Read Ebook: A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) by Orr Sutherland Mrs

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Love carries already the seed of doubt. The wife addresses her husband, who is approaching from outside, in words of anxious tenderness. The season is changing; coming winter is in the air. Will his love change too?

BY THE FIRESIDE.

The note of apprehension deepens. The fire they are sitting by is supplied by ship-wood. It suggests the dangers of the sea, the sailor's longing for land and home. "But the life in port has its dangers too. There are worms which gnaw the ship in harbour, as the heart in sleep. Did some woman before her, in this very house perhaps, begin love's voyage full sail, and then suddenly see the ship's planks start, and hell open beneath the man she loves?"

IN THE DOORWAY.

She remonstrates with her fear. Winter is drawing nearer: nature becoming cold and bare. But they two have all the necessaries of life, and love besides. The human spirit was meant by God to resist change, to put its life into the darkness and the cold. It should fear neither.

ALONG THE BEACH.

The fear has become a certainty. The wife reasons with her husband as they walk together. "He wanted her love, and she gave it to him. He has it, and yet is not content. Why so? She is not blind to his faults, but she does not love him the less for them. She has taken him as he was, with the good seed in him and the bad, waiting patiently for the good to bring its harvest; enduring patiently when the harvest failed. Whether praiseworthy or blameworthy, he has been her world!"

"That is what condemns her in his eyes: she loves too well; she watches too patiently. His nature is impatient of bondage. Such devotion as hers is a bond."

ON THE CLIFF.

She reflects on the power of love. A cricket and a butterfly settle down before her: one on a piece of burnt-up turf, one on the dark flat surface of a rock which the receding tide has left bare. The barren surfaces are transfigured by their brightness. Just so will love settle on the low or barren in life, and transform it.

READING A BOOK UNDER THE CLIFF.

She has reached the transition stage between struggle and resignation. She accepts change and its disappointments as the law of life. We discover this in her comment on the book in question, from which some verses are introduced. The author apostrophizes a moaning wind which appeals to him as a voice of woe more eloquent than any which is given to animal or man: and asks it what form of suffering, mental or bodily, its sighs are trying to convey. James Lee's wife regards the mood here expressed as characteristic of a youthful spirit, disposed to enlarge upon the evils of existence by its over-weening consciousness of power to understand, strength to escape or overcome them. Such a one, she says, can only learn by sad experience what the wind in its moaning means: that subtle change which arrests the course of happiness, as the same wind, stirring however softly in a summer dawn, may annul the promise of its beauty.

"Nothing can be as it has been before; Better, so call it, only not the same. To draw one beauty into our hearts' core, And keep it changeless! such our claim; So answered,--Never more!"

She who has learnt it, can only ask herself if this old world-sorrow be cause for rejoicing through the onward impulse ever forced upon the soul; if it be sent to us in probation. She cannot answer. God alone knows. The fully realized significance of such death in life gives an unutterable pathos to her concluding words.

AMONG THE ROCKS.

She accepts disappointment as also a purifier of love. A sunny autumn morning is exercising its genial influence, and the courage of self-effacement awakens in her. As earth blesses her smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it. Its rewards must be sought in heaven.

BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD.

She accepts the duties of life as an equivalent for its happiness, i.e., for the happiness of love. She has been drawing from the cast of a hand--enraptured with its delicate beauty--thinking how the rapture must have risen into love in the artist who saw it living; when the coarse hand of a little peasant girl reminds her that life, whether beautiful or not, is the artist's noblest study; and that, as the uses of a hand are independent of its beauty and will survive it, life with its obligations will survive love. "She has been a fool to think she must be loved or die."

ON DECK.

She makes the final sacrifice to her husband's happiness, and leaves him. But in so doing she pays a last tribute to the omnipotence of love. She knows there is nothing in her that will claim a place in his remembrance. She knows also that if he had loved her, it might be otherwise. Love could have transformed her in his sight as it has transfigured him in hers. Their positions might even have been reversed. If one touch of such a love as hers could ever come to her in a thought of his, he might turn into a being as ill-favoured as herself. She would neither know nor care, since joy would have killed her.

We learn from the two last monologues, especially the last, that James Lee's wife was a plain woman. This may throw some light on the situation.

"THE WORST OF IT" is the cry of anguish of a man whose wife has been false to him, and who sees in her transgression only the injury she has inflicted on herself, and his own indirect part in its infliction. The strain of suppressed personal suffering betrays itself in his very endeavour to prove that he has not been wronged: that it was his fault, not hers, if his love maddened her, and the vows by which he had bound her were such as she could not keep. But the burden of his lament--"the worst of it" all--is, that her purity was once his salvation, her past kindness has for ever glorified his life; that she is dishonoured, and through him, and that no gratitude of his, no power of his, can rescue her from that dishonour. In his passionate tenderness he strives to pacify her conscience, and again, as earnestly to arouse it. "Her account is not with him who absolves her, but with the world which does not; with her endangered womanhood, her jeopardized hope of Heaven." He implores her for her own sake to return to virtue though not to him. For himself he renounces her even in Paradise. He "will pass nor turn" his "face" if they meet there.

The pathos of "TOO LATE" is all conveyed in its title. The loved woman is dead. She was the wife of another man than he who mourns for her. But so long as there was life there was hope. The lover might, he feels, have learned to compromise with the obstacles to his happiness. Some shock of circumstance might have rolled them away. If the loved one spurned him once, he had of late been earning her friendship. She might in time have discovered that the so-called poet whom she had preferred to him was a mere lay-figure whom her fancy had draped. But all this is at an end. Hope and opportunity are alike gone. He remains to condemn his own quiescence in what was perhaps not inevitable; in what proved no more for her happiness than for his. The husband is probably writing her epitaph.

