The "Epilogue" is a criticism on critics, and is spoken distinctly by Mr. Browning himself. He takes for his text a line from Mrs. Browning:[67]
and denounces those consumers of the wine of poetry, who expect it to combine strength and sweetness in an impossible degree. Body and bouquet, he affirms, may be found on the label of a bottle, but not in the vat from which the bottle was filled. "Mighty" and "mellow" may be born at once; but the one is for now, the other only for after-time. The earth, he declares, is his vineyard; his grape, the loves, the hates, and the thoughts of man; his wine, what these have made it. Bouquet may, he admits, be artificially given. Flowers grow everywhere which will supplement the flavour of the grape; and his life holds flowers of memory, which blossom with every spring. But he denies that his brew would be the more popular if he stripped his meadow to make it so. How much do his public drink of that which they profess to approve? They declare Shakespeare and Milton fit beverage for man and boy. "Look into their cellars, and see how many barrels are unbroached of the one brand, what drippings content them of the other. He will be true to his task, and to Him who set it."
At the 18th stanza the figure is changed, and Mr. Browning speaks of his work (by implication) as a stretch of country which is moor above and mine below; and in which men will find—what they dig for.
"HOUSE" is written in much the same spirit as "At the Mermaid." It reminds us that the whole front of a dwelling must come down before the life within it can be gauged by the vulgar eye; however we may fancy that this or that poetic utterance has unlocked the door—that it opens to a "sonnet-key."[68]
"SHOP" is a criticism on those writers, poets or otherwise, who are so disproportionately absorbed by the material cares of existence as to place the good of literature in its money-making power; and depicts such in the character of the shopman who makes the shop his home, instead of leaving it for some mansion or villa as soon as business hours are past. "The flesh must live, but why should not the spirit have its dues also?"
"RESPECTABILITY" is a comment on the price paid for social position. A pair of lovers have been enjoying a harmless escapade; and one remarks to the other that, if their relation had been recognized by the world, they might have wasted their youth in the midst of proprieties which they would never have learned the danger and the pleasure of infringing. The situation is barely sketched in; but the sentiment of the poem is well marked, and connects it with the foregoing group.
"A LIGHT WOMAN," "DÎS ALITER VISUM," and "BIFURCATION" raise questions of conduct.
A man desires to extricate his friend from the toils of "A LIGHT WOMAN;" and to this end he courts her himself. He is older and more renowned than her present victim, and trusts to her vanity to ensure his success. But his attentions arouse in her something more. He discovers too late that he has won her heart. He can only cast it away, and a question therefore arises: he knows how he appears to his friend; he knows how he will appear to the woman whom his friend loved; "how does he appear to himself?" In other words, did the end for which he has acted justify the means employed? He doubts it.
"DÎS ALITER VISUM" records the verdict of later days on a decision which recommended itself at the time: that is, to the person who formed it. A man and woman are attracted towards each other, though she is young and unformed; he, old in years and in experience; and he is, or seems to be, on the point of offering her his hand. But caution checks the impulse. They drift asunder. He forms a connection with an opera-dancer. She makes a loveless marriage. Ten years later they meet again; and she reminds him of what passed between them, and taxes him with the ruin of four souls. He has thought only of the drawbacks to present enjoyment, which the unequal union would have involved; he never thought or cared how its bitter-sweetness might quicken the striving for eternity.
This criticism reflects the woman's point of view, and was probably intended to justify it. It does not follow that the author would not, in another dramatic mood, have justified the man, in his more practical estimate of the situation. Mr. Browning's poetic self is, however, expressed in the woman's belief: that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a vital impulse to the soul. The stereotyped completeness of the lower existences supplies him here also with a warning.
The title of "BIFURCATION" refers to two paths in life, followed respectively by two lovers whom circumstances divide. The case is not unusual. The woman sacrifices love to duty, and expects her lover to content himself with her choice. Why not, she thinks? She will be constant to him; they will be united in the life to come. And meanwhile, she is choosing what for her is the smoother and safer path, while for him it is full of stumbling-blocks. Love's guidance is refused him, and he falls. Which of these two has been the sinner: he who sinned unwillingly, or she who caused the sin? We feel that Mr. Browning condemns the apparent saint.
