Browning's Heroines Part 11

Oh, guilt enough . . ."

She of course refuses the name. He tells her to p.r.o.nounce, then, her own punishment.

Again her answer, in the utter falseness to all truth of its abas.e.m.e.nt, well-nigh sickens the soul:

"Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!

To die here in this chamber, by that sword, Would seem like punishment; so should I glide Like an arch-cheat, into extremest bliss!"

Comment upon that seems to me simply impossible. This is the woman to whom, but a page or two back, young Mertoun has sung the exquisite song, known to most readers of Browning's lyrics:

"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest, And her n.o.ble heart's the n.o.blest, yes, and her sure faith's the surest" . . .

Already in that hour with her, Mertoun must have learnt that some of those high words were turned to slighter uses when they sang of Mildred Tresham. In that hour he has spoken of the "meeting that appalled us both" (namely, the meeting with her brother, when he was to ask for her hand), saying that it is over and happiness begins, "such as the world contains not." When Mildred answers him with, "This will not be," we could accept, believingly, were only the sense of doom what her reply brought with it. But "this will not be," because they do not "deserve the whole world's best of blisses."

"Sin has surprised us, so will punishment."

And how strange, how sad for a woman is it, to see with what truth and courage Browning can make Mertoun speak! Each word that _he_ says can be brave and clear for all its recognition of their error; no word that _she_ says. . . . Her creator does not understand her; almost, thus, we do feel Mildred to be real, so quick is our resentment of the unrealities heaped on her. Imagining beforehand the moment when she shall receive in presence of them all "the partner of my guilty love"

(is not here the theatre in full blast?), the deception she must practise--called by her, in the vein so cruelly a.s.signed her, "this planned piece of deliberate wickedness" . . . imagining all this, she foresees herself unable to pretend, pouring forth "all our woeful story," and pictures them aghast, "as round some cursed fount that should spirt water and spouts blood." . . . "I'll not!" she cries--

". . . 'I'll not affect a grace That's gone from me--gone once, and gone for ever!'"

"Gone once, and gone for ever." True, when the grace _is_ gone; but surely not from her, in any real sense, had it gone--and would she not, in the deep knowledge of herself which comes with revelation to the world, have felt that pa.s.sionately? There are accusations of ourselves which indeed arraign ourselves, yet leave us our best pride. To me, not the error which made her prey to penitence was Mildred Tresham's "fall," but those crude cries of shame.

We take refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her brother--that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and conventional morality,"[90:1] Thorold, Earl Tresham; but not thus can we solace ourselves for Browning's failure. What a girl he might have given us in Mildred, had he listened only to himself! But, not yet in full possession of that self, he set up as an ideal the ideal of others, trying dutifully to see it as they see it, denying dutifully his deepest instinct; and, thus apostate, piled insincerity on insincerity, until at last no truth is anywhere, and we read on with growing alienation as each figure loses all of such reality as it ever had, and even Gwendolen, the "golden creature"--his own dauntless, individual woman, seeing and feeling truly through every fibre of her being--is lost amid the fog, is stifled in the stifling atmosphere, and only at the last, when Mildred and her brother are both dead, can once more say the word which lights us back to truth:

"Ah, Thorold, we can but--remember you!"

It was indeed all _they_ could do; but we, more fortunate, can forget him, imaging to ourselves the Mildred that Browning could have given us--the Mildred of whom her brother is made to say:

"You cannot know the good and tender heart, Its girl's trust and its woman's constancy, How pure yet pa.s.sionate, how calm yet kind, How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free As light where friends are . . ."

There she is, as Browning might have shown her! "Control's not for this lady," Tresham adds--the sign-manual of a Browning woman. As I have said, he can display this lovely type through others, can sing it in his own person, as in the exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak for herself--he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth departs from him; we have the Mildred Tresham of the theatre, of "the partner of my guilty love," of "Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!" of (in a later scene) "I think I might have urged some little point in my defence to Thorold"; of that last worst unreality of all, when Thorold has told her of his murder of her lover, and she cries:

". . . I--forgive not, But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls!

