Brownings Heroines | Page 6

of clay and fling it??Why did I not put a power?Of thanks in a look, or sing it?"

I confess that this lyric, except for its penultimate verse, soon to be quoted, does not seem to me what Mr. Chesterton calls it--"delightful." Nothing, plainly, did bring these two together; she may have looked jealously at his models, and he at her piano-tuner (though even this, so far as "he" is concerned, I question), but they remained uninterested in one another--and why should they not? When at the end she cries--
"This could but have happened once,?And we missed it, lost it for ever"--
one's impulse surely is (mine is) to ask with some vexation what "this" was?
"Each life's unfulfilled, you see;?It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;?We have not sighed deep, laughed free,?Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy."
Away from its irritating context, that stanza _is_ delightful; with the context it is to me wholly meaningless. The boy and girl had not fallen in love--there is no more to say; and I heartily wish that Browning had not tried to say it. The whole lyric is based on nothingness, or else on a self-consciousness peculiarly unappealing. Kate Brown was evidently quite "safe in her corset-lacing" before she put up a blind. I fear that this confession of my dislike for _Youth and Art_ is a betrayal of lacking humour; I can but face it out, and say that unhumorous is precisely what, despite its levity of manner, rhythm, and rhyme, _Youth and Art_ seems to my sense. . . . I rejoice that we need not reckon this Kate among Browning's girls; she is introduced to us as married to her rich old lord, and queen of _bals-parés_. Thus we may console ourselves with the hope that life has vulgarised her, and that as a girl she was far less objectionable than she now represents herself to have been. We have only to imagine Evelyn Hope putting up a superfluous blind that she might be safe in her corset-lacing, to sweep the gamut of Kate Brown's commonness. . . . Let us remove her from a list which now offers us a figure more definitely and dramatically posed than any of those whom we have yet considered.
FOOTNOTES:
[12:1] Mr. Chesterton and Mrs. Orr both speak of Kate Brown as having succeeded in her art. I cannot find any words in the poem which justify this view. She is "queen at _bals-parés_," and she has married "a rich old lord," but nothing in either condition predicates the successful cantatrice.
I
THE GIRL IN "COUNT GISMOND"
It is like a fairy tale, for there are three beautiful princesses, and the youngest is the heroine. The setting is French--a castle in Aix-en-Provence; it is the fourteenth century, for tourneys and hawking-parties are the amusements, and a birthday is celebrated by an award of crowns to the victors in the lists, when there are ladies in brave attire, thrones, canopies, false knight and true knight. . . . Here is the story.
Once upon a time there were three beautiful princesses, and they lived in a splendid castle. The youngest had neither father nor mother, so she had come to dwell with her cousins, and they had all been quite happy together until one day in summer, when there was a great tourney and prize-giving to celebrate the birthday of the youngest princess. She was to award the crowns, and her cousins dressed her like a queen for the ceremony. She was very happy; she laughed and "sang her birthday-song quite through," while she looked at herself, garlanded with roses, in the glass before they all three went arm-in-arm down the castle stairs. The throne and canopy were ready; troops of merry friends had assembled. These kissed the cheek of the youngest princess, laughing and calling her queen, and then they helped her to stoop under the canopy, which was pierced by a long streak of golden sunshine. There, in the gleam and gloom, she took her seat on the throne. But for all her joy and pride, there came to her, as she sat there, a great ache of longing for her dead father and mother; and afterwards she remembered this, and thought that perhaps if her cousins had guessed that such sorrow was in her heart, even at her glad moment, they might not have allowed the thing to happen which did happen.
All eyes were on her, except those of her cousins, which were lowered, when the moment came for her to stand up and present the victor's crown.
Shy and proud and glad, she stood up, and as she did so, there stalked forth Count Gauthier--
". . . And he thundered 'Stay!'?And all stayed. 'Bring no crowns, I say!'
'Bring torches! Wind the penance-sheet?About her! Let her shun the chaste,?Or lay herself before their feet!?Shall