Browning's Heroines Part 29

Nay--here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the "dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of _The Laboratory_ may have known, like the girl here, only dim, aching wonder at her lover's mutability.

"Was it something said, Something done, Vexed him? was it touch of hand, Turn of head?

Strange! that very way Love begun: I as little understand Love's decay."[238:1]

Here, again, is full authenticity. Girl-like, she sits and broods upon it all--not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. So greatly that still, still, she can dream:

"Would he loved me yet, On and on, While I found some way undreamed --Paid my debt!

Gave more life and more, Till, all gone, He should smile, 'She never seemed Mine before.'"

But this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over"

too, though not yet ended. How will it end for her?

"Well, this cold clay clod Was man's heart: Crumble it, and what comes next?

Is it G.o.d ?" . . .

The dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child!

"'Dying for my sake-- White and pink!

Can't we touch these bubbles then But they break?'"

That is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done since the world began, and will do till it ends.[239:1]

Then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has been between them, clearly he has not known that yet. . . . Again, the supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly _all_ the love, can never turn away from it. Most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams--yet after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who loves truly?

Yet indeed (she now muses) _has_ she enough loved him?

"I had wealth and ease, Beauty, youth: Since my lover gave me love, I gave these.

That was all I meant --To be just, And the pa.s.sion I had raised To content.

Since he chose to change Gold for dust, If I gave him what he praised, Was it strange?"

And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that "way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . .

I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted above:

"_And the pa.s.sion I had raised To content._"

From Browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl cries:

"I, too, at love's brim Touched the sweet: I would die if death bequeathed Sweet to him."

This is more than to "content" the "pa.s.sion she had raised." Let us regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not express either the girl or her poet.

The rest comes right and true--and more than all, perhaps, the second verse, where the mystery of pa.s.sion in its coming no less than in its going is so subtly indicated.

"Strange! that very way Love begun: I _as little understand_ Love's decay."

We hear to-day of love that aims at reason. Love forbid that I should say love knows not reason--but love and G.o.d forbid that it should _aim_ at reason! Leave us that unwisdom at least: we are so wise to-day.

This ardent, gentle girl must suffer, and will suffer long--but will not die. She will live and she will grow. Shall she then look back with scorn upon that earlier self? . . . We talk much now of "re-incarnation," and always by our talk we seem to mean the coming-back to earth of a spirit which at some time has left it. But are there not re-incarnations of the still embodied spirit--is not re-incarnation, like eternity, with us here and now, as we "in this body" live and suffer and despair, and lift our hearts again to hope and faith? How many of us--grown, not changed--can pityingly look back at ourselves in some such dying moment as this poem shows us; for death it is to that "ourself." Hearts do not break, but hearts do die--_that_ heart, _that_ self: we pa.s.s into a Hades.

"Well, this cold clay clod Was man's heart: Crumble it, and what comes next?

Is it G.o.d?"

Or is it new heart, new self, new life? We come forth enfranchised from our Hades. The evil days, the cruel days--we call them back (a little, it may be, ashamed of our escape!) and still the blest remoteness will endure: it was wonderful how it could suffer, the poor heart. . . .

Surely this is re-incarnation; surely no returning spirit witnesses more clearly to a transition-state? We _have been_ dead; but this "us" who comes back to the world we knew is still the same--the heart will answer as it once could answer, the spirit thrill as once it thrilled.

Only--this is the proof--both heart and spirit are _further on_; both have, as it were, gone past the earlier summons and the earlier sense of love; and so, evoking such an hour as this, when we could dream of "dying for his sake, white and pink," we smile in tender, not in scornful, pity--knowing now that "way undreamed" of our girl's dream, and knowing that that way is not to die, but live and grow, since love that changes "in a year" is not the love to die, or live, for.

FOOTNOTES:

[224:1] The descriptive phrase above might really, at a pinch, be applied to Annabella Milbanke.

[236:1] Note the fierceness achieved by the shortening and the alliteration in this line.

[238:1] Mark how the deferred rhymes paint the groping thoughts. Only after much questioning can the answer come, as it were, in the "chime of the rhyme."

[239:1] And men also, I hasten to add, that there may be no pluming of male feathers--if indeed this be an occasion for pluming on either side.

PART IV

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WIFE]

I

A WOMAN'S LAST WORD

They are married, and they have come to a spiritual crisis. She does not, cannot, think as _he_ thinks. But does thinking signify? She loves--is not that enough? Can she not have done with thinking, or at all events with talking about thinking? Perhaps, with every striving, she shall achieve no more than that: to _say_ nothing, to use no influence, to yield the sanctioned woman's trophy of the "last word." . . . Shall she, then, be yielding aught of value, if she contends no more?

"What so wild as words are?"

--and that _they_ should strive and argue! Why, it is as when birds debate about some tiny marvel of those marvellous tiny lives, while the hawk spies from a bough above.

"See the creature stalking While we speak!

Hush and hide the talking, Cheek on cheek!"

For that hawk is ever watching life: it stands for the mysterious effluence which falls on joy and kills it; and that may just as well be "talking" as aught else! He shall have his own way--or no: that is a paltry yielding. There shall _be_ no way but his.

"What so false as truth is, False to thee?"