Brownings Heroines | Page 4

missed me:
And I want and find you,
Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!
I loved you, Evelyn, all the while.
My heart seemed full as it could
hold?
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile, And
the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.
So, hush--I will give
you this leaf to keep:
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!

There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember,
and understand."

Here the average man is revived, the man who can imagine no meaning
for the loveliness of a girl's body and soul but that it shall "do
something" with him. When they meet in the "new life come in the old

one's stead," this is the question he looks forward to asking; and
instinctively, I think, we ask ourselves a different one. _Will_ Evelyn,
on waking, "remember and understand"? Will she not have passed by
very far, in the spirit-world, this unconscious egotist? . . . True, he can
to some extent realise that probability--
"Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall
traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, much to forget,
Ere the time
be come for taking you."
But Browning has used the wrong word here. She whom the "good
stars that met in her horoscope" had made of "spirit, fire, and dew,"
must, whether it be her desire to do so or not, eternally keep part of
herself from the _taking_ of any man. . . . This is a curious lapse in
Browning, to whom women are, in the highest sense of the word,
individuals--not individualists, a less lovable and far more capturable
thing. His heroines are indeed instinct with devotion, but it is devotion
that chooses, not devotion that submits. A world of "gaiety and
courage" lies between the two conceptions--a world, no less, of
widened responsibility and heavier burdens for the devotee. If we
compare a Browning heroine with a Byron one, we shall almost have
traversed that new country, wherein the air grows ever more bracing as
we travel onward.
With shrinking and timidity the Browning girl is unacquainted. As
experience grows, these sensations may sadly touch her, but she will
not have been prepared for them; no reason for feeling either had
entered her dream of life. She trusts--
"Trust, that's purer than pearl"--
and how much purer than shrinking! Free from the athletics and the
slang, she is antetype, indeed, of, say, the St. Andrews girl, that
admirable creation of our age; but she soars beyond her sister on the
wings of her more exquisite sensibility, and her deeper restfulness. Not
for her the perpetual pursuit of the india-rubber or the other kinds of
ball; she can conceive of the open air as something better than a place

to play games in. Like Wordsworth's Lucy--
"Hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm,

Of mute insensate things;"
and from such "being" she draws joys more instant and more
glancingly fair than Lucy drew. Among them is the joy of laughter. Of
all gifts that the fulness of time has brought to women, may we not
reckon that almost the best? A woman laughs nowadays, where, before,
as an ideal she smiled, or as a caricature giggled; and I think that the
great symphony of sex has been deepened, heightened wellnigh beyond
recognition, by that confident and delicate wood-note.

"All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: All the
wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: In the core of
one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: Breath and bloom,
shade and shine--wonder, wealth, and--how far
above them!--
Truth, that's brighter than gem,
Trust, that's purer
than pearl--
Brightest truth, purest trust, in the universe, all were for
me In the kiss of one girl."
Nothing there of "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever"! Do
the fortunate girls of to-day get _Summum Bonum_ in their albums (if
they have albums), as we of the past got Kingsley's ineffable pat on the
head? But since even for us to be a girl was bliss, these maidens of a
later day must surely be in paradise. They keep, in the words of our
poet, "much that we resigned"--much, too, that we prized. No girl, in
our day, but dreamed of the lordly lover, and I hazard a guess that the
fantasy persists. It is slower to be realised than even in our own
dream-period, for now it must come through the horn-gate of the
maiden's own judgment. Man has fallen from the self-erected pedestal
of "superiority." He had placed himself badly on it, such as it was--the
pose was ignoble, the balance insecure.