and talked" together. He was even then "bent, wigged,
and lamed":
"Famous, however, for verse and worse,
Sure of the Fortieth spare Arm-chair"
--that is, the next vacancy at the French Academy, for so illustrious
was he that his secondary reputation would not injure him.
She who now accuses him was then a "young beauty, round and sound as a
mountain-apple," ingenuous, ardent, wealthy--the typical "poor pretty
thoughtful thing" with aspirations, for she tried to sing and draw, read
verse and thought she understood--at any rate, loved the Great, the
Good, and the Beautiful. But to him her "culture" seemed pitifully
amateurish--him who took the arts in his stride, as it were, who could
float wide and free over the whole province of them, as the sea-gull
floats over the waters. Nevertheless he had walked and talked with her
"twice" at the little remote, unspoilt seaside resort where they had
chanced to meet. It was strange that more people had not discovered it,
so fine were the air and scenery--but it remained unvisited, and thus
the two were thrown together. One scorching noon they met; he invited
her to a stroll on the cliff-road. She took his arm, and (looking back
upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and
made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt
that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . Now, recalling the
episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she
asks him what effect his divination of her trembling heart had had on
him that day.
"Did you determine, as we stepped
O'er the lone stone fence, 'Let me get
Her for myself, and what's the earth
With all its art, verse, music, worth--
Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?'"
For she knows, and she knew that _he_ knew, the prompt reply which would
come if he "blurted out" a certain question--come in her instant
silence, her downward look, the rush of colour to her cheek and brow.
They would have returned from that walk as plighted lovers--he, old,
famous, weary; she with her youth and beauty, her ardour and her
wealth, all rapturously given, and with the happy prospect added to all
other joys of being certain of applause for the distinction shown in her
choice! . . . A perfect hour for both--while it lasted.
But (so she now reads his gone-by cogitations for him) it would not
last. The daily life would reclaim them; Paris would follow, with full
time for both to reason and reflect. . . . And thus (still interpreting
to him the imagined outcome of his musings) she would regret that choice
which had seemed to show her of the elect--for after all a poet _need_
not be fifty! Young men can be poets too, and though they blunder, there
is something endearing in their blunders; moreover, one day they will be
as "firm, quiet, and gay" as he, as expert in deceiving the world, which
is all, in the last analysis, that such a man does.
For, if he _had_ spoken to her that day, what would he have said? (She
is still expounding to him the situation of this potential married pair,
as she has divined in her long musings that he then foresaw it.) He
would not have said, like a boy, "Love me or I die." But neither would
he have said the truth, which was simply that he wished to use her young
ardour and vitality to help his age. Such was the demand which she (as,
according to her, he then reasoned it out) would in time have accused
him, tacitly or not, of having made upon her. . . . And what would his
own reflections have been? She is ready to use her disconcerting
clairvoyance for these also; nay, she can do more, she can tell him the
very moment at which he acted upon them in advance! For as they
foreshadowed themselves, he had ceased to press gently her arm to his
side--she remembers well the stopping of that tender pressure, and now
can connect the action with its mental source. _His_ reflection, then,
would have been simply that he had thrown himself away, had bartered all
he was and had been and might be--all his culture, knowledge of the
world, guerdons of gold and great renown--for what? For "two cheeks
freshened by youth and sea": a mere nosegay. _Him_, in exchange for a
nosegay!
"That ended me." . . .
They duly admired the "grey sad church," on the cliff-top, with its
scattered graveyard crosses, its garlands where the swallows perched;
they "took their look" at the sea and sky, wondering afresh at the
general ignorance of so attractive a little hole; then, finding the sun
really too scorching, they descended, got back to the baths, to such
civilisation as there was:
"And then, good-bye! Ten years since then:
Ten years! We meet: you tell me, now,
By a window-seat for that cliff-brow,
On carpet-stripes for those sand-paths."
Ten years. He has a notorious liaison with a dancer at the Opera; she
has married lovelessly. They have met again, and, in sentimental mood,
he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love
to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually
interesting, for the whole monologue proves that she can no longer be
patronisingly summed up in "poor pretty thoughtful thing." And she has
cried, in the words which open the poem:
"Stop, let me have the truth of that!
Is that all true?"
--and at first, between jest and bitterness, has given him the sum of
her musings on that moment when he decided to drop the nosegay.
