[Illustration: THE WIFE]
I
A WOMAN'S LAST WORD
They are married, and they have come to a spiritual crisis. She does
not, cannot, think as _he_ thinks. But does thinking signify? She
loves--is not that enough? Can she not have done with thinking, or at
all events with talking about thinking? Perhaps, with every striving,
she shall achieve no more than that: to _say_ nothing, to use no
influence, to yield the sanctioned woman's trophy of the "last
word." . . . Shall she, then, be yielding aught of value, if she
contends no more?
"What so wild as words are?"
--and that _they_ should strive and argue! Why, it is as when birds
debate about some tiny marvel of those marvellous tiny lives, while the
hawk spies from a bough above.
"See the creature stalking
While we speak!
Hush and hide the talking,
Cheek on cheek!"
For that hawk is ever watching life: it stands for the mysterious
effluence which falls on joy and kills it; and that may just as well be
"talking" as aught else! He shall have his own way--or no: that is a
paltry yielding. There shall _be_ no way but his.
"What so false as truth is,
False to thee?"
She abandons then the cold abstraction; she does not even wish to
"know":
"Where the apple reddens
Never pry--
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I.
Be a god and hold me
With a charm!
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm!
Teach me, only teach, Love!
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought--
Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands."
* * * * *
But even as she measures and exults in the abjection of herself, a voice
whispers in her soul that this is not the way. Something is wrong. She
hears, but cannot heed. It must be so, since he desires it--since he can
desire it. Since he _can_ . . .
"That shall be to-morrow,
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight:
--Must a little weep, Love,
(Foolish me!)
And so fall asleep, Love,
Loved by thee."
He does not wish to know the real Herself. Then the real herself shall
"sleep"; all shall be as before.
+ + + + +
Will this endure? All depends upon the woman: upon how strong _she_ is.
For is not this the sheer denial of her husband's moral force? By her
silence, her abjection, her suppression, he shall prevail: not
otherwise. And so, _if_ this endure, what shall the issue prove? Not the
highest good of married life for either, and still less for the man than
for the woman.
By implication, Browning shows us that in _By the Fireside_, one of his
three great songs of wedded love:
"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!"
Once more we can trace there his development from _Pauline_. She,
looking up "as I might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the
lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as
the wife in the _Last Word_ resolves to do. . . . As the poet grew, so
grew the man in Browning: we reach _By the Fireside_ from these. For the
woman in the _Last Word_, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his
thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring _that_ husband
to the place where stands the man in _By the Fireside_, when the "long
dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads
back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which
they found each other once for all.
"My perfect wife, my Leonor,
Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path grey heads abhor?
* * * * *
My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?"
And now read again:
"Meet, _if thou require it_,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands."
A lower note there, is it not? And shall he so require, and she so
yield, that backward-treading path is not for them--never shall _they_
say to one another:
"Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again,
Let us now forget and now recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
And gather what we let fall!"
Too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary--the wife who had begun
so soon to know that Edens shall be lost by thinking Eves!
But let me not enforce a moral. The mood is one that women know, and
often wisely use. "Talking" _is_ to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from
the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is
not the sum of individuality's expression. She can teach him--learning
from him all the while--_not_ to "require it": she, this same sweet,
strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her
sure indenture of freedom.
"That shall be to-morrow,
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight."
The "sorrow" is for him, not for herself: he has fallen below his
highest in the tyranny of to-night. Then be sure that she, so loving and
so seeing, shall lift him up to-morrow! _This_ tear shall be dried.
II
JAMES LEE'S WIFE
In this song-cycle of nine poems we are shown the death of a woman's
heart. James Lee's wife sums up in herself, as it were, all those
"troubles of love" which we have considered in the earlier monologues.
