Part 23 (1/2)
Beatrice is alive, but she was drawn for him in the records of her trial. Even the woman of his later lyrics soon ceases to be flesh and blood. Keats let women alone, save in Isabella, and all that is of womanhood in her is derived from Boccaccio. Madeline is nothing but a picture. It is curious that his remarkable want of interest in the time in which he lived should be combined with as great a want of interest in women, as if the vivid life of any period in the history of a people were bound up with the vivid life of women in that period. When women awake no full emotion in a poet, the life of the time, as in the case of Keats, awakes little emotion in him. He will fly to the past for his subjects. Moreover, it is perhaps worth saying that when the poets cease to write well about women, the phase of poetry they represent, however beautiful it be, is beginning to decay. When poetry is born into a new life, women are as living in it as men. Womanhood became at once one of its dominant subjects in Tennyson and Browning. Among the new political, social, religious, philosophic and artistic ideas which were then borne like torches through England, the idea of the free development of women was also born; and it carried with it a strong emotion. They claimed the acknowledgment of their separate individuality, of their distinct use and power in the progress of the world. This was embodied with extraordinary fulness in _Aurora Leigh_, and its emotion drove itself into the work of Tennyson and Browning. How Tennyson treated the subject in the _Princess_ is well known. His representation of women in his other poems does not pa.s.s beyond a few simple, well-known types both of good and bad women. But the particular types into which the variety of womanhood continually throws itself, the quick individualities, the fantastic simplicities and subtleties, the resolute extremes, the unconsidered impulses, the obstinate good and evil, the bold cruelties and the bold self-sacrifices, the fears and audacities, the hidden work of the thoughts and pa.s.sions of women in the far-off worlds within them where their soul claims and possesses its own desires--these were beyond the power of Tennyson to describe, even, I think, to conceive. But they were in the power of Browning, and he made them, at least in lyric poetry, a chief part of his work.
In women he touched great variety and great individuality; two things each of which includes the other, and both of which were dear to his imagination. With his longing for variety of representation, he was not content to pile womanhood up into a few cla.s.ses, or to dwell on her universal qualities. He took each woman separately, marking out the points which differentiated her from, not those which she shared with, the rest of her s.e.x. He felt that if he dwelt only on the deep-seated roots of the tree of womanhood, he would miss the endless play, fancy, movement, interaction and variety of its branches, foliage and flowers.
Therefore, in his lyrical work, he leaves out for the most part the simpler elements of womanhood and draws the complex, the particular, the impulsive and the momentary. Each of his women is distinct from the rest. That is a great comfort in a world which, through laziness, wishes to busy itself with cla.s.ses rather than with personalities. I do not believe that Browning ever met man or woman without saying to himself--Here is a new world; it may be cla.s.sed, but it also stands alone. What distinguishes it from the rest--that I will know and that describe.
When women are not enslaved to conventions--and the new movement towards their freedom of development which began shortly after 1840 had enfranchised and has continued ever since to enfranchise a great number from this slavery--they are more individual and various than men are allowed to be. They carry their personal desires, aspirations and impulses into act, speech, and into extremes with much greater licence than is possible to men. One touches with them much more easily the original stuff of humanity. It was this original, individual and various Thing in women on which Browning seized with delight. He did not write half as much as other poets had done of woman as being loved by man or as loving him. I have said that the mere love-poem is no main element in his work. He wrote of the original stuff of womanhood, of its good and bad alike, sometimes of it as all good, as in Pompilia; but for the most part as mingled of good and ill, and of the good as destined to conquer the ill.
He did not exalt her above man. He thought her as vital, interesting and important for progress as man, but not more interesting, vital, or important. He neither lowered her nor idealised her beyond natural humanity. She stands in his poetry side by side with man on an equality of value to the present and future of mankind. And he has wrought this out not by elaborate statement of it in a theory, as Tennyson did in the _Princess_ with a conscious patronage of womanhood, but by unconscious representation of it in the mult.i.tude of women whom he invented.
But though the wholes were equal, the particulars of which the wholes were composed differed in their values; and women in his view were more keenly alive than men, at least more various in their manifestation of life. It was their intensity of life which most attracted him. He loved nothing so much as life--in plant or animal or man. His longer poems are records of the larger movement of human life, the steadfast record in quiet verse as in _Paracelsus_, or the clas.h.i.+ng together in abrupt verse as in _Sordello_, of the turmoil and meditation, the trouble and joy of the living soul of humanity. When he, this archangel of reality, got into touch with pure fact of the human soul, beating with life, he was enchanted. And this was his vast happiness in his longest poem, the _Ring and the Book_--
Do you see this square old yellow book I toss I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about By the crumpled vellum covers--pure crude fact Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard And brains, high blooded, ticked two centuries hence?
Give it me back. The thing's restorative I' the touch and sight.
But in his lyrics, it was not the steady development of life on which he loved to write, but the unexpected, original movement of life under the push of quick thought and sudden pa.s.sion into some new form of action which broke through the commonplace of existence. Men and women, and chiefly women, when they spoke and acted on a keen edge of life with a precipice below them or on the summit of the moment, with straight and clear intensity, and out of the original stuff of their nature--were his darling lyric subjects. And he did this work in lyrics, because the lyric is the poem of the moment.
