Browning's Heroines Part 35

Even our artists! The poet says the thing, but we feel it. Not one of us can express it like him; but has he _had_ it? When he dies, will he have been a whit nearer his own sublimities than the lesser spirits who have never turned a line?

"Sing, riding's a joy! For me, I ride."

(Note the fine irony here. The poet shall sing the joy of riding; this man _rides_.)

The great sculptor, too, with his twenty years' slavery to Art:

"And that's your Venus, whence we turn To yonder girl that fords the burn!"

But the sculptor, with his insight, acquiesces, so this man need not pity him. The musician fares even worse. After _his_ life's labours, they say (even his friends say) that the opera is great in intention, but fashions change so quickly in music--he is out-of-date. He gave his youth? Well--

"I gave my youth; but we ride, in fine."

Supposing we could know perfect bliss in this world, what should we have for which to strive? We must lead some life beyond, we must have a bliss to die for! If _he_ had this glory-garland round his soul, what other joy could he ever so dimly descry?

"Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?

Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride."

Thus he has mused, riding beside her, to the horses' rhythmic stretching pace. It shall be best as she decrees. She rejects him: he will not whine; what she does shall somehow have its good for him--_she_ shall not be wrong! He has the thought of her in his soul, and the memory of her--and there will be, as well, the memory of this ride. That moment he has, whole and perfect:

"Who knows but the world may end to-night!"

Yes; they ride on--the sights, the sounds, the thoughts, encompa.s.s them; they are together. His soul, all hers, has yet been half-withdrawn from her, so deeply has he mused on what she is to him: it is the great paradox--almost one forgets that she is there, so intimate the union, and so silent. . . . But is she _not_ there? and, being there, does she not now seem to give him something strange and wonderful to take from her? She _is_ there--

"And yet--she has not spoke so long!"

She is as silent as he. They might both be in a trance. He knows what his trance is--can it be that hers is the same? Then what would it mean? . . . And the hope so manfully resigned floods back on him. What if this _be_ heaven--what if she has found, caught up like him, that she does love?

Can it mean that, gazing both, now in this glorious moment, at life's flower of love, they both are fixed so, ever shall so abide--she with him, as he with her? Can it mean that the instant is made eternity--

"And heaven just prove that I and she Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"

Despite the transcendental interpretations of this glorious love-song--surpa.s.sed, I think and many others think, by none in the world--I believe that the concluding stanza means just that. Hope has rushed on him again from her twin-silence--can she be at one with him in all, as she is in this? Will the proud dark eyes have forgotten the pity--and the pride? . . . The wrong that has been done to Browning by his too-subtle "interpreters" is, in my view, incalculable. Always he must be, for them, the teacher. But he is the _poet_! He "sings, riding's a joy"--and such joy brings hope along with it, hope for the "obvious human bliss." People seem to forget that it was Browning who made that phrase[289:1]--which might almost be his protest against the transcendentalists.

Much of his finest work has been thus falsified, thus strained to meanings so "profound" as to be none at all. Mr. Nettleship's gloss upon this stanza of _The Last Ride_ is a case in point. "[The lover] buoys himself with the hope that the highest bliss _may_ be the change from the minute's joy to an eternal fulfilment of joy." Does this mean anything? And if it did, does that stanza mean _it_? I declare that it means nothing, and that the stanza means what instinctively (I feel and know) each reader, reading it--not "studying" it--accepts as its best meaning: the human one, the true following of the so subtly-induced mood. And that is, simply, the invigoration, the joy, of riding; and the hope which comes along with that invigoration and that joy.

In the strange _Numpholeptos_ we find, by implication, the heart of Browning's "message" for women. "The nympholepts of old," explains Mr.

Augustine Birrell in one of the volumes of _Obiter Dicta_, "were those unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling among sylvan shades, caught a hasty glimpse of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose pursuit their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent."

The man here has fallen in love with "an angelically pure and inhumanly cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and complete experience of life."[290:1]

She does not reject his love, but will wholly accept it only on these impossible terms. Herself dwells in some "magic hall" whence ray forth shafts of coloured light--crimson, purple, yellow; and along these shafts, which symbolise experience, her lover is to travel--coming back to her at close of each wayfaring, for the rays end before her feet, beneath her eyes and smile, as they began. He goes forth in obedience; he comes back. Ever the issue is the same: he comes back smirched. And she--forgives him, but not loves him.

"What means the sad slow silver smile above My clay but pity, pardon?--at the best But acquiescence that I take my rest, Contented to be clay?"

