Chapter 6

BROWNING'S HEROINES

INTRODUCTORY

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; Servant to a wooden cradle, Living in a baby's life."

I confess that this tabloid "story of a woman" has, ever since my first discovery of it, been a source of anger to me; and I do not think that such resentment should be reckoned as a manifestation of modern decadence. The hustling out of sight of that "lovely hoyden" is unworthy of a poet; poet's eyes should rest longer upon beauty so irrecoverable--for though the wife and mother be the happiest that ever was, she can never be a girl again.

In the same way, to me the earliest verses of _Evelyn Hope_ are the loveliest. As I read on, doubts and questions gather fast--

"But the time will come--at last it will, When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say) In the lower earth, in the years long still, That body and soul so pure and gay? Why your hair was amber, I shall divine, And your mouth of your own geranium's red-- And what you would do with me, in fine, In the new life come in the old one's stead.

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then, Given up myself so many times, Gained me the gains of various men, Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, Either I missed, or itself missed me: And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope! What is the issue? let us see!

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."

* * * * *

Here the average man is revived, the man who can imagine no meaning for the loveliness of a girl's body and soul but that it shall "do something" with him. When they meet in the "new life come in the old one's stead," this is the question he looks forward to asking; and instinctively, I think, we ask ourselves a different one. _Will_ Evelyn, on waking, "remember and understand"? Will she not have passed by very far, in the spirit-world, this unconscious egotist? . . . True, he can to some extent realise that probability--

"Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few: Much is to learn, much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you."

But Browning has used the wrong word here. She whom the "good stars that met in her horoscope" had made of "spirit, fire, and dew," must, whether it be her desire to do so or not, eternally keep part of herself from the _taking_ of any man. . . . This is a curious lapse in Browning, to whom women are, in the highest sense of the word, individuals--not individualists, a less lovable and far more capturable thing. His heroines are indeed instinct with devotion, but it is devotion that chooses, not devotion that submits. A world of "gaiety and courage" lies between the two conceptions--a world, no less, of widened responsibility and heavier burdens for the devotee. If we compare a Browning heroine with a Byron one, we shall almost have traversed that new country, wherein the air grows ever more bracing as we travel onward.

With shrinking and timidity the Browning girl is unacquainted. As experience grows, these sensations may sadly touch her, but she will not have been prepared for them; no reason for feeling either had entered her dream of life. She trusts--

"Trust, that's purer than pearl"--

and how much purer than shrinking! Free from the athletics and the slang, she is antetype, indeed, of, say, the St. Andrews girl, that admirable creation of our age; but she soars beyond her sister on the wings of her more exquisite sensibility, and her deeper restfulness. Not for her the perpetual pursuit of the india-rubber or the other kinds of ball; she can conceive of the open air as something better than a place to play games in. Like Wordsworth's Lucy--

"Hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm, Of mute insensate things;"

and from such "being" she draws joys more instant and more glancingly fair than Lucy drew. Among them is the joy of laughter. Of all gifts that the fulness of time has brought to women, may we not reckon that almost the best? A woman laughs nowadays, where, before, as an ideal she smiled, or as a caricature giggled; and I think that the great symphony of sex has been deepened, heightened wellnigh beyond recognition, by that confident and delicate wood-note.

* * * * *

"All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: Breath and bloom, shade and shine--wonder, wealth, and--how far above them!-- Truth, that's brighter than gem, Trust, that's purer than pearl-- Brightest truth, purest trust, in the universe, all were for me In the kiss of one girl."

Nothing there of "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever"! Do the fortunate girls of to-day get _Summum Bonum_ in their albums (if they have albums), as we of the past got Kingsley's ineffable pat on the head? But since even for us to be a girl was bliss, these maidens of a later day must surely be in paradise. They keep, in the words of our poet, "much that we resigned"--much, too, that we prized. No girl, in our day, but dreamed of the lordly lover, and I hazard a guess that the fantasy persists. It is slower to be realised than even in our own dream-period, for now it must come through the horn-gate of the maiden's own judgment. Man has fallen from the self-erected pedestal of "superiority." He had placed himself badly on it, such as it was--the pose was ignoble, the balance insecure. One day, he will himself look back, rejoicing that he is down; and when--or if--he goes up again, it will be more worthily to stay, since other hands than his own will have built the pillar, and placed him thereupon. His chief hope of reinstatement lies in this one, certain fact: No girl will ever thrill to a lover who cannot answer for her to _A Pearl, A Girl_--

"A simple ring with a single stone, To the vulgar eye no stone of price: Whisper the right word, that alone-- Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice, And lo! you are lord (says an Eastern scroll) Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole, Through the power in a pearl.

A woman ('tis I this time that say) With little the world counts worthy praise, Utter the true word--out and away Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze, Creation's lord, of heaven and earth Lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth-- Through the love in a girl!"

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be! But observe that he has to utter the _true_ word.

+ + + + +

This brave and joyous note is the essential Browning, and to me it supplies an easy explanation for his much-discussed rejection of the very early poem _Pauline_, for which, despite its manifold beauties, he never in later life cared at all--more, he wished to suppress it. In _Pauline_, his deepest sense of woman's spiritual function is falsified. This might be accounted for by the fact that it was written at twenty-one, if it were not that at twenty-one most young men are most "original." Browning, in this as in other things, broke down tradition, for _Pauline_ is by far the least original of his works in outlook--it is, indeed, in outlook, of the purest common-place. "It exhibits," says Mr. Chesterton, "the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old"; and it exhibits too the entirely un-characteristic mark of a Browning poem, the general suggestion that the poet has not thought for himself on a subject which he was, in the issue, almost to make his own--that of the inspiring, as opposed (for in Browning the antithesis is as marked as that) to the consoling, power of a beloved woman. From the very first line this emotional flaccidity is evident--

"Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me--thy soft breast Shall pant to mine--bend o'er me--thy sweet eyes And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms Drawing me to thee--these build up a screen To shut me in with thee, and from all fear . . ."

And again in the picture of her, lovely to the sense, but, in some strange fashion, hardly less than nauseating to the mind--

". . . Love looks through-- Whispers--E'en at the last I have her still, With her delicious eyes as clear as heaven When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist . . . How the blood lies upon her cheek, outspread As thinned by kisses! only in her lips It wells and pulses like a living thing, And her neck looks like marble misted o'er With love-breath--a Pauline from heights above, Stooping beneath me, looking up--one look As I might kill her and be loved the more. So love me--me, Pauline, and nought but me, Never leave loving! . . ."

Something is there to which not again, not once again, did Browning stoop; and that something removes, for me, all difficulty in understanding his rejection, despite its exquisite verbal beauties, of this work. Moreover, it is interesting to observe the queer sub-conscious sense of the lover's inferiority betrayed in the prose note at the end. This is in French, and feigns to be written by Pauline herself. She is there made to speak of "_mon pauvre ami_." Let any woman ask herself what that phrase implies, when used by her in speaking of a lover--"my poor dear friend"! We cannot of course be sure that Browning, as a man, was versed in this scrap of feminine psychology; but we do gather with certainty from Pauline's fabled comment that her view of the confession--for the poem is merely, as Mr. Chesterton says, "the typical confession of a boy"--was very much less lachrymose than that of _mon pauvre ami_. Unconsciously, then, here--but in another poem soon to be discussed, not unconsciously--there sounds the humorous note in regard to men which dominates so many of women's relations with them. "The big child"--to some women, as we all know, man presents himself in that aspect chiefly. Pauline, remarking of her lover's "idea" that it was perhaps as unintelligible to him as to her, is a tender exponent of this view; the girl in _Youth and Art_ is gayer and more ironic. Here we have a woman, successful though (as I read the poem)[12:1] _not_ famous, recalling to a successful and famous sculptor the days when they lived opposite one another--she as a young student of singing, he as a budding statuary--

"We studied hard in our styles, Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos, For air looked out on the tiles, For fun watched each other's windows.

* * * * *

And I--soon managed to find Weak points in the flower-fence facing, Was forced to put up a blind And be safe in my corset-lacing.

* * * * *

No harm! It was not my fault If you never turned your eyes' tail up As I shook upon E in alt, Or ran the chromatic scale up.

* * * * *

Why did you not pinch a flower In a pellet of clay and fling it? Why did I not put a power Of thanks in a look, or sing it?"

* * * * *

I confess that this lyric, except for its penultimate verse, soon to be quoted, does not seem to me what Mr. Chesterton calls it--"delightful." Nothing, plainly, did bring these two together; she may have looked jealously at his models, and he at her piano-tuner (though even this, so far as "he" is concerned, I question), but they remained uninterested in one another--and why should they not? When at the end she cries--

"This could but have happened once, And we missed it, lost it for ever"--

one's impulse surely is (mine is) to ask with some vexation what "this" was?

"Each life's unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still, patchy and scrappy; We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy."

Away from its irritating context, that stanza _is_ delightful; with the context it is to me wholly meaningless. The boy and girl had not fallen in love--there is no more to say; and I heartily wish that Browning had not tried to say it. The whole lyric is based on nothingness, or else on a self-consciousness peculiarly unappealing. Kate Brown was evidently quite "safe in her corset-lacing" before she put up a blind. I fear that this confession of my dislike for _Youth and Art_ is a betrayal of lacking humour; I can but face it out, and say that unhumorous is precisely what, despite its levity of manner, rhythm, and rhyme, _Youth and Art_ seems to my sense. . . . I rejoice that we need not reckon this Kate among Browning's girls; she is introduced to us as married to her rich old lord, and queen of _bals-parés_. Thus we may console ourselves with the hope that life has vulgarised her, and that as a girl she was far less objectionable than she now represents herself to have been. We have only to imagine Evelyn Hope putting up a superfluous blind that she might be safe in her corset-lacing, to sweep the gamut of Kate Brown's commonness. . . . Let us remove her from a list which now offers us a figure more definitely and dramatically posed than any of those whom we have yet considered.

FOOTNOTES:

[12:1] Mr. Chesterton and Mrs. Orr both speak of Kate Brown as having succeeded in her art. I cannot find any words in the poem which justify this view. She is "queen at _bals-parés_," and she has married "a rich old lord," but nothing in either condition predicates the successful cantatrice.

I

THE GIRL IN "COUNT GISMOND"

It is like a fairy tale, for there are three beautiful princesses, and the youngest is the heroine. The setting is French--a castle in Aix-en-Provence; it is the fourteenth century, for tourneys and hawking-parties are the amusements, and a birthday is celebrated by an award of crowns to the victors in the lists, when there are ladies in brave attire, thrones, canopies, false knight and true knight. . . . Here is the story.

Once upon a time there were three beautiful princesses, and they lived in a splendid castle. The youngest had neither father nor mother, so she had come to dwell with her cousins, and they had all been quite happy together until one day in summer, when there was a great tourney and prize-giving to celebrate the birthday of the youngest princess. She was to award the crowns, and her cousins dressed her like a queen for the ceremony. She was very happy; she laughed and "sang her birthday-song quite through," while she looked at herself, garlanded with roses, in the glass before they all three went arm-in-arm down the castle stairs. The throne and canopy were ready; troops of merry friends had assembled. These kissed the cheek of the youngest princess, laughing and calling her queen, and then they helped her to stoop under the canopy, which was pierced by a long streak of golden sunshine. There, in the gleam and gloom, she took her seat on the throne. But for all her joy and pride, there came to her, as she sat there, a great ache of longing for her dead father and mother; and afterwards she remembered this, and thought that perhaps if her cousins had guessed that such sorrow was in her heart, even at her glad moment, they might not have allowed the thing to happen which did happen.

All eyes were on her, except those of her cousins, which were lowered, when the moment came for her to stand up and present the victor's crown.

Shy and proud and glad, she stood up, and as she did so, there stalked forth Count Gauthier--

". . . And he thundered 'Stay!' And all stayed. 'Bring no crowns, I say!'

'Bring torches! Wind the penance-sheet About her! Let her shun the chaste, Or lay herself before their feet! Shall she whose body I embraced A night long, queen it in the day? For Honour's sake no crowns, I say!'"

* * * * *

Some years afterwards she told the story of that birthday to a dear friend, and when she came to Count Gauthier's accusation, she had to stop speaking for an instant, because her voice was choked with tears.

Her friend asked her what she had answered, and she replied--

"I? What I answered? As I live I never fancied such a thing As answer possible to give;"

--for just as the body is struck dumb, as it were, when some monstrous engine of torture is directed upon it, so was her soul for one moment.

But only for one moment. For instantly another knight strode out--Count Gismond. She had never seen him face to face before, but now, so beholding him, she knew that she was saved. He walked up to Gauthier and gave him the lie in his throat, then struck him on the mouth with the back of a hand, so that the blood flowed from it--

". . . North, South, East, West, I looked. The lie was dead And damned, and truth stood up instead."

Recalling it now, with her friend Adela, she mused a moment; then said how her gladdest memory of that hour was that never for an instant had she felt any doubt of the event.

"God took that on him--I was bid Watch Gismond for my part: I did.

Did I not watch him while he let His armourer just brace his greaves, Rivet his hauberk, on the fret The while! His foot . . . my memory leaves No least stamp out, nor how anon He pulled his ringing gauntlets on."

Before the trumpet's peal had died, the false knight lay, "prone as his lie," upon the ground; and Gismond flew at him, and drove his sword into the breast--

"Cleaving till out the truth he clove.

Which done, he dragged him to my feet And said 'Here die, but end thy breath In full confession, lest thou fleet From my first, to God's second death! Say, hast thou lied?' And, 'I have lied To God and her,' he said, and died."

Then Gismond knelt and said to her words which even to this dear friend she could not repeat. She sank on his breast--

"Over my head his arm he flung Against the world . . ."

--and then and there the two walked forth, amid the shouting multitude, never more to return. "And so they were married, and lived happy ever after."

+ + + + +

Gaiety, courage, trust: in this nameless Browning heroine we find the characteristic marks. On that birthday morning, almost her greatest joy was in the sense of her cousins' love--

"I thought they loved me, did me grace To please themselves; 'twas all their deed"

--and never a thought of their jealousy had entered her mind. Both were beautiful--

". . . Each a queen By virtue of her brow and breast; Not needing to be crowned, I mean, As I do. E'en when I was dressed, Had either of them spoke, instead Of glancing sideways with still head!

But no: they let me laugh and sing My birthday-song quite through . . ."

and so, all trust and gaiety, she had gone down arm-in-arm with them, and taken her state on the "foolish throne," while everybody applauded her. Then had come the moment when Gauthier stalked forth; and from the older mind, now pondering on that infamy, a flash of bitter scorn darts forth--

"Count Gauthier, when he chose his post, Chose time and place and company To suit it . . ."

for with sad experience--"knowledge of the world"--to aid her, she can see that the whole must have been pre-concerted--

"And doubtlessly ere he could draw All points to one, he must have schemed!"

* * * * *

Her trust in the swiftly emerging champion and lover is comprehensible to us of a later day--that, and the joy she feels in watching him impatiently submit to be armed. Even so might one of us watch and listen to and keep for ever in memory the stamp of the foot, the sound of the "ringing gauntlets"--reproduced as that must be for modern maids in some less heartening music! But, as the tale proceeds, we lose our sense of sisterhood; we realise that this girl belongs to a different age. When Gauthier's breast is torn open, when he is dragged to her feet to die, she knows not any shrinking nor compassion--can apprehend each word in the dialogue between slayer and slain--can, over the bleeding body, receive the avowal of his love who but now has killed his fellow-man like a dog--and, gathered to Gismond's breast, can, unmoved by all repulsion, feel herself smeared by the dripping sword that hangs beside him. . . . All this we women of a later day have "resigned"--and I know not if that word be the right one or the wrong; so many lessons have we conned since Gismond fought for a slandered maiden. We have learned that lies refute themselves, that "things come right in the end," that human life is sacred, that a woman's chastity may be sacred too, but is not her most inestimable possession--and, if it were, should be "able to take care of itself." Further doctrines, though not yet fully accepted, are being passionately taught: such, for example, as that Man--male Man--is the least protective of animals.

"Over my head his arm he flung Against the world . . ."

I think we can see the princess, as she spoke those words, aglow and tremulous like the throbbing fingers in the Northern skies. Well, the "Northern Lights" recur, in our latitudes, at unexpected moments, at long intervals; but they do recur.

One thing vexes, yet solaces, me in this tale of Count Gismond. The Countess, telling Adela the story, has reached the crucial moment of Gauthier's insult when, choked by tears as we saw, she stops speaking. While still she struggles with her sob, she sees, at the gate, her husband with his two boys, and at once is able to go on. She finishes the tale, prays a perfunctory prayer for Gauthier; then speaks of her sons, in both of whom, adoring wife that she is, she must declare a likeness to the father--

"Our elder boy has got the clear Great brow; tho' when his brother's black Full eye shows scorn, it . . ."

With that "it" she breaks off; for Gismond has come up to talk with her and Adela. The first words we hear her speak to that loved husband are--fibbing words! The broken line is finished thus--

". . . Gismond here? And have you brought my tercel back? I just was telling Adela How many birds it struck since May."

We, who have temporarily lost so many things, have at least gained this one--that we should not think it necessary to tell that fib. We should say nothing of what we had been "telling Adela." And some of us, perhaps, would reject the false rhyme as well as the false words.

II

"PIPPA PASSES"

I. DAWN: PIPPA

The whole of Pippa is emotion. She "passes" alone through the drama, except for one moment--only indirectly shown us--in which she speaks with some girls by the way. She does nothing, is nothing, but exquisite emotion uttering itself in song--quick lyrical outbursts from her joyous child's heart. The happiness-in-herself which this poor silk-winder possesses is something deeper than the gaiety of which I earlier spoke. Gay she can be, and is, but the spell that all unwittingly she exercises, derives from the profounder depth of which the Eastern poet thought when he said that "We ourselves are Heaven and Hell." . . . Innocent but not ignorant, patient, yet capable of a hearty little grumble at her lot, Pippa is "human to the red-ripe of the heart." She can threaten fictively her holiday, if it should ill-use her by bringing rain to spoil her enjoyment; but even this intimidation is of the very spirit of confiding love, for her threat is that if rain does fall, she will be sorrowful and depressed, instead of joyous and exhilarated, for the rest of the year during which she will be bound to her "wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil." Such a possibility, thinks Pippa's trustful heart, must surely be enough to cajole the weather into beauty and serenity.

