Browning's Heroines Part 26

Have and hold, then and there, Her, from head to foot, Breathing and mute, Pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sion's answering pa.s.sion.

"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 pa.s.sion 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 wors.h.i.+pped 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 G.o.d has not said a word!"

This poem was first published as the second of two headed "Madhouse Cells"; and though the cla.s.sifying t.i.tle 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.signed 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 Cyclopaedia_ 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 ant.i.thesis--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 mis...o...b..ed, 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 l.u.s.t. Round the King was gathered the _Pet.i.te 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 d.u.c.h.esse d'etampes, friend of the Dauphin's neglected wife, the Florentine Catherine de Medicis--foe of that wife's so silently detested rival, "Madame Dame Diane de Poitiers, Grande Seneschale de Normandie."

The two great mistresses had each her darling poet: the d.u.c.h.esse d'etampes had chosen Clement Marot, who could turn so gracefully the Psalms of David into verse; La Grande Seneschale, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt.

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.