". . . 'I'll not affect a grace
That's gone from me—gone once, and gone for ever!'"
"Gone once, and gone for ever." True, when the grace is gone; but surely not from her, in any real sense, had it gone—and would she not, in the deep knowledge of herself which comes with revelation to the world, have felt that passionately? There are accusations of ourselves which indeed arraign ourselves, yet leave us our best pride. To me, not the error which made her prey to penitence was Mildred Tresham's "fall," but those crude cries of shame.
We take refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her brother—that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and conventional morality,"[90:1] Thorold, Earl Tresham; but not thus can we solace ourselves for Browning's failure. What a girl he might have given us in Mildred, had he listened only to himself! But, not yet in full possession of that self, he set up as an ideal the ideal of others, trying dutifully to see it as they see it, denying dutifully his deepest instinct; and, thus apostate, piled insincerity on insincerity, until at last no truth is anywhere, and we read on with growing alienation as each figure loses all of such reality as it ever had, and even Gwendolen, the "golden creature"—his own dauntless, individual woman, seeing and feeling truly through every fibre of her being—is lost amid the fog, is stifled in the stifling atmosphere, and only at the last, when Mildred and her brother are both dead, can once more say the word which lights us back to truth:
"Ah, Thorold, we can but—remember you!"
It was indeed all they could do; but we, more fortunate, can forget him, imaging to ourselves the Mildred that Browning could have given us—the Mildred of whom her brother is made to say:
"You cannot know the good and tender heart,
Its girl's trust and its woman's constancy,
How pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind,
How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free
As light where friends are . . ."
There she is, as Browning might have shown her! "Control's not for this lady," Tresham adds—the sign-manual of a Browning woman. As I have said, he can display this lovely type through others, can sing it in his own person, as in the exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak for herself—he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth departs from him; we have the Mildred Tresham of the theatre, of "the partner of my guilty love," of "Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!" of (in a later scene) "I think I might have urged some little point in my defence to Thorold"; of that last worst unreality of all, when Thorold has told her of his murder of her lover, and she cries:
". . . I—forgive not,
But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls!
There! Do not think too much upon the past!
The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud
While it stood up between my friend and you;
You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that
So past retrieve? I have his heart, you know;
I may dispose of it: I give it you!
It loves you as mine loves!"
True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined, will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient claim for Thorold's deed—Thorold who dies with these words on his lips:
". . . You hold our 'scutcheon up.
Austin, no blot on it! You see how blood
Must wash one blot away; the first blot came
And the first blood came. To the vain world's eye
All's gules again: no care to the vain world
From whence the red was drawn!"