For ten years he has had, tacitly, the last word: his decision has stood
unchallenged. Nor shall it now be altered--he has begun to "tell" her,
to meander sentimentally around that episode, but she will have nothing
less than the truth; they will talk of it, yes, since he has so pleased,
but they will talk of it in _her_ way. So she cuts him short, and draws
this acid, witty little sketch for him. . . . Has she not matured? might
it not have "done," after all? The nosegay was not so insipid! . . . But
suddenly, while she mocks, the deeper "truth of that" invades her soul,
and she must cease from cynic gibes, and yield the word to something
greater in herself.
"Now I may speak: you fool, for all
Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?
What was the sea for? What, the grey
Sad church, that solitary day,
Crosses and graves and swallows' call?
Was there nought better than to enjoy?
No feat which, done, would make time break,
And let us pent-up creatures through
Into eternity, our due?
No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?
No grasping at love, gaining a share
O' the sole spark from God's life at strife
With death . . . ?"
He calls his decision wisdom? It is one kind of wisdom only, and that
the least--"worldly" wisdom. He was old, and she was raw and
sentimental--true; each might have missed something in the other; but
completeness is not for our existence here, we await heaven for that.
Only earthbound creatures--like the star-fish, for instance--become all
they _can_ become in this sphere; man's soul must evolve. Have their
souls evolved? And she cries that they have not:
"The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!"
Of course he "did not know" (as he now seems feebly to interpolate); she
can well believe that, for if he had known, he would have saved two
souls--nay, four. What of his Stephanie, who danced vilely last night,
they say--will he not soon, like the public, abandon her now that "her
vogue has had its day"? . . . And what of the speaker herself? It takes
but half a dozen words to indicate _her_ lot:
"Here comes my husband from his whist."
What is "the truth of that"?
Again, I think, something of what I said in writing of _Youth and Art_:
again not quite what Browning seems to wish us to accept. Love is the
fulfilling of the law--with all my heart; but was love here? Does love
weigh worth, as the poet did? does love marry the next comer, as the
lady did? Mrs. Orr, devouter votary than I, explains that Browning meant
"that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a
vital impulse to the soul." Did one wish merely to be humorous, one
might say that this was the most optimistic view of unsuccessful
marriage which has yet found expression! But merely to be humorous is
not what I wish: we must consider this belief, which Mrs. Orr further
declares to be the expression of Browning's "poetic self." Assuredly it
is true that stereotyped monotony, even if happy, does leave the soul
unstirred to deepest depth. We may hesitate, nevertheless, to embrace
the view that "only our mistakes are our experience"; and this is the
view which seems to prevail in Mrs. Orr's interpretation of _Dîs Aliter
Visum_. Mr. Symons says that the woman points out to the man "his fatal
mistake." . . . But was it really a mistake at all? I do not, in urging
that question, commit myself to the crass commonplace of Berdoe, who
argues that "a more unreasonable match could hardly be imagined than
this one would have been"! The "match" standpoint is not here our
standpoint. _That_ is, simply, that love is the fulfilling of the law,
and that these two people did not love. They were in the sentimental
state which frequently results from pleasant chance encounters--and the
experienced, subtle man of the world was able to perceive that, and to
act upon it. That he has pursued his wonted way of life, and that she
has married lovelessly (for a husband who plays whist is, by the
unwritten law of romance, a husband who can by no possibility be
loved!), proves merely that each has fallen away in the pursuit of any
ideal which may then have urged itself--not that both would certainly
have "saved their souls" if they had married one another. Speaking
elsewhere in this book of Browning's theory of love, I said: "Love can
do all, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something
too"--but even love can do nothing if it is not there! Ideals need not
be abandoned because they are not full-realised; and, were we in stern
mood, it would be possible to declare that this lady had abandoned them
more definitely than her poet had, since he at all times was frankly a
worldling. Witty as she has become, there still remain in her, I fear,
some traces of the poor pretty thoughtful thing. . . . To sum up, for
this "tear" also we have but semi-sympathy; and Browning is again not at
his best when he makes the Victim speak for herself.
III.--THE LABORATORY
Now let us see how he can make a woman speak when she suffers, but is
not, and will not be, a victim.
