Chapter 8

I

LOVERS MEETING

Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life--the thing which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general outlook--more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his passion for humanity _as_ humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let us take them for granted--let us examine man as a separate phenomenon, so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest, next to mankind, was art in all its branches--a correlative aspect, that is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in expression of our subtlest inward life. Man _was_, for him, the proper study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," and that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit--differing there from Byron, almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature." Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook; and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.

In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for flabbiness--there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker ways. After _Pauline_--rejected utterance of his green-sickness--the wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up, "as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeed _do all_ for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted, but no _claim_ shall be formulated on either side. This is the true faith, the true freedom, for both. Meredith has said the same, more axiomatically than Browning ever said it:

"He learnt how much we gain who make no claims"

--but Browning's whole existence announced that axiom, and triumphantly proved it true. Almost the historic happy marriage of the world! Such was _his_ marriage, and such it must have been, for never was man declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. He understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!) conduct--what it may do, and not do, for happiness. That is to say, he understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far hinders it--when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. The whole secret, for Browning, lay in loving greatly.

Thus, for example, it is notable that, except _The Laboratory_ and _Fifine at the Fair_, none of his poems of men and women turns upon jealousy. For him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in love for it. And even Elvire's demurs (in _Fifine_), even the departure from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of insight into Juan's better self. He will never be all that he can be (she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be deep and true as well as brilliant.

For Browning, _how_ love comes is not important. It may be by the high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely answered, all is well. Living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our dearest memory.

"What is he buzzing in my ears? 'Now that I come to die, Do I view the world as a vale of tears?' Ah, reverend sir, not I!"

And why not? Because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man "used to meet." What he viewed in the world then, he now sees again--the "suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it were, with the bottles on the bedside table.

"At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, There watched for me, one June, A girl: I know, Sir, it's improper, My poor mind's out of tune."

Nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the details. . . . She left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,'"

"And stole from stair to stair,

And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas! We loved, Sir--used to meet: How sad and mad and bad it was-- But then, how it was sweet!"

They did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other "confession"--if he calls this one! It is the meaning of the man's life: that is all.

In _Confessions_, the story is done; the man is dying. In _Love among the Ruins_, we have almost the great moment itself. The lover, alone, is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before him. Here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of "a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful prince once held his court. There had been a "domed and daring palace," a wall with a hundred gates--its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve men might stand abreast. Now all is pasture-land:

"And such glory and perfection, see, of grass Never was"

--as here,

"Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe Long ago; Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame Struck them tame; And that glory and that shame alike, the gold Bought and sold."

Of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. It was part of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the chariot-races. . . . This is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles as it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes and rills melt into one grey . . . and he knows

"That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb Till I come."

That king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its temples and colonnades,

"All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts--and then All the men! When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand, Either hand On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace Of my face, Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech Each on each."

A million fighters were sent forth every year from that city; and they built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet still had a thousand chariots in reserve--all gold, of course. . . .

"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth's returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin. Shut them in With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best!"

But though love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all; we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us, even from our love. The day is long and we must work in it; but we can meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon can put off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand at the other side of the bay:

"Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!"

Yes--we can meet at night. . . . But we must part at morning.

"Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, And the sun looked over the mountain's rim; And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me."[205:1]

These are plainly not wedded lovers, though some commentators so describe them; and indeed Browning sings but seldom of wedded love. When he does so sing, he reaches heights of beauty beyond any in the other lyrics, but the poems of marriage are not in our survey. In nearly all his other love-poetry, it is the "trouble of love," in one form or another, which occupies him--the lovers who meet to part; those who love "in vain" (as the phrase goes, but never _his_ phrase); those who choose separation rather than defiance of the "world, and what it fears"; those who do defy that world, and reckon up their gains.

"Dear, had the world in its caprice Deigned to proclaim 'I know you both, Have recognised your plighted troth, Am sponsor for you: live in peace!'-- How many precious months and years Of youth had passed, that speed so fast, Before we found it out at last, The world, and what it fears?

How much of priceless life were spent With men that every virtue decks, And women models of their sex, Society's true ornament-- Ere we dared wander, nights like this, Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine, And feel the Boulevard break again To warmth and light and bliss?"

That old quarrel between the ideals of Bohemia and of "respectability"! They could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "People would have talked." . . . Well, people may talk now, but they _have_ gained something. They have gained freedom to live their lives as they choose--rightly or wrongly, but at any rate it is not "the world" that sways them. They have learnt how much that good word is worth! What is happening, this very hour, in that environment--here, for instance, in the Institute, which they are just passing? "Guizot receives Montalembert!" The two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. See the courtyard all alight for the reception! Let them escape from it all, and leave respectability to its false standards. _They_ are not included--they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!"

