Brownings Heroines | Page 5

sprite, like fire from ice,?And lo! you are lord (says an Eastern scroll)?Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole,?Through the power in a pearl.
A woman ('tis I this time that say)?With little the world counts worthy praise,?Utter the true word--out and away?Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze,?Creation's lord, of heaven and earth?Lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth--?Through the love in a girl!"
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be! But observe that he has to utter the _true_ word.
+ + + + +
This brave and joyous note is the essential Browning, and to me it supplies an easy explanation for his much-discussed rejection of the very early poem _Pauline_, for which, despite its manifold beauties, he never in later life cared at all--more, he wished to suppress it. In _Pauline_, his deepest sense of woman's spiritual function is falsified. This might be accounted for by the fact that it was written at twenty-one, if it were not that at twenty-one most young men are most "original." Browning, in this as in other things, broke down tradition, for _Pauline_ is by far the least original of his works in outlook--it is, indeed, in outlook, of the purest common-place. "It exhibits," says Mr. Chesterton, "the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old"; and it exhibits too the entirely un-characteristic mark of a Browning poem, the general suggestion that the poet has not thought for himself on a subject which he was, in the issue, almost to make his own--that of the inspiring, as opposed (for in Browning the antithesis is as marked as that) to the consoling, power of a beloved woman. From the very first line this emotional flaccidity is evident--
"Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me--thy soft breast?Shall pant to mine--bend o'er me--thy sweet eyes?And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms?Drawing me to thee--these build up a screen?To shut me in with thee, and from all fear . . ."
And again in the picture of her, lovely to the sense, but, in some strange fashion, hardly less than nauseating to the mind--
". . . Love looks through--?Whispers--E'en at the last I have her still,?With her delicious eyes as clear as heaven?When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist . . .?How the blood lies upon her cheek, outspread?As thinned by kisses! only in her lips?It wells and pulses like a living thing,?And her neck looks like marble misted o'er?With love-breath--a Pauline from heights above,?Stooping beneath me, looking up--one look?As I might kill her and be loved the more.?So love me--me, Pauline, and nought but me,?Never leave loving! . . ."
Something is there to which not again, not once again, did Browning stoop; and that something removes, for me, all difficulty in understanding his rejection, despite its exquisite verbal beauties, of this work. Moreover, it is interesting to observe the queer sub-conscious sense of the lover's inferiority betrayed in the prose note at the end. This is in French, and feigns to be written by Pauline herself. She is there made to speak of "_mon pauvre ami_." Let any woman ask herself what that phrase implies, when used by her in speaking of a lover--"my poor dear friend"! We cannot of course be sure that Browning, as a man, was versed in this scrap of feminine psychology; but we do gather with certainty from Pauline's fabled comment that her view of the confession--for the poem is merely, as Mr. Chesterton says, "the typical confession of a boy"--was very much less lachrymose than that of _mon pauvre ami_. Unconsciously, then, here--but in another poem soon to be discussed, not unconsciously--there sounds the humorous note in regard to men which dominates so many of women's relations with them. "The big child"--to some women, as we all know, man presents himself in that aspect chiefly. Pauline, remarking of her lover's "idea" that it was perhaps as unintelligible to him as to her, is a tender exponent of this view; the girl in _Youth and Art_ is gayer and more ironic. Here we have a woman, successful though (as I read the poem)[12:1] _not_ famous, recalling to a successful and famous sculptor the days when they lived opposite one another--she as a young student of singing, he as a budding statuary--
"We studied hard in our styles,?Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos,?For air looked out on the tiles,?For fun watched each other's windows.

And I--soon managed to find?Weak points in the flower-fence facing,?Was forced to put up a blind?And be safe in my corset-lacing.

No harm! It was not my fault?If you never turned your eyes' tail up?As I shook upon E in alt,?Or ran the chromatic scale up.

Why did you not pinch a flower?In a pellet