"PISGAH SIGHTS. I." depicts life as it may seem to one who is leaving it; who is, as it were, "looking over the ball." As seen from this position, Good and Evil are reconciled, and even prove themselves indispensable to each other. The seer becomes aware that it is unwise to strive against the mixed nature of existence; vain to speculate on its cause. But the knowledge is bittersweet, for it comes too late.
"PISGAH SIGHTS. II." is a view of life as it might be, if the knowledge just described did not come too late; and shows that according to Mr. Browning's philosophy it would be no life at all. The speaker declares that if he had to live again, he would take everything as he found it. He would neither dive nor soar; he would strive neither to teach nor to reform. He would keep to the soft and shady paths; learn by quiet observation; and allow men of all kinds to pass him by, while he remained a fixture. He would gain the benefit of the distance with those below and above him, since he would be magnified for the one class, while seen from a softening point of view by the other. And so also he would admire the distant brightness, "the mightiness yonder," the more for keeping his own place. If seen too closely, the star might prove a glow-worm.
Those of Mr. Browning's poems which are directly prompted by thought have their counterpart in a large number which are specially inspired by emotion; and must be noticed as such. But this group will perhaps be the most artificial of all; for while thought is with him often uncoloured by feeling, he seldom expresses feeling as detached from thought. The majority, for instance, of his love poems are introduced by the title "dramatic," and describe love as bound up with such varieties of life and character, that questions of life and character are necessarily raised by them; the emotion thus conveyed being really more intense, because more individual, than could be given in any purely lyric effusion not warmed by the poet's own life. Some few, however, are genuine lyrics, whether regarded as personal utterances or not; and in the case of two or three of these, the personal utterance is unmistakable.
Under the head of LYRICAL LOVE POEMS must be placed
"ONE WORD MORE" is a message of love, as direct as it is beautiful; but as such it also expresses an idea which makes it a fitting object of study. Most men and women lay their highest gift at the feet of him or of her they love, and with it such honour as the world may render it. They value both, as making them more worthy of those they love, and for their sake rejoice in the possession. Mr. Browning feels otherwise. According to him the gifts by which we are known to the world have lost graciousness through its contact. Their exercise is marred by its remembered churlishness and ingratitude. Every artist, he declares, longs "once" and for "one only," to utter himself in a language distinct from his art; to "gain" in this manner, "the man's joy," while escaping "the artist's sorrow." So Raphael, the painter, wrote a volume of sonnets to be seen only by one. Dante, poet of the "Inferno," drew an angel in memory of the one (of Beatrice). He—Mr. Browning—has only his verse to offer. But as the fresco painter steals a camel's hair brush to paint flowerets on his lady's missal—as he who blows through bronze may also breathe through silver for the purpose of a serenade, so may he lend his talent to a different use. He has completed his volume of "Men" and "Women." He dedicates it to her to whom this poem is addressed. But his special offering to her is not the book itself, in which he speaks with the mouth of fifty other persons, but the word of dedication—the "One Word More"—in which he speaks to her from his own. The dramatic turns lyric poet for the one only.
And what he says of himself, he in some degree thinks of her. The moon, he reminds her, presents always the same surface to the world: whether new-born, waxing, or waning; whether, as they late saw her, radiant above the hills of Florence; or, as she now appears to them, palely hurrying to her death over London house-tops. But for the "moonstruck mortal" she holds another side, glorious or terrible as the case may be—unknown alike to herdsman and huntsman, philosopher and poet, among the rest of mankind. So she, who is his moon of poets, has also her world's side, which he can see and praise with the rest;
"PROSPICE" (look forward) is a challenge to spiritual conflict, exultant with the certainty of victory, glowing with the prospective joy of re-union with one whom death has sent before. We cannot doubt that this poem, like the preceding, came from the depths of the poet's own heart.
