Browning's Heroines Part 25

[166:1] The "Toccata" which awakens these reflections in the poet is by a Venetian composer, Balda.s.sare Galuppi, who was born in 1706, and died in 1785. He lived and worked in London from 1741 to 1744. "He abounded"

(says Vernon Lee, in her _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_) "in melody, tender, pathetic, and brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty."

PART III

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LOVER]

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 a.n.a.logies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his pa.s.sion for humanity _as_ humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to trace those a.n.a.logies; 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 gra.s.s Never was"

--as here,

"Where a mult.i.tude of men breathed joy and woe Long ago; l.u.s.t of glory p.r.i.c.ked 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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sed, 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 s.e.x, 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 Inst.i.tute, which they are just pa.s.sing? "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 emanc.i.p.ated 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--