Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

Again, in “The Return of the Druses” there is a complicated clash between the ideal of religious reverence for the incarnation of divinity in Djabal and human love for him in the soul of Anael, resulting at the end in the destruction of the idea of Djabal’s supernatural divinity, and his reinstatement perceived by Anael as divine through the complete exaltation of his human love for Anael.

These examples, however, while they illustrate Browning’s attitude toward human love, are far enough removed from nineteenth-century conditions in England. In “Pippa,” the social conditions of nineteenth-century Italy are reflected; in “The Druses,” the religious conditions of the Druse nation in the fifteenth century.

In the “Blot in the ’Scutcheon” a situation is developed which comes home forcibly to the nineteenth-century Englishman despite the fact that the scene is supposed to be laid in the eighteenth century. The poet’s treatment of the clash between the ideal, cherished by an old and honored aristocratic family of its own immaculate purity, and the spontaneous, complete and exalted love of the two young people who in their ecstasy transcend conventions, illustrates, as perhaps no other situation could, his reverential attitude upon the subject of love. Gwendolen, the older, intuitional woman, and Mertoun, the young lover, are the only people in the play to realize that purity may exist although the social enactments upon which it is supposed to depend have not been complied with. Tresham learns it only when he has wounded Mertoun unto death; Mildred never learns it. The grip of conventional teaching has sunk so deeply into her nature that she feels her sin unpardonable and only to be atoned for by death. Mertoun, as he dies, gives expression to the essential purity and truth of his nature in these words:

“Die along with me,
Dear Mildred! ’tis so easy, and you’ll ’scape
So much unkindness! Can I lie at rest,
With rude speech spoken to you, ruder deeds
Done to you?—heartless men shall have my heart
And I tied down with grave-clothes and the worm,
Aware, perhaps, of every blow—O God!—
Upon those lips—yet of no power to bear
The felon stripe by stripe! Die Mildred! Leave
Their honorable world to them! For God
We’re good enough, though the world casts us out.”

This is only one of many instances which go to show that Browning’s conception of love might include, on the one hand, a complete freedom from the trammels imposed upon it by conventional codes of morality, but on the other, was so real and permanent a sympathy between two souls, and so absolute a revelation of divine beauty, that its morality far transcended that of the conventional codes, which under the guise of lawful alliances permit and even encourage marriages based upon the most external of attractions, or those entered into for merely social or commercial reasons. A sin against love seems in Browning’s eyes to come the nearest of all human failings to the unpardonable sin.

It must not be supposed from what has been said that he had any anarchistic desire to do away with the solemnization of marriage, but his eyes were wide open to the fact that there might be sin within the marriage bond, and just as surely that there might be love pure and true outside of it.

Another illustration of Browning’s belief in the existence of a love such as Shakespeare describes, which looks on tempests and is never shaken, is given in the “Inn Album.” Here, again, the characters are all English, and the story is based upon an actual occurrence. Such changes as Browning has made in the story are with the intention of pitting against the villainy of an aristocratic seducer of the lowest type a bourgeois young man, who has been in love with the betrayed woman, and who when he finds out that it was this man, his friend, who had stood between them, does not swerve from his loyalty and truth to her, and in the end avenges her by killing the aristocratic villain. The young man is betrothed to a girl he cares nothing for, the woman has married a man she cares nothing for. All is of no moment in the presence of a genuine loyal emotion which shows itself capable of a life of devotion with no thought of reward.

Browning has nowhere translated into more noble action the love of a man than in the passage where the hero of the story gives himself unselfishly to the woman who has been so deeply wronged:

“Take heart of hers,
And give her hand of mine with no more heart
Than now, you see upon this brow I strike!
What atom of a heart do I retain
Not all yours? Dear, you know it! Easily
May she accord me pardon when I place
My brow beneath her foot, if foot so deign,
Since uttermost indignity is spared—
Mere marriage and no love! And all this time
Not one word to the purpose! Are you free?
Only wait! only let me serve—deserve
Where you appoint and how you see the good!
I have the will—perhaps the power—at least
Means that have power against the world. Fortune—
Take my whole life for your experiment!
If you are bound—in marriage, say—why, still,
Still, sure, there’s something for a friend to do,
Outside? A mere well-wisher, understand!
I’ll sit, my life long, at your gate, you know,
Swing it wide open to let you and him
Pass freely,—and you need not look, much less
Fling me a ‘Thank you!—are you there, old friend?’
Don’t say that even: I should drop like shot!
So I feel now, at least: some day, who knows?
After no end of weeks and months and years
You might smile! ‘I believe you did your best!’
And that shall make my heart leap—leap such leap
As lands the feet in Heaven to wait you there!
Ah, there’s just one thing more! How pale you look!
Why? Are you angry? If there’s after all,
Worst come to worst—if still there somehow be
The shame—I said was no shame,—none, I swear!—
In that case, if my hand and what it holds,—
My name,—might be your safeguard now,—at once—
Why, here’s the hand—you have the heart.”

The genuine lovers in Browning’s gallery will occur to every reader of Browning: lovers who are not deterred by obstacles, like Norbert, lovers like Miranda, devoted to a woman with a “past”; like the lover in “One Way of Love,” who still can say, “Those who win heaven, blest are they.” Sometimes there is a problem to be solved, sometimes not. Whenever there is a problem, however, it is solved by Browning on the side of sincerity and truth, never on the side of convention.