Chapter IV: Wedded Life in Italy. Men and Women (3)

[Footnote 38: An anecdote to which Prof. Dowden has lately called attention (_Browning_, p. 66) describes Browning in his last years as demurring to the current interpretation of the _dénoûment_. Some one had remarked that it was "a natural sequence that the guard should be heard coming to take Norbert to his doom." "'Now I don't quite think that,' answered Browning, _as if he were following out the play as a spectator_. 'The queen has a large and passionate temperament.... She would have died by a knife in her heart. The guard would have come to carry away her dead body.'" The catastrophe here suggested is undoubtedly far finer tragedy. But we cannot believe that this was what Browning originally meant to happen. That Norbert and Constance expect "doom" is obvious, and the queen's parting "glare" leaves the reader in no doubt that they are right. They may, nevertheless, be wrong; but what, then, is meant by the coming of the guard, and the throwing open of the doors? The queen has in any case not died on the stage, for she had left it; and if she died outside, how should they have come "to carry away her dead body"?]

Were it not for its unique position in Browning's poetry, one might well be content with a passing tribute to the great love canticle which closes _Men and Women_--the crown, as it is in a pregnant sense the nucleus, of the whole. But here, for "once, and only once, and for one only," not only the dramatic instinct, which habitually coloured all his speech, but the reticence which so hardly permitted it to disclose his most intimate personal emotion, were deliberately overcome--overcome, however, only in order, as it were, to explain and justify their more habitual sway. All the poetry in it is reached through the endeavour to find speaking symbols for a love that cannot be told. The poet is a high priest, entering with awed steps the sanctuary which even he cannot tread without desecration save after divesting himself of all that is habitual and of routine,--even the habits of his genius and the routine of his art. Unable to divest himself of his poetry altogether, for he has no other art, he lays aside his habitual dramatic guise to speak, for once, not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, but "in his true person." And he strips off the veil of his art and speaks in his own person only to declare that speech is needless, and to fall upon that exquisite symbol of an esoteric love uncommunicated and incommunicable to the apprehension of the world,--the moon's other face with all its "silent silver lights and darks," undreamed of by any mortal. "Heaven's gift takes man's abatement," and poetry itself may only hint at the divinity of perfect love. The _One Word More_ was written in September 1855, shortly before the publication of the volume it closed, as the old moon waned over the London roofs. Less than six years later the "moon of poets" had passed for ever from his ken.