Browning's Heroines Part 1

Browning's Heroines.

by Ethel Colburn Mayne.

PREFACE

When this book was projected, some one asked, "What is there to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself?"--and the question, though it could not stay me, did chill momentarily my primal ardour. Soon, however, the restorative answer presented itself. "If there were nothing to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself, it would be a bad mark against him." For to _suggest_--to open magic cas.e.m.e.nts--surely is the office of our artists in every sort: thus, for them to say all that there is to say about anything is to show the cas.e.m.e.nt stuck fast, as it were, and themselves battering somewhat desperately to open it. Saying the things "about" is the other people's function. It is as if we suddenly saw a princess come out upon her castle-walls, and hymned that fair emergence, which to herself is nothing.

Browning, I think, is "coming back," as stars come back. There has been the period of obscuration. Seventeen years ago, when the _Yellow Book_ and the _National Observer_ were contending for _les jeunes_, Browning was, in the more "precious" coterie, king of modern poets. I can remember the editor of that golden Quarterly reading, declaiming, quoting, almost breathing, Browning! It was from Henry Harland that this reader learnt to read _The Ring and the Book_: "Leave out the lawyers and the Tertium Quid, and all after Guido until the Envoi." It was Henry Harland who would answer, if one asked him what he was thinking of:

"And thinking too--oh, thinking, if you like, How utterly dissociated was I. . . ."

--regardless of all apt.i.tude in the allusion, making it simply because it "burned up in his brain," just as days "struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm" were always _his_ days of excitement. . . . A hundred Browning verses sing themselves around my memories of the flat in Cromwell Road.

_Misconceptions_ was swung forth with gesture that figured swaying branches:

"This is a spray the bird clung to. . . ."

You were to notice how the rhythms bent and tossed like boughs in that first stanza--and to notice, also, how regrettable the second stanza was. Nor shall I easily let slip the memory of _Apparent Failure_, thus recited. He would begin at the second verse, the "Doric little Morgue"

verse. You were not to miss the great "phrase" in

"The three men who did most abhor Their lives in Paris yesterday. . . ."

--but you were to feel, scarce less keenly, the dire descent to bathos in "So killed themselves." It was almost the show-example, he would tell you, of Browning's chief defect--over-statement.

"How did it happen, my poor boy?

You wanted to be Bonaparte, And have the Tuileries for toy, And could not, so it broke your heart. . . ."

How compa.s.sionately he would give that forth! "A screen of gla.s.s, you're thankful for"; "Be quiet, and unclench your fist"; "Poor men G.o.d made, and all for this!"--the phrases (how alert we were for the "phrase" in those days) would fall grave and vibrant from the voice with its subtle foreign colouring: you could always infuriate "H. H." by telling him he had a foreign accent.

Those were Browning days; and now these are, or soon shall be. Two or three years since, to quote him was, in the opinion of a _Standard_ reviewer, to write yourself down a back-number, as they say. I preserve the cutting which d.a.m.ns with faint praise some thus antiquated short stories of 1910. Browning and Wagner were so obsolete! . . . How young that critic must have been--so young that he had never seen a star return. Quite differently they come back--or is it quite the same? Soon we shall be able to judge, for this star is returning, and--oh wonder!--is trailing clouds of glory of the very newest cut. The stars always do that, this watcher fancies, and certainly Browning, like the Jub-jub, was ages ahead of the fas.h.i.+on. His pa.s.sport for to-day is dated up to the very hour--for though he could be so many other things besides, one of his achievements, for us, will prove to have been that he could be so "ugly." _That_ would not have been reckoned among his glories in the Yellow Book-room; but the wheel shall come full circle--we shall be saying all this, one day, the other way round. For, as Browning consoles, encourages, and warns us by showing in _Fifine_,[x:1] each age believes--and should believe--that to it alone the secret of true art has been whispered.

ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE.

FOOTNOTES:

[x:1] I write far from my books, but the pa.s.sage will be easily found or recalled.