There was one of these critical moments which attracted him greatly--that in which all after-life is contained and decided; when a step to the right or left settles, in an instant, the spiritual basis of the soul. I have already mentioned some of these poems--those concerned with love, such as _By the Fireside_ or _Cristina_--and the woman is more prominent in them than the man. One of the best of them, so far as the drawing of a woman is concerned, is _Dis aliter visum_. We see the innocent girl, and ten years after what the world has made of her. But the heart of the girl lies beneath the woman of the world. And she recalls to the man the hour when they lingered near the church on the cliff; when he loved her, when he might have claimed her, and did not.
He feared they might repent of it; sacrificing to the present their chance of the eternities of love. ”Fool! who ruined four lives--mine and your opera-dancer's, your own and my husband's!” Whether her outburst now be quite true to her whole self or not Browning does not let us know; but it is true to that moment of her, and it is full of the poetry of the moment she recalls. Moreover, these thirty short verses paint as no other man could have done the secret soul of a woman in society. I quote her outburst. It is full of Browning's keen poetry; and the first verse of it may well be compared with a similar moment in _By the Fireside_, where nature is made to play the same part, but succeeds as here she fails:
Now I may speak: you fool, for all Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?
What was the sea for? What, the grey Sad church, that solitary day, Crosses and graves and swallows' call?
Was there nought better than to enjoy?
No feat which, done, would make time break, And let us pent-up creatures through Into eternity, our due?
No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?
No wise beginning, here and now, What cannot grow complete (earth's feat) And heaven must finish, there and then?
No tasting earth's true food for men, Its sweet in sad, its sad in sweet?
No grasping at love, gaining a share O' the sole spark from G.o.d's life at strife With death, so, sure of range above The limits here? For us and love.
Failure; but, when G.o.d fails, despair.
This you call wisdom? Thus you add Good unto good again, in vain?
You loved, with body worn and weak; I loved, with faculties to seek: Were both loves worthless since ill-clad?
Let the mere star-fish in his vault Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed, Rose-jacynth to the finger tips: He, whole in body and soul, outstrips Man, found with either in default.
But what's whole, can increase no more, Is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere.
The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!
You knew not? That I well believe; Or you had saved two souls: nay, four.
For Stephanie sprained last night her wrist, Ankle or something. ”Pooh,” cry you?
At any rate she danced, all say, Vilely; her vogue has had its day.
Here comes my husband from his whist.
Here the woman speaks for herself. It is characteristic of Browning's boldness that there are a whole set of poems in which he imagines the unexpressed thoughts which a woman revolves in self-communion under the questionings and troubles of the pa.s.sions, and chiefly of the pa.s.sion of love. The most elaborate of these is _James Lee's Wife_, which tells what she thinks of when after long years she has been unable to retain her husband's love. Finally, she leaves him. The a.n.a.lysis of her thinking is interesting, but the woman is not. She is not the quick, natural woman Browning was able to paint so well when he chose. His own a.n.a.lytic excitement, which increases in mere intellectuality as the poem moves on, enters into her, and she thinks more through Browning the man than through her womanhood. Women are complex enough, more complex than men, but they are not complex in the fas.h.i.+on of this poem. Under the circ.u.mstances Browning has made, her thought would have been quite clear at its root, and indeed in its branches. She is represented as in love with her husband. Were she really in love, she would not have been so involved, or able to argue out her life so anxiously. Love or love's sorrow knows itself at once and altogether, and its cause and aim are simple. But Browning has unconsciously made the woman clear enough for us to guess the real cause of her departure. That departure is believed by some to be a self-sacrifice. There are folk who see self-sacrifice in everything Browning wrote about women. Browning may have originally intended her action to be one of self-sacrifice, but the thing, as he went on, was taken out of his hands, and turns out to be quite a different matter. The woman really leaves her husband because her love for him was tired out. She talks of leaving her husband free, and perhaps, in women's way, persuades herself that she is sacrificing herself; but she desires in reality to set herself free from an unavailing struggle to keep his love. There comes a time when the striving for love wearies out love itself. And James Lee's wife had reached that moment. Her departure, thus explained, is the most womanly thing in the poem, and I should not wonder if Browning meant it so. He knew what self-sacrifice really was, and this departure of the woman was not a true self-sacrifice.
Another of these poems in which a woman speaks out her heart is _Any Wife to any Husband_. She is dying, and she would fain claim his undying fidelity to his love of her; but though she believes in his love, she thinks, when her presence is not with him, that his nature will be drawn towards other women. Then what he brings her, when he meets her again, will not be perfect. Womanly to the core, and her nature is a beautiful nature, she says nothing which is not kind and true, and the picture she draws of faithfulness, without one stain of wavering, is natural and lovely. But, for all that, it is jealousy that speaks, the desire to claim all for one's self. ”Thou art mine, and mine only”--that fine selfishness which injures love so deeply in the end, because it forbids its expansion, that is, forbids the essential nature of love to act.
That may be pardoned, unless in its extremes, during life, if the pardon does not increase it; but this is in the hour of death, and it is unworthy of the higher world. To carry jealousy beyond the grave is a phase of that selfish pa.s.sion over which this hour, touched by the larger thought of the infinite world, should have uplifted the woman.