II
THE WOMAN WON
Love is not static. We may not sit down and say, "It cannot be more than now; it will not be less. Henceforth I take it for granted." Though she be won, there still is more to do. I say "she" (and Browning says it), because the taking-for-granted ideal is essentially man's—woman has never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is because men feel so keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it. Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come to an end of it—and, if we were wise, should not desire so to do.
But is she in truth so elusive? Are not women far simpler than they are accounted? "The First Reader in another language," I have elsewhere said of them; but doubtless a woman cannot be the judge. Let us see what Browning, subtle as few other men, thought of our lucidity.
"Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her—
Next time, herself!—not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew;
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather."
So elusive, says this man, is the real Herself! But (I maintain) she does not know it. She goes her way, unconscious—or, if conscious, blind to its deepest implication. Caprice, mood, whim: these indeed she uses, for fun, as it were, but of "the trouble behind her" she knows nothing. Just to rise from a couch, pull a curtain, pass through a room! How should she dream that the cornice-wreath blossomed anew? And when she tossed her hat off, or carefully put it on before the mirror . . . if the glass did gleam, it was a trick of light; she did not produce it! For, conscious of this magic, she would lose it; her very inapprehensiveness it is which "brings it off." Yet she loves to hear her lover tell of such imaginings, and the more he tells, the more there seem to be for him.
"Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune—
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares?
But 'tis twilight, you see—with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!"
Listening, she begins to understand how deeply he means "herself." It is not only the spell that she leaves behind her in the mere, actual rooms: it is the mystery residing in her "house of flesh." What does that house contain—where is she? He seems to hold her, yet she "goes out as he enters"; he seems to have found her, yet it is like hide-and-seek at twilight, and half-a-hundred hiders in a hundred rooms!
She listens, puzzled; perhaps a little frightened to be so much of a secret. For she never meant to be—she cannot feel that she is; and thus, how shall she help him to "find" her? Perhaps she must always elude? She does not desire that: he must not let her escape him! And he quickly answers:
"Escape me?
Never—
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue."
But she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. She wants him to find her. And this, in its turn, scares him.
"My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed."
It is the trouble of love. He may never reach her. . . . They look at one another, and he takes heart again.
"But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again—
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all."
But she is now almost repelled. She is not this enigma: she wants him to grasp her. Well, then, she can help him, he says:
"Look but once from your farthest bound
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me—
Ever
Removed!"
Is not this the meaning? The two poems seem to me supplementary of each other. First, the sense of her elusiveness; then the dim resentment and fear which this knowledge of mystery awakes in her. She does not (as I have seemed to make her) speak in either of these poems; but the thoughts are those which she must have, and so far, surely, her lover can divine her? The explanation given both by Mrs. Orr and Berdoe of Love in a Life (the first lyric), that the lover is "inhabiting the same house with his love," seems to me simply inept. Is it not clear that no material house[308:1] is meant? They are both inhabiting the body; and she, passing through this sphere, touching it at various points, leaves the spell of her mere being everywhere—on the curtain, the couch, the cornice-wreath, the mirror. But through her house he cannot range, as she through actualities. And though ever she eludes him, this is not what she sets out to do; she needs his comprehension; she does not desire to "escape" him.
The old enigma that is no enigma—the sphinx with the answer to the riddle ever trembling on her lips! But if she were understood, she might be taken for granted. . . . So the lips may tremble, but the answer is kept back:
"While the one eludes must the other pursue."
"The desire of the man is for the woman; the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man."
In those two poems the lovers are almost gay; they can turn and smile at one another 'mid the perplexity. The man is eager, resolute, humorous; the woman, if not acquiescent, is at least apprehending. The heart shall find her some day: "next time herself, not the trouble behind her!" She feels that she can aid him to that finding; it depends, in the last resort, on her.
But in Two in the Campagna a different lover is to deal with. What he wants is more than this. He wants to pass the limits of personality, to forget the search in the oneness. There is more than "finding" to be done: finding is not the secret. He tries to tell her—and he cannot tell her, for he does not himself fully know.
"I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?"
His thought escapes him ever. Like a spider's silvery thread it mocks and eludes; he seeks to catch it, to hang his rhymes upon it. . . . No; it escapes, escapes.
"Help me to hold it! First it left
The yellowing fennel. . . ."
What does the fennel mean? Something, but he cannot grasp it—and the thread now seems to float upon that weed with the orange cup, where five green beetles are groping—but not there either does it rest . . . it is all about him: entangling, eluding:
"Everywhere on the grassy slope,
I traced it. Hold it fast!"
The grassy slope may be the secret! That infinity of passion and peace—the Roman Campagna:
"The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air—
Rome's ghost since her decease."