"NUMPHOLEPTOS" (caught by a nymph) is passionately earnest in tone, and must rank as lyrical in spite of the dramatic, at least fantastic, circumstance in which the feeling is clothed. It is the almost despairing cry of a human love, devoted to a being of superhuman purity; and who does not reject the love, but accepts it on an impossible condition: that the lover shall complete himself as a man by acquiring the fullest knowledge of life, and shall emerge unsullied from its experiences. This woman, more or less than mortal, belongs rather to the "fairyland of science" than to the realm of mythology. She stands, in passionless repose, at the starting-point of the various paths of earthly existence. These radiate from her, many-hued with passion and adventure, as light rays scattered by a prism; and, in the mocking hopes with which she invests their course, she seems herself the cold white light, of which their glow is born, and into which it will also die. She bids her worshipper travel down each red and yellow ray, bathe in its hues, and return to her "jewelled," but not smirched; and each time he returns, not jewelled, but smirched; always to appear monstrous in her sight; always to be dismissed with the same sad smile: so pitying that it promises love, so fixed that it bars its possibility. He rebels at last, but the rebellion is momentary. He renews his hopeless quest.
"PROLOGUE" is a fanciful expression of the ideas of impediment visible and invisible, which may be raised by the aspect of a brick wall; such a one, perhaps, as projects at a right angle to the window of Mr. Browning's study, and was before him when he wrote.
"NATURAL MAGIC" attests the power of love to bring, as by enchantment, summer with its warmth and blossoms, into a barren life.
"MAGICAL NATURE" is a tribute to the beauty of countenance which proceeds from the soul, and has therefore a charmed existence defying the hand of time.
The INTRODUCTION to the "TWO POETS OF CROISIC," (reprinted under the title of "Apparitions,") recalls the sentiment of "Natural Magic." The "TALE" with which it concludes is inspired by the same feeling. Its circumstance is ancient, and the reader is allowed to imagine that it exists in Latin or Greek; but it is simply a poetic and profound illustration of what love can do always and everywhere. A famous poet was singing to his lyre. One of its strings snapped. The melody would have been lost, had not a cricket (properly, cicada) flown on to the lyre and chirped the missing note. The note, thus sounded, was more beautiful than as produced by the instrument itself, and, to the song's end, the cricket remained to do the work of the broken string. The poet, in his gratitude, had a statue of himself made with the lyre in his hand, and the cricket perched on the point of it. They were thus immortalized together: she, whom he had enthroned, he, whom she had crowned.
Love is the cricket which repairs the broken harmonies of life.
The dramatic setting of the majority of the Love poems serves, as I have said, to bring out the vitality of Mr. Browning's conception of love; and though anything like labelling a poet's work brings with it a sense of anomaly, we shall only carry out the spirit of this particular group by connecting each member of it with the condition of thought or feeling it is made to illustrate.
It will be seen that the dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances, which supply so many of the poems of the following and other groups, had been largely recruited from the first collection of "Men and Women;" having first, in several instances, contributed to that work.
"Cristina." (Love as the special gain of life.) "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.
"Evelyn Hope." (Love as conquering Time.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"Love among the Ruins." (Love as the one lasting reality.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"A Lover's Quarrel." (Love as the great harmony which triumphs over smaller discords.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"By the Fireside." (Love in its ideal maturity.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"Any Wife to any Husband." (Love in its ideal of constancy.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"Two in the Campagna." (Love as an unsatisfied yearning.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"Love in a Life." (Love as indomitable purpose.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"Life in a Love." (Love as indomitable purpose.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"The Lost Mistress." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.
"A Woman's last Word." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"A Serenade at the Villa." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"One Way of Love." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Men and Women." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.
"In Three Days." (Love as the intensity of expectant hope.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.
"In a Gondola." (Love as the intensity of a precarious joy.) "Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.
"Porphyria's Lover." (Love as the tyranny of spiritual appropriation.) "Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.
"James Lee's Wife." (Love as saddened by the presentiment and the consciousness of change.) "Dramatis Personæ." 1864
"The Worst of it." (Love as the completeness of self-effacement.) "Dramatis Personnæ." 1864.
"Too Late." (Love as the sense of a loss which death has rendered irrevocable.) "Dramatis Personæ." 1864.
