_WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING_
The first woman we meet in Browning's poetry is Pauline; a twofold
person, exceedingly unlike the woman usually made by a young poet. She
is not only the Pauline idealised and also materialised by the selfish
passion of her lover, but also the real woman whom Browning has
conceived underneath the lover's image of her. This doubling of his
personages, as seen under two diverse aspects or by two different
onlookers, in the same poem, is not unfrequent in his poetry, and it
pleased his intellect to make these efforts. When the thing was well
done, its cleverness was amazing, even imaginative; when it was ill
done, it was confusing. Tennyson never did this; he had not analytic
power enough. What he sees of his personages is all one, quite clearly
drawn and easy to understand. But we miss in them, and especially in his
women, the intellectual play, versatility and variety of Browning.
Tennyson's women sometimes border on dulness, are without that movement,
change and surprises, which in women disturb mankind for evil or for
good. If Tennyson had had a little more of Browning's imaginative
analysis, and Browning a little less of it, both would have been better
artists.
The Pauline of the lover is the commonplace woman whom a young man so
often invents out of a woman for his use and pleasure. She is to be his
salvation, to sympathise with his ideals, joys and pains, to give him
everything, with herself, and to live for him and him alone. Nothing can
be more _naïf_ and simple than this common selfishness which forgets
that a woman has her own life, her own claim on the man, and her own
individuality to develop; and this element in the poem, which never
occurs again in Browning's poetry, may be the record of an early
experience. If so, he had escaped from this youthful error before he had
finished the poem, and despised it, perhaps too much. It is excusable
and natural in the young. His contempt for this kind of love is embodied
in the second Pauline. She is not the woman her lover imagines her to
be, but far older and more experienced than her lover; who has known
long ago what love was; who always liked to be loved, who therefore
suffers her lover to expatiate as wildly as he pleases; but whose life
is quite apart from him, enduring him with pleasurable patience,
criticising him, wondering how he can be so excited. There is a dim
perception in the lover's phrases of these elements in his mistress'
character; and that they are in her character is quite plain from the
patronising piece of criticism in French which Browning has put into her
mouth. The first touch of his humour appears in the contrast of the
gentle and lofty boredom of the letter with the torrents of love in the
poem. And if we may imagine that the lover is partly an image of what
Browning once felt in a youthful love, we may also think that the
making of the second and critical Pauline was his record, when his love
had passed, of what he thought about it all.
This mode of treatment, so much more analytic than imaginative, belongs
to Browning as an artist. He seems, while he wrote, as if half of him
sat apart from the personages he was making, contemplating them in his
observant fashion, discussing them coolly in his mind while the other
half of him wrote about them with emotion; placing them in different
situations and imagining what they would then do; inventing trials for
them and recombining, through these trials, the elements of their
characters; arguing about and around them, till he sometimes loses the
unity of their personality. This is a weakness in his work when he has
to create characters in a drama who may be said, like Shakespeare's, to
have, once he has created them, a life of their own independent of the
poet. His spinning of his own thoughts about their characters makes us
often realise, in his dramas, the individuality of Browning more than
the individuality of the characters. We follow him at this work with
keen intellectual pleasure, but we do not always follow him with a
passionate humanity.
On the contrary, this habit, which was one cause of his weakness as an
artist in the drama, increased his strength as an artist when he made
single pictures of men and women at isolated crises in their lives; or
when he pictured them as they seemed at the moment to one, two, or three
differently tempered persons--pictorial sketches and studies which we
may hang up in the chambers of the mind for meditation or discussion.
Their intellectual power and the emotional interest they awaken, the
vivid imaginative lightning which illuminates them in flashes, arise out
of that part of his nature which made him a weak dramatist.
Had he chosen, for example, to paint Lady Carlisle as he conceived her,
in an isolated portrait, and in the same circumstances as in his drama
of _Strafford_, we should have had a clear and intimate picture of her
moving, alive at every point, amidst the decay and shipwreck of the
Court. But in the play she is a shade who comes and goes, unoutlined,
confused and confusing, scarcely a woman at all. The only clear hints of
what Browning meant her to be are given in the _asides_ of Strafford.