It is New Year's Day, and sole holiday in all the twelve-month for silk-winders in the mills of Asolo. An oddly chosen time, one thinks--the short, cold festival! And it is notable that Browning, though he acquiesces in the fictive date, yet conveys to us, so definitely that it must be with intention, the effect of summer weather. We find ourselves all through imagining mellow warmth and sunshine; nay, he puts into Pippa's mouth, as she anticipates the treasured outing, this lovely and assuredly not Janiverian forecast--

"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing. . . ."

Is it not plain from this that his artist's soul rejected the paltry fact? For "blue" the hours of New Year's Day may be in Italy, but as "_long_ blue hours" they cannot, even there, be figured. I maintain that, whatever it may be called, it is really Midsummer's Day on which Pippa passes from Asolo through Orcana and Possagno, and back to Asolo again.

+ + + + +

We see her first as she springs out of bed with the dawn's earliest touch on her "large mean airy chamber" at Asolo[24:1]--the lovely little town of Northern Italy which Browning loved so well. In that chamber, made vivid to our imagination by virtue of three consummately placed adjectives (note the position of "mean"), Pippa prepares for her one external happiness in the year.

"Oh Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee, A mite of my twelve hours' treasure, The least of thy gazes or glances,

* * * * *

One of thy choices or one of thy chances,

* * * * *

--My Day, if I squander such labour or leisure, Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me!"

I have omitted two lines from this eight-lined stanza, and omitted them because they illustrate all too forcibly Browning's chief fault as a lyric--and, in this case, as a dramatic--poet. Both of them are frankly parenthetic; both parentheses are superfluous; neither has any incidental beauty to redeem it; and, above all, we may be sure that Pippa did not think in parentheses. The agility and (it were to follow an indulgent fashion to add) the "subtlety" of Browning's mind too often led him into like excesses: I deny the subtlety here, for these clauses are so wholly uninteresting in thought that even as examples I shall not cite them. But their crowning distastefulness is in the certitude we feel that, whatever they had been, they never would have occurred to this lyrical child. The stanza without them is the stanza as Pippa felt it. . . . In the same way, the opening rhapsody on dawn which precedes her invocation to the holiday is out of character--impossible to regard its lavish and gorgeous images as those (however sub-conscious) of an unlettered girl.

But all carping is forgotten when we reach

"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing"--

a poet's phrase, it is true, yet in no way incongruous with what we can imagine Pippa to have thought, if not, certainly, in such lovely diction to have been able to express. Thenceforward, until the episodical lines on the Martagon lily, the child and her creator are one. There comes the darling menace to the holiday--

". . . But thou must treat me not As prosperous ones are treated . . . For, Day, my holiday, if thou ill-usest Me, who am only Pippa--old year's sorrow, Cast off last night, will come again to-morrow: Whereas, if thou prove gentle, I shall borrow Sufficient strength of thee for new-year's sorrow. All other men and women that this earth Belongs to, who all days alike possess, Make general plenty cure particular dearth,[26:1] Get more joy one way, if another less: Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven-- Sole light that helps me through the year, thy sun's!"

Having made her threat and her invocation, she falls to thinking of those "other men and women," and tells her Day about them, like the child she is. They, she declares, are "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones." Each is, in the event, to be vitally influenced by her song, as she "passes" at Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night; but this she knows not at the time, nor ever knows.

The first Happy One is "that superb great haughty Ottima," wife of the old magnate, Luca, who owns the silk-mills. The New Year's morning may be wet--

". . . Can rain disturb Her Sebald's homage? all the while thy rain Beats fiercest on her shrub-house window-pane, He will but press the closer, breathe more warm Against her cheek: how should she mind the storm?"

Here we learn what later we are very fully to be shown--that Ottima's "happiness" is not in her husband.

The second Happy One is Phene, the bride that very day of Jules, the young French sculptor. They are to come home at noon, and though noon, like morning, should be wet--

". . . what care bride and groom Save for their dear selves? 'Tis their marriage day;

* * * * *

Hand clasping hand, within each breast would be Sunbeams and pleasant weather, spite of thee."

The third Happy One--or Happy Ones, for these two Pippa cannot separate--are Luigi, the young aristocrat-patriot, and his mother. Evening is their time, for it is in the dusk that they "commune inside our turret"--

"The lady and her child, unmatched, forsooth, She in her age, as Luigi in his youth, For true content . . ."

Aye--though the evening should be obscured with mist, _they_ will not grieve--

". . . The cheerful town, warm, close, And safe, the sooner that thou art morose Receives them . . ."

That is all the difference bad weather can make to such a pair.

The Fourth Happy One is Monsignor, "that holy and beloved priest," who is expected this night from Rome,

"To visit Asolo, his brother's home, And say here masses proper to release A soul from pain--what storm dares hurt his peace? Calm would he pray, with his own thoughts to ward Thy thunder off, nor want the angels' guard."

And now the great Day knows all that the Four Happy Ones possess, besides its own "blue solemn hours serenely flowing"--for not rain at morning can hurt Ottima with her Sebald, nor at noon the bridal pair, nor in the evening Luigi and his mother, nor at night "that holy and beloved" Bishop . . .

"But Pippa--just one such mischance would spoil Her day that lightens the next twelvemonth's toil At wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil."

+ + + + +

All at once she realises that in thus lingering over her toilet, she is letting some of her precious time slip by for naught, and betakes herself to washing her face and hands--

"Aha, you foolhardy sunbeam caught With a single splash from my ewer! You that would mock the best pursuer, Was my basin over-deep?

One splash of water ruins you asleep, And up, up, fleet your brilliant bits.

* * * * *

Now grow together on the ceiling! That will task your wits."

Here we light on a trait in Browning of which Mr. Chesterton most happily speaks--his use of "homely and practical images . . . allusions, bordering on what many would call the commonplace," in which he "is indeed true to the actual and abiding spirit of love," and by which he "awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to utter." Mr. Chesterton, it is true, speaks of this "astonishing realism" in relation to Browning's love-poetry, and _Pippa Passes_ is not a love-poem; but the insight of the comment is no less admirable when we use it to enhance a passage such as this. Who has not caught the sunbeam asleep in the mere washhand basin as water was poured out for the mere daily toilet--and felt that heartening gratitude for the symbol of captured joy, which made the instant typic and immortal? For these are the things that all may have, as Pippa had. The ambushing of that beam and the ordering it, in her sweet wayward imperiousness, to

". . . grow together on the ceiling. That will task your wits!"

--is one of the most enchanting moments in this lovely poem. The sunbeam settles by degrees (I wish that she had not been made to term it, with all too Browningesque agility, "the radiant cripple"), and finally lights on her Martagon lily, which is a lily with purple flowers. . . . Here again, for a moment, she ceases to be the lyrical child, and turns into the Browning (to cite Mr. Chesterton again) to whom Nature really meant such things as the basket of jelly-fish in _The Englishman in Italy_, or the stomach-cyst in _Mr. Sludge the Medium_--"the monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea." To me, these lines on the purple lily are not only ugly and grotesque--in that kind of ugliness which "was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a quite unnecessary luxury, to be enjoyed for its own sake"--but are monstrously (more than any other instance I can recall) unsuited to the mind from which they are supposed to come.

"New-blown and ruddy as St. Agnes' nipple, Plump as the flesh-bunch on some Turk-bird's poll!"

One such example is enough. We have once more been deprived of Pippa, and got nothing really worth the possession in exchange.

But Pippa is quickly retrieved, with her gleeful claim that _she_ is the queen of this glowing blossom, for is it not she who has guarded it from harm? So it may laugh through her window at the tantalised bee (are there travelling bees in Italy on New-Year's Day? But this is Midsummer Day!), may tease him as much as it likes, but must

". . . in midst of thy glee, Love thy Queen, worship me!"

There will be warrant for the worship--

". . . For am I not, this day, Whate'er I please? What shall I please to-day?

* * * * *

I may fancy all day--and it shall be so-- That I taste of the pleasures, am called by the names, Of the Happiest Four in our Asolo!"

So, as she winds up her hair (we may fancy), Pippa plays the not yet relinquished baby-game of Let's-pretend; but is grown-up in this--that she begins and ends with love, which children give and take unconsciously.

"Some one shall love me, as the world calls love: I am no less than Ottima, take warning! The gardens and the great stone house above, And other house for shrubs, all glass in front, Are mine; where Sebald steals, as he is wont, To court me, while old Luca yet reposes . . ."

But this earliest pretending breaks down quickly. What, after all, is the sum of those doings in the shrub-house? What would Pippa gain, were she in truth great haughty Ottima? She would but "give abundant cause for prate." Ottima, bold, confident, and not fully aware, can face that out, but Pippa knows, more closely than the woman rich and proud can know,

"How we talk in the little town below."

So the first dream is over.

"Love, love, love--there's better love, I know!"

--and the next pretending shall "defy the scoffer"; it shall be the love of Jules and Phene--

"Why should I not be the bride as soon As Ottima?"

Moreover, last night she had seen the stranger-girl arrive--"if you call it seeing her," for it had been the merest momentary glimpse--

". . . one flash Of the pale snow-pure cheek and black bright tresses, Blacker than all except the black eyelash; I wonder she contrives those lids no dresses, So strict was she the veil Should cover close her pale Pure cheeks--a bride to look at and scarce touch, Scarce touch, remember, Jules! For are not such Used to be tended, flower-like, every feature, As if one's breath would fray the lily of a creature?

* * * * *

How will she ever grant her Jules a bliss So startling as her real first infant kiss? Oh, no--not envy, this!"

For, recalling the virgin dimness of that apparition, the slender gamut of that exquisite reserve, the little work-girl has a moment's pang of pity for herself, who has to trip along the streets "all but naked to the knee."

"Whiteness in us were wonderful indeed,"

she cries, who is pure gold if not pure whiteness, and in an instant shows herself to be at any rate pure innocence. It could not be envy, she argues, which pierced her as she thought of that immaculate girlhood--

". . . for if you gave me Leave to take or to refuse, In earnest, do you think I'd choose That sort of new love to enslave me? Mine should have lapped me round from the beginning; As little fear of losing it as winning: Lovers grow cold, men learn to hate their wives, And only parents' love can last our lives."

And she turns, thus rejecting the new love, to the "Son and Mother, gentle pair," who commune at evening in the turret: what prevents her being Luigi?

"Let me be Luigi! If I only knew What was my mother's face--my father, too!"

For Pippa has never seen either, knows not who either was, nor whence each came. And just because, thus ignorant, she cannot truly figure to herself such love, she now rejects in turn this third pretending--

"Nay, if you come to that, best love of all Is God's;"

--and she will be Monsignor! To-night he will bless the home of his dead brother, and God will bless in turn

"That heart which beats, those eyes which mildly burn With love for all men! I, to-night at least, Would be that holy and beloved priest."

Now all the weighing of love with love is over; she has chosen, and already has the proof of having chosen rightly, already seems to share in God's love, for there comes back to memory an ancient New-Year's hymn--

"All service ranks the same with God."

No one can work on this earth except as God wills--

". . . God's puppets, best and worst, Are we; there is no last or first."

And we must not talk of "small events": none exceeds another in greatness. . . .

The revelation has come to her. Not Ottima nor Phene, not Luigi and his mother, not even the holy and beloved priest, ranks higher in God's eyes than she, the little work-girl--

"I will pass each, and see their happiness, And envy none--being just as great, no doubt, Useful to men, and dear to God, as they!"

* * * * *

And so, laughing at herself once more because she cares "so mightily" for her one day, but still insistent that the sun shall shine, she sketches her outing--

"Down the grass path grey with dew, Under the pine-wood, blind with boughs, Where the swallow never flew, Nor yet cicala dared carouse, No, dared carouse--"

But breaks off, breathless, in the singing for which through the whole region she is famed, leaves the "large mean airy chamber," enters the little street of Asolo--and begins her Day.

II. MORNING: OTTIMA

In the shrub-house on the hill-side are Ottima, the wife of Luca, and her German lover, Sebald. He is wildly singing and drinking; to him it still seems night. But Ottima sees a "blood-red beam through the shutter's chink," which proves that morning is come. Let him open the lattice and see! He goes to open it, and no movement can he make but vexes her, as he gropes his way where the "tall, naked geraniums straggle"; pushes the lattice, which is behind a frame, so awkwardly that a shower of dust falls on her; fumbles at the slide-bolt, till she exclaims that "of course it catches!" At last he succeeds in getting the window opened, and her only direct acknowledgment is to ask him if she "shall find him something else to spoil." But this imperious petulance, curiously as it contrasts with the patience which, a little later, she will display, is native to Ottima; she is not the victim of her nerves this morning, though now she passes without transition to a mood of sensuous cajolement--

"Kiss and be friends, my Sebald! Is't full morning? Oh, don't speak, then!"

--but Sebald does speak, for in this aversion from the light of day he recognises a trait of hers which long has troubled him.

With _his_ first words we perceive that "nerves" are uppermost, that the song and drink of the opening moment were bravado--that Sebald, in short, is close on a breakdown. He turns upon her with a gibe against her ever-shuttered windows. Though it is she who now has ordered the unwelcome light to be admitted, he overlooks this in his enervation, and says how, before ever they met, he had observed that her windows were always blind till noon. The rest of the little world of Asolo would be active in the day's employment; but her house "would ope no eye." "And wisely," he adds bitterly--

"And wisely; you were plotting one thing there, Nature, another outside. I looked up-- Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars, Silent as death, blind in a flood of light; Oh, I remember!--and the peasants laughed And said, 'The old man sleeps with the young wife.' This house was his, this chair, this window--his."

The last line gives us the earliest hint of what has been done: "This house _was_ his. . . ." But Ottima, whether from scorn of Sebald's mental disarray, or from genuine callousness, answers this first moan of anguish not at all. She gazes from the open lattice: "How clear the morning is--she can see St. Mark's! Padua, blue Padua, is plain enough, but where lies Vicenza? They shall find it, by following her finger that points at Padua. . . ."

Sebald cannot emulate this detachment. Morning seems to him "a night with a sun added"; neither dew nor freshness can he feel; nothing is altered with this dawn--the plant he bruised in getting through the lattice last night droops as it did then, and still there shows his elbow's mark on the dusty sill.

She flashes out one instant. "Oh, shut the lattice, pray!"

No: he will lean forth--

". . . I cannot scent blood here, Foul as the morn may be."

But his mood shifts quickly as her own--

". . . There, shut the world out! How do you feel now, Ottima? There, curse The world and all outside!"

and at last he faces her, literally and figuratively, with a wild appeal to let the truth stand forth between them--

". . . Let us throw off This mask: how do you bear yourself? Let's out With all of it."

But no. Her instinct is never to speak of it, while his drives him to "speak again and yet again," for only so, he feels, will words "cease to be more than words." _His blood_, for instance--

". . . let those two words mean 'His blood'; And nothing more. Notice, I'll say them now: 'His blood.' . . ."

She answers with phrases, the things that madden him--she speaks of "the deed," and at once he breaks out again. _The deed_, and _the event_, and _their passion's fruit_--

". . . the devil take such cant! Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol, I am his cut-throat, you are . . ."

With extraordinary patience, though she there, wearily as it were, interrupts him, Ottima again puts the question by, and offers him wine. In doing this, she says something which sends a shiver down the reader's back--

". . . Here's wine! _I brought it when we left the house above, And glasses too--wine of both sorts . . ._"

He takes no notice; he reiterates--

"But am I not his cut-throat? What are you?"

Still with that amazing, that almost beautiful, patience--the quality of her defect of callousness--Ottima leaves this also without comment. She gazes now from the closed window, sees a Capuchin monk go by, and makes some trivial remarks on his immobility at church; then once more offers Sebald the flask--the "black" (or, as we should say, the "red") wine.

Melodramatic and obvious in all he does and says, Sebald refuses the red wine: "No, the white--the white!"--then drinks ironically to Ottima's black eyes. He reminds her how he had sworn that the new year should not rise on them "the ancient shameful way," nor does it.

"Do you remember last damned New Year's Day?"

* * * * *

The characters now are poised for us--in their national, as well as their individual, traits. Ottima, an Italian, has the racial matter-of-factness, callousness, and patience; Sebald, a German, the no less characteristic sentimentality and emotionalism. Her attitude remains unchanged until the critical moment; his shifts and sways with every word and action. No sooner has he drunk the white wine than he can brutally, for an instant, exult in the thought that Luca is not alive to fondle Ottima before his face; but with her instant answer (rejoicing as she does to retrieve the atmosphere which alone is native to her sense)--

". . . Do you Fondle me, then! Who means to take your life?"

--a new mood seizes on him. They have "one thing to guard against." They must not make much of one another; there must be no more parade of love than there was yesterday; for then it would seem as if he supposed she needed proofs that he loves her--

". . . yes, still love you, love you, In spite of Luca and what's come to him."

That would be a sure sign that Luca's "white sneering old reproachful face" was ever in their thoughts. Yes; they must even quarrel at times, as if they

". . . still could lose each other, were not tied By this . . ."

but on her responding cry of "Love!" he shudders back again: _Is_ he so surely for ever hers?

She, in her stubborn patience, answers by a reminiscence of their early days of love--

". . . That May morning we two stole Under the green ascent of sycamores"

--and, thinking to reason with him, asks if, that morning, they had

". . . come upon a thing like that, Suddenly--"

but he interrupts with his old demand for the true word: she shall not say "a thing" . . . and at last that marvellous patience gives way, and in a superb flash of ironic rage she answers him--

"Then, Venus' body! had we come upon My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close"

--flinging him the "words" he has whimpered for in full measure, that so at last she may attain to asking if, that morning, he would have "pored upon it?" She knows he would not; then why pore upon it now? For him, it is here, as much as in the deserted house; it is everywhere.

