Browning's Heroines Part 37

FOOTNOTES:

[277:1] He excepts, of course, all through this pa.s.sage, _Any Wife to any Husband_--a poem which has not fallen into my scheme.

[285:1] No line which Browning has written is more characteristic than this--nor more famous.

[289:1] In _By the Fireside_.

[290:1] Arthur Symons, _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, p. 198.

[291:1] Browning himself, asked by Dr. Furnivall, on behalf of the Browning Society, to explain this allusion, answered in the fashion which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits'

are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common image." . . . "I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the, after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that _Numpholeptos_ is "an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man who all the while" (as I have once or twice had occasion to say of himself!) "cannot quite blind himself to the fact that" (to put it more concisely than he) knowledge and purity are best obtained by achievement. Still more concisely: "Innocence--sin--virtue"--in the Hegelian chord of experience.

[301:1] Here is a clear echo of Heine, in one of his most renowned lyrics:--

"The dead stand up, 'tis the midnight bell, In crazy dances they're leaping: We two in the grave lie well, lie well, And I in thine arms am sleeping.

The dead stand up, 'tis the Judgment Day, To Heaven or h.e.l.l they're hieing: We two care nothing, we two will stay Together quietly lying."

II

THE WOMAN WON

Love is not static. We may not sit down and say, "It cannot be more than now; it will not be less. Henceforth I take it for granted." Though she be won, there still is more to do. I say "she" (and Browning says it), because the taking-for-granted ideal is essentially man's--woman has never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is _because_ men feel so keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it.

Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come to an end of it--and, if we were wise, should not desire so to do.

But is she in truth so elusive? Are not women far simpler than they are accounted? "The First Reader in another language," I have elsewhere said of them; but doubtless a woman cannot be the judge. Let us see what Browning, subtle as few other men, thought of our lucidity.

"Room after room, I hunt the house through We inhabit together.

Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her-- Next time, herself!--not the trouble behind her Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!

As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew; Yon looking-gla.s.s gleamed at the wave of her feather."

So elusive, says this man, is the real Herself! But (I maintain) she does not know it. She goes her way, unconscious--or, if conscious, blind to its deepest implication. Caprice, mood, whim: these indeed she uses, _for fun_, as it were, but of "the trouble behind her" she knows nothing. Just to rise from a couch, pull a curtain, pa.s.s through a room!

How should she dream that the cornice-wreath blossomed anew? And when she tossed her hat off, or carefully put it on before the mirror . . .

if the gla.s.s did gleam, it was a trick of light; _she_ did not produce it! For, conscious of this magic, she would lose it; her very inapprehensiveness it is which "brings it off." Yet she loves to hear her lover tell of such imaginings, and the more he tells, the more there seem to be for him.

"Yet the day wears, And door succeeds door; I try the fresh fortune-- Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.

Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.

Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares?

But 'tis twilight, you see--with such suites to explore, Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!"

Listening, she begins to understand how deeply he means "herself." It is not only the spell that she leaves behind her in the mere, actual rooms: it is the mystery residing in her "house of flesh." What does _that_ house contain--where is _she_? He seems to hold her, yet she "goes out as he enters"; he seems to have found her, yet it is like hide-and-seek at twilight, and half-a-hundred hiders in a hundred rooms!

She listens, puzzled; perhaps a little frightened to be so much of a secret. For she never meant to be--she cannot feel that she _is_; and thus, how shall she help him to "find" her? Perhaps she must always elude? She does not desire that: he must not let her escape him! And he quickly answers:

"Escape me?

Never-- Beloved!

While I am I, and you are you, So long as the world contains us both, Me the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes, must the other pursue."

But she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. She wants him to find her. And this, in its turn, scares _him_.

"My life is a fault at last, I fear: It seems too much like a fate, indeed!

Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed."

It is the trouble of love. He may never reach her. . . . They look at one another, and he takes heart again.

"But what if I fail of my purpose here?

It is but to keep the nerves at strain, To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, And, baffled, get up and begin again-- So the chase takes up one's life, that's all."

But she is now almost repelled. She is not this enigma: she _wants_ him to grasp her. Well, then, she can help him, he says:

"Look but once from your farthest bound At me so deep in the dust and dark, No sooner the old hope goes to ground Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark, I shape me-- Ever Removed!"

Is not this the meaning? The two poems seem to me supplementary of each other. First, the sense of her elusiveness; then the dim resentment and fear which this knowledge of mystery awakes in her. She does not (as I have seemed to make her) _speak_ in either of these poems; but the thoughts are those which she must have, and so far, surely, her lover can divine her? The explanation given both by Mrs. Orr and Berdoe of _Love in a Life_ (the first lyric), that the lover is "inhabiting the same house with his love," seems to me simply inept. Is it not clear that no material house[308:1] is meant? They are both inhabiting the _body_; and she, pa.s.sing through this sphere, touching it at various points, leaves the spell of her mere being everywhere--on the curtain, the couch, the cornice-wreath, the mirror. But through _her_ house he cannot range, as she through actualities. And though ever she eludes him, this is not what she sets out to do; she needs his comprehension; she does not desire to "escape" him.

The old enigma that is no enigma--the sphinx with the answer to the riddle ever trembling on her lips! But if she were understood, she might be taken for granted. . . . So the lips may tremble, but the answer is kept back:

"While the one eludes must the other pursue."

"The desire of the man is for the woman; the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man."

In those two poems the lovers are almost gay; they can turn and smile at one another 'mid the perplexity. The man is eager, resolute, humorous; the woman, if not acquiescent, is at least apprehending. The heart shall find her some day: "next time herself, not the trouble behind her!" She feels that she can aid him to that finding; it depends, in the last resort, on _her_.

But in _Two in the Campagna_ a different lover is to deal with. What he wants is more than this. He wants to pa.s.s the limits of personality, to forget the search in the oneness. There is more than "finding" to be done: finding is not the secret. He tries to tell her--and he cannot tell her, for he does not himself fully know.

"I wonder do you feel to-day As I have felt since, hand in hand, We sat down on the gra.s.s, to stray In spirit better through the land, This morn of Rome and May?"

His thought escapes him ever. Like a spider's silvery thread it mocks and eludes; he seeks to catch it, to hang his rhymes upon it. . . . No; it escapes, escapes.

"Help me to hold it! First it left The yellowing fennel. . . ."

What does the fennel mean? Something, but he cannot grasp it--and the thread now seems to float upon that weed with the orange cup, where five green beetles are groping--but not there either does it rest . . . it is all about him: entangling, eluding:

"Everywhere on the gra.s.sy slope, I traced it. Hold it fast!"

The gra.s.sy slope may be the secret! That infinity of pa.s.sion and peace--the Roman Campagna:

"The champaign with its endless fleece Of feathery gra.s.ses everywhere!

Silence and pa.s.sion, joy and peace, An everlasting wash of air-- Rome's ghost since her decease."

And think of all that that plain even now stands for:

"Such life here, through such lengths of hours, Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers, Such letting nature have her way While heaven looks from its towers!"

They love one another: why cannot they be like that plain, why cannot _they_ "let nature have her way"? Does she understand?