Browning may have been content with _Strafford_ as a whole, but, with
his passion for vitality, he could not have been content with either
Lady Carlisle or the Queen as representatives of women. Indeed, up to
this point, when he had written _Pauline_, _Paracelsus_ and _Strafford_,
he must have felt that he had left out of his poetry one half of the
human race; and his ambition was to represent both men and women.
Pauline's chief appearance is in French prose. Michel, in _Paracelsus_,
is a mere silhouette of the sentimental German Frau, a soft sympathiser
with her husband and with the young eagle Paracelsus, who longs to leave
the home she would not leave for the world--an excellent and fruitful
mother. She is set in a pleasant garden landscape. Twice Browning tries
to get more out of her and to lift her into reality. But the men carry
him away from her, and she remains undrawn. These mere images, with the
exception of the woman in _Porphyria's Lover_, who, with a boldness
which might have astonished even Byron but is characteristic of Browning
in his audacious youth, leaves the ball to visit her lover in the
cottage in the garden--are all that he had made of womanhood in 1837,
four years after he had begun to publish poetry.
It was high time he should do something better, and he had now begun to
know more of the variousness of women and of their resolute grip on life
and affairs. So, in _Sordello_, he created Palma. She runs through the
poem, and her appearances mark turning points in Sordello's development;
but thrice she appears in full colour and set in striking
circumstances--first, in the secret room of the palace at Verona with
Sordello when she expounds her policy, and afterwards leans with him
amid a gush of torch-fire over the balcony, whence the grey-haired
councillors spoke to the people surging in the square and shouting for
the battle. The second time is in the streets of Ferrara, full of
camping men and fires; and the third is when she waits with Taurello in
the vaulted room below the chamber where Sordello has been left to
decide what side he shall take, for the Emperor or the Pope. He dies
while they wait, but there is no finer passage in the poem than this of
Palma and Taurello talking in the dim corridor of the new world they
would make for North Italy with Sordello. It is not dramatic
characterisation, but magnificent individualisation of the woman and the
man.
We see Palma first as a girl at Goito, where she fills Sordello with
dreams, and Browning gives her the beauty of the Venetians Titian
painted.
How the tresses curled
Into a sumptuous swell of gold and wound
About her like a glory! even the ground
Was bright as with spilt sunbeams:
Full consciousness of her beauty is with her, frank triumph in it; but
she is still a child. At the Court of Love she is a woman, not only
conscious of her loveliness, but able to use it to bind and loose,
having sensuous witchery and intellectual power, that terrible
combination. She lays her magic on Sordello.
But she is not only the woman of personal magic and beauty. Being of
high rank and mixed with great events, she naturally becomes the
political woman, a common type in the thirteenth century. And Browning
gives her the mental power to mould and direct affairs. She uses her
personal charm to lure Sordello into politics.
Her wise
And lulling words are yet about the room,
Her presence wholly poured upon the gloom
Down even to her vesture's creeping stir.
And so reclines he, saturate with her.
* * *
But when she felt she held her friend indeed
Safe, she threw back her curls, began implant
Her lessons;
Her long discourse on the state of parties, and how Sordello may, in
mastering them, complete his being, fascinates him and us by the charm
of her intelligence.
But the political woman has often left love behind. Politics, like
devotion, are a woman's reaction from the weariness of loving and being
loved. But Palma is young, and in the midst of her politics she retains
passion, sentiment, tenderness and charm. She dreams of some soul beyond
her own, who, coming, should call on all the force in her character;
enable her, in loving him, to give consummation to her work for Italy;
and be himself the hand and sword of her mind. Therefore she held
herself in leash till the right man came, till she loved. "Waits he
not," her heart cries, and mixes him with coming Spring:
Waits he not the waking year?
His almond blossoms must be honey-ripe
By this; to welcome him, fresh runnels stripe
The thawed ravines; because of him, the wind
Walks like a herald. I shall surely find
Him now.