The man has failed her--as De Lorge failed his lady, as the poet the
"poor, pretty thoughtful thing"; love has left her--as it left the woman
of _The Laboratory_ and the girl of _In a Year_; she and her husband are
at variance in the great things of life--like the couple, in _A Woman's
last Word_. But even the complete surrender of individuality resolved
upon by the wife in that poem would not now avail, if indeed it ever
would have availed, the wife of James Lee. All is over, and, as she
gradually realises, over with such finality that there is only one thing
she can do, and that is to leave him--"set him free."
We learn the mournful story from the wife's lips only; the husband never
speaks, and is but once present. All we actually see are the moods of
nine separate days--spread over what precise period of time we are not
clearly shown, but it was certainly a year. These nine revealings show
us every stage from the first faint pang of apprehension to the accepted
woe; then the battle with _that_--the hope that love may yet prevail;
the clutch at some high stoicism drawn from the laws of nature, or from
"old earth's" genial wisdom; next, the less exalted plan to be "of use,"
since there is nothing else for her to be--and finally the flight, the
whole renunciation. Echoes hover from all sad women's stories elsewhere
studied: the Tear reigns supreme, the Victim is _in excelsis_--for
hardly did Pompilia suffer such excess of misery, since she at least
could die, remembering Caponsacchi. James Lee's wife will live,
remembering James Lee.
Into the chosen commonplace of the man's name[251:1] we may read a
symbolism. "This is every-day's news," the poet seems to say; "you may
watch the drama for yourselves whenever you so please." And only indeed
in the depth of the woman's passion is there aught unusual. _That_, as
uttered in the final poem, seems more than normal--since she knows her
husband for (as she so strangely says of him) "mere ignoble earth"; yet
still can claim that he "set down to her"
"Love that was life, life that was love,
A tenure of breath at your lips' decree,
A passion to stand as your thoughts approve,
A rapture to fall where your foot might be."
More--or less--than dog-like is such love, for dogs are unaware of
"mere ignoble earth," dogs do not judge and analyse and patronise, and
resolve to "make the low nature better for their throes." Never has the
mistaken idea, the inept conduct, of passion been so subtly shown us,
with so much at once of pity and of irony.
James Lee's wife is a plain woman.
"Why, fade you might to a thing like me,
And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair,
Your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree" . . .
So she cries in the painful concluding poem. Faded, coarse-haired,
coarse-skinned . . . is all said? But he had married her. In what, do we
find the word of that enigma? In the beauties of her heart and mind--the
passionate, devoted heart, the subtle, brooding mind. These had done the
first work; and alas! they have done the second also. The heart was
passionate and devoted, but it analysed too closely, and then clung too
closely; the mind was subtle and intense, but it could not rest, it
could not "take for granted"--male synonym for married bliss! And of
course we shall not dare deny James Lee his trustiest, sturdiest weapon:
_she had no sense of humour!_ . . . If he was incomplete, so too was
she; and her incompleteness was of the kind that, in this relation,
never fails to fail--his, of the kind that more often than not succeeds.
Thus she sums him:
"With much in you waste, with many a weed,
And plenty of passions run to seed,
But a little good grain too."
This man, who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding
type in woman may, needs--not tyrannically, because unconsciously--a
mate who far excels him in all that makes nobility; and, nine times out
of ten, obtains her. "Mrs. James Lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to
realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might
almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. Perhaps she _has_
none. Perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must
alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the _Last
Word_--who was not of it! For here is the very heart of the problem: can
or cannot character be altered? James Lee's wife is of the morbid, the
unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn
the lore of self-suppression. Not for them exactingness, caprice, the
gay or grave analysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in
lovely women, and even in _them_ bring risks along. The Mrs. Lees must
curb them wholly. As the whims of unwedded love, they may perchance
amuse or interest; marriage, for such, comports them not at all.
Let us trace, compassionately if ironically, the mistakes of this sad
woman.
I.--SHE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW
He is coming back to their seaside home at Sainte-Marie, near
Pornic--the Breton "wild little place" which Browning knew and loved so
well. "Close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly
lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.