". . . For me

(she goes on),

Now he is dead, I hate him worse: I hate . . . Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold His two dead hands, and say, 'I hate you worse, Luca, than----'"

And in her frenzy of reminiscent hatred and loathing for the murdered man, she goes to Sebald and takes _his_ hands, as if to feign that other taking.

With the hysteria that has all along been growing in him, Sebald flings her back--

". . . Take your hands off mine; 'Tis the hot evening--off! oh, morning, is it?"

--and she, restored to her cooler state by this repulse, and with a perhaps unconscious moving to some revenge for it, points out, with a profounder depth of callousness than she has yet displayed, that the body at the house will have to be taken away and buried--

"Come in and help to carry"--

and with ghastly glee she adds--

". . . We may sleep Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night."

* * * * *

Now the dialogue sways between her deliberate sensuous allurement of the man and his deepening horror at what they have done. She winds and unwinds her hair--was it so that he once liked it? But he cannot look; he would give her neck and her splendid shoulders, "both those breasts of yours," if this thing could be undone. It is not the mere killing--though he would "kill the world so Luca lives again," even to fondle her as before--but the thought that he has eaten the dead man's bread, worn his clothes, "felt his money swell my purse." . . . _This_ is the intolerable; "there's a recompense in guilt"--

"One must be venturous and fortunate:-- What is one young for else?"

and thus their passion is justified; but to have killed the man who rescued him from starvation by letting him teach music to his wife . . . why--

". . . He gave me Life, nothing less"--

and if he did reproach the perfidy, "and threaten and do more," had he no right after all--what was there to wonder at?

"He sat by us at table quietly: _Why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?_"

In that base blaming of her alone we get the measure of Sebald as at this hour he is. He turns upon her with a demand to know how she now "feels for him." Her answer, wherein the whole of her nature (as, again, at this hour it is) reveals itself--callous but courageous, proud and passionate, cruel in its utter sensuality, yet with the force and honesty which attend on all simplicity, good or evil--her answer strikes a truer note than does anything which Sebald yet has said, or is to say. She replies that she loves him better now than ever--

"And best (_look at me while I speak to you_) Best for the crime."

She is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off--

". . . this naked crime of ours May not now be looked over: look it down."

And were not the joys worth it, great as it is? Would he give up the past?

"Give up that noon I owned my love for you?"

--and as, in her impassioned revocation of the sultry summer's day, she brings back to him the very sense of the sun-drenched garden, the man at last is conquered back to memory. The antiphon of sensual love begins, goes on--the places, aspects, things, sounds, scents, that waited on their ecstasy, the fire and consuming force of hers, the passive, no less lustful, receptivity of his--and culminates in a chant to that "crowning night" in July (and "the day of it too, Sebald!") when all life seemed smothered up except their life, and, "buried in woods," while "heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat," they lay quiescent, till the storm came--

"Swift ran the searching tempest overhead; And ever and anon some bright white shaft Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke The thunder like a whole sea overhead . . ."

--while she, in a frenzy of passion--

". . . stretched myself upon you, hands To hands, my mouth to your hot mouth, and shook All my locks loose, and covered you with them-- You, Sebald, the same you!"

But the flame of her is scorching the feeble lover; feebly he pleads, resists, begs pardon for the harsh words he has given her, yields, struggles . . . yields again at last, for hers is all the force of body and of soul: it is his part to be consumed in her--

"I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now! This way? Will you forgive me--be once more My great queen?"

Glorious in her victory, she demands that the hair which she had loosed in the moment of recalling their wild joys he now shall bind thrice about her brow--

"Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress, Magnificent in sin. Say that!"

So she bids him; so he crowns her--

"My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress, Magnificent . . ."

--but ere the exacted phrase is said, there sounds without the voice of a girl singing.

"The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in his heaven-- All's right with the world!"

(_Pippa passes._)

* * * * *

Like her own lark on the wing, she has dropped this song to earth, unknowing and unheeding where its beauty shall alight; it is the impulse of her glad sweet heart to carol out its joy--no more. She is passing the great house of the First Happy One, so soon rejected in her game of make-believe! If now she could know what part the dream-Pippa might have taken on herself. . . . But she does not know, and, lingering for a moment by the step, she bends to pick a pansy-blossom.

The pair in the shrub-house have been arrested in full tide of passion by her song. It strikes on Sebald with the force of a warning from above--

"God's in his heaven! Do you hear that? Who spoke? You, you spoke!"--

but she, contemptuously--

". . . Oh, that little ragged girl! She must have rested on the step: we give them But this one holiday the whole year round. Did you ever see our silk-mills--their inside? _There are ten silk-mills now belong to you!_"

Enervated by the interruption, she calls sharply to the singer to be quiet--but Pippa does not hear, and Ottima then orders Sebald to call, for _his_ voice will be sure to carry.

No: her hour is past. He is ruled now by that voice from heaven. Terribly he turns upon her--

"Go, get your clothes on--dress those shoulders! . . . Wipe off that paint! I hate you"--

and as she flashes back her "Miserable!" his hideous repulse sinks to a yet more hideous contemplation of her--

"My God, and she is emptied of it now! Outright now!--how miraculously gone All of the grace--had she not strange grace once? Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes, No purpose holds the features up together, Only the cloven brow and puckered chin Stay in their places: and the very hair That seemed to have a sort of life in it, Drops, a dead web!"

Poignant in its authenticity is her sole, piteous answer--

". . . Speak to me--not of me!"

But he relentlessly pursues the dread analysis of baffled passion's aspect--

"That round great full-orbed face, where not an angle Broke the delicious indolence--all broken!"

Once more that cry breaks from her--

"To me--not of me!"

but soon the natural anger against his insolence possesses her; she whelms him with a torrent of recrimination. Coward and ingrate he is, beggar, her slave--

". . . a fawning, cringing lie, A lie that walks and eats and drinks!"

--while he, as in some horrible trance, continues his cold dissection--

". . . My God! Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades-- I should have known there was no blood beneath!"

For though the heaven-song have pierced him, not yet is Sebald reborn, not yet can aught of generosity involve him. Still he speaks "of her, not to her," deaf in the old selfishness and baseness. He can cry, amid his vivid recognition of another's guilt, that "the little peasant's voice has righted all again"--can be sure that _he_ knows "which is better, vice or virtue, purity or lust, nature or trick," and in the high nobility of such repentance as flings the worst of blame upon the other one, will grant himself lost, it is true, but "proud to feel such torments," to "pay the price of his deed" (ready with phrases now, he also!), as, poor weakling, he stabs himself, leaving his final word to her who had been for him all that she as yet knew how to be, in--

"I hate, hate--curse you! God's in his heaven!"

* * * * *

Now, at this crisis, we are fully shown what, in despite of other commentators,[49:1] I am convinced that Browning meant us to perceive from the first--that Ottima's is the nobler spirit of the two. Her lover has stabbed himself, but she, not yet realising it, flings herself upon him, wrests the dagger--

". . . Me! Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself--kill me! Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me--then Yourself--then--presently--first hear me speak! I always meant to kill myself--wait, you! _Lean on my breast--not as a breast; don't love me The more because you lean on me, my own Heart's Sebald!_ There, there, both deaths presently!"

* * * * *

Here at last is the whole woman. "Lean on my breast--not as a breast"; "Mine is the whole crime"; "I always meant to kill myself--wait, you!" She will relinquish even her sense of womanhood; no word of blame for him; she would die, that he might live forgetting her, but it is too late for that, so "There, there, both deaths presently." . . . And now let us read again the lamentable dying words of Sebald. It is even more than I have said: not only are we meant to understand that Ottima's is the nobler spirit, but (I think) that not alone the passing of Pippa with her song has drawn this wealth of beauty from the broken woman's soul. Always it was there; it needed but the loved one's need to pour itself before him. "There, there, both deaths presently"--and in the dying, each is again revealed. He, all self--

"_My_ brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all _I_ feel"

--and so on; while her sole utterance is--

"Not me--to him, O God, be merciful!"

Pippa's song has, doubtlessly, saved them both, but Sebald as by direct intervention, Ottima as by the revelation of her truest self. Again, and yet again and again, we shall find in Browning this passion for "the courage of the deed"; and we shall find that courage oftenest assigned to women. For him, it was wellnigh the cardinal virtue to be brave--not always, as in Ottima, by the help of a native callousness, but assuredly always, as in her and in the far dearer women, by the help of an instinctive love for truth--

"Truth is the strong thing--let man's life be true!"

Ottima's and Sebald's lives have not been "true"; but she, who can accept the retribution and feel no faintest impulse to blame and wound her lover--_she_ can rise, must rise, to heights forbidden the lame wings of him who, in his anguish, can turn and strike the fellow-creature who has but partnered him in sin. Only Pippa, passing, could in that hour save Sebald; but by the tenderness which underlay her fierce and lustful passion, and which, in any later relation, some other need of the man must infallibly have called forth, Ottima would, I believe, without Pippa have saved herself. _Direct intervention_: not every soul needs that. And--whether it be intentional or not, I feel unable to decide, nor does it lose, but rather gain, in interest, if it be unintentional--one of the most remarkable things in this remarkable artistic experiment, this drama in which the scenes "have in common only the appearance of one figure," is that by each of the Four Passings of Pippa, a man's is the soul rescued.

III. NOON: PHENE

A group of art-students is assembled at Orcana, opposite the house of Jules, a young French sculptor, who to-day at noon brings home his bride--that second Happiest One, the pale and shrouded beauty whom Pippa had seen alight at Asolo, and had envied for her immaculate girlhood. Very eagerly the youths are awaiting this arrival; there are seven, including Schramm, the pipe-smoking mystic, and Gottlieb, a new-comer to the group, who hears the reason for their excitement, and tender-hearted and imaginative as he is, provides the human element amid the theorising of Schramm, the flippancy of most of the rest, and the fiendish malice of the painter, Lutwyche, who has a grudge against Jules, because Jules (he has been told) had described him and his intimates as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Very soon after the bridal pair shall have alighted and gone in (so Lutwyche tells Gottlieb), something remarkable will happen; it is this which they are awaiting--Lutwyche, as the moving spirit, close under the window of the studio, that he may lose no word of the anticipated drama. But they must all keep well within call; everybody may be needed.

At noon the married pair arrive--the bridegroom radiant, his hair "half in storm and half in calm--patted down over the left temple--like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it; and the same old blouse that he murders the marble in."[52:1] The bride is--"how magnificently pale!" Most of these young men have seen her before, and always it has been her pallor which has struck them, as it struck Pippa on seeing her alight at Asolo. She is a Greek girl from Malamocco,[52:2] fourteen years old at most, "white and quiet as an apparition," with "hair like sea-moss"; her name is Phene, which, as Lutwyche explains, means sea-eagle. . . . "How magnificently pale"--and how Jules gazes on her! To Gottlieb that gaze of the young, rapturous husband is torture. "Pity--pity!" he exclaims--but he alone of them all is moved to this: Schramm, ever ready with his theories of mysticism and beauty and the immortal idealism of the soul, is unconcerned with practice--theories and his pipe bound all for Schramm; while Lutwyche is close-set as any predatory beast upon his prey; and the rank and file are but the foolish, heartless boys of all time, all place, the "students," mere and transient, who may turn into decent men as they grow older.

Well, they pass in, the bridegroom and his snowflake bride, and we pass in with them--but not, like them, forget the group that lurked and loitered about the house as they arrived.

+ + + + +

The girl is silent as she is pale, and she is so pale that the first words her husband speaks are as the utterance of a fear awakened by her aspect--

"Do not die, Phene! I am yours now, you Are mine now; let fate reach me how she likes, If you'll not die: so, never die!"

He leads her to the one seat in his workroom, then bends over her in worshipping love, while she, still speechless, lifts her white face slowly to him. He lays his own upon it for an instant, then draws back to gaze again, while she still looks into his eyes, until he feels that her soul is drawing his to such communion that--

". . . I could Change into you, beloved! You by me, And I by you; this is your hand in mine, And side by side we sit: all's true. Thank God!"

But her silence is unbroken, and now he needs her voice--

"I have spoken: speak you!"

--yet though he thus claims her utterance, his own bliss drives him onward in eager speech. "O my life to come"--the life with her . . . and yet, how shall he work!

"Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth-- The live truth, passing and re-passing me, Sitting beside me?"

Still she is silent; he cries again "Now speak!"--but in a new access of joy accepts again that silence, for she must see the hiding-place he had contrived for her letters--in the fold of his Psyche's robe, "next her skin"; and now, which of them all will drop out first?

"Ah--this that swam down like a first moonbeam Into my world!"

In his gladness he turns to her with that first treasure in his hand. She is not looking. . . . But there is nothing strange in that--all the rest is new to her; naturally she is more interested in the new things, and adoringly he watches her as--

". . . Again those eyes complete Their melancholy survey, sweet and slow, Of all my room holds; to return and rest On me, with pity, yet some wonder too . . ."

But pity and wonder are natural in her--is she not an angel from heaven? Yet he would bring her a little closer to the earth she now inhabits; so--

"What gaze you at? Those? Books I told you of; Let your first word to me rejoice them too."

Eagerly he displays them, but soon reproves himself: he has shown first a tiny Greek volume, and of course Homer's should be the Greek--

"First breathed me from the lips of my Greek girl!"

So out comes the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon their search." Well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must be--and _they_ will surely bring the word he increasingly longs for. That of the "Almaign Kaiser," one day to be cast in bronze, is not worth lingering at in its present stage, but this--_this_? She will recognise this of Hippolyta--

"Naked upon her bright Numidian horse,"

for this is an imagined likeness, before he saw her, of herself. But no, it is unrecognised; so they move to the next, which she cannot mistake, for was it not done by her command? She had said he was to carve, against she came, this Greek, "feasting in Athens, as our fashion was," and she had given him many details, and he had laboured ardently to express her thought. . . . But still no word from her--no least, least word; and, tenderly, at last he reproaches her--

"But you must say a 'well' to that--say 'well'!"

--for alarm is growing in him, though he strives to think it only fantasy; she gazes too like his marble, she is too like marble in her silence--marble is indeed to him his "very life's-stuff," but now he has found "the real flesh Phene . . ." and as he rhapsodises a while, hardly able to sever this breathing vision from the wonders of his glowing stone, he turns to her afresh and beholds her whiter than before, her eyes more wide and dark, and the first fear seizes him again--

"Ah, you will die--I knew that you would die!"--

and after that, there falls a long silence.

Then she speaks. "Now the end's coming"--that is what she says for her first bridal words.

"Now the end's coming: to be sure it must Have ended some time!"

--and while he listens in the silence dreadfully transferred from her to him, the tale of Lutwyche's revenge is told at last.

We know it before Phene speaks, for Lutwyche, telling Gottlieb, has told us; but Jules must glean it from her puzzled, broken utterance, filled with allusions that mean nothing until semi-comprehension comes through the sighs of tortured soul and heart from her who still is, as it were, in a trance. And this dream-like state causes her, now and then, to say the wrong words--the words _he_ spoke--instead of those which had "cost such pains to learn . . ."

This is the story she tries to tell. Lutwyche had hated Jules for long. There were many reasons, but the chief was that reported judgment of the "crowd of us," as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Greatly, and above all else, had Jules despised their dissoluteness: how could they be other than the poor devils they were, with those debasing habits which they cherished? "He could never," had said Lutwyche to Gottlieb, "be supercilious enough on that matter. . . . _He_ was not to wallow in the mire: _he_ would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with statuary." So Lutwyche had resolved that precisely "on that matter" should his malice concentrate. He happened to hear of a young Greek girl at Malamocco, "white and quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest." She was said to be a daughter of the "hag Natalia"--said, that is, by the hag herself to be so, but Natalia was, in plain words, a procuress. "We selected," said Lutwyche, "this girl as the heroine of our jest"; and he and his gang set to work at once. Jules received, first, a mysterious perfumed letter from somebody who had seen his work at the Academy and profoundly admired it: she would make herself known to him ere long. . . . "Paolina, my little friend of the Fenice," who could transcribe divinely, had copied this letter--"the first moonbeam!"--for Lutwyche; and she copied many more for him, the letters which Psyche, at the studio, was to keep in the fold of her robe.

In his very earliest answer, Jules had proposed marriage to the unknown writer. . . . How they had laughed! But Gottlieb, hearing, could not laugh. "I say," cried he, "you wipe off the very dew of his youth." Schramm, however, had had his pipe forcibly taken from his mouth, and then had pronounced that "nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world"; so, Gottlieb silenced, Lutwyche went on with the story. The letters had gone to Jules, and the answers had come from him, two, three times a day; Lutwyche himself had concocted nearly all the mysterious lady's, which had said she was in thrall to relatives, that secrecy must be observed--in short, that Jules must wed her on trust, and only speak to her when they were indissolubly united.

But that, when accomplished, was not the whole of Lutwyche's revenge, nor of his activity. To get the full savour of his malice, the victim must be undeceived in such a way that there could be no mistaking the hand which had struck; and this could best be achieved by writing a copy of verses which should reveal their author at the end. Nor should these be given Phene to hand Jules, for so Lutwyche would lose the delicious actual instant of the revelation. No; they should be taught her, line by line and word by word (since she could not read), and taught her by the hag Natalia, that not a subtle pang be spared the "strutting stone-squarer." Thus, listening beneath the window, Lutwyche could enjoy each word, each moan, and when Jules should burst out on them in a fury (but he must not be suffered to hurt his bride: she was too valuable a model), they would all declare, with one voice, that this was their revenge for his insults, they would shout their great shout of laughter; and, next day, Jules would depart alone--"oh, alone indubitably!"--for Rome and Florence, and they would be quits with him and his "coxcombry."