She finds him in Sordello, and summons him, when the time is ripe, to
Verona. Love and ambition march together in her now. In and out of all
her schemes Sordello moves. The glory of her vision of North Italian
rule is like a halo round his brow. Not one political purpose is lost,
but all are transfigured in her by love. Softness and strength,
intellect and feeling meet in her. This is a woman nobly carved, and the
step from Michel, Pauline and Lady Carlisle to her is an immense one.
By exercise of his powers Browning's genius had swiftly developed. There
comes a time, sooner or later, to a great poet when, after many
experiments, the doors of his intellect and soul fly open, and his
genius is flooded with the action and thought of what seems a universe.
And with this revelation of Man and Nature, a tidal wave of creative
power, new and impelling, carries the poet far beyond the station where
last he rested. It came to Browning now. The creation of Palma would be
enough to prove it, but there is not a character or scene in _Sordello_
which does not also prove it.
* * * * *
In this new outrush of his genius he created a very different woman from
Palma. He created Pippa, the Asolan girl, at the other end of society
from Palma, at the other end of feminine character. Owing to the host of
new thoughts which in this early summer of genius came pouring into his
soul--all of which he tried to express, rejecting none, choosing none
out of the rest, expressing only half of a great number of them; so
delighted with them all that he could leave none out--he became obscure
in _Sordello_. Owing also to the great complexity of the historical
_mise-en-scène_ in which he placed his characters in that poem, he also
became obscure. Had he been an experienced artist he would have left out
at least a third of the thoughts and scenes he inserted. As it was, he
threw all his thoughts and all the matters he had learnt about the
politics, cities, architecture, customs, war, gardens, religion and
poetry of North Italy in the thirteenth century, pell-mell into this
poem, and left them, as it were, to find their own places. This was very
characteristic of a young man when the pot of his genius was boiling
over. Nothing bolder, more incalculable, was ever done by a poet in the
period of his storm and stress. The boundless and to express it, was
never sought with more audacity. It was impossible, in this effort, for
him to be clear, and we need not be vexed with him. The daring, the
rush, the unconsciousness and the youth of it all, are his excuse, but
not his praise. And when the public comes to understand that the
dimness and complexity of _Sordello_ arise from plenteousness not
scarcity of thought, and that they were not a pose of the poet's but the
natural leaping of a full fountain just let loose from its mountain
chamber, it will have a personal liking, not perhaps for the poem but
for Browning. "I will not read the book," it will say, "but I am glad he
had it in him."
Still it was an artistic failure, and when Browning understood that the
public could not comprehend him--and we must remember that he desired to
be comprehended, for he loved mankind--he thought he would use his
powers in a simpler fashion, and please the honest folk. So, in the joy
of having got rid in _Sordello_ of so many of his thoughts by expression
and of mastering the rest; and determined, since he had been found
difficult, to be the very opposite--loving contrast like a poet--he
wrote _Pippa Passes_. I need not describe its plan. Our business is with
the women in it.
Ottima, alive with carnal passion, in the fire of which the murder of
her husband seems a mere incident, is an audacious sketch, done in
splashes of ungradated colour. Had Browning been more in the woman's
body and soul he would not have done her in jerks as he has done. Her
trick of talking of the landscape, as if she were on a holiday like
Pippa, is not as subtly conceived or executed as it should be, and is
too far away from her dominant carnality to be natural. And her
sensualism is too coarse for her position. A certain success is
attained, but the imagination is frequently jarred. The very outburst of
unsensual love at the end, when her love passes from the flesh into the
spirit, when self-sacrifice dawns upon her and she begins to suffer the
first agonies of redemption, is plainly more due to the poet's pity than
to the woman's spirit. Again, Sebald is the first to feel remorse after
the murder. Ottima only begins to feel it when she thinks her lover is
ceasing to love her. I am not sure that to reverse the whole situation
would not be nearer to the truth of things; but that is matter of
discussion. Then the subject-matter is sordid. Nothing relieves the
coarseness of Sebald, Ottima and Luca and their relations to one another
but the few descriptions of nature and the happy flash of innocence when
Pippa passes by. Nor are there any large fates behind the tale or large
effects to follow which might lift the crime into dignity. This mean,
commonplace, ugly kind of subject had a strange attraction for Browning,
as we see in _The Inn Album_, in _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, and
elsewhere. I may add that it is curious to find him, in 1841, writing
exactly like a modern realist, nearly fifty years before realism of this
kind had begun. And this illustrates what I have said of the way in
which he anticipated by so many years the kind of work to which the
literary world should come. The whole scene between Sebald and Ottima
might have been written by a powerful, relentless modern novelist.
