A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 21

"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 cla.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 ca.n.a.ls 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 impa.s.sioned 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.

"... The Three, I do not scorn To death, because they never lived: but I Have lived indeed, and so--(yet one more kiss)--can die!"

(vol. v. p. 77.)

"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 n.o.bler 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 t.i.tle. 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 circ.u.mstances, and also impressing itself on them; the circ.u.mstances 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 antic.i.p.ates 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 s.h.i.+p-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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p's planks start, and h.e.l.l open beneath the man she loves?"

III.

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 G.o.d 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 b.u.t.terfly 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.

VI.

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.

"Nothing can be as it has been before; Better, so call it, only not the same.

To draw one beauty into our hearts' core, And keep it changeless! such our claim; So answered,--Never more!"

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. G.o.d alone knows. The fully realized significance of such death in life gives an unutterable pathos to her concluding words.

VII.

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 enn.o.bled 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 coa.r.s.e (laborious) hand of a little peasant girl reminds her that life, whether beautiful or not, is the artist's n.o.blest 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 grat.i.tude of his, no power of his, can rescue her from that dishonour. In his pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.s nor turn" his "face" if they meet there.