And think of all that that plain even now stands for:
"Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers!"
They love one another: why cannot they be like that plain, why cannot they "let nature have her way"? Does she understand?
"How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?"
But always they stop short of one another. That is the dread mystery:
"I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
O' the wound, since wound must be?"
He longs to yield his will, his whole being—to see with her eyes, set his heart beating by hers, drink his fill from her soul; make her part his—be her. . . .
"No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul's warmth—I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak—
Then the good minute goes."
Goes—with such swiftness! Already he is "far out of it." And shall this never be different?
". . . Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow?"
He must indeed, for already he is "off again":
"Just when I seemed about to learn!"
Even the letting nature have her way is not the secret. The thread is lost again:
"The old trick! Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."
No contact is close enough. The passion is infinite, the hearts are finite. The deepest love must suffer this doom of isolation: plunged as they may be in one another, body and soul, in the very rapture is the sentence. The good minute goes. It shall be theirs again—again they shall trust it, again the thread be lost: "the old trick!"
For it is the very trick of life, as here we know it. The Campagna itself says that—
"Rome's ghost since her decease."
Mutability, mutability! Though the flowers are the primal, naked forms, they are not the same flowers; though love is ever new, it is ever old. New as to-day is new: old as to-day is old; and all the lovers have discerned, like him,
"Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."
For has she helped him to hold the thread? No; she too has been the sport of "the old trick." And even of that he cannot be wholly sure:
"I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt . . . ?"
In the enchanting Lovers' Quarrel we find a less metaphysical pair than those whom we have followed in their quest. This man has not taken her for granted, but neither has he frightened her with the mystery of her own and his elusiveness. No; these two have just had, very humanly and gladly, the "time of their lives"! All through the winter they have frolicked: there never was a more enchanting love than she, and plainly he has charmed her just as much. The same sort of fun appealed to them both at the same moment—games out of straws of their own devising; drawing one another's faces in the ashes of the hearth:
"Free on each other's flaws,
How we chattered like two church daws!"
And then the Times would come in—and the Emperor has married his Mlle. de Montijo!
"There they sit ermine-stoled,
And she powders her hair with gold."
Or a travel-book arrives from the library—and the two heads are close together over the pictures.
"Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
Miles and miles of gold and green
Where the sunflowers blow
In a solid glow,
And to break now and then the screen—
Black neck and eyeballs keen,
Up a wild horse leaps between!"
. . . No picture in the book like that—what a genius he is! The book is pushed away; and there lies the table bare:
"Try, will our table turn?
Lay your hands there light, and yearn
Till the yearning slips
Thro' the finger-tips
In a fire which a few discern,
And a very few feel burn,
And the rest, they may live and learn!
Then we would up and pace,
For a change, about the place,
Each with arm o'er neck:
'Tis our quarter-deck,
We are seamen in woeful case.
Help in the ocean-space!
Or, if no help, we'll embrace."
The next play must be "dressing-up"; for the sailor-game had ended in that nonsense of a kiss because they had not thought of dressing properly the parts:
"See how she looks now, dressed
In a sledging-cap and vest!
'Tis a huge fur cloak—
Like a reindeer's zoke
Falls the lappet along the breast:
Sleeves for her arms to rest,
Or to hang, as my Love likes best."
Now it is his turn; he must learn to "flirt a fan as the Spanish ladies can"—but she must pretend too, so he makes her a burnt-cork moustache, and she "turns into such a man!" . . .
All this was three months ago, when the snow first mesmerised the earth and put it to sleep. Snow-time is love-time—for hearts can then show all:
"How is earth to know
Neath the mute hand's to-and-fro?"
* * * * *
Three months ago—and now it is spring, and such a dawn of day! The March sun feels like May. He looks out upon it:
"All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey."
Yes—she is gone; they have quarrelled. Or rather, since it does not take two to do that wretched deed, she has quarrelled. It was some little thing that he said—neither sneer nor vaunt, nor reproach nor taunt:
"And the friends were friend and foe!"
She went away, and she has not come back, and it is three months ago.
One cannot help suspecting that the little thing he said, which was not so many things, must then have been something peculiarly tactless! This girl was not, like some of us, devoid of humour—that much is clear: laughter lived in her as in its home. What had he said? Whatever it was, he "did not mean it." But that is frequently the sting of stings. Spontaneity which hurts us hurts far more than malice can—for it is more evidently sincere in what it has of the too-much, or the too-little. . . . Well, angry exceedingly, or wounded exceedingly, she had gone, and still is gone—and he sits marvelling. Three months! Is she going to stay away for ever? Is she going to cast him off for a word, a "bubble born of breath"? Why, they had been one person!