We have more of this realism, but done with great skill, humanity, even
tenderness, in the meeting and talk of the young harlotry on the steps
of the Duomo near the fountain. When we think of this piece of bold,
clear, impressionist reality cast into the midst of the proprieties of
literature in 1841, it is impossible not to wonder and smile. The girls
are excellently drawn and varied from each other. Browning's pity
gathers round them, and something of underlying purity, of natural grace
of soul, of tenderness in memory of their youth emerges in them; and the
charm of their land is round their ways. There was also in his mind, I
think, a sense of picturesqueness in their class when they were young,
which, mingling with his pity for them, attracted his imagination, or
touched into momentary life that roving element in a poet which resents
the barriers made by social and domestic purity. _Fifine at the Fair_ is
partly a study of that temper which comes and goes, goes and comes in
the life not only of poets but of ordinary men and women.
Then, to illustrate this further, there is in _Sordello_ a brilliant
sketch of girls of this kind at Venice, full of sunlight, colour and
sparkling water, in which he has seen these butterflies of women as a
painter would see them, or as a poet who, not thinking then of moral
questions or feeling pity for their fate, is satisfied for the flying
moment with the picture they make, with the natural freedom of their
life.
But he does not leave that picture without a representation of the other
side of this class of womanhood. It was a daring thing, when he wished
to say that he would devote his whole work to the love and
representation of humanity to symbolise it by a sorrowful street-girl in
Venice who wistfully asks an alms; worn and broken with sorrow and
wrong; whose eyes appeal for pity, for comprehension of her good and for
his love; and whose fascination and beauty are more to him than those
of her unsuffering companions. The other side of that class of women is
here given with clear truth and just compassion, and the representation
is lifted into imaginative strength, range and dignity of thought and
feeling by her being made the image of the whole of humanity. "This
woman," he thought, "is humanity, whom I love, who asks the poet in me
to reveal her as she is, a divine seed of God to find some day its
flowering--the broken harlot of the universe, who will be, far off, the
Magdalen redeemed by her ineradicable love. That, and with every power I
have, I will, as poet, love and represent."
This is the imagination working at its best, with its most penetrative
and passionate power, and Browning is far greater as a poet in this
Thing of his, where thought and love are knit into union to give birth
to moral, intellectual and spiritual beauty, than he is in those lighter
and cleverer poems in which he sketches with a facile but too discursive
a pencil, the transient moments, grave or light, of the lives of women.
Yet this and they show his range, his variety, the embracing of his
sympathy.
Over against these girls in the market-place, against Ottima in her
guilt, and Phene who is as yet a nonentity (her speech to the sculptor
is too plainly Browning's analysis of the moment, not her own
thinking--no girl of fourteen brought up by Natalia would talk in that
fashion) is set Pippa, the light, life and love of the day, the town,
the people and the poem. She passes like an angel by and touches with
her wing events and persons and changes them to good. She has some
natural genius, and is as unconscious of her genius as she is of the
good she does. In her unconsciousness is the fountain of her charm. She
lives like a flower of the field that knows not it has blest and
comforted with its beauty the travellers who have passed it by. She has
only one day in the whole year for her own, and for that day she creates
a fresh personality for herself. She clothes her soul, intellect,
imagination, and spiritual aspiration in holiday garments for the day,
becoming for the time a new poetic self, and able to choose any other
personality in Asolo from hour to hour--the queen and spirit of the
town; not wishing to be, actually, the folk she passes by, but only,
since she is so isolated, to be something in their lives, to touch them
for help and company.
