LOVE IN BROWNING.- GEORGE ELIOT.

161

The situation is thoroughly original, and the utterance powerful; but it is so entirely apart from ordinary experience that it can hardly arouse sympathetic emotion, though it may furnish fresh material for thought.

Unrequited love has been frequently treated by Browning, and in a manner different from most other poets. His favourite attitude of mind for the rejected lover is calm resignation, without anger, despair, or the lessening of respect for the person loved. This is the spirit portrayed in The Lost Mistress,' The Last Ride together,' and 'One Way of Love'. The purity and elevation of love are thus depicted with great power; but the effect is more allied to Strength than to Pathos. The situation of undeclared love, whose opportunity is removed by death, as pictured in 'Evelyn Hope,' though evoking the same calm strength of character, is more purely pathetic. Thus :

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while!

My heart seemed full as it could hold;

There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.

So hush,-I will give you this leaf to keep:

See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!

There, that is our secret: go to sleep!

You will wake, and remember, and understand.

Browning's use of harmonizing circumstances is abun dant and appropriate, though often subtle in the application. Personification is happily employed to express this harmony. (See an example under PERSONIFICATION.)

One of George Eliot's finest attempts at picturing beauty, both of person and of ways, is seen in 'Hetty Sorrel'. The description begins with a sort of generic view of Hetty's beauty, as that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief'. The defective side of such an attempt is partly the difficulty of making it combine with the actual form and features of Hetty, and partly the introduction of another interest, the interest of the child-like, which the description of a full-grown girl should not depend upon. Perhaps the intention was to bring out the idea of the unconscious and unreflective enjoyment of life, with which the character harmonizes throughout.

The actual details do not receive the assistance of an

orderly method, and we may doubt whether any imagination could figure this remarkable beauty.

"It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty's cheek was like a rose-petal, that dimples played about her pouting lips, that her large dark eyes hid a soft roguishness under their long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back under her round cap while she was at work, stole back in dark delicate rings on her forehead, and about her white shell-like ears; it is of little use for me to say how lovely was the contour of her pink and white neckerchief, tucked into her low plum-coloured stuff bodice, or how the linen butter-making apron, with its bib, seemed a thing to be imitated in silk by duchesses, since it fell in such charming lines, or how her brown stockings and thick-soled buckled shoes lost all that clumsiness which they must certainly have had when empty of her foot and ankle-of little use, unless you have seen a woman who affected you as Hetty affected her beholders, for otherwise, though you might conjure up the image of a lovely woman, she would not in the least resemble that distracting kitten-like maiden.'

Much more should have been said of her figure and complexion to begin with, instead of repeating it in snatches, in the course of the story. The dress naturally goes with the person, especially when studied for effect. The author, however, takes care to exhaust for the present the still life picture, before adding the following sentences:

"And they are the prettiest attitudes and movements into which a pretty girl is thrown in making up buttertossing movements that give a charming curve to the arm, and a sideward inclination of the round white neck; little patting and rolling movements with the palm of the hand, and nice adaptations and finishings which cannot at all be effected without a great play of the pouting mouth and the dark eyes".

But the comparisons to the divine charms of a bright spring day,' when we strain our eyes after the mountain lark, or wander through the still lanes when the freshopened blossoms fill them with a sacred, silent beauty like that of fretted aisles'-though pleasing in themselves, are scarcely an aid to the conception of a beautiful girl. All comparisons should be subordinated to some definite form and picture, such as we could keep steadily before the mind, throughout the narrative.

POETRY OF CONJUGAL AFFECTION.

163

This is the same author's delineation of the beauty of the arm:

"Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm?—the unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently lessening curves down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness. A woman's arm touched the soul of a great sculptor two thousand years ago, so that he wrought an image of it for the Parthenon which moves us still as it clasps lovingly the time-worn marble of a headless trunk. Maggie's was such an arm as that-and it had the warm tints of life."

The poetizing of Conjugal Love is already seen in the Iliad. Homer's happy instinct chooses the one situation most favourable to its display, that is, the conjoint interest of parents in their child; and other poets have followed in the same track. The parting of Hector and Andromache will be adduced in connexion with the parental feeling.

The picture of our First Parents in Paradise Lost (IV. 288) is a fine ideal of the personal beauty appropriate to the two sexes respectively. It is conceived with Miltonic sternness. As an ideal, it labours under impossibility of fulfilment, and is not in itself interesting; authority without coercion, and absolute submission, qualified only by

Sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.

The attempt to picture wedded happiness, although less frequent than the delineation of love-making, is still a poetic theme. The personal charms, and the first energy of youthful fire are gone. There remains, in the rarer instances, the concentrated attachment to one; while, in a still greater number, there is the mutual play of good offices, and the resolve to cherish the love affection as the main ingredient of happiness for both. With these conditions, and with power and obedience kept in the background, an ideal of conjugal happiness can be presented, such as not to be painfully at variance with human experience.

PARENTAL FEELING.

1. With a view to exemplify the poetry of Parental Feeling, we must recall the distinctive characteristics of

that feeling. While generically agreeing with Sexual Love, it has certain specific differences.

The parental emotion has the generic quality of Love or Tenderness, which is definable mainly by appeal to our experience, although partly also by contrast with the emotion of Strength. In point of intensity, it ranks as a firstclass emotion of the pleasurable kind.

The chief difference between parental and erotic feeling has reference to the object. In the purest form of parental feeling, we have, instead of a full-grown individual of the other sex, an infant in the first and dependent stage of life. Littleness, weakness, dependence, are substituted for reciprocal and equal regards, mutual affection and mutual services. The infant can render nothing; it is a passive object of pleasurable contemplation.

To the charms of littleness and dependence, the infant may add the sensuous beauties, which are the ornament and the charm of mature life, and especially distinguish the feminine personality. While all infants have the character of weakness, they differ among themselves in these other

attractions.

Infancy, however, soon learns to repay the parental affection with endearments of its own kind, so as to make a slight commencement of reciprocal tenderness. Moreover, it can either maintain a behaviour consistent with its position; or it can resort to self-assertion and rebellion, thereby dissipating the charm proper to its character. The ideal excellence of the child is expressed by Innocence; in other words, by subordination to the will of its elders. Ás strength increases, its growing virtues heighten the parental feeling.

Thus, then, for the purposes of poetry, the hinges of delineation are, first and fundamentally-the little, the weak, the helpless, the dependent. Second, the sensuous beauties-a variable quantity. Third, the responsive smiles and tokens of reciprocated affections. Fourth, the expression of the parent's own feelings, and the supposed virtues of

* In discussing the foundations of Beauty, great stress was laid by Burke on the little-the peculiarity of the infant fascination. Nevertheless, a certain limit must be placed to the diminutive figure; there is a proper size suited to our received conception of the child, and to deviate from it far in either direction destroys the effect. The danger of pushing littleness to an extreme was caricatured by Sydney Smith in reviewing Burke's theory.

PARENTAL FEELING IN HOMER.

165

the child-innocence and simplicity. To these may be added, likeness (real or imagined) to one or other parent.

In every age of the world, parental love has counted for a very great pleasure, although a certain degree of civilization is necessary to do justice to it. Like the sexual and other tender feelings, it was late in gaining its full place in poetry.

Homer has not entirely neglected the subject. In the parting of Hector and Andromache, their tender interest in their child is portrayed. The expression is brief, simple and primitive, and yet strikes genuine chords in the parental relationship.

"So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arm to his boy. But the child shrunk crying to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse, dismayed at his dear father's aspect, and in dread at the bronze and horse-hair crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet's top. Then his dear father laughed aloud, and his lady mother; forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head, and laid it, all gleaming, upon the earth; then kissed he his dear son and dandled him in his arms, and spake in prayer to Zeus and all the gods, 'O Zeus and all ye gods, vouchsafe ye that this my son may likewise prove even as I, pre-eminent amid the Trojans, and as valiant in might, and be a great king of Ilios. Then may men say of him, Far greater is he than his father,' as he returneth home from battle; and may he bring with him blood-stained spoils from the foeman he hath slain, and may his mother's heart be glad." (Iliud, Book VI., Leaf's transl.)

In Homer's wide search for illustrative similitudes and circumstances, the situation of parent and child is not omitted. Athene turns aside an arrow aimed by Pandarus at Menelaus

As when a mother from her infant's cheek,
Wrapt in sweet slumbers, brushes off a fly.

The presumptuous Diomede, who wounded the goddess of love, receives a fatal warning

for him no child

Upon his knees shall lisp a father's name.

Teucer, the younger brother of the huge Ajax, fights