I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were pleased to think. The world still counted for them--as it counts for all who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once it recognises the true Contemner! To

"Feel the Boulevard break again To warmth and light and bliss"

--on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes--we must refuse to be dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short--they could not _forget_ the world.

Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn to the dream-meetings--the great encounters which all of us feel might be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so marvellously uttered in _Mesmerism_. Here, in these breathless stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey":

"Till I seemed to have and hold In the vacancy 'Twixt the walls and me From the hair-plait's chestnut-gold To the foot in its muslin fold--

Have and hold, then and there, Her, from head to foot, Breathing and mute, Passive and yet aware, In the grasp of my steady stare--

Hold and have, there and then, All her body and soul That completes my whole, All that women add to men, In the clutch of my steady ken"--

. . . if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of his hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he _must_ draw her from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to suffocate her if she cannot escape from it:

"Out of doors into the night! On to the maze Of the wild wood-ways, Not turning to left nor right From the pathway, blind with sight--

Swifter and still more swift, As the crowding peace Doth to joy increase In the wild blind eyes uplift Thro' the darkness and the drift!"

And he _will_ sit so, feeling his soul dilate, and no muscle shall be relaxed as he sees his belief come true, and more and more she takes shape for him, so that she shall be, when she does come, altered even from what she was at his first seeming to "have and hold her"--for the lips glow, the cheek burns, the hair, from its plait, breaks loose, and spreads with "a rich outburst, chestnut gold-interspersed," and the arms open wide "like the doors of a casket-shrine," as she comes, comes, comes . . .

"'Now--now'--the door is heard! Hark, the stairs! and near-- Nearer--and here-- 'Now!' and at call the third She enters without a word!"

* * * * *

Could a woman ever forget the man who should do that with her! Would she not almost be ready, in such an hour, to die as Porphyria died?

But in _Porphyria's Lover_, not so great a spirit speaks. This man, too, sitting in his room alone, thinks of the woman he loves, and she comes to him; but here it is her own will that drives through wind and rain--there is no compelling glory from the man uncertain still of passion's answering passion.

"The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria." . . .

She glided in and did not speak. She looked round his cottage, then kneeled and made the dying fire blaze up. When all the place was warm, she rose and put off her dripping cloak and shawl, the hat, the soiled gloves; she let her rain-touched hair fall loose,

"And, last, she sat down by my side And called me. When no voice replied,

She put my arm about her waist, And made her smooth white shoulder bare, And all her yellow hair displaced, And, stooping, made my cheek lie there, And spread o'er all her yellow hair--

Murmuring how she loved me--she Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour, To set its struggling passion free From pride, and vainer ties dissever, And give herself to me for ever."

But to-night, at some gay feast in a world all sundered from this man's, there had seized her

"A sudden thought of one so pale For love of her, and all in vain: So, she was come through wind and rain."

She found him indeed as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his grief--unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she calls to him, and as even then he makes no answer, sits down beside him and draws his head to her breast.

"Be sure I looked up at her eyes Happy and proud; at last I knew Porphyria worshipped me; surprise Made my heart swell, and still it grew While I debated what to do.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair, Perfectly pure and good: I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her." . . .

But he knows that she felt no pain, for in a minute he opened her lids to see, and the blue eyes laughed back at him "without a stain." He loosed the tress about her neck, and the colour flashed into her cheek beneath his burning kiss. Now he propped her head--this time _his_ shoulder bore

"The smiling rosy little head, So glad it has its utmost will, That all it scorned at once is fled, And I, its love, am gained instead!

Porphyria's love: she guessed not how Her darling one wish would be heard. And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!"

* * * * *

This poem was first published as the second of two headed "Madhouse Cells"; and though the classifying title was afterwards rejected, that it should ever have been used is something of a clue to the meaning. But only "something," for even so, we wonder if the dream were all a dream, if Porphyria ever came, and, if she did, was this the issue? What truly happened on that night of wind and rain?--that night which _is_ real, whatever else is not . . . I ask, we all ask; but does it greatly matter? Enough that we can grasp the deeper meaning--the sanity in the madness. As Porphyria, with her lover's head on her breast, sat in the little cottage on that stormy night, the world at last rejected, the love at last accepted, she was at her highest pulse of being: she was _herself_. When in all the rest of life would such another moment come? . . . How many lovers have mutually murmured that: "If we could die _now_!"--nothing impaired, nothing gone or to go from them: the sanity in the madness, the courage in the cowardice. . . . So this lover felt, brooding in the "madhouse cell" on what had been, or might have been:

"And thus we sit together now, And yet God has not said a word!"