"Me, do you leave aghast
With the memories We amassed?"
Just for "a moment's spite." . . . She ought to have understood.
"Love, if you knew the light
That your soul casts in my sight,
How I look to you
For the pure and true,
And the beauteous and the right—"
But so had she looked to him, and he had shown her "a moment's spite." . . . Yet he cannot believe that a hasty word can do all this against the other memories. Things like that are indeed for ever happening; trivialities thus can mar immensities. The eye can be blurred by a fly's foot; a straw can stop all the wondrous mechanism of the ear. But that is only the external world; endurance is easy there. It is different with love.
"Wrong in the one thing rare—
Oh, it is hard to bear!"
And especially hard now, in this "dawn of day." Little brooks must be dancing down the dell,
"Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love but attend as well."
But as she cannot, he will not. . . . Only, things will get lovelier every day, for the spring is back, or at any rate close at hand—the spring, when the almond-blossom blows.
"We shall have the word
In a minor third
There is none but the cuckoo knows:
Heaps of the guelder rose!
I must bear with it, I suppose."
For he would choose, if he could choose, that November should come back. Then there would be nothing for her to love but love! In such a world as spring and summer make, heart can dispense with heart; the sun is there, and the "flowers unnipped"; but in winter, freezing in the crypt, the heart cries: "Why should I freeze? Another heart, as chill as mine is now, would quiver back to life at the touch of this one":
"Heart, shall we live or die?
The rest . . . settle by-and-bye!"
Three months ago they were so happy! They lived blocked up with snow, the wind edged in and in, as far as it could get:
"Not to our ingle, though,
Where we loved each the other so!"
If it were but winter now again, instead of the terrible, lovely spring, when she will have the blue sky and the hawthorn-spray and the brooks to love—and the almond-blossom and the cuckoo, and that guelder-rose which he will have to bear with . . .
But, after all, it is November for their hearts! Hers is chill as his; she cannot live without him, as he cannot without her. If it were winter, "she'd efface the score and forgive him as before" (thus we perceive that this is not the first quarrel, that he has offended her before with that word which was not so many things!)—and what else is it but winter for their shivering hearts? So he begins to hope. In March, too, there are storms—here is one beginning now, at noon, which shows that it will last. . . . Not yet, then, the too lovely spring!
"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!"
. . . I think she came back. She would want to see how well he understood the spring—he who could make that picture of the Pampas' sheen and the wild horse. Why should spring's news unfold itself, and he not "say things" about it to her, like those he could say about the mere Times news? And it is impossible to bear with the guelder-rose—the guelder-rose must be adored. They will adore it together; she will efface the score, and forgive him as before. What fun it will be, in the worst of the storm, to feel him pull her through the door!
In The Lost Mistress it is really finished: she has dismissed him. We are not told why. It cannot be because he has not loved her—he who so tenderly, if so whimsically, accepts her decree. He will not let her see how much he suffers—he still can say the "little things" she liked.
"All's over, then: does truth sound bitter
As one at first believes?
Hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter
About your cottage eaves!
And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
I noticed that, to-day;
One day more breaks them open fully
—You know the red turns grey."
That is what his life has turned, but he will not maunder about it.
"To-morrow we meet the same then, dearest?
May I take your hand in mine?
Mere friends are we—well, friends the merest
Keep much that I resign."
He is no more "he" for her: he is a friend like the rest. He resigns. But the friends do not know what "he" knew.
"For each glance of the eye so bright and black
Though I keep with heart's endeavour—
Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
Though it stay in my soul for ever—"
. . . Is this like a friend? But he accepts her bidding—very nearly. There are some things, perhaps, that he may fail in, but she need not fear—he will try.
"Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
Or only a thought stronger;
I will hold your hand but as long as all may,
Or so very little longer!"
Again we have the typical Browning lover, who will not reproach nor scorn nor whine. But I think that this one had perhaps a little excess of whimsical humour. She would herself have needed a good deal of such humour to take this farewell just as it was offered. "Does truth sound bitter, as one at first believes?" Somewhat puzzling to her, it may be, that very philosophical reflection! . . . This has been called a noble, tender, an heroic, song of loss. For me there lurks a smile in it. I do not say that the smile makes the dismissal explicable; rather I a little wonder how she could have sent him away. But is it certain that she will not call him back, as she called the snowdrops? He means to hold her hand a little longer than the others do!
The Worst of It is the cry of a man whose young, beautiful wife has left him for a lover. He cares for nothing else in the world; his whole heart and soul, even now, are set on discovering how he may help her. But there is no way, for him. And the "worst of it" is that all has happened through him. She had given him herself, she had bound her soul by the "vows that damn"—and then had found that she must break them. And he proclaims her right to break them: no angel set them down!
