Man never ceasing to follow the sun of his life in woman’s heart, his brother shall never cease to take interest in the story of an experience which at one time or another has cast its sunshine or shadow over the daily routine of his existence. In the hidden nooks and memory-places of each man’s life there abides the reality or ghost of an ideal, with woman’s hair and eyes and voice, cloistered in dreams of virtue and tenderness and inhabiting realms beyond reach and concern of man’s workaday world with its practical and sordid interests. This ideal is carried in secret hours when no man’s suspicion can detect the captured joy. It is far too holy a thing to have its birth and growth revealed to the unsympathetic knowledge of any whose hearts are not likewise confined in the prison-cage of a woman’s soul. It is left for poets and romancers to look into men’s hearts and tell the world the stories of these passions, for which life has given them the capacity to feel and enact, but not the subtlety and precision of speech to express and interpret.
The story of the “Wounded Eros” is, as the reader will discover, the story of an oblation full of inexplicable shadows. Certainly, as the lover relates the progress of his suit against the obstinacy and contradiction in the woman,—so vague in all her influences!—there is considerably less of that heroic attitude in a love-passion which we would be inclined to associate with one who is so unreasonably ill-used. This man is ever the optimistic lover in his despair; constant—even unalterably persistent—in the hope of ultimately touching and winning the sympathy of her nobler self in the woman. True, at times, because of that unimpeachable self-respect, which is the touchstone of all his dealings with life, he cannot keep silent about her faults of temperament. But the spirit in which he sings of these obvious shortcomings is one to chasten and correct that which does not so much offend his own sensibilities as it blemishes and affects the character and disposition of her womanhood. What true man has ever yet been blind to the faults in the woman he loved! These deepen and enlarge her virtues, since after all she is essentially human beneath the divinity with which the idealization of man envelops her being. But all poets do not conceive the sex so realistically in this respect as Mr. Gibson. Nor in this does he take away anything from the exquisite fascination that surrounds them. He makes, instead, more interesting and piquant those perverse elements in the character of this woman, which furnish the episodical themes for his sonnets to weave their unhappy design upon the loom of his story.
I want to indicate here what seem to me the important qualities in the poem, which are intended both to carry on its development from one emotional phase to another of the story, and simultaneously to reveal the peculiar personal characteristics of the man and woman. I want to mention them in their detached aspects, because I think they are effective in an unusual way. And while, after a close study of these sonnets, I am convinced of their origin in the imagination,—that is to say, there being no likelihood that the story is of an actually known experience,—I am impressed with the note of sincerity which will convince the reader of the poet’s serious and honest treatment of his material.
In the circumstance which ensnares the man’s affections as he conceives them, the author finds fate offering no atonement in the end for the bitter trials of faith and patience endured; and in his art the poet offers no compromise to appease the sentimentalist. Truth is too insistent of her rights. Logic is too tenacious, too pitilessly inflexible in its purpose of carrying the intentions of fate to its grievous conclusions. Not at any point in the poem is there the least suggestion that chance will alter the fortunes of this battle of hearts. Only through a heightened sense of moral duty in the woman could there come that strength of sacrifice which is the test of noble characters, and change the final note of despair into one of exultation. While, as I have said, the author does not attempt to work his art into false attitudes, it is, strangely enough, just this hope which underlies his apparent resignation at the end. He seems somehow to entrust Time to transform the alloy of inconstant youth in the nature of the beloved one into the purer womanhood of maturity, whom a larger experience and deeper knowledge of life will teach to surrender her heart to his constancy, faith, and unwearying devotion.
That there was a prophetic feeling from the very beginning that the fruits of his affection were to be bitter fruits, is suggested in Sonnet VII, where he declares, “Come, though I pay love’s price in future pain.” And yet, despite this open-eyed acceptance of a task so full of doubt, he can say in the very next Sonnet,—
“This pen
Now dedicate to love, thus born again
Out of thy breast....”
He makes the dedication of his life upon the altar of her heart with all its strange inconstancies. With unquestionable intention she has lured him with the skilfully exercised arts of girlish insouciance. And yet, while her conduct is not exemplary, and should be lightly treated as the dross mixture in the frivolous temperament of maidenhood, it is to be rigorously censured when it continues wilfully to exercise itself upon the serious nature of a man. Although the first thought one has, when doubt and dismay have been the reward of affection, is to be mercifully emancipated from the emotions which still make a woman dear, the heart cannot wholly abandon the ties no longer recognized; and so when, as in Sonnet XIII, he confesses,—
“I know not how to cast aside the power
That holds thy presence ever in my thought.
By night or day, thy coming once hath brought
Incessant longing for thee every hour.
Why can I not, in truth, then, overpower
This sense of something that is vainly sought,
And still content me with a friendship caught
From the occasional perfume of a flower?”
we feel in this case that the compromise is made in deference to the woman’s lack of self-reliance in being frank. “A friendship caught from the occasional perfume of a flower”—these lines, the most poetic and significant in the poem, are suggestive of a very subtle pathos; and obdurate as we are in not excusing the woman’s frailties, we do pity her weaknesses, much in the same way as our regretful pity spends itself on some beautiful wild flower with faint and wasting odors.
The flower of this lover’s heart is one nurtured by the sunlight of the world’s opinion. It is not sheltered in the quiet nook of pastoral inexperience with the ways of the urban world. Morally unspotted, it is ethically tainted with all the sophistication of its environment. As in Sonnet XIV, she is seen