Six poems of exultant love--and a man speaks in each! With Browning, the woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even _he_ puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. From the nameless girl in _Count Gismond_ and from Balaustion--these only--do we get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as I have just now shown. . . . Always the tear assigned to woman! It may be "true"; I think it is not at least _so_ true, but true in some degree it must be, since all legend will thus have it. What then shall a woman say? That the time has come to alter this? That woman cries "for nothing," like the children? That she does not understand so well as man the ends of love? Or that she understands them better? . . . Perhaps all of these things; perhaps some others also. Let us study now, at all events, the "tear"; let us see in what, as Browning saw her, the Trouble of Love consists for woman.

FOOTNOTES:

[205:1] Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the minds of some. In Berdoe's _Browning Cyclopædia_ the difficulty is frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He interprets the last line of _Parting at Morning_ as meaning that the woman "desires more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is the _man_ who speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him." Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him" refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . Here is an instance of making obscurity where none really exists.

[208:1] Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break in sense or sound."

II

TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S

I.--THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE"

Writing of the unnamed heroine of _Count Gismond_, I said that she had one of the characteristic Browning marks--that of trust in the sincerity of others. Here, in _The Glove_, we find a figure who resembles her in two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady--a lady of the Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training: _dis_-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very prize-bloom of legend--that famous incident of the glove thrown into the lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . Does this interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which, till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis--vanity! All the world knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried:

". . . 'Twas mere vanity, Not love, set that task to humanity!"

But Browning, who could detect the Court-grown, found excuse for her in that lamentable gardening. The weed had been sown, as it was sown (so much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this alone, to be older. _She had been longer at Court_; its lesson had penetrated her being. Day after day she had watched, day after day had listened; then arrived De Lorge with fervent words of love, and now she watched _him_, hearkened _him_ . . . and more and more misdoubted, hesitated, half-inclined and half-afraid; until at last, "one day struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," she gathered all her hesitation, yielding, courage, into one quick impulse--and flung her glove to the lions! With the result which we know--of an instant and a fearless answer to the test; but, as well, an instant confirmation of the worst she had dreaded.

+ + + + +

It was at the Court of King Francis I of France that it happened--the most brilliant Court, perhaps, in history, where the flower of French knighthood bloomed around the gayest, falsest of kings. Romance was in the air, and so was corruption; poets, artists, worked in every corner, and so did intrigue and baseness and lust. Round the King was gathered the _Petite Bande_, the clique within a clique--"that troop of pretty women who hunted with him, dined with him, talked with him"--led by his powerful mistress, the Duchesse d'Étampes, friend of the Dauphin's neglected wife, the Florentine Catherine de Médicis--foe of that wife's so silently detested rival, "Madame Dame Diane de Poitiers, Grande Sénéschale de Normandie."

The two great mistresses had each her darling poet: the Duchesse d'Étampes had chosen Clement Marot, who could turn so gracefully the Psalms of David into verse; La Grande Sénéschale, always supreme in taste, patronised Pierre Ronsard--and this was why Pierre sometimes found that when he "talked fine to King Francis," the King would yawn in his face, or whistle and move off to some better amusement.

That was what Francis did one day after the Peace of Cambray had been signed by France and Spain. He had grown weary of leisure:

"Here we've got peace, and aghast I'm Caught thinking war the true pastime. Is there a reason in metre? Give us your speech, master Peter!"

Peter obediently began, but he had hardly spoken half a dozen words before the King whistled aloud: "Let's go and look at our lions!"

They went to the courtyard, and as they went, the throng of courtiers mustered--lords and ladies came as thick as coloured clouds at sunset. Foremost among them (relates Ronsard in Browning's poem) were De Lorge and the lady he was "adoring."

"Oh, what a face! One by fits eyed Her, and the horrible pitside"

--for they were now all sitting above the arena round which the lions' dens were placed. The black Arab keeper was told to stir up the great beast, Bluebeard. A firework was accordingly dropped into the den, whose door had been opened . . . they all waited breathless, with beating hearts . . .

"Then earth in a sudden contortion Gave out to our gaze her abortion. Such a brute! . . . One's whole blood grew curdling and creepy To see the black mane, vast and heapy, The tail in the air stiff and straining, The wide eyes nor waxing nor waning."

And the poet, watching him, thought how perhaps in that eruption of noise and light, the lion had dreamed that his shackles were shivered, and he was free again.

"Ay, that was the open sky o'erhead! And you saw by the flash on his forehead, By the hope in those eyes wide and steady, He was leagues in the desert already."

