of love—­reverses the conventional attitude of the wronged husband; he ought, according to all recognised authorities of drama and novel, rage against his faithless wife, and commiserate his virtuous self; here he endeavours, though vainly, to transfer every stain and shame to himself from her; his anguish is all on her behalf, or if on his own chiefly because he cannot restore her purity or save her from her wrong done against herself.  It is a poem of moral stress and strain, imagined with great intensity.  Browning in general isolates a single moment or mood of passion, and studies it, with its shifting lights and shadows, as a living microcosm; often it is a moment of crisis, a moment of culmination.  For once in James Lee’s Wife (named in the first edition by a stroke of perversity James Lee), he represents in a sequence of lyrics a sequence of moods, and with singular success.  The season of the year is autumn, and autumn as felt not among golden wheatfields, but on a barren and rocky sea-coast; the processes of the declining year, from the first touch of change to bareness everywhere, accompany and accord with those of the decline of hope in the wife’s heart for any return of her love.  Her offence is that she has loved too well; that she has laid upon her husband too great a load of devotion; hostility might be met and vanquished; but how can she deal with a heart which love itself only petrifies?  It should be a warning to critics who translate dramatic poems into imaginary biography to find that Browning, who had known so perfect a success in the one love of his life, should constantly present in work of imagination the ill fortunes of love and lovers.  Looking a little below the surface we see that he could not write directly, he could not speak effusively, of the joy that he had known.  But in all these poems he thinks of love as a supreme possession in itself and as a revelation of infinite things which lie beyond it; as a test of character, and even as a pledge of perpetual advance in the life of the spirit.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 84:  Letter to Story in Henry James’s “W.W.  Story,” vol. ii. p. 91 and p. 97.]

[Footnote 85:  H. James’s “W.W.  Story,” vol. ii. p. 100.]

[Footnote 86:  “Rossetti Papers,” p. 302.]

[Footnote 87:  In 1863 Browning gave time and pains to revising his friend Story’s Roba di Roma.]

[Footnote 88:  In 1864 Browning again “braved the awful Biarritz” and stayed at Cambo.  On this occasion he visted Fontarabia.  An interesting letter from Cambo, undated as to time, is printed in Henry James’s “W.W.  Story,” vol. ii. pp. 153-156.  The year—­1864—­may be ascertained by comparing it with a letter addressed to F.T.  Palgrave, given in Palgrave’s Life, the date of this letter being Oct. 19, 1864.  Browning in the letter to Story speaks of “the last two years in the dear rough Ste.-Marie.”]