I feel out of the earth sometimes as I sit here at the window."[254:1]
And at the window _she_ sits, watching for James Lee's return. Yesterday
it was summer, but the strange sudden "stop" has come, eerily, as it
always seems to come.
"Ah, Love, but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun's away,
And the bird estranged;
The wind has dropped,
And the sky's deranged:
Summer has stopped."
We can picture him as he arrives and listens to her: is there already a
faint annoyance? Need she so drearily depict the passing of summer? It
is bad enough that it _should_ pass--we need not talk about it! Such
annoyance we all have felt with the relentless chroniclers of change.
Enough, enough; since summer is gone and we cannot bring it back, let us
think of something else. . . . But she goes on, and now we shall not\
doubt that he is enervated, for this is what she says:
"Look in my eyes!
Wilt thou change too?
Should I fear surprise?
Shall I find aught new
In the old and dear,
In the good and true,
With the changing year?"
The questions have come to her--come on what cold blast from heaven, or
him? But in pity for herself, let her not ask them! We seem to see the
man turn from her, not "looking in her eyes," and seem to catch the
thought, so puerile yet so instinctive, that flashes through his mind.
"I never meant to 'change'; why does she put it into my head." . . . And
then, doomed blunderer, she goes on:
"Thou art a man,
But I am thy love.
For the lake, its swan;
For the dell, its dove;
And for thee (oh, haste!)
Me, to bend above,
Me, to hold embraced."
She does not _say_, "oh, haste!"--that is the silent comment (we must
think) on her not instantly answered plea for his embrace. . . . And
when the embrace does come--the claimed embrace--we can figure to
ourselves the all it lacks.
II.--BY THE FIRESIDE
Summer now indeed is gone; they are sitting by their fire of wood. The
blue and purple flames leap up and die and leap again, and she sits
watching them. The wood that makes those coloured flames is shipwreck
wood. . . .
"Oh, for the ills half-understood,
The dim dead woe
Long ago
Befallen this bitter coast of France!"
And then, ever the morbid analogy, the fixed idea:
"Well, poor sailors took their chance;
I take mine."
Out there on the sea even now, some of those "poor sailors" may be
eyeing the ruddy casement and gnashing their teeth for envy and hate,
"O' the warm safe house and happy freight
--Thee and me."
The irony of it seizes her. Those sailors need not curse them! Ships
safe in port have their own perils of rot and rust and worms in the wood
that gnaw the heart to dust. . . . "That is worse."
And how long the house has stood here, to anger the drenched, stark men
on the sea! Who lived here before this couple came? Did another woman
before herself watch the man "with whom began love's voyage full-sail"
. . . watch him and see the planks of love's ship start, and hell open
beneath?
_This_ mood she speaks not, only sits and broods upon. And he? Men too
can watch, and struggle with themselves, and feel that little help is
given them. Some sailors come safe home, and these would have been
lighted by the ruddy casement. But she thinks only of the sailors
drowning, and gnashing their teeth for hate of the "warm safe house."
That melancholy brooding--and if she but looked lovely while she
broods. . . .
III.--IN THE DOORWAY
She stands alone in the doorway, and looks out upon the dreary autumn
landscape.[257:1] It is a grey October day; the sea is in "stripes like
a snake"--olive-pale near the land, black and "spotted white with the
wind" in the distance. How ominous it shows: good fortune is surely on
the wing.
"Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!"
As she gazes, her heart dies within her. Their fig-tree has lost all the
golden glint of summer; the vines "writhe in rows, each impaled on its
stake"--and like the leaves of the tree, and like the vines, her heart
"shrivels up and her spirit shrinks curled."