* * * * *

That is the plan, but Phene does not know it. All she knows is that Natalia said that harm would come unless she spoke their lesson to the end. Yet, despite this threat, when Jules has fallen silent in his terror at her "whitening cheek and still dilating eyes," she feels at first that that foolish speech need not be spoken. She has forgotten half of it; she does not care now for Natalia or any of them; above all, she wants to stay where Jules' voice has lifted her, by just letting it go on. "But can it?" she asks piteously--for with that transferring of silence a change had come; the music once let fall, even Jules does not seem able to take up its life again--"no, or you would!" . . . So trust, we see, is born in her: if Jules could do what she desires, Phene knows he would. But since he cannot, they'll stay as they are--"above the world."

"Oh, you--what are you?" cries the child, who never till to-day has heard such words or seen such looks as his. But she has heard other words, seen other looks--

"The same smile girls like me are used to bear, But never men, men cannot stoop so low . . ."

Yet, watching those friends of Jules who came with the lesson she was to learn, the strangest thing of all had been to see how, speaking of him, they had used _that_ smile--

"But still Natalia said they were your friends, And they assented though they smiled the more, And all came round me--that thin Englishman With light lank hair, seemed leader of the rest; He held a paper"

--and from that paper he read what Phene had got by heart.

But oh, if she need not say it! if she could look up for ever to those eyes, as now Jules lets her!

". . . I believe all sin, All memory of wrong done, suffering borne, Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth Whence all that's low comes, and there touch and stay --Never to overtake the rest of me, All that, unspotted, reaches up to you, Drawn by those eyes!"

But even as she gazes, she sees that the eyes "are altering--altered!" She knows not why, she never has understood this sudden, wondrous happening of her marriage, but the eyes to which she trusts are altering--altered--and what can she do? . . . With heartrending pathos, what she does is to clutch at his words to her, the music which had lifted her, and now perhaps will lift him too by its mere sound. "I love you, love" . . . but what does love mean? She knows not, and her "music" is but ignorant echo; if she did know, she could prevent this change, but the change is not prevented, so it cannot have been just the words--it must have been in the tone that his power lay to lift her, and _that_ she cannot find, not understanding. So in the desperate need to see and hear him as he was at first, she turns to her last device--

". . . Or stay! I will repeat Their speech, if that contents you. Only change No more"--

and thus to him, but half aware as yet, sure only that she is not the dream-lady from afar, Phene speaks the words that Lutwyche wrote, and now waits outside to hear.

"I am a painter who cannot paint; In my life, a devil rather than saint; In my brain, as poor a creature too; No end to all I cannot do! Yet do one thing at least I can-- Love a man or hate a man Supremely: thus my lore began . . ."

The timid voice goes on, saying the lines by rote as Phene had learned them--and hard indeed they must have been to learn! For, as Lutwyche had told his friends, it must be "something slow, involved, and mystical," it must hold Jules long in doubt, and lure him on until at innermost--

"Where he seeks sweetness' soul, he may find--this!"

And truly it is so "involved," that, in the lessons at Natalia's, it had been thought well to tutor Phene in the probable interruptions from her audience of one. There was an allusion to "the peerless bride with her black eyes," and _here_ Jules was almost certain to break in, saying that assuredly the bride was Phene herself, and so, could she not tell him what it all meant?

"And I am to go on without a word."

She goes on--on to the analysis, utterly incomprehensible to her, of Lutwyche's plan for intertwining love and hate; and with every word the malice deepens, becomes directer in its address. If any one should ask this painter who can hate supremely, _how_ his hate can "grin through Love's rose-braided mask," and _how_, hating another and having sought, long and painfully, to reach his victim's heart and pierce to the quick of it, he might chance to have succeeded in that aim--

"Ask this, my Jules, and be answered straight, By thy bride--how the painter Lutwyche can hate!"

* * * * *

Phene has said her lesson, but it too has failed. He still is changed. He is not even thinking of her as she ceases. The name upon his lips is Lutwyche, not her own. He mutters of "Lutwyche" and "all of them," and "Venice"; yes, them he will meet at Venice, and it will be their turn. But with that word--"meet"--he remembers her; he speaks to her--

". . . You I shall not meet: If I dreamed, saying this would wake me."

Now Phene is again the silent one. We figure to ourselves the dark bent head, the eyes that dare no more look up, the dreadful acquiescence as he gives her money. So many others had done that; she had not thought _he_ would, but she has never understood, and if to give her money is his pleasure--why, she must take it, as she had taken that of the others. But he goes on. He speaks of selling all his casts and books and medals, that the produce may keep her "out of Natalia's clutches"; and if he survives the meeting with the gang in Venice, there is just one hope, for dimly she hears him say--

"We might meet somewhere, since the world is wide . . ."

Just that one vague, far hope, and for her _how_ wide the world is, how very hard to compass! But she stands silent, in her well-learnt patience; and he is about to speak again, when suddenly from outside a girl's voice is heard, singing.

"Give her but a least excuse to love me! When--where-- How--can this arm establish her above me, If fortune fixed her as my lady there, There already, to eternally reprove me?"

It is the song the peasants sing of "Kate the Queen"[64:1] and the page who loved her, and pined "for the grace of her so far above his power of doing good to"--

"'She never could be wronged, be poor,' he sighed, 'Need him to help her!' . . ."

Pippa, going back towards Asolo, carols it out as she passes; and Jules listens to the end. It was bitter for the page to know that his lady was above all need of him; yet men are wont to love so. But why should they always choose the page's part? _He_ had not, in his dreams of love. . . . And all at once, as he vaguely ponders the song, the deep mysterious import of its sounding in this hour dawns on him.

"Here is a woman with utter need of me-- I find myself queen here, it seems! How strange!"

He turns and looks again at the white, quiet child who stands awaiting her dismissal. Her soul is on her silent lips--

"Look at the woman here with the new soul . . . This new soul is mine!"

And then, musing aloud, he comes upon the truth of it--

"Scatter all this, my Phene--this mad dream! What's the whole world except our love, my own!"

To-night (he told her so, did he not?), aye, even before to-night, they will travel for her land, "some isle with the sea's silence on it"; but first he must break up these paltry attempts of his, that he may begin art, as well as life, afresh. . . .

"Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!

* * * * *

And you are ever by me while I gaze, --Are in my arms as now--as now--as now! Some unsuspected isle in the far seas! Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!"

That is what Lutwyche, under the window, hears for his revenge.

In this Passing of Pippa, silence and song have met and mingled into one another, for Phene is silence, as Pippa is song. Phene will speak more when Jules and she are in their isle together--but never will she speak much: she _is_ silence. Her need of him indeed was utter--she had no soul until he touched her into life: it is the very Pygmalion and Galatea. But Jules' soul, no less, had needed Pippa's song to waken to its truest self: once more the man is the one moved by the direct intervention. Not that Phene, like Ottima, could have saved herself; there _was_ no self to save--she had that awful, piercing selflessness of the used flesh and ignored soul. If Pippa had not passed, if Jules had gone, leaving money in her hand . . . I think that Phene would have killed herself--like Ottima, yet how unlike! For Phene (but one step upon the way) would have died for her own self's sake only, because till now she had never known it, but in that strangest, dreadfullest, that least, most, sacred of offerings-up, had "lived for others"--the others of the smile which girls like her are used to bear,

"But never men, men cannot stoop so low."

Were ever scorn and irony more blasting, was ever pity more profound, than in that line which Browning sets in the mouth of silence?

IV. EVENING; NIGHT: THE ENDING OF THE DAY

Our interest now centres again upon Pippa--partly because the Evening and Night episodes are little touched by other feminine influence, but also (and far more significantly) because the dramatic aspect of the work here loses nearly all of its peculiar beauty. The story, till now so slight yet so consummately sufficient, henceforth is involved with "plot"--that natural enemy of spontaneity and unity, and here most eminently successful in blighting both. Indeed, the lovely simplicity of the earlier plan seems actually to aid the foe in the work of destruction, by cutting, as it were, the poem into two or even three divisions: first, the purely lyric portions--those at the beginning and the end--where Pippa is alone in her room; second, the Morning and Noon episodes, where the dramas are absolutely unconnected with the passing girl; third, these Evening and Night scenes, where, on the contrary, all is forced into more or less direct relation with the little figure whose most exquisite magic has hitherto resided in the fusion of her complete personal loneliness with her potent influence upon the lives and characters of those who hear her sing.

Mr. Chesterton claims to have been the first to point out "this gross falsification of the whole beauty of _Pippa Passes_"--a glaring instance, as he says, of the definite literary blunders which Browning could make. But though that searching criticism were earliest in declaring this, I think that few of us can have read the poem without being vaguely and discomfortably aware of it. From the moment of the direct introduction of Bluphocks[68:1] (whose very name, with its dull and pointless punning, is an offence), that sense of over-ingenuity, of "tiresomeness," which is the prime stumbling-block to whole-hearted Browning worship, becomes perceptible, and acts increasingly upon our nerves until the Day is over, and Pippa re-enters her "large, mean, airy chamber."

+ + + + +

On her return to Asolo from Orcana, she passes the ruined turret wherein Luigi and his mother--those Third Happiest Ones whom in her thoughts she had not been able to separate--are wont to talk at evening. Some of the Austrian police are loitering near, and with them is an Englishman, "lusty, blue-eyed, florid-complexioned"--one Bluphocks, who is on the watch in a double capacity. He is to point out Luigi to the police, in whose pay he is, and to make acquaintance with Pippa in return for money already given by a private employer--for Bluphocks is the creature of anyone's purse.

As Pippa reaches the turret, a thought of days long, long before it fell to ruin makes her choose from her store of songs that which tells how--

"A king lived long ago, In the morning of the world When earth was nigher heaven than now;"

and coming to be very old, was so serene in his sleepy mood, "so safe from all decrepitude," and so beloved of the gods--

"That, having lived thus long, there seemed No need the king should ever die."

Her clear note penetrates to the spot where Luigi and his mother are talking, as so often before. He is bound this night for Vienna, there to kill the hated Emperor of Austria, who holds his Italy in thrall; for Luigi is a Carbonarist, and has been chosen for this "lesser task" by his leaders. His mother is urging him not to go. First she had tried the direct appeal, but this had failed; then argument, but this failed too; and as she stood at end of her own resources, the one hope that remained was her son's delight in living--that sense of the beauty and glory of the world which was so strong in him that he felt

"God must be glad one loves his world so much."

This joy breaks out at each turn of the mother's discourse. While Luigi is striving to make plain to her the "grounds for killing," he thinks to hear the cuckoo, and forgets all his array of facts; for April and June are coming! The mother seizes at once on this, and joins to it a still more powerful persuasion. In June, not only summer's loveliness, but Chiara, the girl he is to marry, is coming: she who gazes at the stars as he does--and how her blue eyes lift to them

"As if life were one long and sweet surprise!"

In June she comes--and with the reiteration, Luigi falters, for he recollects that in this June they were to see together "the Titian at Treviso." . . . His mother has almost won, when a "low noise" outside, which Luigi has first mistaken for the cuckoo, next for the renowned echo in the turret . . . that low noise is heard again--"the voice of Pippa, singing."

And, listening to the song which tells what kings were in the morning of the world, Luigi cries--

"No need that sort of king should ever die!"

And she begins again--

"Among the rocks his city was: Before his palace, in the sun, He sat to see his people pass, And judge them every one"

--and as she tells the manner of his judging, Luigi again exclaims:

"That king should still judge, sitting in the sun!"

But the song goes on--

"His councillors, to left and right, Looked anxious up--but no surprise Disturbed the king's old smiling eyes, Where the very blue had turned to white";

and those eyes kept their tranquillity even when, as legend tells, a Python one day "scared the breathless city," but coming, "with forked tongue and eyes on flame," to where the king sat, and seeing the sweet venerable goodness of him, did not dare

"Approach that threshold in the sun, Assault the old king smiling there . . . Such grace had kings when the world begun!"

"And such grace have they, now that the world ends!"

cries Luigi bitterly, for at Vienna the Python _is_ the king, and brave men lurk in corners "lest they fall his prey." . . . He hesitates no more--

"'Tis God's voice calls: how could I stay? Farewell!"

and rushes from the turret, resolute for Vienna.

By going he escapes the police, for it had been decided that if he stayed at Asolo that night he should be arrested at once. He still may lose his life, for he will try to kill the Emperor; but he will then have been true to his deepest convictions--and thus Pippa's passing, Pippa's song, have for the third time helped a soul to know itself.

+ + + + +

Unwitting as before, she goes on to the house near the Duomo Santa Maria, where the Fourth Happiest One, the Monsignor of her final choice, "that holy and beloved priest," is to stay to-night. And now, for the first time, we are to see her, though only for the barest instant, come into actual contact with some fellow-creatures.

Four "poor girls" are sitting on the steps of the Santa Maria. We hear them talk with one another before Pippa reaches them: they are playing a "wishing game," originated by one who, watching the swallows fly towards Venice, yearns for their wings. She is not long from the country; her dreams are still of new milk and apples, and

". . . the farm among The cherry-orchards, and how April snowed White blossom on her as she ran."

So says one of her comrades scornfully, and tells her how of course the home-folk have been careful to blot out all memories of one who has come to the town to lead the life _she_ leads. She may be sure the old people have rubbed out the mark showing how tall she was on the door, and have

"Twisted her starling's neck, broken his cage, Made a dung-hill of her garden!"

She acquiesces mournfully, but loses herself again in memories: of her fig-tree that curled out of the cottage wall--

"They called it mine, I have forgotten why"

--and the noise the wasps made, eating the long papers that were strung there to keep off birds in fruit-time. . . . As she murmurs thus to herself, her mouth twitches, and the same girl who had laughed before, laughs now again: "Would I be such a fool!"--and tells _her_ wish. The country-goose wants milk and apples, and another girl could think of nothing better than to wish "the sunset would finish"; but Zanze has a real desire, something worth talking about! It is that somebody she knows, somebody "greyer and older than her grandfather," would give her the same treat he gave last week--

"Feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers, Lampreys and red Breganze wine;"

while she had stained her fingers red by

"Dipping them in the wine to write bad words with On the bright table: how he laughed!"

And as she recalls that night, she sees a burnished beetle on the ground before her, sparkling along the dust as it makes its slow way to a tuft of maize, and puts out her foot and kills it. The country girl recalls a superstition connected with these bright beetles--that if one was killed, the sun, "his friend up there," would not shine for two days. They said it in her country "when she was young"; and one of the others scoffs at the phrase, but looking at her, exclaims that indeed she _is_ no longer young: how thin her plump arms have got--does Cecco beat her still? But Cecco doesn't matter, nor the loss of her young freshness, so long as she keeps her "curious hair"--

"I wish they'd find a way to dye our hair Your colour . . . . . . The men say they are sick of black."

A girl who now speaks for the first and last time retorts upon this one that very likely "the men" are sick of _her_ hair, and does she pretend that _she_ has tasted lampreys and ortolans . . . but in the midst of this new speaker's railing, the girl with wine-stained fingers exclaims--

"Why there! Is not that Pippa We are to talk to, under the window--quick-- . . ."

The country girl thinks that if it were Pippa, she would be singing, as they had been told.

"Oh, you sing first," retorts the other--

"Then if she listens and comes close . . . I'll tell you, Sing that song the young English noble made Who took you for the purest of the pure, And meant to leave the world for you--what fun!"

So, not the country girl, but she whose black hair discontents her, sings, and Pippa "listens and comes close," for the song has words as sweet as any of her own . . . and the red-fingered one calls to her to come closer still, they won't eat her--why, she seems to be "the very person the great rich handsome Englishman has fallen so violently in love with." She shall hear all about it; and on the steps of the church Pippa is told by this creature, Zanze, how a foreigner, "with blue eyes and thick rings of raw silk-coloured hair," had gone to the mills at Asolo a month ago and fallen in love with Pippa. Pippa, however, will not keep him in love with her, unless she takes more care of her personal appearance--she must "pare her nails pearlwise," and buy shoes "less like canoes" for her small feet; _then_ she may hope to feast upon lampreys and drink Breganze, as Zanze does. . . . And now Pippa sings one of her songs, and it might have been chosen expressly to please the country girl. It begins--

"Overhead the tree-tops meet, Flowers and grass spring 'neath our feet; There was nought above me, and nought below My childhood had not learned to know"

--a little story of an innocent girl's way of making out for herself only the sweetness of the world, the majesty of the heavens . . . and just when all seemed on the verge of growing clear, and out of the "soft fifty changes" of the moon, "no unfamiliar face" could look, the sweet life was cut short--

"Suddenly God took me . . ."

As Pippa sang those words, she passed on. She had heard enough of the four girls' talk, even were they not now interrupted by a sudden clatter inside Monsignor's house--a sound of calling, of quick heavy feet, of cries and the flinging down of a man, and then a noise as of dragging a bound prisoner out. . . . Monsignor appeared for an instant at the window as she, coming from the Duomo, passed his house. His aspect disappointed her--

"No mere mortal has a right To carry that exalted air; Best people are not angels quite . . ."

and with that one look at him, she passed on to Asolo.

+ + + + +

What was the noise that broke out as Pippa finished her song? The loud call which came first was Monsignor's, summoning his guards from an outer chamber to gag and bind his steward. This steward had been supping alone with the Bishop, who had come not only (as Pippa said in the morning, choosing him as the ideal person for her pretending) "to bless the home of his dead brother," but also to take possession of that brother's estate. . . . He knows the steward to be a rascal; but he himself, the "holy and beloved priest," is a good deal of a rascal too; he has connived at his brother's death, and had connived at his mode of life. Now the steward is preparing to blackmail the Bishop, as he had blackmailed the Bishop's brother. Both are aware that the dead man had a child; Monsignor believes that this child was murdered by the steward at the instigation of a younger brother, who wished to succeed to the estates. He urges the man to confess; otherwise he shall be arrested by Monsignor's people who are in the outer room. "Did you throttle or stab my brother's infant--come now?"[77:1]

But the steward has yet another card to play; moreover, so many enemies now surround him that his life is probably forfeited anyhow, so he will tell the truth. And the truth is that the child was not murdered by him or anyone else. The child--the girl--is close at hand; he sees her every day, he saw her this morning. Now, shall he make away with her for Monsignor? Not "the stupid obvious sort of killing . . . of course there is to be no killing; but at Rome the courtesans perish off every three years, and he can entice her thither, has begun operations already"--making use of a certain Bluphocks, an Englishman. Monsignor will not _formally_ assent, of course . . . but will he give the steward time to cross the Alps? The girl is "but a little black-eyed pretty singing Felippa,[77:2] gay silk-winding girl"; some women are to pass off Bluphocks as a somebody, and once Pippa entangled--it will be best accomplished through her singing. . . . Well, Monsignor has listened; Monsignor conceives--is it a bargain?