The two first of these are inspired by the belief in the distinctness and continuity of the soul's life; and represent love as a condition of the soul with which positive experience has very little to do; but in all the others it is treated as part of this experience, and subject for the time being to its laws. The situation sketched—for it is nothing more—in "CRISTINA" is that of a man and woman whom a glance has united, and who both have recognized in this union the predestined object of their life. The knowledge has only flashed on the woman's mind, to be extinguished by worldly ambitions and worldly honours; and for her, therefore, the union remains barren. But the existence of the man is enriched and perfected by it. She has spiritually lost him, but he has gained her; for though she has drifted away from him, he retains her soul. (This poetical paradox is the strong point of the poem.) It is henceforth his mission to test their blended powers; and when that has been accomplished, he will have done, he says, with this world.
"EVELYN HOPE" is the utterance of a love which has missed its fruition in this life, but confidently anticipates it for a life to come. The beloved is a young girl. The lover is three times her age, and was a stranger to her; she is lying dead. But God, he is convinced, creates love to reward love: and no matter what worlds must be traversed, what lives lived, what knowledge gained or lost, before that moment is reached, Evelyn Hope will, in the end, be given to him.
"LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" depicts a pastoral solitude in which are buried the remains of an ancient city, fabulous in magnificence and in strength. A ruined turret marks the site of a mighty tower, from which the king of that city overlooked his domains, or, with his court, watched the racing chariots as they encircled it in their course. In that turret, in the evening grey, amidst the tinkling of the sheep, a yellow-haired maiden is waiting for him she loves; and as they bury sight and speech in each other's arms, he bids the human heart shut in the centuries, with their triumphs and their follies, their glories and their sins, for "Love is best."
"A LOVER'S QUARREL" describes, not the quarrel itself, but the impression it leaves on him who has unwittingly provoked it: one of amazement as well as sorrow, that such a thing could have occurred. The speaker, apostrophizing his absent love, reminds her how happy they have been together, with no society but their own; no pleasures but those of sympathy; no amusements but those which their common fancy supplied; and he asks her if it be possible that so perfect a union can be destroyed by a hasty word with which his deeper self has had nothing to do. He believes this so little that he is sure she will, in some way, come back to him; and then they will part no more.
A vein of playfulness runs through this monologue, which represents the lovers before their quarrel as more like children enjoying a long holiday, than a man and a woman sharing the responsibilities of life. It conveys, nevertheless, a truth deeply rooted in the author's mind: that the foundation of a real love can never be shaken.
"BY THE FIRESIDE" is a retrospect, in which the speaker is carried from middle-age to youth, and from his, probably English, fireside to the little Alpine gorge in which he confessed his love; and he summons the wife who received and sanctioned the avowal to share with him the joy of its remembrance. He describes the scene of his declaration, the conflict of feeling which its risks involved, the generous frankness with which she cut the conflict short. He dwells on the blessings which their union has brought to him, and which make his youth seem barren by the richness of his maturer years; and he asks her if there exist another woman, with whom he could thus have retraced the descending path of life, and found nothing to regret in what he had left behind. He declares that their mutual love has been for him that crisis in the life of the soul to which all experience tends—the predestined test of its quality. It is his title to honour as well as his guarantee of everlasting joy.
The subtler realities of life and love are reflected throughout the poem in picturesque impressions often no less subtle, and the whole is dramatic, i.e., imaginary, as far as conception goes; but the obvious genuineness of the sentiment is confirmed by the allusion to the "perfect wife" who,
is known to all of us.
"ANY WIFE TO ANY HUSBAND" might be the lament of any woman about to die, who believes that her husband will remain true to her in heart, but will lack courage to be so in his life. She anticipates the excuses he will offer for seeking temporary solace in the society of other women; but these all, to her mind, resolve themselves into a confession of weakness; and it grieves her that such a confession should proceed from one, in all other respects, so much stronger than she. "Were she the survivor, it would be so easy to her to be faithful to the end!" Her grief is unselfish. The wrong she apprehends will be done to his spiritual dignity far more than to his love for her, though with a touch of feminine inconsistency she identifies the two; and she cannot resign herself to the idea that he whose earthly trial is "three parts" overcome will break down under this final test. She accepts it, however, as the inevitable.
