A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 20

The dramatic setting of the majority of the Love poems serves, as I have said, to bring out the vitality of Mr. Browning's conception of love; and though anything like labelling a poet's work brings with it a sense of anomaly, we shall only carry out the spirit of this particular group by connecting each member of it with the condition of thought or feeling it is made to ill.u.s.trate.

It will be seen that the dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances, which supply so many of the poems of the following and other groups, had been largely recruited from the first collection of "Men and Women;" having first, in several instances, contributed to that work.

DRAMATIC LOVE POEMS.

"Cristina." (Love as the special gain of life.) "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"Evelyn Hope." (Love as conquering Time.) "Dramatic Lyrics."

Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Love among the Ruins." (Love as the one lasting reality.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"A Lover's Quarrel." (Love as the great harmony which triumphs over smaller discords.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"By the Fireside." (Love in its ideal maturity.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Any Wife to any Husband." (Love in its ideal of constancy.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Two in the Campagna." (Love as an unsatisfied yearning.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Love in a Life." (Love as indomitable purpose.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Life in a Love." (Love as indomitable purpose.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"The Lost Mistress." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"A Woman's last Word." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"A Serenade at the Villa." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"One Way of Love." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Men and Women." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"In Three Days." (Love as the intensity of expectant hope.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"In a Gondola." (Love as the intensity of a precarious joy.) "Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"Porphyria's Lover." (Love as the tyranny of spiritual appropriation.) "Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"James Lee's Wife." (Love as saddened by the presentiment and the consciousness of change.) "Dramatis Personae." 1864

"The Worst of it." (Love as the completeness of self-effacement.) "Dramatis Personnae." 1864.

"Too Late." (Love as the sense of a loss which death has rendered irrevocable.) "Dramatis Personae." 1864.

The two first of these are inspired by the belief in the distinctness and continuity of the soul's life; and represent love as a condition of the soul with which positive experience has very little to do; but in all the others it is treated as part of this experience, and subject for the time being to its laws. The situation sketched--for it is nothing more--in "CRISTINA" is that of a man and woman whom a glance has united, and who both have recognized in this union the predestined object of their life. The knowledge has only flashed on the woman's mind, to be extinguished by worldly ambitions and worldly honours; and for her, therefore, the union remains barren. But the existence of the man is enriched and perfected by it. She has spiritually lost him, but _he_ has gained _her_; for though she has drifted away from him, he retains her soul. (This poetical paradox is the strong point of the poem.) It is henceforth his mission to test their blended powers; and when that has been accomplished, he will have done, he says, with this world.

"EVELYN HOPE" is the utterance of a love which has missed its fruition in this life, but confidently antic.i.p.ates it for a life to come. The beloved is a young girl. The lover is three times her age, and was a stranger to her; she is lying dead. But G.o.d, he is convinced, creates love to reward love: and no matter what worlds must be traversed, what lives lived, what knowledge gained or lost, before that moment is reached, Evelyn Hope will, in the end, be given to him.

"LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" depicts a pastoral solitude in which are buried the remains of an ancient city, fabulous in magnificence and in strength. A ruined turret marks the site of a mighty tower, from which the king of that city overlooked his domains, or, with his court, watched the racing chariots as they encircled it in their course. In that turret, in the evening grey, amidst the tinkling of the sheep, a yellow-haired maiden is waiting for him she loves; and as they bury sight and speech in each other's arms, he bids the human heart shut in the centuries, with their triumphs and their follies, their glories and their sins, for "Love is best."

"A LOVER'S QUARREL" describes, not the quarrel itself, but the impression it leaves on him who has unwittingly provoked it: one of amazement as well as sorrow, that such a thing could have occurred. The speaker, apostrophizing his absent love, reminds her how happy they have been together, with no society but their own; no pleasures but those of sympathy; no amus.e.m.e.nts but those which their common fancy supplied; and he asks her if it be possible that so perfect a union can be destroyed by a hasty word with which his deeper self has had nothing to do. He believes this so little that he is sure she will, in some way, come back to him; and then they will part no more.

A vein of playfulness runs through this monologue, which represents the lovers before their quarrel as more like children enjoying a long holiday, than a man and a woman sharing the responsibilities of life. It conveys, nevertheless, a truth deeply rooted in the author's mind: that the foundation of a real love can never be shaken.

