ng
the second-rate poets so sweetly, nobly, tenderly and wisely drawn as
Pompilia and Balaustion.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIV

_WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING_

(_THE DRAMATIC LYRICS AND POMPILIA_)

No modern poet has written of women with such variety as Browning.
Coleridge, except in a few love-poems, scarcely touched them. Wordsworth
did not get beyond the womanhood of the home affections, except in a few
lovely and spiritual sketches of girlhood which are unique in our
literature, in which maidenhood and the soul of nature so interchange
their beauty that the girl seems born of the lonely loveliness of nature
and lives with her mother like a child.

What motherhood in its deep grief and joy, what sisterhood and wifehood
may be, have never been sung with more penetration and exquisiteness
than Wordsworth sang them. But of the immense range, beyond, of
womanhood he could not sing. Byron's women are mostly in love with Byron
under various names, and he rarely strays beyond the woman who is loved
or in love. The woman who is most vital, true and tender is Haidee in
_Don Juan_. Shelley's women melt into philosophic mist, or are used to
build up a political or social theory, as if they were "properties" of
literature. Cythna, Rosalind, Asia, Emilia are ideas, not realities.
Beatrice is alive, but she was drawn for him in the records of her
trial. Even the woman of his later lyrics soon ceases to be flesh and
blood. Keats let women alone, save in Isabella, and all that is of
womanhood in her is derived from Boccaccio. Madeline is nothing but a
picture. It is curious that his remarkable want of interest in the time
in which he lived should be combined with as great a want of interest in
women, as if the vivid life of any period in the history of a people
were bound up with the vivid life of women in that period. When women
awake no full emotion in a poet, the life of the time, as in the case of
Keats, awakes little emotion in him. He will fly to the past for his
subjects. Moreover, it is perhaps worth saying that when the poets cease
to write well about women, the phase of poetry they represent, however
beautiful it be, is beginning to decay. When poetry is born into a new
life, women are as living in it as men. Womanhood became at once one of
its dominant subjects in Tennyson and Browning. Among the new political,
social, religious, philosophic and artistic ideas which were then borne
like