"TWO IN THE CAMPAGNA." The sentiment of this poem can only be rendered in its concluding words:
For its pain is that of a heart both restless and weary: ever seeking to grasp the Infinite in the finite, and ever eluded by it. The sufferer is a man. He longs to rest in the affection of a woman who loves him, and whom he also loves; but whenever their union seems complete, his soul is spirited away, and he is adrift again. He asks the meaning of it all—where the fault lies, if fault there be; he begs her to help him to discover it. The Campagna is around them, with its "endless fleece of feathery grasses," its "everlasting wash of air;" its wide suggestions of passion and of peace. The clue to the enigma seems to glance across him, in the form of a gossamer thread. He traces it from point to point, by the objects on which it rests. But just as he calls his love to help him to hold it fast, it breaks off, and floats into the invisible. His doom is endless change. The tired, tantalized spirit must accept it.
"LOVE IN A LIFE" represents the lover as inhabiting the same house with his unseen love; and pursuing her in it ceaselessly from room to room, always catching the flutter of her retreating presence, always sure that the next moment he will overtake her.
"LIFE IN A LOVE" might be the utterance of the same person, when he has grasped the fact that the loved one is determined to elude him. She may baffle his pursuit, but he will never desist from it, though it absorb his whole life.
"THE LOST MISTRESS" is the farewell expression of a discarded love which has accepted the conditions of friendship. Its tone is full of manly self-restraint and of patient sadness.
"A WOMAN'S LAST WORD" is one of moral and intellectual self-surrender. She has been contending with her husband, and been silenced by the feeling, not that the truth is on his side, but that it was not worth the pain of such a contention. What, she seems to ask herself, is the value of truth, when it is false to her Divinity; or knowledge, when it costs her her Eden? She begs him whom she worships as well as loves, to mould her to himself; but she begs also the privilege of a few tears—a last tribute, perhaps, to her sacrificed conscience, and her lost liberty.
"A SERENADE AT THE VILLA" has a tinge of melancholy humour, which makes it the more pathetic. A lover has been serenading the lady of his affections through a sultry night, in which Earth seemed to turn painfully in her sleep, and the silent darkness was unbroken, except by an occasional flash of lightning, and a few drops of thundery rain. He wishes his music may have told her that whenever life is dark or difficult there will be one near to help and guide her: one whose patience will never tire, and who will serve her best when there are none to witness his devotion. But her villa looks very dark; its closed windows are very obdurate. The gate ground its teeth as it let him pass. And he fears she only said to herself, that if the silence of a thundery night was oppressive, such noise was a worse infliction.
"ONE WAY OF LOVE." This lover has strewn the roses of a month's gathering on his lady's path, only for the chance of her seeing them: as he has conquered the difficulties of the lute, only for the chance of her liking its sound; thrown his whole life into a love, which is hers to accept or reject. She cares for none of these things. So the roses may lie, the lute-string break. The lover can still say, "Blest is he who wins her."
"RUDEL TO THE LADY OF TRIPOLI" is a pathetic declaration, in which the lover compares himself to a sunflower, and proclaims it as his badge. The French poet Rudel loves the "Lady of Tripoli;"[69] and she is dear to him as is the sun to that foolish flower, which by constant contemplation has grown into its very resemblance. And he bids a pilgrim tell her that, as bees bask on the sunflower, men are attracted by his song; but, as the sunflower looks ever towards the sun, so does he, disregarding men's applause, look towards the East, and her.
"IN THREE DAYS" is a note of joyful expectation, and doubtless a pure lyric, though classed as dramatic-lyrical. The lover will see his love in three days; and his complex sense of the delay, as meaning both all this time, and only this, is leavened by the joyful consciousness that the reunion will be as absolute as the union has been. He knows that life is full of chance and change. The possibilities of three days are a great deal to encounter, very little to have escaped. Unsuspected dangers may lurk in the coming year. But—he will see her in three days; and in that thought he can laugh all misgiving and all fear to scorn.
"IN A GONDOLA" is a love scene, beginning with a serenade from a gondola, and continued by the two lovers in it, after the Venetian fashion of the olden time. They are escaping, as they think, the vigilance of a certain "Three"—one of whom we may conjecture to be the lady's husband or father—and have already regained her home, and fixed the signal for to-morrow's meeting, when the lover is surprised and stabbed. As they glide through the canals of the city, by its dark or illuminated palaces, each concealing perhaps some drama of love or crime—the sense of danger never absent from them,—the tense emotion relieves itself in playful though impassioned fancies, in which the man and the woman vie with each other. But when the blow has fallen, the light tone gives way, on the lover's side, to one of solemn joy in the happiness which has been realized.