"Too Late" expresses an attachment as individual as it is complete. "Edith" was not considered a beauty. She was not one even in her lover's eyes. This fact, and the manner in which he shows it, give a characteristic force to the situation.

FOOTNOTES:

EMOTIONAL POEMS .

RELIGIOUS, ARTISTIC, AND EXPRESSIVE OF THE FIERCER EMOTIONS.

The emotions which, after that of love, are most strongly represented in Mr. Browning's works are the RELIGIOUS and the ARTISTIC: emotions closely allied in every nature in which they happen to co-exist, and which are so in their proper degree in Mr. Browning's; the proof of this being that two poems which I have placed in the Artistic group almost equally fit into the Religious. But the religious poems impress us more by their beauty than by their number, if we limit it to those which are directly inspired by this particular emotion. Religious questions have occupied, as we have seen, some of Mr. Browning's most important reflective poems. Religious belief forms the undercurrent of many of the emotional poems. And it was natural therefore, that religious feeling should not often lay hold of him in a more exclusive form. It does so only in three cases; those of

"Saul."

"Epilogue."

"Fears and Scruples."

The religious sentiment in "SAUL" anticipates Christianity. It begins with the expression of an exalted human tenderness, and ends in a prophetic vision of Divine Love, as manifested in Christ. The speaker is David. He has been sent into the presence of Saul to sing and play to him; for Saul is in the agony of that recurring spiritual conflict from which only David's song can deliver him; and when the boy-shepherd has crept his way into the darkness of the tent, he sees the monarch with arms outstretched against its poles, dumb, sightless, and stark, like the serpent in the solitude of the forest awaiting its transformation.

David tells his story, re-enacting the scene which it describes, in strong, simple, picturesque words which rise naturally into the language of prophecy. He tells how first he tried the influence of pastoral tunes: those which call the sheep back to the pen, and stir the sense of insect and bird; how he passed to the song of the reapers--their challenge to mutual help and fellowship; to the warrior's march; the burial and marriage chants; the chorus of the Levites advancing towards the altar; and how at this moment Saul sent forth a groan, though the lights which leapt from the jewels of his turban were his only sign of motion. Then--the tale continues--David changes his theme. He sings of the goodness of human life, as attested by the joyousness of youth, the gratitude of old age. He sings of labour and success, of hope and fulfilment, of high ambitions and of great deeds; of the great king in whom are centred all the gifts and the powers of human nature--of Saul himself. And at these words the tense body relaxes, the arms cross themselves on the breast. But the eyes of Saul still gaze vacantly before him, without consciousness of life, without desire for it.

David's song has poured forth the full cup of material existence; he has yet to infuse into it that draught of "Soul Wine" which shall make it desirable. In a fresh burst of inspiration, he challenges his hearer to follow him beyond the grave. "The tree is known by its fruits; life by its results. Life, like the palm fruit, must be crushed before its wine can flow. Saul will die. But his passion and his power will thrill the generations to come. His achievements will live in the hearts of his people; for whom their record, though covering the whole face of a rock, will still seem incomplete." And as the "Soul Wine" works, as the vision of this earthly immortality unfolds itself before the sufferer's sight, he becomes a king again. The old attitude and expression assert themselves. The hand is gently laid on the young singer's forehead; the eyes fix themselves in grave scrutiny upon him.

Then the heart of David goes out to the suffering monarch in filial, pitying tenderness; and he yearns to give him more than this present life--a new life equal to it in goodness, and which shall be everlasting.

And the yearning converts itself into prophecy. What he, as man, can desire for his fellow-man, God will surely give. What he would suffer for those he loves, surely God would suffer. Human nature in its power of love would otherwise outstrip the Divine. He cries for the weakness to be engrafted upon strength, the human to be manifested in the Divine. And exulting in the consciousness that his cry is answered, he hails the advent of Christ. He bids Saul "see" that a Face like his who now speaks to him awaits him at the threshold of an eternal life; that a Hand like his hand opens to him its gates.

David's prophecy has rung through the universe; and as he seeks his home in the darkness, unseen "cohorts" press everywhere upon him. A tumultuous expectation is filling earth and hell and heaven. The Hand guides him through the tumult. He sees it die out in the birth of the young day. But the hushed voices of nature attest the new dispensation. The seal of the new promise is on the face of the earth.

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows!"

"FEARS AND SCRUPLES" illustrates this personal religion in an opposite manner. It is the expression of a tender and very simple religious feeling, saddened by the obscurity which surrounds its object, and still more by the impossibility of proving to other minds that this object is a real one. It is described as the devotion to an unseen friend, known only by his letters and reported deeds, but whom one loves as by instinct, believes in without testimony, and trusts to as accepting the allegiance of the smaller being, and sure sooner or later to acknowledge it In the present case the days are going by. No sign of acknowledgment has been given. Sceptics assure the believer that his faith rests on letters which were forged, on actions which others equally have performed; he can only yearn for some word or token which would enable him to shut their mouth. But when some one hints that the friend is only concealing himself to test his power of vision, and will punish him if he does not see; and another objects that this would prove the friend a monster; he crushes the objector with a word: "and what if the friend be GOD?"

The next group is fuller and still more characteristic: for it displays the love of Art in its special conditions, and, at the same time, in its union with all the general human instincts in which artistic emotion can be merged. We find it in its relation to the general love of life in

"Fra Lippo Lippi."

In its relation to the spiritual sense of existence in

"Abt Vogler."

As a transformation of human tenderness in

"Pictor Ignotus."

In its directly sensuous effects in

"The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church."

In its associative power in

"A Toccata of Galuppi's."

In its representative power in

"The Guardian-Angel: a Picture at Fano."

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