At once she is a completely realised human creature, uttering herself in
such abandonment of all pretence as never fails to compass majesty. Into
the soul of this woman in _The Laboratory_, Browning has penetrated till
he seems to breathe with her breath. I question if there is another
fictive utterance to surpass this one in authenticity. It bears the
Great Seal. Not Shakespeare has outdone it in power and concentration.
Every word counts, almost every comma--for, like Browning, we too seem
to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the
very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech
is _our_ pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression
of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant
and civilised consciousness, is at any rate effectively inhibited.
+ + + + +
She is a Court lady of the _ancien régime_, in the great Brinvilliers
poisoning-period, and she is buying from an old alchemist in his
laboratory the draught which is to kill her triumphant rival. Small,
gorgeous, and intense, she sits in the strange den and watches the old
wizard set about his work. She is due to dance at the King's, but there
is no hurry: he may take as long as he chooses. . . . Now she must put
on a glass mask like his, the old man tells her, for these "faint smokes
that curl whitely" are themselves poisonous--and she submits, and with
all her intensity at work, ties it on "tightly"; then sits again, to
peer through the fumes of the devil's-smithy. But she cannot be silent;
even to him--and after all, is such an one as he quite truly a man!--she
must pour forth the anguish of her soul. Questions relieve her now and
then:
"Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?"
--but not long can she be merely curious; every minute there breaks out
a cry:
"He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do . . ."
--the pitiful self-consciousness of such torment, unable to believe in
the oblivion (familiar as it has been in past good hours) which sweeps
through lovers in their bliss. They could not forget _me_, she thinks,
as all her sister-sufferers think. . . . Yet even in this hell, there is
some solace. They must be remembering her, and
". . . they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."
Yes, here--where the old man works for her: grinding, moistening, and
mashing his paste, pounding at his powder. It is better to sit here and
watch him than go dance at the King's; and she looks round in her
restless, nervous anguish--the dagger in her heart, but this way, _this_
way, to stanch the wound it makes!
"That in the mortar--you call it a gum?
Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come!
And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,
Sure to taste sweetly--is that poison too?"
But, maddened by the deadlier drug of wretchedness, she loses for a
moment the single vision of her rival: it were good to have _all_ the
old man's treasures, for the joy of dealing death around her at that
hateful Court where each knows of her misery.
"To carry pure death in an earring, a casket,
A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!"
She need but give a lozenge "at the King's," and Pauline should die in
half an hour; or light a pastille, and Elise, "with her head and her
breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead." . . . But he is
taking too long.
"Quick--is it finished? The colour's too grim!
Why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim?"
For if it were, she could watch that other stir it into her drink, and
dally with "the exquisite blue," and then, great glowing creature, lift
the goblet to her lips, and taste. . . . But one must be content: the
old man knows--this grim drug is the deadly drug; only, as she bends to
the vessel again, a new doubt assails her.
"What a drop! She's not little, no minion like me--
That's why she ensnared him: this never will free
The soul from those masculine eyes--say, 'No!'
To that pulse's magnificent come-and-go.
For only last night, as they whispered, I brought
My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought
Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall,
Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all!"
* * * * *
But it is not painless in its working? She does not desire that: she
wants the other to _feel_ death; more--she wants the proof of death to
remain,
"Brand, burn up, bite into its grace[236:1]--
He is sure to remember her dying face!"
Is it done? Then he must take off her mask; he must--nay, he need not
look morose about it:
"It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close."
She is not afraid to dispense with the protecting vizor:
"_If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?_"
There it lies--there. . . .
"Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill,
You may kiss me, old man, on the mouth if you will!"
--and, looking her last look round the den, she prepares to go; but what
is that mark on her gorgeous gown? Brush it off! Brush off that dust! It
might bring horror down on her in an instant, before she knows or
thinks, and she is going straight from here to dance at the
King's. . . . She is gone, with her jealousy and her anguish and her
passion, and, clutched to her heart, the phial that shall end but one of
those torments.
+ + + + +
She is gone, and she remains for ever. Her age is past, but not the
hearts that ached in it. We curb those hearts to-day; we do not poison
now; but have we forgotten the mood for poisoning?
"If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?"
Such fiercenesses are silenced now; but, silent, they have still their
utterance, and it is here.
IV.--IN A YEAR
Nay--here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the
"dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can
even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of _The
Laboratory_ may have known, like the girl here, only dim, aching wonder
at her lover's mutability.