She "smiles him slow forgiveness"--nothing more; he is dismissed, must travel forth again. _This_ time he may return, untinged by the ray which he is to traverse. She sends him, deliberately; he must break through the quintessential whiteness that surrounds her--but he is to come back unsmirched. So she pitilessly, for all her "pity," has decreed.

And patient, mute, obedient, always he has gone--until this day. This day his patience fails him, and he speaks. Once more he had come back--once more been "pardoned." But the pity was so gentle--like a moon-beam. He had almost hoped the smile would pa.s.s the "pallid moonbeam limit," be "transformed at last to sunlight and salvation." If she could pa.s.s that goal and "gain love's birth," he scarce would know his clay from gold's own self; "for gold means love." . . . But no; the "sad slow silver smile" had meant, as ever, naught but pity, pardon, acquiescence in his lesserness for _him_. _She_ acquiesced not; she keeps her love for the "spirit-seven" before G.o.d's throne.[291:1]

He then made one supreme appeal for

"Love, the love sole and whole without alloy."

Vainly! Such an appeal "must be felt, not heard." Her calm regard was unchanged--nay, rather it had grown harsh and hard, had seemed to imply disdain, repulsion, and he could not face those things; he rose from his kissing of her feet--he _did_ go forth again. This time he might return, immaculate, from the path of that "lambent flamelet." . . . He knew he could not, but--he _might_! She promises that he can: should he not trust her?

And now, to-day, once more he is returned. Still she stands, still she listens, still she smiles! But he protests at last:

"Surely I had your sanction when I faced, Fared forth upon that untried yellow ray Whence I retrack my steps?"

The crimson, the purple had been explored; from them he had come back deep-stained. How has the yellow used him? He has placed himself again for judgment before her "blank pure soul, alike the source and tomb of that prismatic glow." To this yellow he has subjected himself utterly: she _had_ ordained it! He was to "bathe, to burnish himself, soul and body, to swim and swathe in yellow licence." And here he is: "absurd and frightful," "suffused with crocus, saffron, orange"--just as he had been with crimson, purple!

She willed it so: he was to track the yellow ray. He pleads once more her own permission--nay, command! And, as before, she shows

"Scarce recognition, no approval, some Mistrust, more wonder at a man become Monstrous in garb, nay--flesh-disguised as well, Through his adventure."

But she had said that, if he were worthily to retain her love, he must share the knowledge shrined in her supernal eyes. And this was the one way for _man_ to gain that knowledge. Well, it is as before:

"I pa.s.s into your presence, I receive Your smile of pity, pardon, and I leave."

But no! This time he will not leave, he will not dumbly bend to his penance. Hitherto he has trusted her word that the feat can be achieved, the ray trod to its edge, yet he return unsmirched. He has tried the experiment--and returned, "absurd as frightful." This is his last word.

". . . No, I say: No fresh adventure! No more seeking love At end of toil, and finding, calm above My pa.s.sion, the old statuesque regard, The sad petrific smile!"

And he turns upon her with a violent invective. She is not so much hard and hateful as mistaken and obtuse.

"You very woman with the pert pretence To match the male achievement!"

_Who_ could not be victorious when all is made easy, when the rough effaces itself to smooth, the gruff "grinds down and grows a whisper"; when man's truth subdues its rapier-edge to suit the bulrush spear that womanly falsehood fights with? Oh woman's ears that will not hear the truth! oh woman's "thrice-superfine feminity of sense," that ignores, as by right divine, the process, and takes the spotless result from out the very muck that made it!

But he breaks off. "Ah me!" he cries,

"The true slave's querulous outbreak!"

And forth again, all slavishly, at her behest he fares. Who knows but _this_ time the "crimson quest" may deepen to a sunrise, not decay to that cold sad sweet smile--which he obeys?

Such a being as this, said Browning himself, "is imaginary, not real; a nymph and no woman"; but the poem is "an allegory of an impossible ideal of love, accepted conventionally." _How_ impossible he has shown not only here but everywhere--_how_ conventionally accepted. This is not woman's mission! And in the lover's querulous outbreak--the "true slave's" outbreak--we may read the innermost meaning of the allegory. If women will set up "the pert pretence to match the male achievement,"

they must consent to take the world as men are forced to take it. There must be no unfairness, no claim on the chivalry which has sought to shield them: in the homely phrase, they must "take the rough with the smooth"--not the stainless result alone, with a revolted shudder for the marrings which have made it possible.

But having flung these truths at her, observe that the man rues them. He accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this pa.s.sage) to what is _true_ in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays--of all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but if he could explore, and not return "absurd as frightful." . . . He cannot.