It was precisely as the steward asked that question that Pippa finished her song of a maiden's lesson and its ending, and Monsignor leaped up and shouted to his guards. . . . The singing by which "little black-eyed pretty Felippa" was to be entangled had rescued instead the soul of her Fourth Happiest One from this deep infamy.

+ + + + +

The great Day is over. Pippa, back in her room, finds horribly uppermost among her memories the talk of those lamentable four girls. It had spoilt the sweetness of her day; it spoils now, for a while, her own sweetness. Her comments on it have none of the wayward charm of her morning fancies, for Pippa is very human--she can envy and decry, swinging loose from the central steadiness of her nature like many another of us, obsessed like her by some vile happening of the hours. Just as we might find our whole remembrance of a festival thus overlaid by malice and ugliness, _she_ finds it; she can only think "how pert that girl was," and how glad she is not to be like her. Yet, all the same, she does not see why she should not have been told who it was that "passed that jest upon her" of the Englishman in love--no foreigner had come to the mills that she recollects. . . . And perhaps, after all, if Luca raises the wage, she may be able to buy shoes next year, and not look any worse than Zanze.

But gradually the atmosphere of her mind seems restored; the fogs of envy and curiosity begin to clear off--she goes over the game of make-believe, how she was in turn each of the Four . . . but no! the miasma is still in the air, and she's "tired of fooling," and New Year's Day is over, and ill or well, _she_ must be content. . . . Even her lily's asleep, but she will wake it up, and show it the friend she has plucked for it--the flower she gathered as she passed the house on the hill. . . . Alas! even the flower seems infected. She compares it, "this pampered thing," this double hearts-ease of the garden, with the wild growth, and once more Zanze comes to mind--isn't she like the pampered blossom? And if there were a king of the flowers, "and a girl-show held in his bowers," which would he like best, the Zanze or the Pippa? . . . No: nothing will conquer her dejection; fancies will not do, awakening sleepy lilies will not do--

"Oh what a drear dark close to my poor day! How could that red sun drop in that black cloud?"

and despairingly she accepts the one truth that seems to confront her: "Day's turn is over, now arrives the night's;" the larks and thrushes and blackbirds have had their hour; owls and bats and such-like things rule now . . . and listlessly she begins to undress herself. She is so alone; she has nothing but fancies to play with--this morning's, for instance, of being anyone she liked. She had played her game, had kept it up loyally with herself all day--what was the good?

"Now, one thing I should like to really know: How near I ever might approach all those I only fancied being, this long day: Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, so As to . . . in some way . . . move them--if you please, Do good or evil to them some slight way. For instance, if I wind Silk to-morrow, my silk may bind And border Ottima's cloak's hem . . ."

Sitting on her bed, undressed, the solitary child thus broods. No nearer than that can she get--her silk might border Ottima's cloak's hem. . . . But she cannot endure this dejection: back to her centre of gaiety, trust, and courage Pippa must somehow swing--and how shall she achieve it? There floats into her memory the hymn which she had murmured in the morning--

"All service ranks the same with God."

But even this can help her only a little--

"True in some sense or other, I suppose . . ."

She lies down; she can pray no more than that; the hymn no doubt is right, "some way or other," and with its message thus almost mocking in her ears, she falls asleep--the lonely little girl who has saved four souls to-day, and does not know, will never know; but will be again, to-morrow perhaps, when that sad talk on the church steps is faded from her memory, the gay, brave, trustful spirit who, by merely being that, had sung her Four Happiest Ones up toward "God in his heaven."

FOOTNOTES:

[24:1] Asolo, in the Trevisan, is a very picturesque mediæval fortified town, the ancient Acelum. It lies at the foot of a hill which is surrounded by the ruins of an old castle; before it stretches the great plain of the rivers Brenta and Piave, where Treviso, Vicenza, and Padua may be clearly recognised. The Alps encircle it, and in the distance rise the Euganean Hills. Venice can be discerned on the extreme eastern horizon, which ends in the blue line of the Adriatic. The village of Asolo is surrounded by a wall with mediæval turrets.--BERDOE, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 50.

[26:1] Another line that I should like to omit, for the following words, wholly in character, say all that the ugly ones have boomed at us so incredibly. But here the rhyme-scheme provides a sort of unpardonable excuse.

[49:1] Dr. Berdoe and Mrs. Orr.

[52:1] All the talk between the students is in prose.

[52:2] The long shoaly island in the Lagoon, immediately opposite Venice.

[64:1] This song refers to Catherine of Cornaro, the last Queen of Cyprus, who came to her castle at Asolo when forced to resign her kingdom to the Venetians in 1489. "She lived for her people's welfare, and won their love by her goodness and grace."

[68:1] "The name means _Blue-Fox_, and is a skit on the _Edinburgh Review_, which is bound in blue and fox" (Dr. Furnivall).

[77:1] The dialogue between Monsignor and the steward is in prose.

[77:2] Having made her Monsignor's niece, observes Mr. Chesterton, "Browning might just as well have made Sebald her long-lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married."

III

MILDRED TRESHAM

IN "A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON"

I have said that, to my perception, the most characteristic mark in Browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which I constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence" (as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to show; and Browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own person hymned it, found words for its delineation which lift the soul as it were to morning skies. But when words are further called upon for its _expression_, when such a woman, in short, has to speak for herself, he rarely makes her do so without a certain consciousness of that especial trait in her--and hence her speech must of necessity ring false, for innocence knows nothing of itself.

So marked is this failure, to my sense, that I cannot refuse the implication which comes along with it: that only theoretically, only as it were by deference to others, did the attribute, in that particular apprehension of it, move him to admiration. I do not, of course, mean anything so inconceivable as that he questioned the loveliness of the "pure in heart"; I mean merely that he questioned the artificial value which has been set upon physical chastity--and that when departure from this was the _circumstance_ through which he had to show the more essential purity, his instinctive scepticism drove him to the forcing of a note which was not really native to his voice. For always (to my sense) when he presents dramatically a girl or woman in the grip of this circumstance, he gives her words, and feelings to express through them, which only the French _mièvre_ can justly describe. He does not, in short, reveal her as she is, but only as others see her--and, among those others, not himself.

In Browning this might seem the stranger because he was so wholly untouched by cynicism; but here we light upon a curious paradox--the fact that the more "worldly" the writer, the better can he (as a general rule and other things being equal) display this type. It may be that such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration--that his fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted," thus becomes inclined to mawkishness . . . it _may_ be, I say, but at the bottom of my heart I do not feel that that is the explanation. One with which I am better satisfied emerges from a line of verse already quoted:

"For each man kills the thing he loves";

and the man most apt for such "killing" is precisely he who appraises most shrewdly the thing he kills. As the cool practised libertine is oftenest attracted by the immature girl, so the ardent inexperienced man of any age will be drawn to the older woman; and the psychology of this matter of everyday experience is closely akin to the paradox in artistic creation of which I now speak.

Browning, who saw woman so clearly as a creature with her definite and justified demand upon life, saw, by inevitable consequence, that for woman to "depart from innocence" (again, in the conventional sense of the words) is not her most significant error; and this conviction necessarily reacted upon his presentment of those in whom such purity is the most salient quality--a type of which, as I have said, the poet is bound to attempt the portrayal. Browning's instinctive questioning of the "man-made" value then betrays itself--he exaggerates, he loses grasp, for he is singing in a mode not native to his temperament.

+ + + + +

The character of Mildred in _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is a striking example of this. She is a young girl who has been drawn by her innocent passion into complete surrender to her lover. He, after this surrender, seeks her in marriage from her brother, who stands in the place of both parents to the orphan girl. The brother consents, unknowing; but after his consent, learns from a servant that Mildred has yielded herself to a man--he learns not _whom_. She, accused, makes no denial, gives no name, and to her brother's consternation, proposes thus to marry her suitor, whom Tresham thinks to be in ignorance of her error. Tresham violently repudiates her; then, meeting beneath her window the cloaked lover, attacks him, forces him to reveal himself, learns that he and the accepted suitor are one and the same, and kills him--Mertoun (the lover) making no defence. Tresham goes to Mildred and tells her what he has done; she dies of the hearing, and he, having taken poison after the revelation of Mertoun's identity, dies also.

The defects in this story are so obvious that I need hardly point them out. Most prominent of all is the difficulty of reconciling Earl Mertoun's conduct with that of a rational being. He is all that in Mildred's suitor might be demanded, yet, loving her deeply and so loved by her, he has feared to ask her brother for her hand, because of his reverence for this Earl Tresham.

". . . I was young, And your surpassing reputation kept me So far aloof . . ."

Thus he explains himself. He feared to ask for her hand, yet did not fear to seduce her! The thing is so absurd that it vitiates all the play, which indeed but once or twice approaches aught that we can figure to ourselves of reality in any period of history. "Mediæval" is a strange adjective, used by Mrs. Orr to characterise a work of which the date is placed by Browning himself in the eighteenth century.

Mildred is but fourteen: an age at which, with our modern sense of girlhood as, happily, in this land we now know it, we find ourselves unable to apprehend her at all. Instinctively we assign to her at least five years more, since even these would leave her still a child--though not at any moment in the play does she actually so affect us, for Mildred is never a child, never even a young girl. Immature indeed she is, but it is with the immaturity which will not develop, which has nothing to do with length of years. To me, the failure here is absolute; she never comes to life. Every student of Browning knows of the enthusiasm which Dickens expressed for this piece and this character:

"Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting . . . is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. . . . I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young--I had no mother.'"

Such ardour well might stir us to agreement, were it not that Dickens chose for its warmest expression the very centre of our disbelief: Mildred's _recurrence_ to that cry. . . . The cry itself--I cannot be alone in thinking--rings false, and the recurrence, therefore, but heaps error upon error. When I imagine an ardent girl in such a situation, almost anything she could have been made to say would to me seem more authentic than this. The first utterance, moreover, occurs before she knows that Tresham has learnt the truth--it occurs, in soliloquy, immediately after an interview with her lover.

"I was so young, I loved him so, I had No mother, God forgot me, and I fell."

_I fell_ . . . No woman, in any extremity, says that; that is what is said by others of her. And _God forgot me_--is this the thought of one who "loves him so"? . . . The truth is that we have here the very commonplace of the theatre: the wish to have it both ways, to show, yet not to reveal--the "dramatic situation," in short, set out because it _is_ dramatic, not because it is true. We cannot suppose that Browning meant Earl Mertoun for a mere seducer, ravishing from a maiden that which she did not desire to give--yet the words he here puts in Mildred's mouth bear no other interpretation. Either she is capable of passion, or she is not. If she _is_, sorrow for the sorrow that her recklessness may cause to others will indeed put pain and terror in her soul, but she will not, can not, say that "God forgot her": those words are alien to the passionate. If she is _not_, if Mertoun is the mere seducer . . . but the suggestion is absurd. We know that he is like herself, as herself should have been shown us, young love incarnate, rushing to its end mistakenly--wrong, high, and pure. These errors are the errors of quick souls, of souls that, too late realising all, yet feel themselves unstained, and know that not God forgot them, but they this world in which we dwell.

In her interview with Tresham after the servant's revelation, I find the same untruth. He delivers a long rhapsody on brothers' love, saying that it exceeds all other in its unselfishness. Her sole rejoinder--and here she does for one second attain to authenticity--is the question: "What is this for?" He, after some hesitation, tells her what he knows, calls upon her to confess, she standing silent until, at end of the arraignment, he demands the lover's name. Listen to her answer:

". . . Thorold, do you devise Fit expiation for my guilt, if fit There be! 'Tis nought to say that I'll endure And bless you--that my spirit yearns to purge Her stains off in the fierce renewing fire: But do not plunge me into other guilt! Oh, guilt enough . . ."

She of course refuses the name. He tells her to pronounce, then, her own punishment.

Again her answer, in the utter falseness to all truth of its abasement, well-nigh sickens the soul:

"Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus! To die here in this chamber, by that sword, Would seem like punishment; so should I glide Like an arch-cheat, into extremest bliss!"

Comment upon that seems to me simply impossible. This is the woman to whom, but a page or two back, young Mertoun has sung the exquisite song, known to most readers of Browning's lyrics:

"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest, And her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the surest" . . .

Already in that hour with her, Mertoun must have learnt that some of those high words were turned to slighter uses when they sang of Mildred Tresham. In that hour he has spoken of the "meeting that appalled us both" (namely, the meeting with her brother, when he was to ask for her hand), saying that it is over and happiness begins, "such as the world contains not." When Mildred answers him with, "This will not be," we could accept, believingly, were only the sense of doom what her reply brought with it. But "this will not be," because they do not "deserve the whole world's best of blisses."

"Sin has surprised us, so will punishment."

And how strange, how sad for a woman is it, to see with what truth and courage Browning can make Mertoun speak! Each word that _he_ says can be brave and clear for all its recognition of their error; no word that _she_ says. . . . Her creator does not understand her; almost, thus, we do feel Mildred to be real, so quick is our resentment of the unrealities heaped on her. Imagining beforehand the moment when she shall receive in presence of them all "the partner of my guilty love" (is not here the theatre in full blast?), the deception she must practise--called by her, in the vein so cruelly assigned her, "this planned piece of deliberate wickedness" . . . imagining all this, she foresees herself unable to pretend, pouring forth "all our woeful story," and pictures them aghast, "as round some cursed fount that should spirt water and spouts blood." . . . "I'll not!" she cries--

". . . 'I'll not affect a grace That's gone from me--gone once, and gone for ever!'"

"Gone once, and gone for ever." True, when the grace _is_ gone; but surely not from her, in any real sense, had it gone--and would she not, in the deep knowledge of herself which comes with revelation to the world, have felt that passionately? There are accusations of ourselves which indeed arraign ourselves, yet leave us our best pride. To me, not the error which made her prey to penitence was Mildred Tresham's "fall," but those crude cries of shame.

We take refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her brother--that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and conventional morality,"[90:1] Thorold, Earl Tresham; but not thus can we solace ourselves for Browning's failure. What a girl he might have given us in Mildred, had he listened only to himself! But, not yet in full possession of that self, he set up as an ideal the ideal of others, trying dutifully to see it as they see it, denying dutifully his deepest instinct; and, thus apostate, piled insincerity on insincerity, until at last no truth is anywhere, and we read on with growing alienation as each figure loses all of such reality as it ever had, and even Gwendolen, the "golden creature"--his own dauntless, individual woman, seeing and feeling truly through every fibre of her being--is lost amid the fog, is stifled in the stifling atmosphere, and only at the last, when Mildred and her brother are both dead, can once more say the word which lights us back to truth:

"Ah, Thorold, we can but--remember you!"

It was indeed all _they_ could do; but we, more fortunate, can forget him, imaging to ourselves the Mildred that Browning could have given us--the Mildred of whom her brother is made to say:

"You cannot know the good and tender heart, Its girl's trust and its woman's constancy, How pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind, How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free As light where friends are . . ."

There she is, as Browning might have shown her! "Control's not for this lady," Tresham adds--the sign-manual of a Browning woman. As I have said, he can display this lovely type through others, can sing it in his own person, as in the exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak for herself--he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth departs from him; we have the Mildred Tresham of the theatre, of "the partner of my guilty love," of "Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!" of (in a later scene) "I think I might have urged some little point in my defence to Thorold"; of that last worst unreality of all, when Thorold has told her of his murder of her lover, and she cries:

". . . I--forgive not, But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls! There! Do not think too much upon the past! The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud While it stood up between my friend and you; You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that So past retrieve? I have his heart, you know; I may dispose of it: I give it you! It loves you as mine loves!"

True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined, will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient claim for Thorold's deed--Thorold who dies with these words on his lips:

". . . You hold our 'scutcheon up. Austin, no blot on it! You see how blood Must wash one blot away; the first blot came And the first blood came. To the vain world's eye All's gules again: no care to the vain world From whence the red was drawn!"

And on Austin's cry that "no blot shall come!" he answers:

"I said that: yet it did come. Should it come, Vengeance is God's, not man's. Remember me!"

_Vengeance_: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard that word, that "God"?

FOOTNOTES:

[90:1] Berdoe. _Browning Cyclopædia._

IV

BALAUSTION

IN "BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE" AND "ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY"

To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women--nay, I am tempted to proclaim her queen of every poet's women. For in her meet all lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ (what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose--"enmisted by the scent it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb, statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the long, close argument of the _Apology_. In that piece, the Bald Bard himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes, the _Adventure_, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric phrases our queen before we crown her.

He comes to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that her adored Euripides is dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are "sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door, and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1] bids!"--and, heralded by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there enters, "stands in person, Aristophanes." Balaustion had never seen him till that moment, nor he her:

"Forward he stepped: I rose and fronted him";

and as thus for the first time they meet, he breaks into a pæan of admiration:

"'You, lady? What, the Rhodian? Form and face, Victory's self upsoaring to receive The poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name, Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants, Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end In _ion_' . . ."

and trying to recall that name "in _ion_," he guesses two or three at random, seizing thus the occasion to express her effect on him:

"'Phibalion, for the mouth split red-fig-wise, Korakinidion, for the coal-black hair, Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness?'"

