It is only the masculine lover whom Browning allows [thus] to get the better of unreturned love. His women have no such remedia amoris; their heart's blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. It is women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism, his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of the grief-pangs of his own sex. This distinction is very apparent in the group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love. An almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in A Woman's Last Word, In a Year, and Any Wife to Any Husband: the first, with its depth of self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it is, on the verge of the "sentimental." There is a rarer, subtler pathos in Two in the Campagna. The outward scene finds its way to his senses, and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply across it and sting it to a cry. He feels the Campagna about him, with its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:—
"Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air— ...
Such life here, through such length 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;"
and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he would fain also "be unashamed of soul" and probe [love's] wound to the core. But the invisible barriers will not be put aside or transcended, and in the midst of that "infinite passion" there remain "the finite hearts that yearn." Or else he wakes after the quarrel in the blitheness of a bright dawn:—
"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."
The disasters of love rarely, with Browning, stir us very deeply. His temperament was too elastic, his intellect too resourceful, to enter save by artificial processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief. Tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune—kinder to the man than to the poet—had as yet denied him, in love, the "baptism of sorrow" which has wrung immortal verse from the lips of frailer men. It may even be questioned whether all Browning's poetry of love's tragedy will live as long as a few stanzas of Musset's Nuits,—bare, unadorned verses, devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating as a cry:—
"Ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaître,
C'était par une triste nuit.
L'aile des vents battait à ma fenêtre;
J'étais seul, courbé sur mon lit.
J'y regardais une place chérie,
Tiède encor d'un baiser brûlant;
Et je songeais comme la femme oublie,
Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie,
Qui se déchirait lentement.
Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille,
Des cheveux, des débris d'amour.
Tout ce passé me criait à l'oreille
Ses éternels serments d'un jour.
Je contemplais ces réliques sacrées,
Qui me faisaient trembler la main:
Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorées,
Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurées
Ne reconnaîtront plus demain!"[37]
[37] Musset, Nuit de décembre.
The same quest of the problematic which attracted Browning to the poetry of passion repelled or unrequited made him a curious student also of fainter and feebler "wars of love"—embryonic or simulated forms of passion which stood still farther from his personal experience. A Light Woman, A Pretty Woman, and Another Way of Love are refined studies in this world of half tones. But the most important and individual poem of this group is The Statue and the Bust, an excellent example of the union in Browning of the Romantic temper with a peculiar mastery of everything in human nature which traverses and repudiates Romance. The duke and the lady are simpler and slighter Hamlets—Hamlets who have no agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach; intervening in the long pageant of the famous lovers of romantic tradition with the same disturbing shock as he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers. The poet's indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, apparently for not violating the vows of marriage, is puzzling to readers who do not appreciate the extreme [subtlety] of Browning's use of figure. He was at once too much and too little of a casuist,—too habituated to fine distinctions and too unaware of the pitfalls they often present to others,—to understand that in condemning his lovers for wanting the energy to commit a crime he could be supposed to imply approval of the crime they failed to commit.
Lastly, in the outer periphery of his love poetry belong his rare and fugitive "dreams" of love. Women and Roses has an intoxicating swiftness and buoyancy of music. But there is another and more sinister kind of love-dream—the dream of an unloved woman. Such a dream, with its tragic disillusion, Browning painted in his poignant and original In a Balcony. It is in no sense a drama, but a dramatic incident in three scenes, affecting the fates of three persons, upon whom the entire interest is concentrated. The three vivid and impressive character-heads stand out with intense and minute brilliance from a background absolutely blank and void. Though the scene is laid in a court and the heroine is a queen, there is no bustle of political intrigue, no conflict between the rival attractions of love and power, as in Colombe's Birthday. Love is the absorbing preoccupation of this society, the ultimate ground of all undertakings. There is vague talk of diplomatic victories, of dominions annexed, of public thanksgivings; but the statesman who has achieved all this did it all to win the hand of a girl, and the aged queen whom he has so successfully served has secretly dreamed all the time, [though] already wedded, of being his. For a brilliant young minister to fail to make love to his sovereign, in spite of her grey hairs and the marriage law, is a kind of high treason. In its social presuppositions this community belongs to a world as visionary as the mystic dream-politics of M. Maeterlinck. But, those presuppositions granted, everything in it has the uncompromising clearness and persuasive reality that Browning invariably communicates to his dreams. The three figures who in a few hours taste the height of ecstasy and then the bitterness of disillusion or severance, are drawn with remarkable psychologic force and truth. For all three love is the absorbing passion, the most real thing in life, scornfully contrasted with the reflected joys of the painter or the poet. Norbert's noble integrity is of a kind which mingles in duplicity and intrigue with disastrous results; he is too invincibly true to himself easily to act a part; but he can control the secret hunger of his heart and give no sign, until the consummate hour arrives when he may
"resume
Life after death (it is no less than life,
After such long unlovely labouring days)
And liberate to beauty life's great need
O' the beautiful, which, while it prompted work,
Suppress'd itself erewhile."