"PORPHYRIA'S LOVER" is an episode which, with one of the poems of "Men and Women," "Johannes Agricola in Meditation," first appeared under the head of "Madhouse Cells."[70] Porphyria is deeply attached to her "lover," but has not courage to break the ties of an artificial world, and give herself to him; and when one night love prevails, and she proves it by a voluntary act of devotion, he murders her in the act, that her nobler and purer self may be preserved. Such a crime might be committed in a momentary aberration, or even intense excitement, of feeling. It is characterized here by a matter-of-fact simplicity, which is its sign of madness. The distinction, however, is subtle; and we can easily guess why this and its companion poem did not retain their title. A madness which is fit for dramatic treatment is not sufficiently removed from sanity.
"JAMES LEE'S WIFE" is the study of a female character developed by circumstances, and also impressing itself on them; the circumstances being those of an unfortunate marriage, in which the love has been mutual, but the constancy is all on the woman's side. "James Lee" is (as we understand) a man of shallow nature, whose wife's earnestness repels him when its novelty has ceased to charm. The "Wife" is keenly alive to his change of feeling towards her: and even anticipates it, in melancholy forebodings which probably hasten its course.
I.
JAMES LEE'S WIFE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW.
Love carries already the seed of doubt. The wife addresses her husband, who is approaching from outside, in words of anxious tenderness. The season is changing; coming winter is in the air. Will his love change too?
II.
BY THE FIRESIDE.
The note of apprehension deepens. The fire they are sitting by is supplied by ship-wood. It suggests the dangers of the sea, the sailor's longing for land and home. "But the life in port has its dangers too. There are worms which gnaw the ship in harbour, as the heart in sleep. Did some woman before her, in this very house perhaps, begin love's voyage full sail, and then suddenly see the ship's planks start, and hell open beneath the man she loves?"
IN THE DOORWAY.
She remonstrates with her fear. Winter is drawing nearer: nature becoming cold and bare. But they two have all the necessaries of life, and love besides. The human spirit (the spirit of love) was meant by God to resist change, to put its life into the darkness and the cold. It should fear neither.
IV.
ALONG THE BEACH.
The fear has become a certainty. The wife reasons with her husband as they walk together. "He wanted her love, and she gave it to him. He has it, and yet is not content. Why so? She is not blind to his faults, but she does not love him the less for them. She has taken him as he was, with the good seed in him and the bad, waiting patiently for the good to bring its harvest; enduring patiently when the harvest failed. Whether praiseworthy or blameworthy, he has been her world!"
"That is what condemns her in his eyes: she loves too well; she watches too patiently. His nature is impatient of bondage. Such devotion as hers is a bond."
V.
ON THE CLIFF.
She reflects on the power of love. A cricket and a butterfly settle down before her: one on a piece of burnt-up turf, one on the dark flat surface of a rock which the receding tide has left bare. The barren surfaces are transfigured by their brightness. Just so will love settle on the low or barren in life, and transform it.
READING A BOOK UNDER THE CLIFF.
She has reached the transition stage between struggle and resignation. She accepts change and its disappointments as the law of life. We discover this in her comment on the book in question, from which some verses are introduced.[71] The author apostrophizes a moaning wind which appeals to him as a voice of woe more eloquent than any which is given to animal or man: and asks it what form of suffering, mental or bodily, its sighs are trying to convey. James Lee's wife regards the mood here expressed as characteristic of a youthful spirit, disposed to enlarge upon the evils of existence by its over-weening consciousness of power to understand, strength to escape or overcome them. Such a one, she says, can only learn by sad experience what the wind in its moaning means: that subtle change which arrests the course of happiness, as the same wind, stirring however softly in a summer dawn, may annul the promise of its beauty.
She who has learnt it, can only ask herself if this old world-sorrow be cause for rejoicing through the onward impulse ever forced upon the soul; if it be sent to us in probation. She cannot answer. God alone knows. The fully realized significance of such death in life gives an unutterable pathos to her concluding words.
