Browning's Heroines Part 32

"No turf, no rock: in their ugly stead, See, wonderful blue and red!"

Shall there not then be other a.n.a.logies? May not the minds of men, though burnt and bare as the turf and the rock, be changed like them, transfigured like them:

"With such a blue-and-red grace, not theirs-- Love settling unawares!"

It was almost a miracle, was it not? the way they changed. Such miracles happen every day.

VI.--READING A BOOK, UNDER THE CLIFF

These clever young men! She is reading a poem of the wind.[262:1] The singer asks what the wind wants of him--so instant does it seem in its appeal.

"'Art thou a dumb wronged thing that would be righted, Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!

No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith requited With falsehood--love, at last aware Of scorn--hopes, early blighted--

'We have them; but I know not any tone So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow; Dost think men would go mad without a moan, If they knew any way to borrow A pathos like thine own?'"

The splendid lines a.s.sail her.[263:1] In her anguish of response she turns from them at last--they are too much. This power of perception is almost a baseness! And bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, _at last aware_ of scorn," she flings the volume from her--rejecting him, detesting him, and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. He is wrong: the wind does _not_ mean what he fancies by its moaning. He thus interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the suffering of others--failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment--is but the example for his use, the help to his path untried! Such agonies as her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a phrase--like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. How dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words, how dare he know--and now her irony turns cruel:

"Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest!

Himself the undefeated that shall be: Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test-- His triumph in eternity Too plainly manifest!"

Of course he does not know! The wind means something else. And as the pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. How _could_ "the happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? Only "the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the mind. This young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day--on a midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign country," at its height of gloom and gloss. At its height--next minute must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the earliest sign? That very wind beginning among the vines:

"So low, so low, what shall it say but this?

'Here is the change beginning, here the lines Circ.u.mscribe beauty, set to bliss The limit time a.s.signs.'" . . .

Change is the law of life: _that_ is what the wind says.

"Nothing can be as it has been before; Better, so call it, only not the same.

To draw one beauty into our hearts' core, And keep it changeless! Such our claim; So answered: Never more!

Simple? Why, this is the old woe of the world; Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.

Rise with it then! Rejoice that man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled!"

Her rejection of the "young man's pride" has raised her for an instant above her own suffering. Flinging back his interpretation in his face--that interpretation which had pierced her to the quick with its intensity of vision--she has found a better one; and for a while she rests in this. "The laws of nature": shall not that be the formula to still her pain? . . . Not yet, not yet; the heart was numbed but for a moment. Stung to such fresh life as it has been but now, it cries imperiously again. The laws of nature?

"That's a new question; still replies the fact, Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so; We moan in acquiescence."

Only to acquiescence can we attain.

"G.o.d knows: endure his act!"

But the human loss, the human anguish. . . . Formulas touch not these, nor does acquiescence mitigate. Tell ourselves as wisely as we may that mutability must be--we yet discern where the woe lies. We cannot fix the "one fair good wise thing" just as we grasped it--cannot engrave it, as it were, on our souls. And then we die--and it is gone for ever, and we would have sunk beneath death's wave, as we sink now, to save it--but time washed over it ere death mercifully came. It was abolished even while we lived: the wind had begun "so low, so low" . . . and carried it away on its moaning voice. Change is the very essence of life; and life may be probation for a better life--who knows? But if she could have engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband loved her. . . .

VII.--AMONG THE ROCKS

Such anguish must, at least, "change" with the rest! And now that autumn is fully come, the loss of summer is more bearable. It is while we hope that summer still may stay that we are tortured.

"Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, This autumn morning!"

She will forget the "laws of nature": she will unreflectingly watch earth. That is best.

". . . How he sets his bones To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet For the ripple to run over in its mirth; Listening the while, where on the heap of stones The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet."

The geniality of earth! She will sink her troubled soul into the vast tranquillity. No science, no "cosmic whole"--just this: the brown old earth.

But soon the a.n.a.logy-hunting begins: that soul of hers can never rest.

What does "this," then, show forth? Her love in its tide can flow over the lower nature, as the waves flow over the basking rocks. "Old earth smiles and knows":

"If you loved only what were worth your love, Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you: Make the low nature better by your throes!

Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!"

I confess that I cannot follow this a.n.a.logy. The lesson may be clear--of that later; the a.n.a.logy escapes me. Who says that rocks are of lower nature than the sea which washes them? But if it does not mean this, what does it mean? Mrs. Orr interprets thus: "As earth blesses her smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those less worthy beings who may be enn.o.bled by it." That seems to me to touch this instance not at all. It is the earth who has set "himself" (in the unusual personification) to bask in the sun; the earth, _here_, is getting, not giving. Or rather, all is one: each element wholly joys in the other. And watching this, the woman wrings from it "the doctrine simple, ancient, true," that love is self-sacrifice. Let that be true, I still cannot see how the symbol aids the doctrine.

And the doctrine? Grant that love is self-sacrifice (I had rather say that self-sacrifice is a part, and but a part, of love): is love also self-sufficiency?

"Make the low nature better by your throes."

It is a strange love, surely, which so speaks? Shall a man live, despised, in harmony with her who despises him? James Lee's wife may call this love, but we absolve James Lee, I think, if he does not! For human beings feel most subtly when scorn dwells near them; they may indeed have caused that scorn--but let there be no talk of love where it subsists.

Even bitterness were less destructive to the woman's hope than this strange counting of the cost, this self-sufficiency. Our sympathy must leave her at this phase; and sympathy for her was surely Browning's aim?

But possibly it was not; and _if_ not, this indeed is subtle.

VIII.--BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD

She had turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been happily working. She has failed; but that has not clouded joy nor damped ardour.

"Its beauty mounted into my brain,"

and, effacing the failures, she has yielded to a fancy--has taken the chalk between her lips, instead of her fingers:

"With soul to help if the mere lips failed, I kissed all right where the drawing ailed, Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips Still from one's soulless finger-tips."

This hand was that of a worshipped woman. Her fancy sets the ring on it, by which one knows

"That here at length a master found His match, a proud lone soul its mate."

Not even Da Vinci's pencil had been able to trace all the beauty--

". . . how free, how fine To fear almost!--of the limit-line."

_He_, like her, had suffered some defeat. But think of the minutes in which, with her he worshipped, he "looked and loved, learned and drew, Drew and learned and loved again!" Such moments are not for such as she.

She will go back to the household cares--she has her lesson, and it is not the same as Da Vinci's.