The world of nature speaks to her and loves her. She sees all that is
beautiful, feeds on it, and grasps the matter of thought that underlies
the beauty. And so much is she at home with nature that she is able to
describe with ease in words almost as noble as the thing itself the
advent of the sun. When she leaps out of her bed to meet the leap of the
sun, the hymn of description she sings might be sung by the Hours
themselves as they dance round the car of the god. She can even play
with the great Mother as with an equal, or like her child. The charming
gaiety with which she speaks to the sunlights that dance in her room,
and to the flowers which are her sisters, prove, however isolated her
life may be, that she is never alone. Along with this brightness she has
seriousness, the sister of her gaiety; the deep seriousness of
imagination, the seriousness also of the evening when meditation broods
over the day and its doings before sleep. These, with her sweet
humanity, natural piety, instinctive purity, compose her of soft
sunshine and soft shadow. Nor does her sadness at the close, which is
overcome by her trust in God, make her less but more dear to us. She is
a beautiful creation. There are hosts of happy women like her. They are
the salt of the earth. But few poets have made so much of them and so
happily, or sung about these birds of God so well as Browning has in
_Pippa Passes_.
That was in 1841. Pleased with his success in this half-lyrical,
half-dramatic piece, he was lured towards the drama again, and also to
try his hand at those short lyrics--records of transient emotion on
fanciful subjects--or records of short but intense moments of thought or
feeling. It is a pity that he did not give to dramatic lyrics (in which
species of poetry he is quite our first master) the time he gave to
dramas, in which he is not much better than an amateur. Nevertheless, we
cannot omit the women in the dramas. I have already written of Lady
Carlisle. Polyxena, in _King Victor and King Charles_, is partly the
political woman and partly the sensible and loving wife of a strangely
tempered man. She is fairly done, but is not interesting. Good womanly
intelligence in affairs, good womanly support of her man; clear womanly
insight into men and into intrigue--a woman of whom there are hundreds
of thousands in every rank of life. In her, as in so much of Browning's
work, the intellect of the woman is of a higher quality than the
intellect of the man.
Next, among his women, is Anael in the _Return of the Druses_, She is
placed in too unnatural a situation to allow her nature to have fair
play. In the preternatural world her superstition creates, she adores
Djabal, murders the Prefect, and dies by her own hand. She is, in that
world, a study of a young girl's enthusiasm for her faith and her
country, and for the man she thinks divine; and were the subject, so far
as it relates to her character, well or clearly wrought, she might be
made remarkable. As it is wrought, it is so intertwisted with complex
threads of thought and passion that any clear outline of her character
is lost. Both Djabal and she are like clouds illuminated by flashes of
sheet lightning which show an infinity of folds and shapes of vapour in
each cloud, but show them only for an instant; and then, when the
flashes come again, show new folds, new involutions. The characters are
not allowed by Browning to develop themselves.
Anael, when she is in the preternatural world, loves Djabal as an
incarnation of the divine, but in the natural world of her girlhood her
heart goes out to the Knight of Malta who loves her. The in-and-out of
these two emotional states--one in the world of religious enthusiasm,
and one in her own womanhood, as they cross and re-cross one another--is
elaborated with merciless analysis; and Anael's womanhood appears, not
as a whole, but in bits and scraps. How will this young girl, divided by
two contemporaneous emotions, one in the supernatural and one in the
natural world, act in a crisis of her life? Well, the first, conquering
the second, brings about her death the moment she tries to transfer the
second into the world of the first--her dim, half-conscious love for
Lois into her conscious adoration of Djabal.
Mildred and Guendolen are the two women in _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_.
