And with no chilling of love on the man's part, this is the point of central pain, in that poem of exquisite and pathetic distrust at the heart of trust and admiration, Any Wife to any Husband; noble and faithful as the husband has been, still he is only a man. But elsewhere Browning does justice to the pure chivalry of a man's devotion. Caponsacchi's joy is the joy of a saviour who himself is saved; the great event of his life by which he is lifted above self is single and ultimate; his soul is delivered from careless egoism once and for ever; the grace of love is here what the theologians called invincible grace, and invincible grace, we know, results in final perseverance. Even here in Men and Women two contrasted poems assure us that, while the passion of a man may be no more than Love in a Life, it may also be an unweariable Life in a Love.
Of the poems of attainment one—Respectability—has the spirit of youth and gaiety in it. Here love makes its gallant bid for freedom, fires up for lawlessness, if need be, and at least sets convention at defiance:
The world's good word!—the Institute!
Guizot receives Montalembert!
Eh? Down the court three lampions flare:
Set forward your best foot!
But, after all, this love may be no more than an adventure of the boulevard and the attic in the manner of Béranger's gay Bohemianism. The distance is wide between such élan of youthful passion and the fidelity which is inevitable, and on which age has set its seal, in that poem of perfect attainment, By the Fireside. This is the love which completes the individual life and at the same time incorporates it with the life of humanity, which unites as one the past and the present, and which, owing no allegiance of a servile kind to time, becomes a pledge for futurity. Browning's personal experience is here taken up into his imagination and transfigured, but its substance remains what it had been in literal fact.
The poems of failure are more numerous, and they range through various degrees and kinds of failure. It is not death which can bring the sense of failure to love. In Evelyn Hope all the passion has been on the man's side; all possibilities of love in the virginal heart of the dead girl, all her warmth and sweetness, had been folded in the bud. But death, in the mood of infinite tenderness and unfulfilled aspiration which the poem expresses, seems no bar to some far-off attainment, of which the speaker's passion, breaking through time, is the assurance, an attainment the nature of which he cannot divine but which will surely explain the meaning of things that are now obscure. Perhaps the saddest and the most hopeless kind of failure is that in which, to borrow an image from the old allegory, the arrow of love all but flies to the mark and yet just misses it. This is the subject of a poem equally admirable in its descriptive and its emotional passages, Two in the Campagna. The line "One near one is too far," might serve as its motto. Satisfaction is all but reached and never can be reached. Two hearts touch and never can unite. One drop of the salt estranging sea is as unplumbed as the whole ocean. And the only possible end is
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.[[65]]
Compared with such a failure as this an offer of love rejected, rejected with decision but not ungenerously, may be accounted a success. There is something tonic to a brave heart in the putting forth of will, even though it encounter an obstacle which cannot be removed. Such is the mood which is presented in One Way of Love; the foiled lover has at least made his supreme effort; it has been fruitless, but he thinks with satisfaction that he has played boldly for the prize, and never can he say that it was not worth risking all on the bare chance of success:
She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!
Lose who may—I still can say
Those who win heaven, blest are they!
So, too, in The Last Ride together, the lover is defeated but he is not cast down, and he remains magnanimous throughout the grief of defeat. Who in this our life—he reflects—statesman or soldier, sculptor or poet, attains his complete ideal? He has been granted the grace of one hour by his mistress' side, and he will carry the grateful recollection of this with him into the future as his inalienable and his best possession. With these generous rejections and magnanimous acceptances of failure stands in contrast A Serenade at the Villa, where the lover's devotion is met only by obdurate insensibility or, worse, by an irritated sense of the persecution and plague of such love, and where all things seem to conspire to leave his pain mere pain, bitter and unredeemed.
In these examples, though love has been frustrated in its aim, the cause of failure did not lie in any infirmity of the lover's heart or will. But what if the will itself be supine, what if it dallies and delays, consults the convenience of occasions, observes the indications of a shallow prudence, slackens its pace towards the goal, and meanwhile the passion languishes and grows pale from day to day, until the day of love has waned, and the passion dies in a twilight hour through mere inanition? Such a failure as this seems to Browning to mean the perishing of a soul, or of more souls than one. He takes in The Statue and the Bust a case where the fulfilment of passion would have been a crime. The lady is a bride of the Riccardi; to win her, now a wedded wife, would be to violate the law of God and man. Nevertheless it is her face which has "filled the empty sheath of a man" with a blade for a knight's adventure—The