"BY THE FIRESIDE" is a retrospect, in which the speaker is carried from middle-age to youth, and from his, probably English, fireside to the little Alpine gorge in which he confessed his love; and he summons the wife who received and sanctioned the avowal to share with him the joy of its remembrance. He describes the scene of his declaration, the conflict of feeling which its risks involved, the generous frankness with which she cut the conflict short. He dwells on the blessings which their union has brought to him, and which make his youth seem barren by the richness of his maturer years; and he asks her if there exist another woman, with whom he could thus have retraced the descending path of life, and found nothing to regret in what he had left behind. He declares that their mutual love has been for him that crisis in the life of the soul to which all experience tends--the predestined test of its quality. It is his t.i.tle to honour as well as his guarantee of everlasting joy.

The subtler realities of life and love are reflected throughout the poem in picturesque impressions often no less subtle, and the whole is dramatic, i.e., imaginary, as far as conception goes; but the obvious genuineness of the sentiment is confirmed by the allusion to the "perfect wife" who,

"Reading by firelight, that great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it," (vol. vi. p. 132.)

is known to all of us.

"ANY WIFE TO ANY HUSBAND" might be the lament of any woman about to die, who believes that her husband will remain true to her in heart, but will lack courage to be so in his life. She antic.i.p.ates the excuses he will offer for seeking temporary solace in the society of other women; but these all, to her mind, resolve themselves into a confession of weakness; and it grieves her that such a confession should proceed from one, in all other respects, so much stronger than she. "Were she the survivor, it would be so easy to her to be faithful to the end!" Her grief is unselfish. The wrong she apprehends will be done to his spiritual dignity far more than to his love for her, though with a touch of feminine inconsistency she identifies the two; and she cannot resign herself to the idea that he whose earthly trial is "three parts"

overcome will break down under this final test. She accepts it, however, as the inevitable.

"TWO IN THE CAMPAGNA." The sentiment of this poem can only be rendered in its concluding words:

"Infinite pa.s.sion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn." (vol. vi. p. 153.)

For its pain is that of a heart both restless and weary: ever seeking to grasp the Infinite in the finite, and ever eluded by it. The sufferer is a man. He longs to rest in the affection of a woman who loves him, and whom he also loves; but whenever their union seems complete, his soul is spirited away, and he is adrift again. He asks the meaning of it all--where the fault lies, if fault there be; he begs her to help him to discover it. The Campagna is around them, with its "endless fleece of feathery gra.s.ses," its "everlasting wash of air;" its wide suggestions of pa.s.sion and of peace. The clue to the enigma seems to glance across him, in the form of a gossamer thread. He traces it from point to point, by the objects on which it rests. But just as he calls his love to help him to hold it fast, it breaks off, and floats into the invisible. His doom is endless change. The tired, tantalized spirit must accept it.

"LOVE IN A LIFE" represents the lover as inhabiting the same house with his unseen love; and pursuing her in it ceaselessly from room to room, always catching the flutter of her retreating presence, always sure that the next moment he will overtake her.

"LIFE IN A LOVE" might be the utterance of the same person, when he has grasped the fact that the loved one is determined to elude him. She may baffle his pursuit, but he will never desist from it, though it absorb his whole life.

"THE LOST MISTRESS" is the farewell expression of a discarded love which has accepted the conditions of friendship. Its tone is full of manly self-restraint and of patient sadness.

"A WOMAN'S LAST WORD" is one of moral and intellectual self-surrender.

She has been contending with her husband, and been silenced by the feeling, not that the truth is on his side, but that it was not worth the pain of such a contention. What, she seems to ask herself, is the value of truth, when it is false to her Divinity; or knowledge, when it costs her her Eden? She begs him whom she worships as well as loves, to mould her to himself; but she begs also the privilege of a few tears--a last tribute, perhaps, to her sacrificed conscience, and her lost liberty.

"A SERENADE AT THE VILLA" has a tinge of melancholy humour, which makes it the more pathetic. A lover has been serenading the lady of his affections through a sultry night, in which Earth seemed to turn painfully in her sleep, and the silent darkness was unbroken, except by an occasional flash of lightning, and a few drops of thundery rain. He wishes his music may have told her that whenever life is dark or difficult there will be one near to help and guide her: one whose patience will never tire, and who will serve her best when there are none to witness his devotion. But her villa looks very dark; its closed windows are very obdurate. The gate ground its teeth as it let him pa.s.s.

And he fears she only said to herself, that if the silence of a thundery night was oppressive, such noise was a worse infliction.