Brownings Heroines | Page 5

One day, he will himself look
back, rejoicing that he is down; and when--or if--he goes up again, it
will be more worthily to stay, since other hands than his own will have

built the pillar, and placed him thereupon. His chief hope of
reinstatement lies in this one, certain fact: No girl will ever thrill to a
lover who cannot answer for her to _A Pearl, A Girl_--
"A simple ring with a single stone,
To the vulgar eye no stone of
price:
Whisper the right word, that alone--
Forth starts a 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