That old quarrel between the ideals of Bohemia and of "respectability"! They could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "People would have talked." . . . Well, people may talk now, but they have gained something. They have gained freedom to live their lives as they choose—rightly or wrongly, but at any rate it is not "the world" that sways them. They have learnt how much that good word is worth! What is happening, this very hour, in that environment—here, for instance, in the Institute, which they are just passing? "Guizot receives Montalembert!" The two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. See the courtyard all alight for the reception! Let them escape from it all, and leave respectability to its false standards. They are not included—they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!"
I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were pleased to think. The world still counted for them—as it counts for all who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once it recognises the true Contemner! To
"Feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss"
—on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes—we must refuse to be dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short—they could not forget the world.
Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn to the dream-meetings—the great encounters which all of us feel might be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so marvellously uttered in Mesmerism. Here, in these breathless stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey":
"Till I seemed to have and hold
In the vacancy
'Twixt the walls and me
From the hair-plait's chestnut-gold
To the foot in its muslin fold—
Have and hold, then and there,
Her, from head to foot,
Breathing and mute,
Passive and yet aware,
In the grasp of my steady stare—
Hold and have, there and then,
All her body and soul
That completes my whole,
All that women add to men,
In the clutch of my steady ken"—
. . . if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of his hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he must draw her from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to suffocate her if she cannot escape from it: