Browning's Heroines. Ethel Colburn Mayne

BROWNING'S HEROINES

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INTRODUCTORY

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      Browning's power of embodying in rhythm the full beauty of girlhood is unequalled by any other English poet. Heine alone is his peer in this; but even Heine's imagination dwelt more fondly on the abstract pathos and purity of a maiden than on her individual gaiety and courage. In older women, also, these latter qualities were the spells for Browning; and, with him, a girl sets forth early on her brave career. That is the just adjective. His girls are as brave as the young knights of other poets; and in this appreciation of a dauntless gesture in women we see one of the reasons why he may be called the first "feminist" poet since Shakespeare. To me, indeed, even Shakespeare's maidens have less of the peculiar iridescence of their state than Browning's have, and I think this is because, already in the modern poet's day, girlhood was beginning to be seen as it had never been seen before—that is, as a "thing-by-itself." People had perceived—dimly enough, but with eyes which have since grown clearer-sighted—that there is a stage in woman's development which ought to be her very own to enjoy, as a man enjoys his adolescence. This dawning sense is explicit in the earlier verses of one of Browning's most original utterances, Evelyn Hope, which is the call of a man, many years older, to the mysterious soul of a dead young girl—

      "Sixteen years old when she died!

       Perhaps she had hardly heard my name;

       It was not her time to love; beside,

       Her life had many a hope and aim,

       Duties enough and little cares,

       And now was quiet, now astir … "

      Here recognition of the girl's individuality is complete. Not a word in the stanza hints at Evelyn's possible love for another man. "It was not her time"; there were quite different joys in life for her. … Such a view is even still something of a novelty, and Browning was the first to express it thus whole-heartedly. There had been, of course, from all time the hymning of maiden purity and innocence, but beneath such celebrations had lurked that predatory instinct which a still more modern poet has epitomised in a haunting and ambiguous phrase—

      "For each man kills the thing he loves."

      Thus, even in Shakespeare, the Girl is not so much that transient, exquisite thing as she is the Woman-in-love; thus, even for Rosalind, there waits the Emersonian précis—

      "Whither went the lovely hoyden?

       Disappeared in blessèd wife;