Browning's Heroines

T IN THE

is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to show; and Browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own person hymned it, found words for its delineation which lift the soul as it were to morning skies

eliness of the "pure in heart"; I mean merely that he questioned the artificial value which has been set upon physical chastity-and that when departure from this was the circumstance through which he had to show the more essential purity, his instinctive scepticism drove him to the forcing of a note which was not really native to

It may be that such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration-that his fancy, brooding with closed

kills the th

ertine is oftenest attracted by the immature girl, so the ardent inexperienced man of any age will be drawn to the older woman; a

of the words) is not her most significant error; and this conviction necessarily reacted upon his presentment of those in whom such purity is the most salient quality-a type of which, as I have said, the p

; but after his consent, learns from a servant that Mildred has yielded herself to a man-he learns not whom. She, accused, makes no denial, gives no name, and to her brother's consternation, proposes thus to marry her suitor, whom Tresham thinks to be in ignorance of her error. Tresham violently repudiates her; then, meeting beneath her win

iling Earl Mertoun's conduct with that of a rational being. He is all that in Mildred's suitor might be demanded, yet, loving

I was

passing repu

aloof

play, which indeed but once or twice approaches aught that we can figure to ourselves of reality in any period of history. "Medi?val" i

even these would leave her still a child-though not at any moment in the play does she actually so affect us, for Mildred is never a child, never even a young girl. Immature indeed she is, but it is with the immaturity which will

ely, true, deeply affecting . . . is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. . . . I know nothing

ot be alone in thinking-rings false, and the recurrence, therefore, but heaps error upon error. When I imagine an ardent girl in such a situation, almost anything she could have been made to say wou

ung, I loved

od forgot me

Mertoun for a mere seducer, ravishing from a maiden that which she did not desire to give-yet the words he here puts in Mildred's mouth bear no other interpretation. Either she is capable of passion, or she is not. If she is, sorrow for the sorrow that her recklessness may cause to others will indeed put pain and terror in her soul, but she will not, can not, say that "God forgot her": those words are alien to the pas

other in its unselfishness. Her sole rejoinder-and here she does for one second attain to authenticity-is the question: "What is this for?" He, after some hesita

rold, do

on for my g

nought to say t

that my spirit

in the fierce

lunge me int

lt enou

me. He tells her to pronounc

lseness to all truth of its abase

you must never

this chamber,

punishment; so

heat, into ext

oman to whom, but a page or two back, young Mertoun has sung t

a dewdrop, she's so

noblest, yes, and her sure

ppalled us both" (namely, the meeting with her brother, when he was to ask for her hand), saying that it is over and happiness begins, "such as the world contains not." When Mildred answers him with,

ised us, so wi

ed to be real, so quick is our resentment of the unrealities heaped on her. Imagining beforehand the moment when she shall receive in presence of them all "the partner of my guilty love" (is not here the theatre in full blast?), the deception she must practise-called by her, in the vein so cru

ll not aff

me-gone once, and

nowledge of herself which comes with revelation to the world, have felt that passionately? There are accusations of ourselves which indeed arraign our

not yet in full possession of that self, he set up as an ideal the ideal of others, trying dutifully to see it as they see it, denying dutifully his deepest instinct; and, thus apostate, piled insincerity on insincerity, until at last no truth is anywhere, and we read on with growing alienation as each figure loses all of such reality

we can but-r

orget him, imaging to ourselves the Mildred that Browning coul

ow the good an

st and its wom

assionate, how

joyous, how re

ere friends

he exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak for herself-he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth departs from him; we have the Mildred Tresham of the theatre, of "the partner of my guilty love," of "Oh, Thorold,

I-forgi

Thorold, from m

think too much

s broke was all

up between my

neath its shad

e? I have his h

se of it: I

you as mi

d, will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient c

hold our 's

ot on it! You

blot away; the

ood came. To the

ain: no care t

e the red

that "no blot shal

et it did come.

od's, not man'

met again in the spirit-world

TNO

oe. Brownin