But none of these is right; "it was some fruit-flower"; and at last it comes: _Balaustion_, Wild-Pomegranate-Bloom, and he exclaims in ecstasy, "Thanks, Rhodes!"--for her fellow-countrymen had found this name for her, so apt in every way that her real name was forgotten, and as Balaustion she shall live and die.

"Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness"; and for all her intellect and ardour, it is greatly _this_ that makes Balaustion queen--the lovely eager sweetness, the tenderness, the "darlingness": Aristophanes guessed almost right!

+ + + + +

How did she win the name of Wild-Pomegranate-Flower? We learn it from herself in the _Adventure_. Let us hear: let us feign ourselves members of the little band of friends, all girls, with their charming, chiming names: "Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion"--to whom she cries in the delightful opening:

"About that strangest, saddest, sweetest song I, when a girl, heard in Kameiros once, And after, saved my life by? Oh, so glad To tell you the adventure!"

Part of the adventure is historical. In the second stage of the Peloponnesian War (that famous contention between the Athenians and the inhabitants of Peloponnesus which began on May 7, 431 B.C. and lasted twenty-seven years), the Athenian General, Nikias, had suffered disaster at Syracuse, and had given himself up, with all his army, to the Sicilians. But the assurances of safety which he had received were quickly proved false. He was no sooner in the hands of the enemy than he was shamefully put to death with his naval ally, Demosthenes; and his troops were sent to the quarries, where the plague and the hard labour lessened their numbers and increased their miseries. When this bad news reached Rhodes, the islanders rose in revolt against the supremacy of Athens, and resolved to side with Sparta. Balaustion[96:1] was there, and she passionately protested against this decision, crying to "who would hear, and those who loved me at Kameiros"[96:2]:

". . . No! Never throw Athens off for Sparta's sake-- Never disloyal to the life and light Of the whole world worth calling world at all!

* * * * *

To Athens, all of us that have a soul, Follow me!"

and thus she drew together a little band, "and found a ship at Kaunos," and they turned

"The glad prow westward, soon were out at sea, Pushing, brave ship with the vermilion cheek, Proud for our heart's true harbour."

But they were pursued by pirates, and, fleeing from these, drove unawares into the harbour of that very Syracuse where Nikias and Demosthenes had perished, and in whose quarries their countrymen were slaves. The inhabitants refused them admission, for they had heard, as the ship came into harbour, Balaustion singing "that song of ours which saved at Salamis." She had sprung upon the altar by the mast, and carolled it forth to encourage the oarsmen; and now it was vain to tell the Sicilians that these were Rhodians who had cast in their lot with the Spartan League, for the Captain of Syracuse answered:

"Ay, but we heard all Athens in one ode . . . You bring a boatful of Athenians here";

and Athenians they would not have at Syracuse, "with memories of Salamis" to stir up the slaves in the quarry.

No prayers, no blandishments, availed the Rhodians; they were just about to turn away and face the pirates in despair, when somebody raised a question, and

". . . 'Wait!' Cried they (and wait we did, you may be sure). 'That song was veritable Aischulos, Familiar to the mouth of man and boy, Old glory: how about Euripides? Might you know any of his verses too?'"

Browning here makes use of the historical fact that Euripides was reverenced far more by foreigners and the non-Athenian Greeks than by the Athenians--for Balaustion, "the Rhodian," had been brought up in his worship, though she knew and loved the other great Greek poets also; and already it was known to our voyagers that the captives in the quarries had found that those who could "teach Euripides to Syracuse" gained indulgence far beyond what any of the others could obtain. Thus, when the question sounded, "Might you know any of his verses too?" the captain of the vessel cried:

"Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands, Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl!

* * * * *

Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through, Has she been falling thick in flakes of him,

* * * * *

And so, although she has some other name, We only call her Wild-Pomegranate-Flower, Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns

* * * * *

You shall find food, drink, odour all at once."

He called upon her to save their little band by singing a strophe. But she could do better than that--she could recite a whole play:

"That strangest, saddest, sweetest song of his, ALKESTIS!"

Only that very year had it reached "Our Isle o' the Rose"; she had seen it, at Kameiros, played just as it was played at Athens, and had learnt by heart "the perfect piece." Now, quick and subtle for all her enthusiasm, she remembers to tell the Sicilians how, besides "its beauty and the way it makes you weep," it does much honour to their own loved deity:

"Herakles, whom you house i' the city here Nobly, the Temple wide Greece talks about; I come a suppliant to your Herakles! Take me and put me on his temple-steps To tell you his achievement as I may."

"Then," she continues, in a passage which rings out again in the _Apology_:

"Then, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts, And poetry is power--they all outbroke In a great joyous laughter with much love: 'Thank Herakles for the good holiday! Make for the harbour! Row, and let voice ring: _In we row bringing in Euripides!_'"

So did the Rhodians land at Syracuse. And the whole city, hearing the cry "In we row," which was taken up by the crowd around the harbour-quays, came rushing out to meet them, and Balaustion, standing on the topmost step of the Temple of Herakles, told the play:

"Told it, and, two days more, repeated it, Until they sent us on our way again With good words and great wishes."

That was her Adventure. Three things happened in it "for herself": a rich Syracusan brought her a whole talent as a gift, and she left it on the tripod as thank-offering to Herakles; a band of the captives--"whom their lords grew kinder to, Because they called the poet countryman"--sent her a crown of wild-pomegranate-flower; and the third thing . . . Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion, hear of this also--of the youth who, all the three days that she spoke the play, was found in the gazing, listening audience; and who, when they sailed away, was found in the ship too, "having a hunger to see Athens"; and when they reached Piræus, once again was found, as Balaustion landed, beside her. February's moon is just a-bud when she tells her comrades of this youth; and when that moon rounds full:

"We are to marry. O Euripides!"

* * * * *

Everyone who speaks of _Balaustion's Adventure_ will quote to you that ringing line, for it sums up the high, ardent girl who, even in the exultation of her love, must call upon the worshipped Master. It is this passion for intellectual beauty which sets Balaustion so apart, which makes her so complete and stimulating. She has a mind as well as a heart and soul; she is priestess as well as goddess--Euthukles will have a wife indeed! Every word she speaks is stamped with the Browning marks of gaiety, courage, trust, and with how many others also: those of high-heartedness, deep-heartedness, the true patriotism that cherishes most closely the soul of its country; and then generosity, pride, ardour--all enhanced by woman's more peculiar gifts of gentleness, modesty, tenderness, insight, gravity . . . for Balaustion is like many women in having, for all her gaiety, more sense of happiness than sense of humour. It often comes to me as debatable if this be not the most attractive of deficiencies! Certainly Balaustion persuades us of its power; for in the _Apology_, her refusal of the Aristophanic Comedy is firm-based upon that imputed lack in women. No man, thus poised, could have convinced us of his reality; while she convinces us not only of her reality, but of her rightness. Again, we must applaud our poet's wisdom in choosing woman for the Bald Bard's accuser; she is as potent in this part as in that of Euripides' interpreter.

But what a girl Balaustion is, as well as what a woman! Let us see her with the little band of friends about her, as in the exquisite revocation (in the _Apology_) of the first adventure's telling:

". . . O that Spring, That eve I told the earlier[101:1] to my friends! Where are the four now, with each red-ripe mouth I wonder, does the streamlet ripple still, Outsmoothing galingale and watermint?

* * * * *

Under the grape-vines, by the streamlet-side, Close to Baccheion; till the cool increase, And other stars steal on the evening star, And so, we homeward flock i' the dusk, we five!"

Then, in the _Adventure_, comes the translation by Browning of the _Alkestis_ of Euripides, which Balaustion is feigned to have spoken upon the temple steps at Syracuse. With this we have here no business, though so entire is his "lyric girl," so fully and perfectly by him conceived, that not a word of the play but might have been Balaustion's own. This surely is a triumph of art--to imagine such a speaker for such a piece, and to blend them both so utterly that the supreme Greek dramatist and this girl are indivisible. What a woman was demanded for such a feat, and what a poet for both! May we not indeed say now that Browning was our singer? Whom but he would have done this--so crowned, so trusted, us, and so persuaded men that women can be great?

"Its beauty, and the way it makes you weep": yes--and the way it makes you thrill with love for Herakles, never before so god-like, because always before too much the apotheosis of mere physical power. But read of him in the _Alkestis_ of Euripides, and you shall feel him indeed divine--"this grand benevolence." . . . We can hear the voice of Balaustion deepen, quiver, and grow grave with gladdened love, as Herakles is fashioned for us by these two men's noble minds.

+ + + + +

When she had told the "perfect piece" to her girl-friends, a sudden inspiration came to her:

"I think I see how . . . You, I, or anyone might mould a new Admetos, new Alkestis";

and saying this, a flood of gratitude for the great gift of poetry comes full tide across her soul:

". . . Ah, that brave Bounty of poets, the one royal race That ever was, or will be, in this world! They give no gift that bounds itself and ends I' the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds I' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes The man who only was a man before, That he grows god-like in his turn, can give-- He also; share the poet's privilege, Bring forth new good, new beauty from the old. . . . So with me: For I have drunk this poem, quenched my thirst, Satisfied heart and soul--yet more remains! Could we too make a poem? Try at least, Inside the head, what shape the rose-mists take!"

And, trying thus, Balaustion, Feminist, portrays the perfect marriage.

Admetos, in Balaustion's and Browning's _Alkestis_, will not let his wife be sacrificed for him:

"Never, by that true word Apollon spoke! All the unwise wish is unwished, oh wife!"

and he speaks, as in a vision, of the purpose of Zeus in himself.

"This purpose--that, throughout my earthly life, Mine should be mingled and made up with thine-- And we two prove one force and play one part And do one thing. Since death divides the pair, 'Tis well that I depart and thou remain Who wast to me as spirit is to flesh: Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more, So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh, Bend yet awhile, a very flame above The rift I drop into the darkness by-- And bid remember, flesh and spirit once Worked in the world, one body, for man's sake. Never be that abominable show Of passive death without a quickening life-- Admetos only, no Alkestis now!"

It is so that the man speaks to and of the woman, in Balaustion's and Browning's _Alkestis_.

And the woman, answering, declares that the reality of their joint existence lies not in her, but in him:

". . . 'What! thou soundest in my soul To depths below the deepest, reachest good By evil, that makes evil good again, And so allottest to me that I live, And not die--letting die, not thee alone, But all true life that lived in both of us? Look at me once ere thou decree the lot!'

* * * * *

Therewith her whole soul entered into his, He looked the look back, and Alkestis died."

But when she reaches the nether world--"the downward-dwelling people"--she is rejected as a deceiver: "This is not to die," says the Queen of Hades, for her death is a mockery, since it doubles the life of him she has left behind:

"'Two souls in one were formidable odds: Admetos must not be himself and thou!'

* * * * *

And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit, The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look; And lo, Alkestis was alive again."

How do our little squabbles--the "Sex-War"--look to us after this?

+ + + + +

When next we meet with Balaustion, in _Aristophanes' Apology_, she is married to her Euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the waters--this time back to Rhodes, from Athens which has fallen.

Many things have happened in the meantime, and Balaustion, leaving her adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of Athens, she may free herself from anguish. Euthukles shall write it down for her, and they will go back to the night they heard Euripides was dead: "One year ago, Athenai still herself." Together she and Euthukles had mused, together glorified their poet. Euthukles had met the audience flocking homeward from the theatre, where Aristophanes had that night won the prize which Euripides had so seldom won. They had stopped him to hear news of the other poet's death: "Balaustion's husband, the right man to ask"--but he had refused them all satisfaction, and scornfully rated them for the crown but now awarded. "Appraise no poetry," he had cried: "price cuttlefish!"

Balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in Athens, but one work of Aristophanes, the _Lysistrata_; and now, in breathless reminiscent anger, recalls the experience. It had so appalled her, "that bestiality so beyond all brute-beast imagining," that she would never see again a play by him who in the crowned achievement of this evening had drawn himself as Virtue laughingly reproving Vice, and Vice . . . Euripides! Such a piece it was which had "gained the prize that day we heard the death."

Yet, musing on that death, her wrath had fallen from her.

"I thought, 'How thoroughly death alters things! Where is the wrong now, done our dead and great?'"

Euthukles, divining her thought, told her that the mob had repented when they learnt the news. He had heard them cry: "Honour him!" and "A statue in the theatre!" and "Bring his body back,[106:1] bury him in Piræus--Thucydides shall make his epitaph!"

But she was not moved to sympathy with the general cry.

"Our tribute should not be the same, my friend. Statue? Within our hearts he stood, he stands!"

and, for his mere mortal body:

"Why, let it fade, mix with the elements There where it, falling, freed Euripides!"

_She_ knew, that night, a better way to hail his soul's new freedom. This, by

"Singing, we two, its own song back again Up to that face from which flowed beauty--face Now abler to see triumph and take love Than when it glorified Athenai once."

Yes: they two would read together _Herakles_, the play of which Euripides himself had given her the tablets, in commemoration of the Adventure at Syracuse. After that, on her first arrival in Athens, she had gone to see him, "held the sacred hand of him, and laid it to my lips"; she had told him "how Alkestis helped," and he, on bidding her farewell, had given her these tablets, with the stylos pendant from them still, and given her, too, his own psalterion, that she might, to its assisting music, "croon the ode bewailing age."

All was prepared for the reading, when (as we earlier learnt) there came the torch-light and the knocking at their door, and Aristophanes, fresh from his triumph, entered with the banquet-band, to hail the "house, friendly to Euripides."

He knew, declared Aristophanes, that the Rhodian hated him most of mortals, but he would not blench. The others blenched--no word could they utter, nor one laugh laugh. . . . So he drove them out, and stood alone confronting

"Statuesque Balaustion pedestalled On much disapprobation and mistake."

He babbled on for a while, defiantly and incoherently, and at length she turned in dumb rebuke, which he at once understood.

"True, lady, I am tolerably drunk";

for it was the triumph-night, and merriment had reigned at the banquet, reigned and increased

"'Till something happened' . . . Here he strangely paused";

but soon went on to tell the way in which the news had reached them there. . . . While Aristophanes spoke, Balaustion searched his face; and now (recalling, on the way to Rhodes, that hour to Euthukles), she likens the change which she then saw in it to that made by a black cloud suddenly sailing over a stretch of sparkling sea--such a change as they are in this very moment beholding.

"Just so, some overshadow, some new care Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face, And left there only such a dark surmise-- No wonder if the revel disappeared, So did his face shed silence every side! I recognised a new man fronting me."

At once he perceived her insight, and answered it: "So you see myself? Your fixed regard can strip me of my 'accidents,' as the sophists say?" But neither should this disconcert him:

"Thank your eyes' searching; undisguised I stand: The merest female child may question me. Spare not, speak bold, Balaustion!"

She, searching thus his face, had learnt already that "what she had disbelieved most proved most true." Drunk though he was,

"There was a mind here, mind a-wantoning At ease of undisputed mastery Over the body's brood, those appetites. Oh, but he grasped them grandly!"

It was no "ignoble presence": the broad bald brow, the flushed cheek, great imperious fiery eyes, wide nostrils, full aggressive mouth, all the pillared head:

"These made a glory, of such insolence-- I thought--such domineering deity . . . Impudent and majestic . . ."

Instantly on her speaking face the involuntary homage had shown; and it was to this that Aristophanes, keen of sight as she, had confidently addressed himself when he told her to speak boldly. And in the very spirit of her face she did speak:

"Bold speech be--welcome to this honoured hearth, Good Genius!"

Here sounds the essential note of generous natures. Proved mistaken, their instant impulse is to rejoice in defeat, if defeat means victory for the better thing. Thus, as Balaustion speaks, her ardour grows with every word. He is greater than she had supposed, and so she must even rhapsodise--she must crowd praise on praise, until she ends with the exultant cry:

"O light, light, light, I hail light everywhere! No matter for the murk that was--perchance That will be--certes, never should have been Such orb's associate!"

Mark that Aristophanes has not yet _said_ anything to justify her change of attitude: the seeing of him is enough to draw from her this recantation--for she trusts her own quick insight, and so, henceforth trusts him.

Now begins the long, close argument between them which constitutes _Aristophanes' Apology_. It is (from him) the defence of comedy as he understands and practises it--broad and coarse when necessary; violent and satiric against those who in any way condemn it. Euripides had been one of these, and Balaustion now stands for him. . . . In the long run, it is the defence of "realism" against "idealism," and, as such, involves a whole philosophy of life. We cannot follow it here; all we may do is to indicate the points at which it reveals, as she speaks in it, the character of Balaustion, and the growing charm which such revelation has for her opponent.

At every turn of his argument, Aristophanes is sure of her comprehension. He knows that he need not adapt himself to a feebler mind: "You understand," he says again and again. At length he comes, in his narration, to the end of their feast that night, and tells how, rising from the banquet interrupted by the entrance of Sophocles with tidings of Euripides dead, he had cried to his friends that they must go and see

"The Rhodian rosy with Euripides! . . . And here you stand with those warm golden eyes! Maybe, such eyes must strike conviction, turn One's nature bottom-upwards, show the base . . . Anyhow, I have followed happily The impulse, pledged my genius with effect, Since, come to see you, I am shown--myself!"

She instantly bids him, as she has honoured him, that he do honour to Euripides. But, seized by perversity, he declares that if she will give him the _Herakles_ tablets (which he has discerned, lying with the other gifts of Euripides), he will prove to her, by this play alone, the "main mistake" of her worshipped Master.

She warmly interrupts, reproving him. Their house _is_ the shrine of that genius, and he has entered it, "fresh from his worst infamy"--yet she has withheld the words she longs to speak, she has inclined, nay yearned, to reverence him:

"So you but suffer that I see the blaze And not the bolt--the splendid fancy-fling, Not the cold iron malice, the launched lie."

If he does _this_, if he shows her

"A mere man's hand ignobly clenched against Yon supreme calmness,"

she will interpose:

"Such as you see me! Silk breaks lightning's blow!"