There! Do not think too much upon the past!

The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud While it stood up between my friend and you; You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that So past retrieve? I have his heart, you know; I may dispose of it: I give it you!

It loves you as mine loves!"

True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined, will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient claim for Thorold's deed--Thorold who dies with these words on his lips:

". . . You hold our 'scutcheon up.

Austin, no blot on it! You see how blood Must wash one blot away; the first blot came And the first blood came. To the vain world's eye All's gules again: no care to the vain world From whence the red was drawn!"

And on Austin's cry that "no blot shall come!" he answers:

"I said that: yet it did come. Should it come, Vengeance is G.o.d's, not man's. Remember me!"

_Vengeance_: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard that word, that "G.o.d"?

FOOTNOTES:

[90:1] Berdoe. _Browning Cyclopaedia._

IV

BALAUSTION

IN "BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE" AND "ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY"

To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women--nay, I am tempted to proclaim her queen of every poet's women. For in her meet all lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ (what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose--"enmisted by the scent it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb, statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the long, close argument of the _Apology_. In that piece, the Bald Bard himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes, the _Adventure_, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric phrases our queen before we crown her.

He comes to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that her adored Euripides is dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are "sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door, and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1] bids!"--and, heralded by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there enters, "stands in person, Aristophanes." Balaustion had never seen him till that moment, nor he her:

"Forward he stepped: I rose and fronted him";

and as thus for the first time they meet, he breaks into a paean of admiration:

"'You, lady? What, the Rhodian? Form and face, Victory's self upsoaring to receive The poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name, Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants, Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end In _ion_' . . ."

and trying to recall that name "in _ion_," he guesses two or three at random, seizing thus the occasion to express her effect on him:

"'Phibalion, for the mouth split red-fig-wise, Korakinidion, for the coal-black hair, Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness?'"

But none of these is right; "it was some fruit-flower"; and at last it comes: _Balaustion_, Wild-Pomegranate-Bloom, and he exclaims in ecstasy, "Thanks, Rhodes!"--for her fellow-countrymen had found this name for her, so apt in every way that her real name was forgotten, and as Balaustion she shall live and die.

"Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness"; and for all her intellect and ardour, it is greatly _this_ that makes Balaustion queen--the lovely eager sweetness, the tenderness, the "darlingness": Aristophanes guessed almost right!

How did she win the name of Wild-Pomegranate-Flower? We learn it from herself in the _Adventure_. Let us hear: let us feign ourselves members of the little band of friends, all girls, with their charming, chiming names: "Petale, Phullis, Charope, Chrusion"--to whom she cries in the delightful opening:

"About that strangest, saddest, sweetest song I, when a girl, heard in Kameiros once, And after, saved my life by? Oh, so glad To tell you the adventure!"

Part of the adventure is historical. In the second stage of the Peloponnesian War (that famous contention between the Athenians and the inhabitants of Peloponnesus which began on May 7, 431 B.C. and lasted twenty-seven years), the Athenian General, Nikias, had suffered disaster at Syracuse, and had given himself up, with all his army, to the Sicilians. But the a.s.surances of safety which he had received were quickly proved false. He was no sooner in the hands of the enemy than he was shamefully put to death with his naval ally, Demosthenes; and his troops were sent to the quarries, where the plague and the hard labour lessened their numbers and increased their miseries. When this bad news reached Rhodes, the islanders rose in revolt against the supremacy of Athens, and resolved to side with Sparta. Balaustion[96:1] was there, and she pa.s.sionately protested against this decision, crying to "who would hear, and those who loved me at Kameiros"[96:2]:

". . . No!

Never throw Athens off for Sparta's sake-- Never disloyal to the life and light Of the whole world worth calling world at all!

To Athens, all of us that have a soul, Follow me!"

and thus she drew together a little band, "and found a s.h.i.+p at Kaunos,"

and they turned