AMONG THE ROCKS.
She accepts disappointment as also a purifier of love. A sunny autumn morning is exercising its genial influence, and the courage of self-effacement awakens in her. 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. Its rewards must be sought in heaven.
VIII.
BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD.
She accepts the duties of life as an equivalent for its happiness, i.e., for the happiness of love. She has been drawing from the cast of a hand—enraptured with its delicate beauty—thinking how the rapture must have risen into love in the artist who saw it living; when the coarse (laborious) hand of a little peasant girl reminds her that life, whether beautiful or not, is the artist's noblest study; and that, as the uses of a hand are independent of its beauty and will survive it, life with its obligations will survive love. "She has been a fool to think she must be loved or die."
IX.
ON DECK.
She makes the final sacrifice to her husband's happiness, and leaves him. But in so doing she pays a last tribute to the omnipotence of love. She knows there is nothing in her that will claim a place in his remembrance. She knows also that if he had loved her, it might be otherwise. Love could have transformed her in his sight as it has transfigured him in hers. Their positions might even have been reversed. If one touch of such a love as hers could ever come to her in a thought of his, he might turn into a being as ill-favoured as herself. She would neither know nor care, since joy would have killed her.
We learn from the two last monologues, especially the last, that James Lee's wife was a plain woman. This may throw some light on the situation.
"THE WORST OF IT" is the cry of anguish of a man whose wife has been false to him, and who sees in her transgression only the injury she has inflicted on herself, and his own indirect part in its infliction. The strain of suppressed personal suffering betrays itself in his very endeavour to prove that he has not been wronged: that it was his fault, not hers, if his love maddened her, and the vows by which he had bound her were such as she could not keep. But the burden of his lament—"the worst of it" all—is, that her purity was once his salvation, her past kindness has for ever glorified his life; that she is dishonoured, and through him, and that no gratitude of his, no power of his, can rescue her from that dishonour. In his passionate tenderness he strives to pacify her conscience, and again, as earnestly to arouse it. "Her account is not with him who absolves her, but with the world which does not; with her endangered womanhood, her jeopardized hope of Heaven." He implores her for her own sake to return to virtue though not to him. For himself he renounces her even in Paradise. He "will pass nor turn" his "face" if they meet there.
The pathos of "TOO LATE" is all conveyed in its title. The loved woman is dead. She was the wife of another man than he who mourns for her. But so long as there was life there was hope. The lover might, he feels, have learned to compromise with the obstacles to his happiness. Some shock of circumstance might have rolled them away. If the loved one spurned him once, he had of late been earning her friendship. She might in time have discovered that the so-called poet whom she had preferred to him was a mere lay-figure whom her fancy had draped. But all this is at an end. Hope and opportunity are alike gone. He remains to condemn his own quiescence in what was perhaps not inevitable; in what proved no more for her happiness than for his. The husband is probably writing her epitaph.
"Too Late" expresses an attachment as individual as it is complete. "Edith" was not considered a beauty. She was not one even in her lover's eyes. This fact, and the manner in which he shows it, give a characteristic force to the situation.
FOOTNOTES:
The classification of this poem is open to the obvious objection that it is not a monologue; but a dialogue or alternation of monologues, in which the second speaker, Balaustion (who is also the narrator), is, for the time being, as real as the first. Its conception is, however, expressed in the first title; and the arguments and descriptions which Balaustion supplies only contribute to the vividness with which Aristophanes and his defence are brought before us. "Aristophanes' Apology" is identical in spirit with the other poems of this group.
This incident is founded on fact. It is related in Plutarch's Lives, that after the defeat of Nicias, all those of the captives who could recite something from Euripides were kindly treated by the Syracusans.
The name signifies celebration of the festival of the Thesmophoria. This was held by women only, in honour of Ceres and Proserpine.
The chorus of each new play was supplied to its author by the Government, when considered worth the outlay. Sketches of this and other plays alluded to in the course of the work may be read in the first volume of Mahaffy's "History of Classical Greek Literature."
The plays were performed at the lesser and greater festivals of Bacchus; this, the Lenaia, being the smaller one. Hence, the presence of priest as well as archon at the ensuing banquet