But courage, courage! Winter comes to all--not to them alone. And have
they not love, and a house big enough to hold them, with its four rooms,
and the field there, red and rough, not yielding now, but again to
yield? Rabbits and magpies, though now they find no food there (the
magpies already have well-nigh deserted it; when one _does_ alight, it
seems an event), yet will again find food. But November--the chill month
with its "rebuff"--will see both rabbits and magpies quite
departed. . . . No! This shall not be her mood. Winter comes indeed to
mere material nature; God means precisely that the spirit shall inherit
His power to put life into the darkness and the cold. The spirit defies
external change:
"Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange!"
And she turns to go in, for the hour at rest and solaced. They have the
house, and the field . . . and love.
IV.--ALONG THE BEACH
Rest and solace have departed: winter is come--to all. She walks alone
on the beach; one may do that, "on the edge of the low rocks by the sea,
for miles";[258:1] and broods once more. She figures him beside her;
they are speaking frankly of her pain. She "will be quiet." . . .
Piteous phrase of all unquiet women! She will be quiet; she will "reason
why he is wrong." Well for her that the talk is but a fancied one; she
would not win far with such a preamble, were it real! It is thus that in
almost every word we can trace the destined failure of this loving
woman. . . . She begins her "reasoning."
"You wanted my love--is that much true?
And so I did love, so I do:
What has come of it all along?
I took you--how could I otherwise?
For a world to me, and more;
For all, love greatens and glorifies
Till God's aglow, to the loving eyes,
In what was mere earth before.
Yes, earth--yes, mere ignoble earth!
Now do I mis-state, mistake?
Do I wrong your weakness and call it worth?
Expect all harvest, dread no dearth,
Seal my sense up for your sake?
Oh, Love, Love, no, Love! Not so, indeed!
You were just weak earth, I knew":
--and then, pursuing, she sums him up as we saw at the beginning of our
study.
Well for her, I say again, that this is but a fancied talk! And since it
is, we can accord her a measure of wisdom. For she _has_ been wise in
one thing: she has not "wronged his weakness and called it worth"--that
memorable phrase, so Browningesque!
She has "seen through" him, yet she loves him. Thus far, then, kind and
wise in her great passion. . . . But she should _forget_ that she has
seen through him--she should keep that vision in the background, not
hold it ever in her sight. And now herself begins to see that this is
where she has not been wise. She took him for hers, just as he was--and
did not he, thus accepted, find her his? Has she not watched all that
was as yet developed in him, and waited patiently, wonderingly, for the
more to come?
"Well, and if none of these good things came,
What did the failure prove?
The man was my whole world, all the same."
_That_ is the fault in her:
"That I do love, watch too long,
And wait too well, and weary and wear;
And 'tis all an old story, and my despair
Fit subject for some new song."
She has shown him too much love and indulgence and hope implied in the
indulgence: this was the wrong way. The "bond" has been felt--and such
"light, light love" as his has wings to fly at the mere suspicion of a
bond. He has grown weary of her "wisdom"; pleasure is his aim in life,
and _that_ is always ready to "turn up next in a laughing eye." . . . So
the songs have said and will say for all time--the new songs for the old
despair.
But though she knows all this (we seem to see), she will not be able to
act upon it. Always she will watch too long, and wait too well. Hers is
a nature as simple as it is intense. No sort of subterfuge is within her
means--neither the gay deception nor the grave. What she knows that he
resents, she still must do immutably--bound upon the wheel of her true
self. For only one "self" she has, and that the wrong one.
She turns back, she walks homeward along the beach--"on the edge of the
low rocks by the sea, for miles."
V.--ON THE CLIFF
But still love is a power! Love can move mountains, for is not love the
same as faith? And not a mountain is here, but a mere man's
heart--already "moved," for he _has_ loved her.
It is summer again. She sits on the cliff, leaning back on the short dry
grass--if one still can call it grass, so "deep was done the work of the
summer sun." And there near by is the rock, baked dry as the grass, and
flat as an anvil's face. "No iron like that!" Not a weed nor a shell:
"death's altar by the lone shore." The drear analogies succeed one
another; she sees them everywhere, in everything. The dead grass, the
dead rock. . . . But now, what is this on the turf? A gay blue cricket!