But she—the pride of the day, the swan with no fleck on her wonder of white; she, with "the brow that looked like marble and smelt like myrrh," with the eyes and the grace and the glory! Is there to be no heaven for her—no crown for that brow? Shall other women be sainted, and not she, graced here beyond all saints?
"Hardly! That must be understood!
The earth is your place of penance, then."
But even the earthly punishment will be heavy for her to bear. . . . If it had only been he that was false, not she! He could have borne all easily; speckled as he is, a spot or two would have made little difference. And he is nothing, while she is all.
Too monstrously the magnanimity of this man weights the scale against the woman. Instinctively we seek a different "excuse" for her from that which he makes—though indeed there scarce is one at which he does not catch.
"And I to have tempted you"—
. . . that is, tempted her to snap her gold ring and break her promise:
"I to have tempted you! I, who tired
Your soul, no doubt, till it sank! Unwise,
I loved and was lowly, loved and aspired,
Loved, grieving or glad, till I made you mad,
And you meant to have hated and despised—
Whereas, you deceived me nor inquired!"
This is the too-much of magnanimity. Browning tends to exaggerate the beauty of that virtue, as already we have seen in Pompilia; and assuredly this husband has, like her, the defect of his quality. Tender, generous, high-hearted he is, but without the "sinew of the soul," as some old writer called anger. All these wonderful and subtle reasons for the tragic issue, all this apprehensive forecasting of the blow that awaits the woman "at the end of life," and the magnanimity which even then she shall find dreadfully awaiting her . . . all this is noble enough to read of, but imagine its atmosphere in daily life! The truth is that such natures are but wasted if they do not suffer—almost they might be called responsible for others' misdoings. We read the ringing stanzas of The Worst of It, and feel that no one should be doomed to suffer such forgiveness. What chance had her soul? At every turn it found itself forestalled, and shall so find itself, he tells her, to all eternity.
"I knew you once; but in Paradise,
If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."
No: this with me is not a favourite poem. The wife, beautiful and passionate, was never given a chance, in this world, to be "placed" at all in virtue; and she felt, no doubt, with a woman's intuition, that even in the last of all encounters she should still be baffled. Already that faultless husband is planning to be crushingly right on the Day of Judgment. And he is so crushingly right! He is not a prig, he is not a Pharisee; he is only perfectly magnanimous—perfectly right. . . . And sometimes, she must have thought vaguely, with a pucker on the glorious brow,—sometimes, to love lovably, we must yield a little of our virtue, we must be willing to be perfectly wrong.
But his suffering is genuine. She has twisted all his world out of shape. He believes no more in truth or beauty or life.
"We take our own method, the devil and I,
With pleasant and fair and wise and rare:
And the best we wish to what lives, is—death."
She is better off; she has committed a fault and has done . . . now she can begin again. But most likely she does not repent at all, he goes on to reflect—most likely she is glad she deceived him. She had endured too long:—
"[You] have done no evil and want no aid,
Will live the old life out and chance the new.
And your sentence is written all the same,
And I can do nothing—pray, perhaps:
But somehow the word pursues its game—
If I pray, if I curse—for better or worse:
And my faith is torn to a thousand scraps,
And my heart feels ice while my words breathe flame.
Dear, I look from my hiding-place.
Are you still so fair? Have you still the eyes?
Be happy! Add but the other grace,
Be good! Why want what the angels vaunt?
I knew you once: but in Paradise,
If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."
I think the saddest thing in this poem is its last stanza; for we feel, do we not? that now she is having her first opportunity to be both happy and good—free from the intolerable magnanimity of this husband. And so, by making a male utterance too "noble," Browning has almost redressed the balance. The tear had been too frequently assigned to woman; exultation too often had sounded from man. We have seen that many of the feminine "tears" were supererogatory; and now, in this chapter of the Woman Won, we see that she can tap the source of those salt drops in man. But not in James Lee's Wife is the top-note of magnanimity more strained than in The Worst of It. Moral gymnastics should not be practised at the expense of others. No one knew that better than Browning, but too often he allowed his subtle intellect to confute his warm, wise heart—too often he fell to the lure of "situation," and forgot the truth. "A man and woman might feel so," he sometimes seems to have said; "it does not matter that no man and woman ever have so felt."
And thus, now and then, he gave both men and women—the worst of it. But oftener he gave them such a best of it that I hardly can imagine a reader of Browning who has not love and courage in the heart, and trust and looking-forward in the soul; who does not, in the words of the great Epilogue:—
"Greet the unseen with a cheer."