Browning's Heroines Part 33

"Little girl with the poor coa.r.s.e hand"

. . . this is _her_ model, from whom she had turned to a cold clay cast.

Her business is to understand, not the almost fearful beauty of a thing like this, but "the worth of flesh and blood."

But was not that Da Vinci's business too? Would he not, could she speak with him, proudly tell her so? "Nothing but beauty in a hand." Would the Master have turned from this peasant one? No: she hears him condemn her, laugh her woes to scorn.

"The fool forsooth is all forlorn Because the beauty she thinks best Lived long ago or was never born, Because no beauty bears the test In this rough peasant hand!"

It was not long before Da Vinci threw aside the faulty pencil, and spent years instead of hours in studying, not the mere external loveliness, but the anatomy of the hand, learning the veritable use

"Of flesh and bone and nerve that make The poorest coa.r.s.est human hand An object worthy to be scanned A whole life long for their sole sake."

Just the hand--and all the body still to learn. Is not this the lesson of life--this incompleteness?

"Now the parts and then the whole!"

And here is she, declaring that if she is not loved, she must die--she, with her stinted soul and stunted body! Look again at the peasant hand.

No beauty is there--but it can spin the wool and bake the bread:

"'What use survives the beauty?'"

Yes: Da Vinci would proclaim her fool.

Then _this_ shall be the new formula. She will be of use; will do the daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. She cannot keep her husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. She will be useful; she will gain cheer _that_ way, since all the others fail her.

"Go, little girl with the poor coa.r.s.e hand!

I have my lesson, shall understand."

This is the last hope--to be of humble use; this the last formula for survival.

IX.--ON DECK

And this has failed like the rest. She is on board the boat that carries her away from him, she has found the last formula: _set him free_. Well, it in its turn has been followed: she is gone. Gone--in every sense.

"There is nothing to remember in me, Nothing I ever said with a grace, Nothing I did that you care to see, Nothing I was that deserves a place In your mind, now I leave you, set you free."

No "_pet.i.te fleur dans la pensee_"--none, none: she grants him all her dis-grace. But will he not grant her something too--now that she is gone? Will he not grant that men have loved such women, when the women have loved them so utterly? It _has_ been: she knows that, and the more certainly now that she has yielded finally her claim to a like miracle.

His soul is locked fast; but, "love for a key" (if he could but have loved her!), what might not have happened? She might have grown the same in his eyes as he is in hers!

So strange it is to think of _that_. . . . She can think anything when such imagining is once possible to her. She can think of _him_ as the "harsh, ill-favoured one!" For what would it have mattered--her ugliness--if he had loved her? They would have been "like as pea and pea." Ever since the world began, love has worked such spells--that is so true that she has warrant to work out this strange, new dream.

Imagine it. . . . If he had all her in his heart, as she has all him in hers! He, whose least word brought gloom or glee, who never lifted his hand in vain--that hand which will hold hers still, from over the sea . . . if, when _he_ thinks of her, a face as beautiful as his own should rise to his imagination--with eyes as dear, a mouth like that, as bright a brow. . . .

"Till you saw yourself, while you cried ''Tis she!'"

But it will not be--and if it could be, she would not know or care, for the joy would have killed her.

Or turn it again the converse way. Supposing he could "fade to a thing like her," with the coa.r.s.e hair and skin . . .

"You might turn myself!--should I know or care When I should be dead of joy, James Lee?"

Either way it would kill her, so she may as well be gone, with her

"Love that was life, life that was love";

and there is nothing at all to remember in her. As long as she lives his words and looks will circle round _her_ memory. If she could fancy one touch of love for her once coming in those words and looks again. . . . But the boat moves on, farther, ever farther from the little house with its four rooms and its field and fig-tree and vines--from the window, the fireside, the doorway, from the beach and cliff and rocks. All the formulas have failed but this one. This one will not fail. He is set free.

She had to go; and neither him nor her can we condemn. "One near one is too far." She saw and loved too well: one or the other she should have been wise enough to hide from him. But she could not. Character is fate; and two characters are two fates. Neither, with that other, could be different; each might, with another "other," have been all that each was meant to be.

FOOTNOTES:

[251:1] The poems were first called _James Lee_ only.

[254:1] _Life_, Mrs. Orr, p. 266.

[257:1] "The little church, a field, a few houses, and the sea . . .

Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"--_Life_, p. 266.

[258:1] _Life_, p. 266.

[262:1] These lines were published by Browning, separately, in 1836, when he was twenty-six. _James Lee's Wife_ was published in 1864.

[263:1] Nettleship well says: "The difference between the first and second parts of this section is that, while the plaint of the wind was enough to make Browning write in 1836, he must have the plaint of a soul in 1863. . . . And yet, something is lost."

PART V

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TROUBLE OF LOVE]

TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S

I

THE WOMAN UNWON

In the section ent.i.tled "Lovers Meeting" we saw the exultant mood of love in man, and I there pointed out how seldom even Browning has a.s.signed that mood to woman. But he does not show her as alone in suffering love's pain. The lyrics we are now to consider give us woman as the maker of love's pain for man; we learn her in this character through the utterances of men--and these are n.o.ble utterances, every one. Mr. J. T. Nettleship, in his _Essays and Thoughts_, well remarks that man's pa.s.sion shows, in Browning's work, "a greater width of view and intellectual power" than woman's does; that in the feminine utterances "little beyond the actual love of this life is imagined";[277:1] and that in such utterances "we notice . . . an absolute want of originality and of power to look at the pa.s.sion of love in an abstract sense outside the woman herself and her lover."

I too have, by implication, found this fault with Browning; but Mr.