WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING

The first woman we meet in Browning’s poetry is Pauline; a twofold person, exceedingly unlike the woman usually made by a young poet.  She is not only the Pauline idealised and also materialised by the selfish passion of her lover, but also the real woman whom Browning has conceived underneath the lover’s image of her.  This doubling of his personages, as seen under two diverse aspects or by two different onlookers, in the same poem, is not unfrequent in his poetry, and it pleased his intellect to make these efforts.  When the thing was well done, its cleverness was amazing, even imaginative; when it was ill done, it was confusing.  Tennyson never did this; he had not analytic power enough.  What he sees of his personages is all one, quite clearly drawn and easy to understand.  But we miss in them, and especially in his women, the intellectual play, versatility and variety of Browning.  Tennyson’s women sometimes border on dulness, are without that movement, change and surprises, which in women disturb mankind for evil or for good.  If Tennyson had had a little more of Browning’s imaginative analysis, and Browning a little less of it, both would have been better artists.

The Pauline of the lover is the commonplace woman whom a young man so often invents out of a woman for his use and pleasure.  She is to be his salvation, to sympathise with his ideals, joys and pains, to give him everything, with herself, and to live for him and him alone.  Nothing can be more naif and simple than this common selfishness which forgets that a woman has her own life, her own claim on the man, and her own individuality to develop; and this element in the poem, which never occurs again in Browning’s poetry, may be the record of an early experience.  If so, he had escaped from this youthful error before he had finished the poem, and despised it, perhaps too much.  It is excusable and natural in the young.  His contempt for this kind of love is embodied in the second Pauline.  She is not the woman her lover imagines her to be, but far older and more experienced than her lover; who has known long ago what love was; who always liked to be loved, who therefore suffers her lover to expatiate as wildly as he pleases; but whose life is quite apart from him, enduring him with pleasurable patience, criticising him, wondering how he can be so excited.  There is a dim perception in the lover’s phrases of these elements in his mistress’ character; and that they are in her character is quite plain from the patronising piece of criticism in French which Browning has put into her mouth.  The first touch of his humour appears in the contrast of the gentle and lofty boredom of the letter with the torrents of love in the poem.  And if we may imagine that the lover is partly an image of what Browning once felt in a youthful love, we may also think that the making of the second and critical Pauline was his record, when his love had passed, of what he thought about it all.