Part 17 (1/2)
Another motive, used with varied circ.u.mstance in three or four poems, but fully expanded in _James Lee's Wife_, is the discovery, after years of love, that love on one side is lost irretrievably. Another motive is, that rather than lose love men or women will often sacrifice their conscience, their reason, or their liberty. This sacrifice, of all that makes our n.o.bler being for the sake of personal love alone, brings with it, because the whole being is degraded, the degradation, decay, and death of personal love itself.
Another set of poems describes with fanciful charm, sometimes with happy gaiety, love at play with itself. True love makes in the soul an unfathomable ocean in whose depths are the imaginations of love, serious, infinite, and divine. But on its surface the light of jewelled fancies plays--a thousand thousand sunny memories and hopes, flying thoughts and dancing feelings. A poet would be certain to have often seen this happy crowd, and to desire to trick them out in song. So Browning does in his poem, _In a Gondola_. The two lovers, with the dark shadow of fate brooding over them, sing and muse and speak alternately, imaging in swift and rival pictures made by fancy their deep-set love; playing with its changes, creating new worlds in which to place it, but always returning to its isolated individuality; recalling how it began, the room where it reached its aim, the pictures, the furniture, the balcony, her dress, all the scenery, in a hundred happy and glancing pictures; while interlaced through their gaiety--and the gaiety made keener by the nearness of dark fate--is coming death, death well purchased by an hour of love. Finally, the lover is stabbed and slain, and the pity of it throws back over the suns.h.i.+ne of love's fancies a cloud of tears. This is the stuff of life that Browning loved to paint--interwoven darkness and brightness, sorrow and joy trembling each on the edge of the other, life playing at ball, as joyous as Nausicaa and her maids, on a thin crust over a gulf of death.
Just such another poem--of the sportiveness of love, only this time in memory, not in present pleasure, is to be found in _A Lovers' Quarrel_, and the quarrel is the dark element in it. Browning always feels that mighty pa.s.sion has its root in tragedy, and that it seeks relief in comedy. The lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had together, when love expressed its depth of pleasure in dramatic fancies. Every separate picture is done in Browning's impressionist way. And when the glad memories are over, and the sorrow returns, pa.s.sion leaps out--
It is twelve o'clock: I shall hear her knock In the worst of a storm's uproar, I shall pull her through the door, I shall have her for evermore!
This is partly a study of the memory of love; and Browning has represented, without any sorrow linked to it, memorial love in a variety of characters under different circ.u.mstances, so that, though the subject is the same, the treatment varies. A charming instance of this is _The Flowers Name_; easy to read, happy in its fancy, in its scenery, in the subtle play of deep affection, in the character of its lover, in the character of the girl who is remembered--a good example of Browning's power to image in a few verses two human souls so clearly that they live in our world for ever. _Meeting at Night--Parting at Morning_ is another reminiscence, mixed up with the natural scenery of the meeting and parting, a vivid recollection of a fleeting night of pa.s.sion, and then the abandonment of its isolation for a wider, fuller life with humanity.
I quote it for the fine impa.s.sioned way in which human feeling and natural scenery are fused together.
MEETING AT NIGHT.
The grey sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep, As I gain the cove with pus.h.i.+ng prow.
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.
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!
PARTING 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.
The poem ent.i.tled _Confessions_ is another of these memories, in which a dying man, careless of death, careless of the dull conventions of the clergyman, cares for nothing but the memory of his early pa.s.sion for a girl one happy June, and dies in comfort of the sweetness of the memory, though he thinks--
How sad and bad and mad it was.
Few but Browning would have seen, and fewer still have recorded, this vital piece of truth. It represents a whole type of character--those who in a life of weary work keep their day of love, even when it has been wrong, as their one poetic, ideal possession, and cherish it for ever.
The wrong of it disappears in the ideal beauty which now has gathered round it, and as it was faithful, unmixed with other love, it escapes degradation. We see, when the man images the past and its scenery out of the bottles of physic on the table, how the material world had been idealised to him all his life long by this pa.s.sionate memory--
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I.
It might be well to compare with this another treatment of the memory of love in _St. Martin's Summer_. A much less interesting and natural motive rules it than _Confessions_; and the characters, though more ”in society” than the dying man, are grosser in nature; gross by their inability to love, or by loving freshly to make a new world in which the old sorrow dies or is transformed. There is no humour in the thing, though there is bitter irony. But there is humour in an earlier poem--_A Serenade at the Villa_, where, in the last verse, the bitterness of wrath and love together (a very different bitterness from that of _St.
Martin's Summer_), breaks out, and is attributed to the garden gate. The night-watch and the singing is over; she must have heard him, but she gave no sign. He wonders what she thought, and then, because he was only half in love, flings away--
Oh how dark your villa was, Windows fast and obdurate!
How the garden grudged me gra.s.s Where I stood--the iron gate Ground its teeth to let me pa.s.s!
It is impossible to notice all these studies of love, but they form, together, a book of transient phases of the pa.s.sion in almost every cla.s.s of society. And they show how Browning, pa.s.sing through the world, from the Quartier Latin to London drawing-rooms, was continually on the watch to catch, store up, and reproduce a crowd of motives for poetry which his memory held and his imagination shaped.
There is only one more poem, which I cannot pa.s.s by in this group of studies. It is one of sacred and personal memory, so much so that it is probable the loss of his life lies beneath it. It rises into that highest poetry which fuses together into one form a hundred thoughts and a hundred emotions, and which is only obscure from the mingling of their mult.i.tude. I quote it, I cannot comment on it.
Never the time and the place And the loved one all together!
This path--how soft to pace!
This May--what magic weather!
Where is the loved one's face?
In a dream that loved one's face meets mine But the house is narrow, the place is bleak Where, outside, rain and wind combine With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak, With a hostile eye at my flus.h.i.+ng cheek, With a malice that marks each word, each sign!