"Was it something said,
Something done,
Vexed him? was it touch of hand,
Turn of head?
Strange! that very way
Love begun:
I as little understand
Love's decay."[238:1]
Here, again, is full authenticity. Girl-like, she sits and broods upon
it all--not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is
abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. So
greatly that still, still, she can dream:
"Would he loved me yet,
On and on,
While I found some way undreamed
--Paid my debt!
Gave more life and more,
Till, all gone,
He should smile, 'She never seemed
Mine before.'"
But this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over"
too, though not yet ended. How will it end for her?
"Well, this cold clay clod
Was man's heart:
Crumble it, and what comes next?
Is it God ?" . . .
The dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child!
"'Dying for my sake--
White and pink!
Can't we touch these bubbles then
But they break?'"
That is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he
hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done
since the world began, and will do till it ends.[239:1]
Then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has
been between them, clearly he has not known that yet. . . . Again, the
supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly _all_ the love,
can never turn away from it. Most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams--yet
after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who
loves truly?
Yet indeed (she now muses) _has_ she enough loved him?
"I had wealth and ease,
Beauty, youth:
Since my lover gave me love,
I gave these.
That was all I meant
--To be just,
And the passion I had raised
To content.
Since he chose to change
Gold for dust,
If I gave him what he praised,
Was it strange?"
And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of
herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that
"way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . .
I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted
above:
"_And the passion I had raised
To content._"
From Browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl
cries:
"I, too, at love's brim
Touched the sweet:
I would die if death bequeathed
Sweet to him."
This is more than to "content" the "passion she had raised." Let us
regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not
express either the girl or her poet.
The rest comes right and true--and more than all, perhaps, the second
verse, where the mystery of passion in its coming no less than in its
going is so subtly indicated.
"Strange! that very way
Love begun:
I _as little understand_
Love's decay."
We hear to-day of love that aims at reason. Love forbid that I should
say love knows not reason--but love and God forbid that it should _aim_
at reason! Leave us that unwisdom at least: we are so wise to-day.
+ + + + +
This ardent, gentle girl must suffer, and will suffer long--but will not
die. She will live and she will grow. Shall she then look back with
scorn upon that earlier self? . . . We talk much now of
"re-incarnation," and always by our talk we seem to mean the coming-back
to earth of a spirit which at some time has left it. But are there not
re-incarnations of the still embodied spirit--is not re-incarnation,
like eternity, with us here and now, as we "in this body" live and
suffer and despair, and lift our hearts again to hope and faith? How
many of us--grown, not changed--can pityingly look back at ourselves in
some such dying moment as this poem shows us; for death it is to that
"ourself." Hearts do not break, but hearts do die--_that_ heart, _that_
self: we pass into a Hades.
"Well, this cold clay clod
Was man's heart:
Crumble it, and what comes next?
Is it God?"
Or is it new heart, new self, new life? We come forth enfranchised from
our Hades. The evil days, the cruel days--we call them back (a little,
it may be, ashamed of our escape!) and still the blest remoteness will
endure: it was wonderful how it could suffer, the poor heart. . . .
Surely this is re-incarnation; surely no returning spirit witnesses more
clearly to a transition-state? We _have been_ dead; but this "us" who
comes back to the world we knew is still the same--the heart will answer
as it once could answer, the spirit thrill as once it thrilled.
Only--this is the proof--both heart and spirit are _further on_; both
have, as it were, gone past the earlier summons and the earlier sense of
love; and so, evoking such an hour as this, when we could dream of
"dying for his sake, white and pink," we smile in tender, not in
scornful, pity--knowing now that "way undreamed" of our girl's dream,
and knowing that that way is not to die, but live and grow, since love
that changes "in a year" is not the love to die, or live, for.
FOOTNOTES:
[224:1] The descriptive phrase above might really, at a pinch, be
applied to Annabella Milbanke.
[236:1] Note the fierceness achieved by the shortening and the
alliteration in this line.
[238:1] Mark how the deferred rhymes paint the groping thoughts. Only
after much questioning can the answer come, as it were, in the "chime of
the rhyme."
[239:1] And men also, I hasten to add, that there may be no pluming of
male feathers--if indeed this be an occasion for pluming on either side.