But Aristophanes, at that word of "calmness," exclaims vehemently. Death is the great unfairness! Once a man dead, the survivors croak, "Respect him." And so one must--it is the formidable claim, "immunity of faultiness from fault's punishment." That is why _he_, Aristophanes, has always attacked the living; he knew how they would hide their heads, once dead! Euripides had chosen the other way; "men pelted him, but got no pellet back"; and it was not magnanimity but arrogance that prompted him to such silence. Those at whom Aristophanes or he should fling mud were by that alone immortalised--and Euripides, "that calm cold sagacity," knew better than to do them such service.

As he speaks thus, Balaustion's "heart burns up within her to her tongue." She exclaims that the baseness of Aristophanes' attack, of his "mud-volleying" at Euripides, consists in the fact that both men had, at bottom, the same ideals; they both extended the limitations of art, both were desirous from their hearts that truth should triumph--yet Aristophanes, thus desiring, poured out his supremacy of power against the very creature who loved all that _he_ loved! And she declares that such shame cuts through all his glory. Comedy is in the dust, laid low by him:

"Balaustion pities Aristophanes!"

Now she has gone too far--she has spoken too boldly.

"Blood burnt the cheek-bone, each black eye flashed fierce: 'But this exceeds our license!'"

--so he exclaims; but then, seizing his native weapon, stops ironically to search out an excuse for her. He finds it soon. She and her husband are but foreigners; they are "uninstructed"; the born and bred Athenian needs must smile at them, if he do not think a frown more fitting for such ignorance. But strangers are privileged: Aristophanes will condone. They want to impose their squeamishness on sturdy health: that is at the bottom of it all. Their Euripides had cried "Death!"--deeming death the better life; he, Aristophanes, cries "Life!" If the Euripideans condescend to happiness at all, they merely "talk, talk, talk about the empty name," while the thing itself lies neglected beneath their noses; they

"think out thoroughly how youth should pass-- Just as if youth stops passing, all the same!"

* * * * *

As he proceeds, in the superb defence of his own methods, he sees Balaustion grow ever more indignant. But he conjures her to wait a moment ere she "looses his doom" on him--and at last, drawing to an end, declares that after all the ground of difference between him and her is slight. In so far as it does exist, however, he claims to have won. Euripides, for whom she stands, is beaten in this contest, yet he, Aristophanes, has not even put forth all his power! If she will not acknowledge final defeat:

"Help him, Balaustion! Use the rosy strength!"

--and he urges her to use it all, to "let the whole rage burst in brave attack."

It is evident how he has been moved, despite his boasting--how eagerly he awaits her use of the rosy strength. . . . But she begins meekly enough. She is a woman, she says, and claims no quality "beside the love of all things lovable"; in _that_, she does claim to stand pre-eminent. But men may use, justifiably, different methods from those which women most admire, and so far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers, will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they find Aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides also; and has Aristophanes yet written anything like the glorious Song to Peace in the _Cresphontes_?

"Come, for the heart within me dies away, So long dost thou delay!"

She gives this forth, in the old "Syracusan" manner, and is well aware that he can have no answer for her. Again (she proceeds), Euripides discredited war by showing how it outrages the higher feelings: by what method has Aristophanes discredited it? By the obscene allurements of the _Lysistrata_! . . . Thus she takes him through his works, and finally declares that only in "more audaciously lying" has he improved upon the earlier writers of comedy. He has genius--she gladly grants it; but he has debased his genius. The mob indeed has awarded him the crowns: is such crowning the true guerdon?

"Tell him, my other poet--where thou walk'st Some rarer world than e'er Ilissos washed!"

But as to the immortality of either, who shall say? And is even _that_ the question? No: the question is--did both men wish to waft the white sail of good and beauty on its way? Assuredly. . . . And so she cries at the last: "Your nature too is kingly"; and this is for her the sole source of ardour--she "trusts truth's inherent kingliness"; and the poets are of all men most royal. She never would have dared approach this poet so:

"But that the other king stands suddenly, In all the grand investiture of death, Bowing your knee beside my lowly head --Equals one moment! --Now arise and go. Both have done homage to Euripides!"

But he insists that her defence has been oblique--it has been merely an attack on himself. She must defend her poet more directly, or Aristophanes will do no homage. At once she answers that she will, that she has the best, the only, defence at hand. She will read him the _Herakles_, read it as, at Syracuse, she spoke the _Alkestis_.

"Accordingly I read the perfect piece."

It ends with the lament of the Chorus for the departure of Herakles:

"The greatest of all our friends of yore We have lost for evermore!"

and when Balaustion has chanted forth that strophe, there falls a long silence, on this night of losing a friend.

Aristophanes breaks it musingly. "'Our best friend'--who has been the best friend to Athens, Euripides or I?" And he answers that it is himself, for he has done what he knew he _could_ do, and thus has charmed "the Violet-Crowned"; while Euripides had challenged failure, and had failed. Euripides, he cries, remembering an instance, has been like Thamyris of Thrace, who was blinded by the Muses for daring to contend with them in song; _he_, Aristophanes, "stands heart-whole, no Thamyris!" He seizes the psalterion--Balaustion must let him use it for once--and sings the song, from Sophocles, of Thamyris marching to his doom.

He gives some verses,[117:1] then breaks off in laughter, having, as he says, "sung content back to himself," since he is _not_ Thamyris, but Aristophanes. . . . They shall both be pleased with his next play; it shall be serious, "no word more of the old fun," for "death defends," and moreover, Balaustion has delivered her admonition so soundly! Thus he departs, in all friendliness:

"Farewell, brave couple! Next year, welcome me!"

It is "next year," and Balaustion and Euthukles are fleeing across the water to Rhodes from Athens. This year has seen the death of Sophocles; and the greatest of all the Aristophanic triumphs in the _Frogs_. It was all _him_, Balaustion says:

"There blazed the glory, there shot black the shame"

--it showed every facet of his genius, and in it Bacchos himself was "duly dragged through the mire," and Euripides, after all the promises, was more vilely treated than ever before.

"So, Aristophanes obtained the prize, And so Athenai felt she had a friend Far better than her 'best friend,' lost last year."

But then, what happened? The great battle of Ægos Potamos was fought and lost, and Athens fell into the hands of the Spartans. The conqueror's first words were, "Down with the Piræus! Peace needs no bulwarks." At first the stupefied Athenians had been ready to obey--but when the next decree came forth, "No more democratic government; _we_ shall appoint your oligarchs!" the dreamers were stung awake by horror; they started up a-stare, their hands refused their office.

"Three days they stood, stared--stonier than their walls."

Lysander, the Spartan general, angered by the dumb delay, called a conference, issued decree. Not the Piræus only, but all Athens should be destroyed; every inch of the "mad marble arrogance" should go, and so at last should peace dwell there.

* * * * *

Balaustion stands, recalling this to Euthukles, who writes her words . . . and now, though she does not name it so, she tells the third "supreme adventure" of her life. When that decree had sounded, and the Spartans' shout of acquiescence had died away:

"Then did a man of Phokis rise--O heart! . . . _Who_ was the man of Phokis rose and flung A flower i' the way of that fierce foot's advance"

--the "choric flower" of the _Elektra_, full in the face of the foe?

"You flung that choric flower, my Euthukles!"

--and, gazing down on him from her proud rosy height, while he sits gazing up at her, she chants again the words she spoke to her girl-friends at the Baccheion:

"So, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts, And poetry is power, and Euthukles Had faith therein to, full-face, fling the same-- Sudden, the ice-thaw! The assembled foe, Heaving and swaying with strange friendliness, Cried 'Reverence Elektra!'--cried . . . 'Let stand Athenai'! . . ."

--and Athens was saved through Euripides,

"Through Euthukles, through--more than ever--me, Balaustion, me, who, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower, Felt my fruit triumph, and fade proudly so!"

* * * * *

But next day, Sparta woke from the spell. Harsh Lysander decreed that though Athens might be saved, the Piræus should not. Comedy should destroy the Long Walls: the flute-girls should lead off in the dance, should time the strokes of spade and pickaxe, till the pride of the Violet-Crowned lay in the dust. "Done that day!" mourns Balaustion:

"The very day Euripides was born."

But _they_ would not see the passing of Athenai; they would go, fleeing the sights and sounds,

"And press to other earth, new heaven, by sea That somehow ever prompts to 'scape despair"

--and wonderfully, at the harbour-side they found that old grey mariner, whose ship she had saved in the first Adventure! The ship was still weather-wise: it should

"'Convey Balaustion back to Rhodes, for sake Of her and her Euripides!' laughed he,"

--and they embarked. It should be Rhodes indeed: to Rhodes they now are sailing.

Euripides lies buried in the little valley "laughed and moaned about by streams,"

"Boiling and freezing, like the love and hate Which helped or harmed him through his earthly course. They mix in Arethusa by his grave."

But, just as she had known, this revocation _has_ consoled her. Now she will be able to forget. Never again will her eyes behold Athenai, nor in imagination see "the ghastly mirth that mocked her overthrow"; but she and Euthukles are exiles from the dead, not from the living, Athens:

"That's in the cloud there, with the new-born star!"

There is no despair, there can be none; for does not the soul anticipate its heaven here on earth:

"Above all crowding, crystal silentness, Above all noise, a silver solitude . . . Hatred and cark and care, what place have they In yon blue liberality of heaven? How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!"

They are entering Rhodes now, and every wave and wind seems singing out the same:

"All in one chorus--what the master-word They take up? Hark! 'There are no gods, no gods! Glory to GOD--who saves Euripides!'"

. . . There she is, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower, Balaustion--and Triumphant Woman. What other man has given us this?--and even Browning only here. Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore. But Balaustion triumphs, and we hail her--and we hail her poet too, who dared to make her great not only in her love, but in her own deep-hearted, ardent self.

"This mortal shall put on individuality." Of all men Browning most wished women to do that.

FOOTNOTES:

[94:1] I follow Browning's spellings throughout.

[96:1] The character of Balaustion is wholly imaginary.

[96:2] A town of the island of Rhodes.

[101:1] In the _Apology_, she tells "the second supreme adventure": her interview with Aristophanes, and the recital to him of the _Herakles_ of Euripides.

[106:1] Euripides died at the Court of Archelaus, King of Macedonia.

[117:1] Browning never finished his translation of this splendid song.

V

POMPILIA

IN "THE RING AND THE BOOK"

I said, in writing of Balaustion: "Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore."

I should have said that this _has been_ so: for the tendency to-day is to demonstrate rather the power than the weakness of woman. True that in the "victim," that weakness was usually shown to be the very source of that power: through her suffering not only she, but they who stood around and saw the anguish, were made perfect. That this theory of the outcome of suffering is an eternal verity I am not desirous to deny; but I do deplore that, in literature, women should be made so disproportionately its exemplars; and I deplore it not for feminist reasons alone. Once we regard suffering in this light of a supreme uplifting influence, we turn, as it were, our weapons against ourselves--we exclaim that men too suffer in this world and display the highest powers of endurance: why, then, do they so frequently, in their imaginative works, present themselves as makers of women's woes? For women make men suffer often; yet how relatively seldom men show this! Thus, paradoxically enough, we may come to declare that it is to themselves that men are harsh, and to us generous. "Chivalry from women!"--how would that sound as a war-cry?

Not all in jest do I so speak, though such recognition of male generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which assails me--and if me, then probably many another--when I find myself reading of the immemorial "victim." It is this which makes Balaustion supreme for my delight. There is a woman with every noble attribute of womanhood at its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the Great Fates, as one might say--the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering--we turn to Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and last, for the paltriest of motives--money. And money in no large, imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be at all conceived as a theme for tragedy. A dowry, and a tiny one: _this_ created "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us in _The Ring and the Book_.

"Another day that finds her living yet, Little Pompilia, with the patient brow And lamentable smile on those poor lips, And, under the white hospital-array, A flower-like body, to frighten at a bruise You'd think, yet now, stabbed through and through again, Alive i' the ruins. 'Tis a miracle. It seems that when her husband struck her first, She prayed Madonna just that she might live So long as to confess and be absolved; And whether it was that, all her sad life long Never before successful in a prayer, This prayer rose with authority too dread-- Or whether because earth was hell to her, By compensation when the blackness broke, She got one glimpse of quiet and the cool blue, To show her for a moment such things were,"

--the prayer was granted her.

So, musing on the murder of the Countess Franceschini by her husband; and her four days' survival of her wounds, does one half of Rome express itself--"The Other Half" in contrast to the earliest commentator on the crime: "Half-Rome." This Other-Half is wholly sympathetic to the seventeen-yeared child who lies in the hospital-ward at St. Anna's. "Why was she made to learn what Guido Franceschini's heart could hold?" demands the imagined spokesman; and, summing up, he exclaims:

"Who did it shall account to Christ-- Having no pity on the harmless life And gentle face and girlish form he found, And thus flings back. Go practise if you please With men and women. Leave a child alone For Christ's particular love's sake!"

Then, burning with pity and indignation, he proceeds to tell the story of Pompilia as he sees it, feels it--and as Browning, in the issue, makes us see and feel it too.

In _The Ring and the Book_, Browning tells us this story--this "pure crude fact" (for fact it actually is)--_ten times over_, through nine different persons, Guido Franceschini, the husband, speaking twice. Stated thus baldly, the plan may sound almost absurd, and the prospect of reading the work appear a tedious one; but once begin it, and neither impression survives for a moment. Each telling is at once the same and new--for in each the speaker's point of view is altered. We get, first of all, Browning's own summary of the "pure crude fact"; then the appearance of that fact to:

1. Half-Rome, antagonistic to Pompilia.

2. The Other Half, sympathetic to her.

3. "Tertium Quid," neutral.

4. Count Guido Franceschini, at his trial.

5. Giuseppe Caponsacchi (the priest with whom Pompilia fled), at the trial.

6. Pompilia, on her death-bed.

7. Count Guido's counsel, preparing his speech for the defence.

8. The Public Prosecutor's speech.

9. The Pope, considering his decision on Guido's appeal to him after the trial.

10. Guido, at the last interview with his spiritual advisers before execution.

Only the speeches of the two lawyers are wholly tedious; the rest of the survey is absorbing. Not a point which can be urged on any side is omitted, as that side presents itself; yet in the event, as I have said, one overmastering effect stands forth--the utter loveliness and purity of Pompilia. "She is the heroine," says Mr. Arthur Symons,[126:1] "as neither Guido nor Caponsacchi can be called the hero. . . . With hardly [any] consciousness of herself, [she] makes and unmakes the lives and characters of those about her"; and in this way he compares her story with Pippa's: "the mere passing of an innocent child."

And so, here, have we not indeed the victim? But though I spoke of weariness, I must take back the words; for here too we have indeed the beauty and the glory of suffering, and here the beauty and the glory of manhood. Guido, like all evil things, is Nothingness: he serves but to show forth what purity and love, in Pompilia, could be; what bravery and love, in Caponsacchi, the "warrior-priest," could do. This girl has not the Browning-mark of gaiety, but she has both the others--this "lady young, tall, beautiful, strange, and sad," who answered without fear the call of the unborn life within her, and trusted without question "the appointed man."

The "pure crude fact," detailed by Browning, was found in the authentic legal documents bound together in an old, square, yellow parchment-covered volume, picked up by him, "one day struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," on a stall in the Piazza San Lorenzo of Florence. He bought the pamphlet for eightpence, and it gave to him and us the great, unique achievement of this wonderful poem:

"Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore, Prime nature with an added artistry."

+ + + + +

Pompilia, called Comparini, was in reality "nobody's child." This, which at first sight may seem of minor importance to the issue, is actually at the heart of all; for, as I have said, it was the question of her dowry which set the entire drama in motion. The old Comparini couple, childless, of mediocre class and fortunes, had through silly extravagance run into debt, and in 1679 were hard pressed by creditors. They could not draw on their capital, for it was tied up in favour of the legal heir, an unknown cousin. But if they had a child, that disability would be removed. Violante Comparini, seeing this, resolved upon a plan. She bought beforehand for a small sum the expected baby of a disreputable woman, giving herself out to her husband, Pietro, and their friends as almost miraculously pregnant--for she was past fifty. In due time she became the apparent mother of a girl, Pompilia. This girl was married at thirteen to Count Guido Franceschini, an impoverished nobleman, fifty years old, of Arezzo. He married her for her reported dowry, and she was sold to him for the sake of his rank. Both parties to the bargain found themselves deceived (Pompilia was, of course, a mere chattel in the business), for there was no dowry, and Guido, though he _had_ the rank, had none of the appurtenances thereof which had dazzled the fancy of Violante. Pietro too was tricked, and the marriage carried through against his will. The old couple, reduced to destitution by extracted payment of a part of the dowry, were taken to the miserable Franceschini castle at Arezzo, and there lived wretchedly, in every sense, for a while; but soon fled back to Rome, leaving the girl-wife behind to aggravated woes. About three years afterwards she also fled, intending to rejoin the Comparini at Rome. She was about to become a mother. The organiser and companion of her flight was a young priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, who was a canon at Arezzo. Guido followed them, caught them at Castelnuovo, a village on the outskirts of Rome, and caused both to be arrested. They were confined in the "New Prisons" at Rome, and tried for adultery. The result was a compromise--they were pronounced guilty, but a merely nominal punishment ("the jocular piece of punishment," as the young priest called it) was inflicted on each. Pompilia was relegated for a time to a convent; Caponsacchi was banished for three years to Civita Vecchia. As the time for Pompilia's confinement drew near, she was permitted to go to her reputed parents' home, which was a villa just outside the walls of the city. A few months after her removal there, she became the mother of a son, whom the old people quickly removed to a place of concealment and safety. A fortnight later--on the second day of the New Year--Count Guido, with four hired assassins, came to the villa, and all three occupants were killed: Pietro and Violante Comparini, and Pompilia his wife. For these murders, Guido and his hirelings were hanged at Rome on February 22, 1698.

But now we must return upon our steps, if we would know "the truth of this."