A cricket--only that? Nay, a war-horse, a magic little steed, a "real
fairy, with wings all right." And there too on the rock, like a drop of
fire, that gorgeous-coloured butterfly.
"No turf, no rock: in their ugly stead,
See, wonderful blue and red!"
Shall there not then be other analogies? May not the minds of men,
though burnt and bare as the turf and the rock, be changed like them,
transfigured like them:
"With such a blue-and-red grace, not theirs--
Love settling unawares!"
It was almost a miracle, was it not? the way they changed. Such miracles
happen every day.
VI.--READING A BOOK, UNDER THE CLIFF
These clever young men! She is reading a poem of the wind.[262:1] The
singer asks what the wind wants of him--so instant does it seem in its
appeal.
"'Art thou a dumb wronged thing that would be righted,
Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!
No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith requited
With falsehood--love, at last aware
Of scorn--hopes, early blighted--
'We have them; but I know not any tone
So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow;
Dost think men would go mad without a moan,
If they knew any way to borrow
A pathos like thine own?'"
The splendid lines assail her.[263:1] In her anguish of response she
turns from them at last--they are too much. This power of perception is
almost a baseness! And bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can
thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, _at last aware_
of scorn," she flings the volume from her--rejecting him, detesting him,
and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who
has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. He is
wrong: the wind does _not_ mean what he fancies by its moaning. He thus
interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the
suffering of others--failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment--is but
the example for his use, the help to his path untried! Such agonies as
her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a
phrase--like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to
woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. How
dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words,
how dare he know--and now her irony turns cruel:
"Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest!
Himself the undefeated that shall be:
Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test--
His triumph in eternity
Too plainly manifest!"
Of course he does not know! The wind means something else. And as the
pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. How _could_ "the
happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? Only
"the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the
mind. This young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day--on a
midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign
country," at its height of gloom and gloss. At its height--next minute
must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the
earliest sign? That very wind beginning among the vines:
"So low, so low, what shall it say but this?
'Here is the change beginning, here the lines
Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
The limit time assigns.'" . . .
Change is the law of life: _that_ is what the wind says.
"Nothing can be as it has been before;
Better, so call it, only not the same.
To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,
And keep it changeless! Such our claim;
So answered: Never more!
Simple? Why, this is the old woe of the world;
Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.
Rise with it then! Rejoice that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His soul's wings never furled!"
* * * * *
Her rejection of the "young man's pride" has raised her for an instant
above her own suffering. Flinging back his interpretation in his
face--that interpretation which had pierced her to the quick with its
intensity of vision--she has found a better one; and for a while she
rests in this. "The laws of nature": shall not that be the formula to
still her pain? . . . Not yet, not yet; the heart was numbed but for a
moment. Stung to such fresh life as it has been but now, it cries
imperiously again. The laws of nature?
"That's a new question; still replies the fact,
Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;
We moan in acquiescence."
Only to acquiescence can we attain.
"God knows: endure his act!"
But the human loss, the human anguish. . . . Formulas touch not these,
nor does acquiescence mitigate. Tell ourselves as wisely as we may that
mutability must be--we yet discern where the woe lies. We cannot fix the
"one fair good wise thing" just as we grasped it--cannot engrave it, as
it were, on our souls. And then we die--and it is gone for ever, and we
would have sunk beneath death's wave, as we sink now, to save it--but
time washed over it ere death mercifully came. It was abolished even
while we lived: the wind had begun "so low, so low" . . . and carried
it away on its moaning voice. Change is the very essence of life; and
life may be probation for a better life--who knows? But if she could
have engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband
loved her. . . .
VII.--AMONG THE ROCKS
Such anguish must, at least, "change" with the rest! And now that autumn
is fully come, the loss of summer is more bearable. It is while we hope
that summer still may stay that we are tortured.
"Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,
This autumn morning!"
She will forget the "laws of nature": she will unreflectingly watch
earth. That is best.
". . . How he sets his bones
To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet."
The geniality of earth! She will sink her troubled soul into the vast
tranquillity. No science, no "cosmic whole"--just this: the brown old
earth.
But soon the analogy-hunting begins: that soul of hers can never rest.
What does "this," then, show forth? Her love in its tide can flow over
the lower nature, as the waves flow over the basking rocks. "Old earth
smiles and knows":
"If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
Make the low nature better by your throes!
Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!"
I confess that I cannot follow this analogy. The lesson may be clear--of
that later; the analogy escapes me. Who says that rocks are of lower
nature than the sea which washes them? But if it does not mean this,
what does it mean? Mrs. Orr interprets thus: "As earth blesses her
smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those
less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it." That seems to me to touch
this instance not at all. It is the earth who has set "himself" (in the
unusual personification) to bask in the sun; the earth, _here_, is
getting, not giving. Or rather, all is one: each element wholly joys in
the other. And watching this, the woman wrings from it "the doctrine
simple, ancient, true," that love is self-sacrifice. Let that be true, I
still cannot see how the symbol aids the doctrine.
And the doctrine? Grant that love is self-sacrifice (I had rather say
that self-sacrifice is a part, and but a part, of love): is love also
self-sufficiency?
"Make the low nature better by your throes."
It is a strange love, surely, which so speaks? Shall a man live,
despised, in harmony with her who despises him? James Lee's wife may
call this love, but we absolve James Lee, I think, if he does not! For
human beings feel most subtly when scorn dwells near them; they may
indeed have caused that scorn--but let there be no talk of love where it
subsists.
Even bitterness were less destructive to the woman's hope than this
strange counting of the cost, this self-sufficiency. Our sympathy must
leave her at this phase; and sympathy for her was surely Browning's aim?
But possibly it was not; and _if_ not, this indeed is subtle.
VIII.--BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD
She had turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of
a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da
Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been
happily working. She has failed; but that has not clouded joy nor damped
ardour.
"Its beauty mounted into my brain,"
and, effacing the failures, she has yielded to a fancy--has taken the
chalk between her lips, instead of her fingers:
"With soul to help if the mere lips failed,
I kissed all right where the drawing ailed,
Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips
Still from one's soulless finger-tips."
This hand was that of a worshipped woman. Her fancy sets the ring on
it, by which one knows
"That here at length a master found
His match, a proud lone soul its mate."
Not even Da Vinci's pencil had been able to trace all the beauty--
". . . how free, how fine
To fear almost!--of the limit-line."
_He_, like her, had suffered some defeat. But think of the minutes in
which, with her he worshipped, he "looked and loved, learned and drew,
Drew and learned and loved again!" Such moments are not for such as she.
She will go back to the household cares--she has her lesson, and it is
not the same as Da Vinci's.
"Little girl with the poor coarse hand"
. . . this is _her_ model, from whom she had turned to a cold clay cast.
Her business is to understand, not the almost fearful beauty of a thing
like this, but "the worth of flesh and blood."
But was not that Da Vinci's business too? Would he not, could she speak
with him, proudly tell her so? "Nothing but beauty in a hand." Would the
Master have turned from this peasant one? No: she hears him condemn her,
laugh her woes to scorn.
"The fool forsooth is all forlorn
Because the beauty she thinks best
Lived long ago or was never born,
Because no beauty bears the test
In this rough peasant hand!"
It was not long before Da Vinci threw aside the faulty pencil, and spent
years instead of hours in studying, not the mere external loveliness,
but the anatomy of the hand, learning the veritable use
"Of flesh and bone and nerve that make
The poorest coarsest human hand
An object worthy to be scanned
A whole life long for their sole sake."
Just the hand--and all the body still to learn. Is not this the lesson
of life--this incompleteness?