The King laughed: "Was there a man among them all who would brave Bluebeard?" Not as a challenge did he say this--he knew well that it were almost certain death:

"Once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold!"

But Francis had scarcely finished speaking when (as all the world knows) a glove fluttered down into the arena and fell close to the lion. It was the glove of De Lorge's lady. They were sitting together, and he had been, as Ronsard could see, "weighing out fine speeches like gold from a balance." . . . He now delayed not an instant, but leaped over the barrier and walked straight up to the glove. The lion never moved; he was still staring (as all of us, with aching hearts, have seen such an one stare from his cage) at the far, unseen, remembered land. . . . De Lorge picked up the glove, calmly; calmly he walked back to the place where he had leaped the barrier before, leaped it again, and (once more, as all the world knows) dashed the glove in the lady's face. Every eye was on them. The King cried out in applause that _he_ would have done the same:

". . . 'Twas mere vanity, Not love, set that task to humanity!"

--and, having the royal word for it, all the lords and ladies turned with loathing from De Lorge's "queen dethroned."

All but Peter Ronsard. _He_ noticed that she retained undisturbed her self-possession amid the Court's mockery.

"As if from no pleasing experiment She rose, yet of pain not much heedful, So long as the process was needful.

* * * * *

She went out 'mid hooting and laughter; Clement Marot stayed; I followed after."

Catching her up, he asked what it had all meant. "I'm a poet," he added; "I must know human nature."

"She told me, 'Too long had I heard Of the deed proved alone by the word: For my love--what De Lorge would not dare! With my scorn--what De Lorge could compare! And the endless descriptions of death He would brave when my lip formed a breath, I must reckon as braved'" . . .

--and for these great gifts, must give in return her love, as love was understood at the Court of King Francis. But to-day, looking at the lion, she had mused on all the dangers affronted to get that beast to that den: his capture by some poor slave whom no lady's love was to reward, no King or Court to applaud, but only the joy of the sport, and the delight of his children's wonder at the glorious creature. . . . And at this very Court, the other day, did not they tell of a page who for mere boyish bravado had dropped his cap over the barrier and leaped across, pretending that he must get it back? Why should she not test De Lorge here and now? For _now_ she was still free; now she could find out what "death for her sake" really meant; otherwise, he might yet break down her doubts, she might yield, still unassured, and only then discover that it did not mean anything at all! So--she had thrown the glove.

"'The blow a glove gives is but weak: Does the mark yet discolour my cheek? But when the heart suffers a blow, Will the pain pass so soon, do you know?'"

* * * * *

De Lorge, indeed, had braved "death for her sake"; but he had then been capable of the public insult. The pain of _that_, had she loved him, must quite have broken her heart. And not only had he been capable of this, but he had not understood her, he too had thought it "mere vanity." Love then was nowhere--neither in his heart nor in hers. . . . Ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would pass. He was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as that of the brilliant De Lorge (thus Ronsard ironically remarks); but there was no doubt what _he_ would have done, "had our brute been Nemean." He would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought it right that he should earn what he so ardently desired.

"And when, shortly after, she carried Her shame from the Court, and they married, To that marriage some happiness, maugre The voice of the Court, I dared augur."

De Lorge led for some time the most brilliant of envied careers, and finally married a beauty who had been the King's mistress for a week. Thenceforth he fetched her gloves very diligently, at the hours when the King desired her presence and his absence--and never did he set off on that errand (looking daggers at her) but Francis took occasion to tell the Court the story of the other glove. And she would smile and say that he brought _hers_ with no murmur.

+ + + + +

Was the first lady right or wrong? She was right to hesitate in accepting De Lorge's "devotion"--not because De Lorge was worthless, but because she did not love him. The King spoke truly when he said that not love set that task to humanity. Neither did mere vanity set it, as we now perceive; but _only_ love could excuse the test which love could never have imposed. De Lorge was worthless--no matter; the lady held no right over him, whatever he was, for she did not love him. And not alone her "test" was the proof of this: her hesitation had already proved it.

But, it may be said, the age was different: women still believed that love could come to them through "wooing." Nowadays, to be sure, so subtle a woman as this would know that her own heart lay passive, and that women's hearts do not lie passive when they love. . . . But I think there were few things about love that women did not know in the days of King Francis! We have only to read the discourses of Marguerite de Valois, sister of the King--we have only to consider the story of Diane de Poitiers, seventeen years older than her Dauphin, to realise _that_ most fully. Women's hearts were the same; and a woman's heart, when it loves truly, will make no test for very pride-in-love's dear sake. It scorns tests--too much scorns them, it may be, and yet I know not. Again it is the Meredithian axiom which arrests me: "He learnt how much we gain who make no claims." Our lovers then may be, should be, prepared to plunge among the lions for our gloves--but we should not be able to send them! And if so, a De Lorge here and there should win a "hand" he merits not, we may reflect that the new, no more than the old, De Lorge will have won the _heart_ which doubts--and, doubting, flings (or keeps) the glove.

