Browning's Heroines

—but not long can she be merely curious; every minute there breaks out a cry:

—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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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,

Is it done? Then he must take off her mask; he must—nay, he need not look morose about it:

She is not afraid to dispense with the protecting vizor:

There it lies—there. . . .

—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?

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.

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:

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?

The dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child!

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?

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:

From Browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl cries:

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.

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.

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:

PART IV

I

A WOMAN'S LAST WORD

They are married, and they have come to a spiritual crisis. She does not, cannot, think as he thinks. But does thinking signify? She loves—is not that enough? Can she not have done with thinking, or at all events with talking about thinking? Perhaps, with every striving, she shall achieve no more than that: to say nothing, to use no influence, to yield the sanctioned woman's trophy of the "last word." . . . Shall she, then, be yielding aught of value, if she contends no more?

—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.

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.

She abandons then the cold abstraction; she does not even wish to "know":

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 . . .

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:

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.

And now read again:

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:

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.

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"

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.

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:

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.

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:

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:

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. . . .

And then, ever the morbid analogy, the fixed idea:

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,

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.

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:

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."

—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?

That is the fault in her:

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.

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:

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.