"Now the parts and then the whole!"
And here is she, declaring that if she is not loved, she must die--she,
with her stinted soul and stunted body! Look again at the peasant hand.
No beauty is there--but it can spin the wool and bake the bread:
"'What use survives the beauty?'"
Yes: Da Vinci would proclaim her fool.
Then _this_ shall be the new formula. She will be of use; will do the
daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. She cannot keep her
husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she
will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. She will be useful;
she will gain cheer _that_ way, since all the others fail her.
"Go, little girl with the poor coarse hand!
I have my lesson, shall understand."
This is the last hope--to be of humble use; this the last formula for
survival.
IX.--ON DECK
And this has failed like the rest. She is on board the boat that carries
her away from him, she has found the last formula: _set him free_. Well,
it in its turn has been followed: she is gone. Gone--in every sense.
"There is nothing to remember in me,
Nothing I ever said with a grace,
Nothing I did that you care to see,
Nothing I was that deserves a place
In your mind, now I leave you, set you free."
No "_petite fleur dans la pensée_"--none, none: she grants him all her
dis-grace. But will he not grant her something too--now that she is
gone? Will he not grant that men have loved such women, when the women
have loved them so utterly? It _has_ been: she knows that, and the more
certainly now that she has yielded finally her claim to a like miracle.
His soul is locked fast; but, "love for a key" (if he could but have
loved her!), what might not have happened? She might have grown the same
in his eyes as he is in hers!
So strange it is to think of _that_. . . . She can think anything when
such imagining is once possible to her. She can think of _him_ as the
"harsh, ill-favoured one!" For what would it have mattered--her
ugliness--if he had loved her? They would have been "like as pea and
pea." Ever since the world began, love has worked such spells--that is
so true that she has warrant to work out this strange, new dream.
Imagine it. . . . If he had all her in his heart, as she has all him in
hers! He, whose least word brought gloom or glee, who never lifted his
hand in vain--that hand which will hold hers still, from over the
sea . . . if, when _he_ thinks of her, a face as beautiful as his own
should rise to his imagination--with eyes as dear, a mouth like that, as
bright a brow. . . .
"Till you saw yourself, while you cried ''Tis she!'"
But it will not be--and if it could be, she would not know or care, for
the joy would have killed her.
Or turn it again the converse way. Supposing he could "fade to a thing
like her," with the coarse hair and skin . . .
"You might turn myself!--should I know or care
When I should be dead of joy, James Lee?"
Either way it would kill her, so she may as well be gone, with her
"Love that was life, life that was love";
and there is nothing at all to remember in her. As long as she lives
his words and looks will circle round _her_ memory. If she could fancy
one touch of love for her once coming in those words and looks
again. . . . But the boat moves on, farther, ever farther from the
little house with its four rooms and its field and fig-tree and
vines--from the window, the fireside, the doorway, from the beach and
cliff and rocks. All the formulas have failed but this one. This one
will not fail. He is set free.
+ + + + +
She had to go; and neither him nor her can we condemn. "One near one is
too far." She saw and loved too well: one or the other she should have
been wise enough to hide from him. But she could not. Character is fate;
and two characters are two fates. Neither, with that other, could be
different; each might, with another "other," have been all that each was
meant to be.
FOOTNOTES:
[251:1] The poems were first called _James Lee_ only.
[254:1] _Life_, Mrs. Orr, p. 266.
[257:1] "The little church, a field, a few houses, and the sea . . .
Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"--_Life_, p. 266.
[258:1] _Life_, p. 266.
[262:1] These lines were published by Browning, separately, in 1836,
when he was twenty-six. _James Lee's Wife_ was published in 1864.
[263:1] Nettleship well says: "The difference between the first and
second parts of this section is that, while the plaint of the wind was
enough to make Browning write in 1836, he must have the plaint of a soul
in 1863. . . . And yet, something is lost."