"Utter the true word--out and away Escapes her soul." . . .

Gloves flung to lions are not the answer which that enfranchised soul will give! And so the Lady thought right and did wrong: 'twas _not_ love set that task to humanity. Even Browning cannot win her our full pardon; we devote not many kerchiefs to drying this "tear."

II.--DÎS ALITER VISUM; OR, LE BYRON DE NOS JOURS

"The gods saw it otherwise." Thus we may translate the first clause of the title; the second, the reference to Byron, I have never understood, and I think shall never understand. Of all the accusations which stand against him, that of letting opportunity in this sort slip by is assuredly not one. Such "poor pretty thoughtful things" as the lady of this poem played their parts most notably in Byron's life--to their own disaster, it is true, but never because he weighed their worth in the spirit of this French poet, so bitterly at last accused, who meets again, ten years after the day of his cogitations, the subject of them in a Paris drawing-room--married, and as dissatisfied as he, who still is free. Reading the poem, indeed, with Byron in mind, the fancy comes to me that if it had been by any other man but Browning, it might almost be regarded as a sidelong vindication of the Frenchman for having rejected the "poor pretty thoughtful thing." For Byron married her[224:1]--and in what did it result? . . . But that Browning should in any fashion, however sidelong, acknowledge Byron as anything but the most despicable of mortals, cannot for a moment be imagined; he who understood so many complex beings failed entirely here. Thus, ever in perplexity, I must abjure the theory of Byronic merit. There lurks in this poem no hidden plea for abstention, for the "man who doesn't"--hinted at through compassionate use of his name who made one of the great disastrous marriages of the world.

+ + + + +

Ten years before this meeting in Paris, the two of the poem had known one another, though not with any high degree of intimacy, for only twice had they "walked and talked" together. He was even then "bent, wigged, and lamed":

"Famous, however, for verse and worse, Sure of the Fortieth spare Arm-chair"

--that is, the next vacancy at the French Academy, for so illustrious was he that his secondary reputation would not injure him.

She who now accuses him was then a "young beauty, round and sound as a mountain-apple," ingenuous, ardent, wealthy--the typical "poor pretty thoughtful thing" with aspirations, for she tried to sing and draw, read verse and thought she understood--at any rate, loved the Great, the Good, and the Beautiful. But to him her "culture" seemed pitifully amateurish--him who took the arts in his stride, as it were, who could float wide and free over the whole province of them, as the sea-gull floats over the waters. Nevertheless he had walked and talked with her "twice" at the little remote, unspoilt seaside resort where they had chanced to meet. It was strange that more people had not discovered it, so fine were the air and scenery--but it remained unvisited, and thus the two were thrown together. One scorching noon they met; he invited her to a stroll on the cliff-road. She took his arm, and (looking back upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . Now, recalling the episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she asks him what effect his divination of her trembling heart had had on him that day.

"Did you determine, as we stepped O'er the lone stone fence, 'Let me get Her for myself, and what's the earth With all its art, verse, music, worth-- Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?'"

For she knows, and she knew that _he_ knew, the prompt reply which would come if he "blurted out" a certain question--come in her instant silence, her downward look, the rush of colour to her cheek and brow. They would have returned from that walk as plighted lovers--he, old, famous, weary; she with her youth and beauty, her ardour and her wealth, all rapturously given, and with the happy prospect added to all other joys of being certain of applause for the distinction shown in her choice! . . . A perfect hour for both--while it lasted.

But (so she now reads his gone-by cogitations for him) it would not last. The daily life would reclaim them; Paris would follow, with full time for both to reason and reflect. . . . And thus (still interpreting to him the imagined outcome of his musings) she would regret that choice which had seemed to show her of the elect--for after all a poet _need_ not be fifty! Young men can be poets too, and though they blunder, there is something endearing in their blunders; moreover, one day they will be as "firm, quiet, and gay" as he, as expert in deceiving the world, which is all, in the last analysis, that such a man does.