11 HOLLAND ROAD, KENSINGTON, W.

PART I

[Ill.u.s.tration: GIRLHOOD]

BROWNING'S HEROINES

INTRODUCTORY

Browning's power of embodying in rhythm the full beauty of girlhood is unequalled by any other English poet. Heine alone is his peer in this; but even Heine's imagination dwelt more fondly on the abstract pathos and purity of a maiden than on her individual gaiety and courage. In older women, also, these latter qualities were the spells for Browning; and, with him, a girl sets forth early on her brave career. That is the just adjective. His girls are as brave as the young knights of other poets; and in this appreciation of a dauntless gesture in women we see one of the reasons why he may be called the first "feminist" poet since Shakespeare. To me, indeed, even Shakespeare's maidens have less of the peculiar iridescence of their state than Browning's have, and I think this is because, already in the modern poet's day, girlhood was beginning to be seen as it had never been seen before--that is, as a "thing-by-itself." People had perceived--dimly enough, but with eyes which have since grown clearer-sighted--that there is a stage in woman's development which ought to be her very own to enjoy, as a man enjoys _his_ adolescence. This dawning sense is explicit in the earlier verses of one of Browning's most original utterances, _Evelyn Hope_, which is the call of a man, many years older, to the mysterious soul of a dead young girl--

"Sixteen years old when she died!

Perhaps she had hardly heard my name; It was not her time to love; beside, Her life had many a hope and aim, Duties enough and little cares, And now was quiet, now astir . . ."

Here recognition of the girl's individuality is complete. Not a word in the stanza hints at Evelyn's possible love for another man. "It was not her time"; there were quite different joys in life for her. . . . Such a view is even still something of a novelty, and Browning was the first to express it thus whole-heartedly. There had been, of course, from all time the hymning of maiden purity and innocence, but beneath such celebrations had lurked that predatory instinct which a still more modern poet has epitomised in a haunting and ambiguous phrase--

"For each man kills the thing he loves."

Thus, even in Shakespeare, the Girl is not so much that transient, exquisite thing as she is the Woman-in-love; thus, even for Rosalind, there waits the Emersonian _precis_--

"Whither went the lovely hoyden?

Disappeared in blessed wife; Servant to a wooden cradle, Living in a baby's life."

I confess that this tabloid "story of a woman" has, ever since my first discovery of it, been a source of anger to me; and I do not think that such resentment should be reckoned as a manifestation of modern decadence. The hustling out of sight of that "lovely hoyden" is unworthy of a poet; poet's eyes should rest longer upon beauty so irrecoverable--for though the wife and mother be the happiest that ever was, she can never be a girl again.

In the same way, to me the earliest verses of _Evelyn Hope_ are the loveliest. As I read on, doubts and questions gather fast--

"But the time will come--at last it will, When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say) In the lower earth, in the years long still, That body and soul so pure and gay?

Why your hair was amber, I shall divine, And your mouth of your own geranium's red-- And what you would do with me, in fine, In the new life come in the old one's stead.

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then, Given up myself so many times, Gained me the gains of various men, Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, Either I missed, or itself missed me: And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!

What is the issue? let us see!

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while.

My heart seemed full as it could hold?

There was place and to spare for the frank young smile, And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.

So, hush--I will give you this leaf to keep: See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!

There, that is our secret: go to sleep!

You will wake, and remember, and understand."

Here the average man is revived, the man who can imagine no meaning for the loveliness of a girl's body and soul but that it shall "do something" with him. When they meet in the "new life come in the old one's stead," this is the question he looks forward to asking; and instinctively, I think, we ask ourselves a different one. _Will_ Evelyn, on waking, "remember and understand"? Will she not have pa.s.sed by very far, in the spirit-world, this unconscious egotist? . . . True, he can to some extent realise that probability--

"Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few: Much is to learn, much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you."

But Browning has used the wrong word here. She whom the "good stars that met in her horoscope" had made of "spirit, fire, and dew," must, whether it be her desire to do so or not, eternally keep part of herself from the _taking_ of any man. . . . This is a curious lapse in Browning, to whom women are, in the highest sense of the word, individuals--not individualists, a less lovable and far more capturable thing. His heroines are indeed instinct with devotion, but it is devotion that chooses, not devotion that submits. A world of "gaiety and courage" lies between the two conceptions--a world, no less, of widened responsibility and heavier burdens for the devotee. If we compare a Browning heroine with a Byron one, we shall almost have traversed that new country, wherein the air grows ever more bracing as we travel onward.

With shrinking and timidity the Browning girl is unacquainted. As experience grows, these sensations may sadly touch her, but she will not have been prepared for them; no reason for feeling either had entered her dream of life. She trusts--

"Trust, that's purer than pearl"--