Guendolen is the incarnation of high-hearted feminine commonsense, of
clear insight into the truth of things, born of the power of love in
her. Amid all the weaknesses of the personages and the plot; in the
wildered situation made by a confused clashing of pride and innocence
and remorse, in which Browning, as it were on purpose to make a display
of his intellectual ability, involves those poor folk--Guendolen is the
rock on which we can rest in peace; the woman of the world, yet not
worldly; full of experience, yet having gained by every experience more
of love; just and strong yet pitiful, and with a healthy but
compassionate contempt for the intelligence of the men who belong to
her.
Contrasted with her, and the quality of her love contrasted also, is
Mildred, the innocent child girl who loves for love's sake, and
continues to be lost in her love. But Browning's presentation of her
innocence, her love, is spoiled by the over-remorse, shame and fear
under whose power he makes her so helpless. They are in the
circumstances so unnaturally great that they lower her innocence and
love, and the natural courage of innocence and love. These rise again to
their first level, but it is only the passion of her lover's death which
restores them. And when they recur, she is outside of girlhood. One
touch of the courage she shows in the last scene would have saved in the
previous scene herself, her lover, and her brother. The lie she lets her
brother infer when she allows him to think that the lover she has
confessed to is not the Earl, yet that she will marry the Earl, degrades
her altogether and justly in her brother's eyes, and is so terribly out
of tune with her character that I repeat I cannot understand how
Browning could invent that situation. It spoils the whole presentation
of the girl. It is not only out of her character, it is out of nature.
Indeed, in spite of the poetry, in spite of the pathetic beauty of the
last scene, Mildred and Tresham are always over-heightened,
over-strained beyond the concert-pitch of nature. But the drawing of the
woman's character suffers more from this than the man's, even though
Tresham, in the last scene, is half turned into a woman. Sex seems to
disappear in that scene.
A different person is Colombe, the Duchess in _Colombe's Birthday_. That
play, as I have said, gets on, but it gets on because Colombe moves
every one in the play by her own motion. From beginning to end of the
action she is the fire and the soul of it. Innocent, frank and brave,
simple and constant among a group of false and worldly courtiers, among
whom she moves like the white Truth, untouched as yet by love or by the
fates of her position, she is suddenly thrown into a whirlpool of
affairs and of love; and her simplicity, clearness of intelligence,
unconscious rightness of momentary feeling, which comes of her not
thinking about her feelings--that rare and precious element in
character--above all, her belief in love as the one worthy thing in the
world, bring her out of the whirlpool, unshipwrecked, unstained by a
single wave of ill-feeling or mean thinking, into a quiet harbour of
affection and of power. For she will influence Berthold all his life
long.
She is herself lovely. Valence loves her at sight. Her love for Valence
is born before she knows it, and the touch of jealousy, which half
reveals it to her, is happily wrought by Browning. When she finds out
that Valence did for love of her what she thought was done for loyalty
alone to her, she is a little revolted; her single-heartedness is
disappointed. She puts aside her growing love, which she does not know
as yet is love, and says she will find out if Berthold wishes to marry
her because he loves her, or for policy. Berthold is as honest as she
is, and tells her love has nothing to do with the matter. The thought of
an untrue life with Berthold then sends her heart with a rush back to
Valence, and she chooses love and obscurity with Valence. It is the
portrait of incarnate truth, in vivid contrast to Constance, who is a
liar in grain.
Constance is the heroine of the fragment of a drama called _In a
Balcony_. Norbert, a young diplomat, has served the Queen, who is fifty
years old, for a year, all for the love of Constance, a cousin and
dependent of the Queen. He tells Constance he will now, as his reward,
ask the Queen for her hand. Constance says, "No; that will ruin us both;
temporise; tell the Queen, who is hungry for love, that you love her;
and that, as she cannot marry a subject, you will be content with me,
whom the Queen loves." Norbert objects, and no wonder, to this lying
business, but he does it; and the Queen runs to Constance, crying, "I am
loved, thank God! I will throw everything aside and marry him. I
thought he loved you, but he loves me." Then Constance, wavering from
truth again, says that the Queen is right. Norbert does love her. And
this is supposed by some to be a noble self-sacrifice, done in pity for
the Queen. It is much more like jealousy.