For, if he _had_ spoken to her that day, what would he have said? (She is still expounding to him the situation of this potential married pair, as she has divined in her long musings that he then foresaw it.) He would not have said, like a boy, "Love me or I die." But neither would he have said the truth, which was simply that he wished to use her young ardour and vitality to help his age. Such was the demand which she (as, according to her, he then reasoned it out) would in time have accused him, tacitly or not, of having made upon her. . . . And what would his own reflections have been? She is ready to use her disconcerting clairvoyance for these also; nay, she can do more, she can tell him the very moment at which he acted upon them in advance! For as they foreshadowed themselves, he had ceased to press gently her arm to his side--she remembers well the stopping of that tender pressure, and now can connect the action with its mental source. _His_ reflection, then, would have been simply that he had thrown himself away, had bartered all he was and had been and might be--all his culture, knowledge of the world, guerdons of gold and great renown--for what? For "two cheeks freshened by youth and sea": a mere nosegay. _Him_, in exchange for a nosegay!

"That ended me." . . .

They duly admired the "grey sad church," on the cliff-top, with its scattered graveyard crosses, its garlands where the swallows perched; they "took their look" at the sea and sky, wondering afresh at the general ignorance of so attractive a little hole; then, finding the sun really too scorching, they descended, got back to the baths, to such civilisation as there was:

"And then, good-bye! Ten years since then: Ten years! We meet: you tell me, now, By a window-seat for that cliff-brow, On carpet-stripes for those sand-paths."

Ten years. He has a notorious liaison with a dancer at the Opera; she has married lovelessly. They have met again, and, in sentimental mood, he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually interesting, for the whole monologue proves that she can no longer be patronisingly summed up in "poor pretty thoughtful thing." And she has cried, in the words which open the poem:

"Stop, let me have the truth of that! Is that all true?"

--and at first, between jest and bitterness, has given him the sum of her musings on that moment when he decided to drop the nosegay.

For ten years he has had, tacitly, the last word: his decision has stood unchallenged. Nor shall it now be altered--he has begun to "tell" her, to meander sentimentally around that episode, but she will have nothing less than the truth; they will talk of it, yes, since he has so pleased, but they will talk of it in _her_ way. So she cuts him short, and draws this acid, witty little sketch for him. . . . Has she not matured? might it not have "done," after all? The nosegay was not so insipid! . . . But suddenly, while she mocks, the deeper "truth of that" invades her soul, and she must cease from cynic gibes, and yield the word to something greater in herself.

"Now I may speak: you fool, for all Your lore! Who made things plain in vain? What was the sea for? What, the grey Sad church, that solitary day, Crosses and graves and swallows' call?

Was there nought better than to enjoy? No feat which, done, would make time break, And let us pent-up creatures through Into eternity, our due? No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?

No grasping at love, gaining a share O' the sole spark from God's life at strife With death . . . ?"

He calls his decision wisdom? It is one kind of wisdom only, and that the least--"worldly" wisdom. He was old, and she was raw and sentimental--true; each might have missed something in the other; but completeness is not for our existence here, we await heaven for that. Only earthbound creatures--like the star-fish, for instance--become all they _can_ become in this sphere; man's soul must evolve. Have their souls evolved? And she cries that they have not:

"The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!"

Of course he "did not know" (as he now seems feebly to interpolate); she can well believe that, for if he had known, he would have saved two souls--nay, four. What of his Stephanie, who danced vilely last night, they say--will he not soon, like the public, abandon her now that "her vogue has had its day"? . . . And what of the speaker herself? It takes but half a dozen words to indicate _her_ lot:

"Here comes my husband from his whist."

What is "the truth of that"?

Again, I think, something of what I said in writing of _Youth and Art_: again not quite what Browning seems to wish us to accept. Love is the fulfilling of the law--with all my heart; but was love here? Does love weigh worth, as the poet did? does love marry the next comer, as the lady did? Mrs. Orr, devouter votary than I, explains that Browning meant "that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a vital impulse to the soul." Did one wish merely to be humorous, one might say that this was the most optimistic view of unsuccessful marriage which has yet found expression! But merely to be humorous is not what I wish: we must consider this belief, which Mrs. Orr further declares to be the expression of Browning's "poetic self." Assuredly it is true that stereotyped monotony, even if happy, does leave the soul unstirred to deepest depth. We may hesitate, nevertheless, to embrace the view that "only our mistakes are our experience"; and this is the view which seems to prevail in Mrs. Orr's interpretation of _Dîs Aliter Visum_. Mr. Symons says that the woman points out to the man "his fatal mistake." . . . But was it really a mistake at all? I do not, in urging that question, commit myself to the crass commonplace of Berdoe, who argues that "a more unreasonable match could hardly be imagined than this one would have been"! The "match" standpoint is not here our standpoint. _That_ is, simply, that love is the fulfilling of the law, and that these two people did not love. They were in the sentimental state which frequently results from pleasant chance encounters--and the experienced, subtle man of the world was able to perceive that, and to act upon it. That he has pursued his wonted way of life, and that she has married lovelessly (for a husband who plays whist is, by the unwritten law of romance, a husband who can by no possibility be loved!), proves merely that each has fallen away in the pursuit of any ideal which may then have urged itself--not that both would certainly have "saved their souls" if they had married one another. Speaking elsewhere in this book of Browning's theory of love, I said: "Love can do all, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something too"--but even love can do nothing if it is not there! Ideals need not be abandoned because they are not full-realised; and, were we in stern mood, it would be possible to declare that this lady had abandoned them more definitely than her poet had, since he at all times was frankly a worldling. Witty as she has become, there still remain in her, I fear, some traces of the poor pretty thoughtful thing. . . . To sum up, for this "tear" also we have but semi-sympathy; and Browning is again not at his best when he makes the Victim speak for herself.

