Brownings Heroines | Page 6

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 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