Then, finding that all Norbert's future depends on the Queen, she is
supposed to sacrifice herself again, this time for Norbert's sake. She
will give him up to the Queen, for the sake of his career; and she tells
the Queen, before Norbert, that he has confessed to her his love for the
Queen--another lie! Norbert is indignant--he may well be--and throws
down all this edifice of falsehood. The Queen knows then the truth, and
leaves them in a fury. Constance and Norbert fly into each other's arms,
and the tramp of the soldiers who come to arrest them is heard as the
curtain falls.
I do not believe that Browning meant to make self-sacrifice the root of
Constance's doings. If he did, he has made a terrible mess of the whole
thing. He was much too clear-headed a moralist to link self-sacrifice to
systematic lying. Self-sacrifice is not self-sacrifice at all when it
sacrifices truth. It may wear the clothes of Love, but, in injuring
righteousness, it injures the essence of love. It has a surface beauty,
for it imitates love, but if mankind is allured by this beauty, mankind
is injured. It is the false Florimel of self-sacrifice. Browning, who
had studied self-sacrifice, did not exhibit it in Constance. There is
something else at the root of her actions, and I believe he meant it to
be jealousy. The very first lie she urges her lover to tell (that is, to
let the Queen imagine he loves her) is just the thing a jealous woman
would invent to try her lover and the Queen, if she suspected the Queen
of loving him, and him of being seduced from her by the worldly
advantage of marrying the Queen. And all the other lies are best
explained on the supposition of jealous experiments. At the last she is
satisfied; the crowning test had been tried. Through a sea of lying she
had made herself sure of Norbert's love, and she falls into his arms.
Had Browning meant Constance to be an image of self-sacrifice, he would
scarcely have written that line when Norbert, having told the truth of
the matter to the Queen, looks at both women, and cries out, "You two
glare, each at each, like panthers now." A woman, filled with the joy
and sadness of pure self-sacrifice, would not have felt at this moment
like a panther towards the woman for whom she had sacrificed herself.
Even as a study of jealousy, Constance is too subtle. Jealousy has none
of these labyrinthine methods; it goes straight with fiery passion to
its end. It may be said, then, that Constance is not a study of
jealousy. But it may be a study by Browning of what he thought in his
intellect jealousy would be. At any rate, Constance, as a study of
self-sacrifice, is a miserable failure. Moreover, it does not make much
matter whether she is a study of this or that, because she is eminently
wrong-natured. Her lying is unendurable, only to be explained or excused
by the madness of jealousy, and she, though jealous, is not maddened
enough by jealousy to excuse her lies. The situations she causes are
almost too ugly. Whenever the truth is told, either by the Queen or
Norbert, the situations break up in disgrace for her. It is difficult
to imagine how Norbert could go on loving her. His love would have
departed if they had come to live together. He is radically true, and
she is radically false. A fatal split would have been inevitable.
Nothing could be better for them both--after their momentary outburst of
love at the end--than death.
From the point of view of art, Constance is interesting. It is more than
we can say of Domizia in _Luria_. She is nothing more than a passing
study whom Browning uses to voice his theories. Eulalia in _A Soul's
Tragedy_ is also a transient thing, only she is more colourless, more a
phantom than Domizia.
By this time, by the year 1846, Browning had found out that he could not
write dramas well, or even such dramatic proverbs as _In a Balcony_. And
he gave himself up to another species of his art. The women he now draws
(some of which belong to the years during which he wrote dramas) are
done separately, in dramatic lyrics as he called them, and in narrative
and philosophical poems. Some are touched only at moments of their
lives, and we are to infer from the momentary action and feeling the
whole of the woman. Others are carefully and lovingly drawn from point
to point in a variety of action, passion and circumstance. In these we
find Browning at his best in the drawing of women. I know no women among
the second-rate poets so sweetly, nobly, tenderly and wisely drawn as
Pompilia and Balaustion.
* * * * *