III.--THE LABORATORY

Now let us see how he can make a woman speak when she suffers, but is not, and will not be, a victim.

At once she is a completely realised human creature, uttering herself in such abandonment of all pretence as never fails to compass majesty. Into the soul of this woman in _The Laboratory_, Browning has penetrated till he seems to breathe with her breath. I question if there is another fictive utterance to surpass this one in authenticity. It bears the Great Seal. Not Shakespeare has outdone it in power and concentration. Every word counts, almost every comma--for, like Browning, we too seem to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech is _our_ pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant and civilised consciousness, is at any rate effectively inhibited.

+ + + + +

She is a Court lady of the _ancien régime_, in the great Brinvilliers poisoning-period, and she is buying from an old alchemist in his laboratory the draught which is to kill her triumphant rival. Small, gorgeous, and intense, she sits in the strange den and watches the old wizard set about his work. She is due to dance at the King's, but there is no hurry: he may take as long as he chooses. . . . Now she must put on a glass mask like his, the old man tells her, for these "faint smokes that curl whitely" are themselves poisonous--and she submits, and with all her intensity at work, ties it on "tightly"; then sits again, to peer through the fumes of the devil's-smithy. But she cannot be silent; even to him--and after all, is such an one as he quite truly a man!--she must pour forth the anguish of her soul. Questions relieve her now and then:

"Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?"

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

"He is with her, and they know that I know Where they are, what they do . . ."

--the pitiful self-consciousness of such torment, unable to believe in the oblivion (familiar as it has been in past good hours) which sweeps through lovers in their bliss. They could not forget _me_, she thinks, as all her sister-sufferers think. . . . Yet even in this hell, there is some solace. They must be remembering her, and

". . . they believe my tears flow While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."

Yes, here--where the old man works for her: grinding, moistening, and mashing his paste, pounding at his powder. It is better to sit here and watch him than go dance at the King's; and she looks round in her restless, nervous anguish--the dagger in her heart, but this way, _this_ way, to stanch the wound it makes!

"That in the mortar--you call it a gum? Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come! And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue, Sure to taste sweetly--is that poison too?"

But, maddened by the deadlier drug of wretchedness, she loses for a moment the single vision of her rival: it were good to have _all_ the old man's treasures, for the joy of dealing death around her at that hateful Court where each knows of her misery.

"To carry pure death in an earring, a casket, A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!"

She need but give a lozenge "at the King's," and Pauline should die in half an hour; or light a pastille, and Elise, "with her head and her breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead." . . . But he is taking too long.

"Quick--is it finished? The colour's too grim! Why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim?"

For if it were, she could watch that other stir it into her drink, and dally with "the exquisite blue," and then, great glowing creature, lift the goblet to her lips, and taste. . . . But one must be content: the old man knows--this grim drug is the deadly drug; only, as she bends to the vessel again, a new doubt assails her.

"What a drop! She's not little, no minion like me-- That's why she ensnared him: this never will free The soul from those masculine eyes--say, 'No!' To that pulse's magnificent come-and-go.

For only last night, as they whispered, I brought My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall, Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all!"

* * * * *

But it is not painless in its working? She does not desire that: she wants the other to _feel_ death; more--she wants the proof of death to remain,

"Brand, burn up, bite into its grace[236:1]-- He is sure to remember her dying face!"

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

"It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close."

She is not afraid to dispense with the protecting vizor:

"_If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?_"

There it lies--there. . . .

"Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill, You may kiss me, old man, on the mouth if you will!"

