Browning's Heroines Part 30

She abandons then the cold abstraction; she does not even wish to "know":

"Where the apple reddens Never pry-- Lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.

Be a G.o.d and hold me With a charm!

Be a man and fold me With thine arm!

Teach me, only teach, Love!

As I ought I will speak thy speech, Love, Think thy thought--

Meet, if thou require it, Both demands, Laying flesh and spirit In thy hands."

But even as she measures and exults in the abjection of herself, a voice whispers in her soul that this is not the way. Something is wrong. She hears, but cannot heed. It must be so, since he desires it--since he can desire it. Since he _can_ . . .

"That shall be to-morrow, Not to-night: I must bury sorrow Out of sight:

--Must a little weep, Love, (Foolish me!) And so fall asleep, Love, Loved by thee."

He does not wish to know the real Herself. Then the real herself shall "sleep"; all shall be as before.

Will this endure? All depends upon the woman: upon how strong _she_ is.

For is not this the sheer denial of her husband's moral force? By her silence, her abjection, her suppression, he shall prevail: not otherwise. And so, _if_ this endure, what shall the issue prove? Not the highest good of married life for either, and still less for the man than for the woman.

By implication, Browning shows us that in _By the Fireside_, one of his three great songs of wedded love:

"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine, Your heart antic.i.p.ate my heart, You must be just before, in fine, See and make me see, for your part, New depths of the divine!"

Once more we can trace there his development from _Pauline_. She, looking up "as I might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as the wife in the _Last Word_ resolves to do. . . . As the poet grew, so grew the man in Browning: we reach _By the Fireside_ from these. For the woman in the _Last Word_, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring _that_ husband to the place where stands the man in _By the Fireside_, when the "long dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which they found each other once for all.

"My perfect wife, my Leonor, Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too, Whom else could I dare look backward for, With whom beside should I dare pursue The path grey heads abhor?

My own, confirm me! If I tread This path back, is it not in pride To think how little I dreamed it led To an age so blest that, by its side, Youth seems the waste instead?"

And now read again:

"Meet, _if thou require it_, Both demands, Laying flesh and spirit In thy hands."

A lower note there, is it not? And shall he so require, and she so yield, that backward-treading path is not for them--never shall _they_ say to one another:

"Come back with me to the first of all, Let us lean and love it over again, Let us now forget and now recall, Break the rosary in a pearly rain, And gather what we let fall!"

Too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary--the wife who had begun so soon to know that Edens shall be lost by thinking Eves!

But let me not enforce a moral. The mood is one that women know, and often wisely use. "Talking" _is_ to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is not the sum of individuality's expression. She can teach him--learning from him all the while--_not_ to "require it": she, this same sweet, strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her sure indenture of freedom.

"That shall be to-morrow, Not to-night: I must bury sorrow Out of sight."

The "sorrow" is for him, not for herself: he has fallen below his highest in the tyranny of to-night. Then be sure that she, so loving and so seeing, shall lift him up to-morrow! _This_ tear shall be dried.

II

JAMES LEE'S WIFE

In this song-cycle of nine poems we are shown the death of a woman's heart. James Lee's wife sums up in herself, as it were, all those "troubles of love" which we have considered in the earlier monologues.

The man has failed her--as De Lorge failed his lady, as the poet the "poor, pretty thoughtful thing"; love has left her--as it left the woman of _The Laboratory_ and the girl of _In a Year_; she and her husband are at variance in the great things of life--like the couple, in _A Woman's last Word_. But even the complete surrender of individuality resolved upon by the wife in that poem would not now avail, if indeed it ever would have availed, the wife of James Lee. All is over, and, as she gradually realises, over with such finality that there is only one thing she can do, and that is to leave him--"set him free."

We learn the mournful story from the wife's lips only; the husband never speaks, and is but once present. All we actually see are the moods of nine separate days--spread over what precise period of time we are not clearly shown, but it was certainly a year. These nine revealings show us every stage from the first faint pang of apprehension to the accepted woe; then the battle with _that_--the hope that love may yet prevail; the clutch at some high stoicism drawn from the laws of nature, or from "old earth's" genial wisdom; next, the less exalted plan to be "of use,"

since there is nothing else for her to be--and finally the flight, the whole renunciation. Echoes hover from all sad women's stories elsewhere studied: the Tear reigns supreme, the Victim is _in excelsis_--for hardly did Pompilia suffer such excess of misery, since she at least could die, remembering Caponsacchi. James Lee's wife will live, remembering James Lee.

Into the chosen commonplace of the man's name[251:1] we may read a symbolism. "This is every-day's news," the poet seems to say; "you may watch the drama for yourselves whenever you so please." And only indeed in the depth of the woman's pa.s.sion is there aught unusual. _That_, as uttered in the final poem, seems more than normal--since she knows her husband for (as she so strangely says of him) "mere ign.o.ble earth"; yet still can claim that he "set down to her"

"Love that was life, life that was love, A tenure of breath at your lips' decree, A pa.s.sion to stand as your thoughts approve, A rapture to fall where your foot might be."

More--or less--than dog-like is such love, for dogs are unaware of "mere ign.o.ble earth," dogs do not judge and a.n.a.lyse and patronise, and resolve to "make the low nature better for their throes." Never has the mistaken idea, the inept conduct, of pa.s.sion been so subtly shown us, with so much at once of pity and of irony.

James Lee's wife is a plain woman.

"Why, fade you might to a thing like me, And your hair grow these coa.r.s.e hanks of hair, Your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree" . . .

So she cries in the painful concluding poem. Faded, coa.r.s.e-haired, coa.r.s.e-skinned . . . is all said? But he had married her. In what, do we find the word of that enigma? In the beauties of her heart and mind--the pa.s.sionate, devoted heart, the subtle, brooding mind. These had done the first work; and alas! they have done the second also. The heart was pa.s.sionate and devoted, but it a.n.a.lysed too closely, and then clung too closely; the mind was subtle and intense, but it could not rest, it could not "take for granted"--male synonym for married bliss! And of course we shall not dare deny James Lee his trustiest, st.u.r.diest weapon: _she had no sense of humour!_ . . . If he was incomplete, so too was she; and her incompleteness was of the kind that, in this relation, never fails to fail--his, of the kind that more often than not succeeds.

Thus she sums him:

"With much in you waste, with many a weed, And plenty of pa.s.sions run to seed, But a little good grain too."

This man, who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding type in woman may, needs--not tyrannically, because unconsciously--a mate who far excels him in all that makes n.o.bility; and, nine times out of ten, obtains her. "Mrs. James Lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. Perhaps she _has_ none. Perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the _Last Word_--who was not of it! For here is the very heart of the problem: can or cannot character be altered? James Lee's wife is of the morbid, the unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn the lore of self-suppression. Not for them exactingness, caprice, the gay or grave a.n.a.lysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in lovely women, and even in _them_ bring risks along. The Mrs. Lees must curb them wholly. As the whims of unwedded love, they may perchance amuse or interest; marriage, for such, comports them not at all.

Let us trace, compa.s.sionately if ironically, the mistakes of this sad woman.

I.--SHE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW

He is coming back to their seaside home at Sainte-Marie, near p.o.r.nic--the Breton "wild little place" which Browning knew and loved so well. "Close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.

I feel out of the earth sometimes as I sit here at the window."[254:1]

And at the window _she_ sits, watching for James Lee's return. Yesterday it was summer, but the strange sudden "stop" has come, eerily, as it always seems to come.

"Ah, Love, but a day And the world has changed!

The sun's away, And the bird estranged; The wind has dropped, And the sky's deranged: Summer has stopped."