We can find no difference between these great chronicles of the heart, beyond the fact of love winning or losing, except what time has made in the fashions of art between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. One cannot believe that the complex psychology in the interpretation of modern love makes that love essentially a different thing in man’s nature then in its more primal expression, when social conditions were less reticent and self-conscious in the tameless civilization of the mid-sixteenth century. Here is the ancient and immemorial love of man for woman, whose only change has been the difference between Adam waking to behold Eve beside him and the conventional introduction of the sexes which the custom of the twentieth century demands. The influence of time upon love is not more literal in the science of sociology than in the art of poetry, and one has but to take a typical Elizabethan amatory sonnet-sequence and compare it with Mr. Meredith’s “Modern Love,” Mr. Blunt’s “Esther,” or Mr. Gibson’s “The Wounded Eros,” to be convinced of this opinion. The elemental note in the great sonnet cycles, from Petrarch’s to those of our own day, being the realization of an objective ideal in the opposite sex, with the interpretation of it varying as human society progressed in its ethical, moral, and political aspects, there remains—what has always made the intensity of interest in this poetic form—the circumstance of personality giving tone and temperament to the particulars of this episodic drama of man’s heart. Apart from any consideration of the perfection of art in which any series of related love-sonnets may be dressed, this question of the personal attitude compels interest. It is the private chamber of a human heart opened without reserve, for the intrusion of strangers to behold the truth of a bitter or joyous experience, as fate may decree.
In this book of sonnets, there is touched a deep note of pathos in the unrequited passion of a man who tells the circumstances of his own love. It is so before all things, because it is the direct speech of a heart without subtlety. I mean, that he invents nothing that is illusory between himself and the object of his desire. If subtlety had been in the heart of this lover, one might have expected more frequent verbal conceits in the methods of telling his tale; but the lack of them by no means diminishes the importance of its human interest. Indeed, the modern sonnet has gained in this respect over its predecessors of the English Renaissance. And in Mr. Gibson’s sequence the interest is entirely a modern one.
These sonnets of the “Wounded Eros” keep, moreover, the dignity that belongs to the character of thought and feeling employed by the best examples. If less abstract in any symbolistic purpose, they gain narratively by allusions sufficiently definite to link each phase of emotion into a story,—the story old, but ever new, of passion in a man’s heart for a woman’s love,—and the character and progress of it unfolded in associations wholly spiritual. The one here celebrated leaves us with the impression of being a myth created in the fervent imagination of the poet. Her vague personality hovers in uncertain imagery about the edges of the poet’s metaphors. One feels her influence behind the poet’s conception of her virtues, her faults, and her physical charms, rather than by gaining any perception of her identity through speech or action. Yet it was around a similar ideal, or vision, that Dante and Petrarch wove stories of devotion and rhapsodic worship: and Shakespeare has been able to mystify the curiosity of three centuries of prying criticism and literary history.
Despite the revelation of the lover’s heart in this poem, the poet has veiled, if indeed she exists at all in any world more palpable than Arcadia, the object of his affection behind the profuse chronicling of his own feelings. It is through him the story proceeds for us; his nature acting as an impressionable substance upon which her influence shapes itself into mood and manner. Yet it is more often from memory and recollection—the consecration of a dream—that the image weaves its spell upon the worshipper:—
“Thou wilt not give me
Thy treasured self, more often than the time
Of every year doth change,”
he declares; and for a maiden so obdurate in denying those frequent meetings which are the very Eden of love’s progress, we can plainly see how the task became difficult in building the illusion of love between these two people of the imagination.
If it was the woman’s indifference which led to such arbitrary allowances of time when she might be visited, we can begin to understand from what source is taken the significance of the author’s title. The writer of these Sonnets had, as the reader following his story will discover, his love wounded by all the opposing fates of his passion concentrating in the cruelty and vanity of the woman he loved. That even in these qualities of disposition, however, she was without that self-conscious arrogance which intentionally hurts the feelings of honest and faithful affection, is attested throughout the entire poem by many a gracious allusion. We are prone to consider her innocent of any base premeditated wile or motive; like Keats’ Fanny Brawne, she simply lacked that sympathetic nature which was able to penetrate and appreciate the true worth in the man’s heart which fate had laid at her feet.
“Tell me, in truth, why thou dost still seem fond
Of me, yet ’neath my heart dost plunge the knife.”
This is the paradox in this woman’s nature, and a bit of real human nature it is of the gentler sex, the attempt to delineate which has been the theme of much noble music flowing from wounded hearts.
What is the mystery in the perverseness of such natures? Is it the complexity in personality, of which the possessor has neither knowledge nor control? Or is it the enigma of human nature moulded into the subtler diverse forms of the feminine sex? Whatever it is, it offers questions in psychology hard to deal with in any form of art. That it can at least be handled with interest, this poem shows. Mr. Gibson’s theme works out in its allotted way the immemorial conflict upon the old battleground. All the forces of individual character and temperament are levied in the pursuit and the evasion; and when in the end comes the surrender or escape,—happiness or despair in the heart,—there is still the same wonder and mystery of it all, such as man and woman have experienced over and over again since time began. The end of this battle of man’s and woman’s heart against terms of alliance with the opposite sex is always, and has always been, inexplicable. A force deeper than can be comprehended or controlled—the vital preservation of the human kind—draws them by its inevitable laws towards the completion of its wonderful purpose in mortal existence: and yet the peculiar circumstances of man’s intellectual sovereignty over the destiny of his kind have set this purpose into warring factions.