--and, looking her last look round the den, she prepares to go; but what is that mark on her gorgeous gown? Brush it off! Brush off that dust! It might bring horror down on her in an instant, before she knows or thinks, and she is going straight from here to dance at the King's. . . . She is gone, with her jealousy and her anguish and her passion, and, clutched to her heart, the phial that shall end but one of those torments.

+ + + + +

She is gone, and she remains for ever. Her age is past, but not the hearts that ached in it. We curb those hearts to-day; we do not poison now; but have we forgotten the mood for poisoning?

"If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?"

Such fiercenesses are silenced now; but, silent, they have still their utterance, and it is here.

IV.--IN A YEAR

Nay--here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the "dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of _The Laboratory_ may have known, like the girl here, only dim, aching wonder at her lover's mutability.

"Was it something said, Something done, Vexed him? was it touch of hand, Turn of head? Strange! that very way Love begun: I as little understand Love's decay."[238:1]

Here, again, is full authenticity. Girl-like, she sits and broods upon it all--not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. So greatly that still, still, she can dream:

"Would he loved me yet, On and on, While I found some way undreamed --Paid my debt! Gave more life and more, Till, all gone, He should smile, 'She never seemed Mine before.'"

But this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over" too, though not yet ended. How will it end for her?

"Well, this cold clay clod Was man's heart: Crumble it, and what comes next? Is it God ?" . . .

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

"'Dying for my sake-- White and pink! Can't we touch these bubbles then But they break?'"

That is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done since the world began, and will do till it ends.[239:1]

Then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has been between them, clearly he has not known that yet. . . . Again, the supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly _all_ the love, can never turn away from it. Most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams--yet after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who loves truly?

Yet indeed (she now muses) _has_ she enough loved him?

"I had wealth and ease, Beauty, youth: Since my lover gave me love, I gave these.

That was all I meant --To be just, And the passion I had raised To content. Since he chose to change Gold for dust, If I gave him what he praised, Was it strange?"

And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that "way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . .

I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted above:

"_And the passion I had raised To content._"

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

"I, too, at love's brim Touched the sweet: I would die if death bequeathed Sweet to him."

This is more than to "content" the "passion she had raised." Let us regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not express either the girl or her poet.

The rest comes right and true--and more than all, perhaps, the second verse, where the mystery of passion in its coming no less than in its going is so subtly indicated.

"Strange! that very way Love begun: I _as little understand_ Love's decay."

We hear to-day of love that aims at reason. Love forbid that I should say love knows not reason--but love and God forbid that it should _aim_ at reason! Leave us that unwisdom at least: we are so wise to-day.

+ + + + +

This ardent, gentle girl must suffer, and will suffer long--but will not die. She will live and she will grow. Shall she then look back with scorn upon that earlier self? . . . We talk much now of "re-incarnation," and always by our talk we seem to mean the coming-back to earth of a spirit which at some time has left it. But are there not re-incarnations of the still embodied spirit--is not re-incarnation, like eternity, with us here and now, as we "in this body" live and suffer and despair, and lift our hearts again to hope and faith? How many of us--grown, not changed--can pityingly look back at ourselves in some such dying moment as this poem shows us; for death it is to that "ourself." Hearts do not break, but hearts do die--_that_ heart, _that_ self: we pass into a Hades.

"Well, this cold clay clod Was man's heart: Crumble it, and what comes next? Is it God?"

Or is it new heart, new self, new life? We come forth enfranchised from our Hades. The evil days, the cruel days--we call them back (a little, it may be, ashamed of our escape!) and still the blest remoteness will endure: it was wonderful how it could suffer, the poor heart. . . . Surely this is re-incarnation; surely no returning spirit witnesses more clearly to a transition-state? We _have been_ dead; but this "us" who comes back to the world we knew is still the same--the heart will answer as it once could answer, the spirit thrill as once it thrilled. Only--this is the proof--both heart and spirit are _further on_; both have, as it were, gone past the earlier summons and the earlier sense of love; and so, evoking such an hour as this, when we could dream of "dying for his sake, white and pink," we smile in tender, not in scornful, pity--knowing now that "way undreamed" of our girl's dream, and knowing that that way is not to die, but live and grow, since love that changes "in a year" is not the love to die, or live, for.

FOOTNOTES:

[224:1] The descriptive phrase above might really, at a pinch, be applied to Annabella Milbanke.

[236:1] Note the fierceness achieved by the shortening and the alliteration in this line.

[238:1] Mark how the deferred rhymes paint the groping thoughts. Only after much questioning can the answer come, as it were, in the "chime of the rhyme."

[239:1] And men also, I hasten to add, that there may be no pluming of male feathers--if indeed this be an occasion for pluming on either side.