When the old Comparini reached Rome, after their flight from Arezzo, the Pope had just proclaimed jubilee in honour of his eightieth year, and absolution for any sin was to be had for the asking--atonement, however, necessarily preceding. Violante, remorseful for the sacrifice of their darling, and regarding the woe as retribution for her original lie about the birth, resolved to confess; but since absolution was granted only if atonement preceded it, she must be ready to restore to the rightful heir that which her pretended motherhood had taken from him. She therefore confessed to Pietro first, and he instantly seized the occasion for revenge on Guido, though that was not (or at any rate, according to the Other Half-Rome, may not have been) his only motive.

"What? All that used to be, may be again?

* * * * *

What, the girl's dowry never was the girl's, And unpaid yet, is never now to pay? Then the girl's self, my pale Pompilia child That used to be my own with her great eyes-- Will she come back, with nothing changed at all?"

He repudiated Pompilia publicly, and with her, of course, all claims from her husband. Taken into Court, the case (also bound up in the square yellow book) was, after appeals and counter-appeals, left undecided.

It was this which loosed all Guido's fury on Pompilia. He had already learned to hate her for her shrinking from him; now, while he still controlled her person, and wreaked the vilest cruelties and basenesses upon it, he at the same time resolved to rid himself of her in any fashion whatsoever which should leave him still a legal claimant to the disputed dowry.[130:1] There was only one way thus to rid himself, and that was to prove her guilty of adultery. He concentrated on it. First, his brother, the young Canon Girolamo, who lived at the castle, was incited to pursue her with vile solicitations. She fled to the Archbishop of Arezzo and implored his succour. He gave none. Then she went to the Governor: he also "pushed her back." She sought out a poor friar, and confessed her "despair in God"; he promised to write to her parents for her, but afterwards flinched, and did nothing. . . . Guido's plan was nevertheless hanging fire; a supplementary system of persecution must be set up. She was hourly accused of "looking love-lures at theatre and church, in walk, at window"; but this, in the apathy which was descending on her, she baffled by "a new game of giving up the game."[131:1] She abandoned theatre, church, walk, and window; she "confounded him with her gentleness and worth," he "saw the same stone strength of white despair":

"How does it differ in aught, save degree, From the terrible patience of God?"

--and more and more he hated her.

But at last, at the theatre one night, Pompilia--

"Brought there I knew not why, but now know well"[131:2]

--saw, for the first time, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, "the young frank personable priest"[131:3]--and seeing him as rapt he gazed at her, felt

". . . Had there been a man like that, To lift me with his strength out of all strife Into the calm! . . . Suppose that man had been instead of this?"

* * * * *

Caponsacchi had hitherto been very much "the courtly spiritual Cupid" that Browning calls him. His family, the oldest in Arezzo and once the greatest, had wide interest in the Church, and he had always known that he was to be a priest. But when the time came for "just a vow to read!" he stopped awestruck. Could he keep such a promise? He knew himself too weak. But the Bishop smiled. There were two ways of taking that vow, and a man like Caponsacchi, with "that superior gift of making madrigals," need not choose the harder one.

"Renounce the world? Nay, keep and give it us!"

He was good enough for _that_, thought Caponsacchi, and in this spirit he took the vows. He did his formal duties, and was equally diligent "at his post where beauty and fashion rule"--a fribble and a coxcomb, in short, as he described himself to the judges at the murder-trial. . . . After three or four years of this, he found himself, "in prosecution of his calling," at the theatre one night with fat little Canon Conti, a kinsman of the Franceschini. He was in the mood proper enough for the place, amused or no . . .

"When I saw enter, stand, and seat herself A lady young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad"

--and it was (he remembered) like seeing a burden carried to the Altar in his church one day, while he "got yawningly through Matin-Song." The burden was unpacked, and left--

"Lofty and lone: and lo, when next I looked There was the Rafael!"

Fat little Conti noticed his rapt gaze, and exclaimed that he would make the lady respond to it. He tossed a paper of comfits into her lap; she turned,

"Looked our way, smiled the beautiful sad strange smile;"

and thought the thought that we have learned--for instinctively and surely she felt that whoever had thrown the comfits, it was not "that man":

". . . Silent, grave, Solemn almost, he saw me, as I saw him."

Conti told Caponsacchi who she was, and warned him to look away; but promised to take him to the castle if he could. At Vespers, next day, Caponsacchi heard from Conti that the husband had seen that gaze. _He_ would not signify, but there was Pompilia:

"Spare her, because he beats her as it is, She's breaking her heart quite fast enough."

It was the turning-point in Caponsacchi's life. He had no thought of pursuing her; wholly the contrary was his impulse--he felt that he must leave Arezzo. All that hitherto had charmed him there was done with--the social successes, the intrigue, song-making; and his patron was already displeased. These things were what he was there to do, and he was going to church instead! "Are you turning Molinist?" the patron asked. "I answered quick" (says Caponsacchi in his narrative)

"Sir, what if I turned Christian?"

--and at once announced his resolve to go to Rome as soon as Lent was over. One evening, before he went, he was sitting thinking how his life "had shaken under him"; and

"Thinking moreover . . . oh, thinking, if you like, How utterly dissociated was I A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife Of Guido . . . . . . I had a whole store of strengths Eating into my heart, which craved employ, And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help-- And yet there was no way in the wide world To stretch out mine."

Her smile kept glowing out of the devotional book he was trying to read, and he sat thus--when suddenly there came a tap at the door, and on his summons, there glided in "a masked muffled mystery," who laid a letter on the open book, and stood back demurely waiting.

It was Margherita, the "kind of maid" of Count Guido, and the letter purported to be from Pompilia, offering her love. Caponsacchi saw through the trick at once: the letter was written by Guido. He answered it in such a way that it would save _her_ from all anger, and at the same time infuriate the "jealous miscreant" who had written it:

". . . What made you--may one ask?-- Marry your hideous husband?"

But henceforth such letters came thick and fast. Caponsacchi was met in the street, signed to in church; slips were found in his prayer-book, they dropped from the window if he passed. . . . At length there arrived a note in a different manner. This warned him _not_ to come, to avoid the window for his life. At once he answered that the street was free--he should go to the window if he chose, and he would go that evening at the Ave. His conviction was that he should find the husband there, not the wife--for though he had seen through the trick, it did not occur to him that it was more than a device of jealousy to trap them, already suspected after that mutual gaze at the theatre. What it really was, he never guessed at all.

Meanwhile--turning now to Pompilia's dying speech to the nuns who nursed her--the companion persecution had been going on at the castle. Day after day, Margherita had dinned the name of Caponsacchi into the wife's ears. How he loved her, what a paragon he was, how little she owed fidelity to the Count who used _her_, Margherita, as his pastime--ought she not at least to see the priest and warn him, if nothing more? Guido might kill him! Here was a letter from him; and she began to impart it:

"I know you cannot read--therefore, let me! '_My idol_'" . . .

The letter was not from Caponsacchi, and Pompilia, divining this as surely as she had divined that he did not throw the comfits, took it from the woman's hands and tore it into shreds. . . . Day after day such moments added themselves to all the rest of the misery, and at last, at end of her strength, she swooned away. As she was coming to again, Margherita stooped and whispered _Caponsacchi_. But still, though the sound of his name was to the broken girl as if, drowning, she had looked up through the waves and seen a star . . . still she repudiated the servant's report of him: had she not that once beheld him?

"Therefore while you profess to show him me, I ever see his own face. Get you gone!"

But the swoon had portended something; and on "one vivid daybreak," half through April, Pompilia learned what that something was. . . . Going to bed the previous night, the last sound in her ears had been Margherita's prattle. "Easter was over; everyone was on the wing for Rome--even Caponsacchi, out of heart and hope, was going there." Pompilia had heard it, as she might have heard rain drop, thinking only that another day was done:

"How good to sleep and so get nearer death!"

But with the daybreak, what was the clear summons that seemed to pierce her slumber?

". . . Up I sprang alive, Light in me, light without me, everywhere Change!"

The exquisite morning was there--the broad yellow sunbeams with their "myriad merry motes," the glittering leaves of the wet weeds against the lattice-panes, the birds--

"Always with one voice--where are two such joys?-- The blessed building-sparrow! I stepped forth, Stood on the terrace--o'er the roofs such sky! My heart sang, 'I too am to go away, I too have something I must care about, Carry away with me to Rome, to Rome!

* * * * *

Not to live now would be the wickedness.'"[137:1]

Pope Innocent XII--"the great good old Pope," as Browning calls him in the summary of Book I--when in his turn he speaks to us, gives his highest praise, "where all he praises," to this trait in her whom he calls "My rose, I gather for the breast of God."

"Oh child, that didst despise thy life so much When it seemed only thine to keep or lose, How the fine ear felt fall the first low word 'Value life, and preserve life for My sake!'

* * * * *

Thou, at first prompting of what I call God, And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend, Accept the obligation laid on thee, Mother elect, to save the unborn child. . . . Go past me, And get thy praise--and be not far to seek Presently when I follow if I may!"

"Now" (says the sympathetic Other Half-Rome), "begins the tenebrific passage of the tale." As we have seen, Pompilia had tried all other means of escape, even before the great call came to her. Her last appeal had been made to two of Guido's kinsmen, on the wing for Rome like everyone else--Conti being one. Both had refused, but Conti had referred her to Caponsacchi--not evilly like Margherita, but jestingly, flippantly. Nevertheless, that name had come to take a half-fateful sense to her ears . . . and the Other Half-Rome thus images the moment in which she resolved to appeal to him.

"If then, all outlets thus secured save one, At last she took to the open, stood and stared With her wan face to see where God might wait-- And there found Caponsacchi wait as well For the precious something at perdition's edge, He only was predestinate to save . . .

* * * * *

Whatever way in this strange world it was, Pompilia and Caponsacchi met, in fine, She at her window, he i' the street beneath, And understood each other at first look."

For suddenly (she tells us) on that morning of Annunciation, she turned on Margherita, ever at her ear, and said, "Tell Caponsacchi he may come!" "How plainly" (says Pompilia)--

"How plainly I perceived hell flash and fade O' the face of her--the doubt that first paled joy, Then final reassurance I indeed Was caught now, never to be free again!"

But she cared not; she felt herself strong for everything.

"After the Ave Maria, at first dark, I will be standing on the terrace, say!"

She knew he would come, and prayed to God all day. At "an intense throe of the dusk" she started up--she "dared to say," in her dying speech, that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace--and there he waited her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to save me."

+ + + + +

He had come, as he defiantly had said, and not the husband met him, but, at the window, with a lamp in her hand, "Our Lady of all the Sorrows." He knelt, but even as he knelt she vanished, only to reappear on the terrace, so close above him that she could almost touch his head if she bent down--"and she did bend, while I stood still as stone, all eye, all ear."

First she told him that she could neither read nor write, but that the letters said to be from him had been read to her, and seemed to say that he loved her. She did not believe that he meant that as Margherita meant it; but "good true love would help me now so much" that at last she had resolved to see him. Her whole life was so strange that this but belonged to the rest: that an utter stranger should be able to help her--he, and he alone! She told him her story. There was a reason now at last why she must fly from "this fell house of hate," and she would take from Caponsacchi's love what she needed: enough to save her life with--

". . . Take me to Rome! Take me as you would take a dog, I think, Masterless left for strangers to maltreat: Take me home like that--leave me in the house Where the father and mother are" . . .

She tells his answer thus:

"He replied-- The first word I heard ever from his lips, All himself in it--an eternity Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth O' the soul that then broke silence--'I am yours.'"

* * * * *

But when he had left her, irresolution swept over him. First, the Church seemed to rebuke--the Church who had smiled on his silly intrigues! Now she changed her tone, it appeared:--

"Now, when I found out first that life and death Are means to an end, that passion uses both, Indisputably mistress of the man Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice."

But that soon passed: the word was God's; this was the true self-sacrifice. . . . But might it not injure her--scandal would hiss about her name. Would not God choose His own way to save her? And _he_ might pray. . . . Two days passed thus. But he must go to counsel and to comfort her--was he not a priest? He went. She was there, leaning over the terrace; she reproached him: why did he delay the help his heart yearned to give? He answered with his fears for her, but she broke in, never doubting him though he should doubt himself:

"'I know you: when is it that you will come?'"

"To-morrow at the day's dawn," he replied; and all was arranged--the place, the time; she came, she did not speak, but glided into the carriage, while he cried to the driver:

". . . 'By San Spirito, To Rome, as if the road burned underneath!'"

When she was dying of Guido's twenty-two dagger-thrusts, this was how Pompilia thought of that long flight:

"I did pray, do pray, in the prayer shall die: 'Oh, to have Caponsacchi for my guide!' Ever the face upturned to mine, the hand Holding my hand across the world . . ."

And he, telling the judges of it at the murder-trial, cried that he never could lie quiet in his grave unless he "mirrored them plain the perfect soul Pompilia."

"You must know that a man gets drunk with truth Stagnant inside him. Oh, they've killed her, Sirs! Can I be calm?"

But he must be calm: he must show them that soul.

"The glory of life, the beauty of the world, The splendour of heaven . . . well, Sirs, does no one move? Do I speak ambiguously? The glory, I say, And the beauty, I say, and splendour, still say I" . . .

--for thus he flings defiance at them. Why do they not smile as they smiled at the earlier adultery-trial, when they gave him "the jocular piece of punishment," now that he stands before them "in this sudden smoke from hell"?

"Men, for the last time, what do you want with me?"

For if they had but seen _then_ what Guido Franceschini was! If they would but have been serious! Pompilia would not now be

"Gasping away the latest breath of all, This minute, while I talk--not while you laugh?"

How can the end of this deed surprise them? Pompilia and he had shown them what its beginning meant--but all in vain. He, the priest, had left her to "law's watch and ward," and now she is dying--"there and thus she lies!" Do they understand _now_ that he was not unworthy of Christ when he tried to save her? His part is done--all that he had been able to do; he wants no more with earth, except to "show Pompilia who was true"--

"The snow-white soul that angels fear to take Untenderly . . . Sirs, Only seventeen!"

Then he begins his story of

". . . Our flight from dusk to clear, Through day and night and day again to night Once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all."

Thinking how they sat in silence, both so fearless and so safe, waking but now and then to consciousness of the wonder of it, he cries:

"You know this is not love, Sirs--it is faith, The feeling that there's God."

By morning they had passed Perugia; Assisi was opposite. He met her look for the first time since they had started. . . . At Foligno he urged her to take a brief rest, but with eyes like a fawn's,

"Tired to death in the thicket, when she feels The probing spear o' the huntsman,"

she had cried, "On, on to Rome, on, on"--and they went on. During the night she had a troubled dream, waving away something with wild arms; and Caponsacchi prayed (thinking "Why, in my life I never prayed before!") that the dream might go, and soon she slept peacefully. . . . When she woke, he answered her first look with the assurance that Rome was within twelve hours; no more of the terrible journey. But she answered that she wished it could last for ever: to be "with no dread"--

"Never to see a face nor hear a voice-- Yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb; Nor face, I see it in the dark" . . .

--such tranquillity was such heaven to her!

"This one heart" (she said on her death-bed):

"This one heart gave me all the spring! I could believe himself by his strong will Had woven around me what I thought the world We went along in . . . For, through the journey, was it natural Such comfort should arise from first to last?"

As she looks back, new stars bud even while she seeks for old, and all is Caponsacchi:

"Him I now see make the shine everywhere."

Best of all her memories--"oh, the heart in that!"--was the descent at a little wayside inn. He tells of it thus. When the day was broad, he begged her to descend at the post-house of a village. He told the woman of the house that Pompilia was his sister, married and unhappy--would she comfort her as women can? And then he left them together:

"I spent a good half-hour, paced to and fro The garden; just to leave her free awhile . . . I might have sat beside her on the bench Where the children were: I wish the thing had been, Indeed: the event could not be worse, you know: One more half-hour of her saved! She's dead now, Sirs!"

As they again drove forward, she asked him if, supposing she were to die now, he would account it to be in sin? The woman at the inn had told her about the trees that turn away from the north wind with the nests they hold; she thought she might be like those trees. . . . But soon, half-sleeping again, and restless now with returning fears, she seemed to wander in her mind; once she addressed him as "Gaetano." . . . Afterwards he knew that this name (the name of a newly-made saint) was that which she destined for her child, if she was given a son:

"One who has only been made a saint--how long? Twenty-five years: so, carefuller, perhaps, To guard a namesake than those old saints grow, Tired out by this time--see my own five saints!"[146:1]

For "little Pompilia" had been given five names by her pretended parents:

". . . so many names for one poor child --Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela Pompilia Comparini--laughable!"[146:1] . . .

But now Caponsacchi himself grew restless, nervous: here was Castelnuovo, as good as Rome:

"Say you are saved, sweet lady!"

She awoke. The sky was fierce with the sunset colours--suddenly she cried out that she must not die:

"'Take me no farther, I should die: stay here! I have more life to save than mine!' She swooned. We seemed safe: what was it foreboded so?"

He carried her,

"Against my heart, beneath my head bowed low, As we priests carry the paten,"

into the little inn and to a couch, where he laid her, sleeping deeply. The host urged him to leave her in peace till morn.

"Oh, my foreboding! But I could not choose."

All night he paced the passage, throbbing with fear from head to foot, "filled with a sense of such impending woe" . . . and at the first pause of night went to the courtyard, ordered the horses--the last moment came, he must awaken her--he turned to go:

". . . And there Faced me Count Guido."

Oh, if he had killed him then! if he had taken the throat in "one great good satisfying gripe," and abolished Guido with his lie! . . . But while he mused on the irony of such a miscreant calling _her_ his wife,

"The minute, oh the misery, was gone;"

--two police-officers stood beside, and Guido was ordering them to take her.

Caponsacchi insisted that _he_ should lead them to the room where she was sleeping. He was a priest and privileged; when they came there, if the officer should detect

"Guilt on her face when it meets mine, then judge Between us and the mad dog howling there!"

They all went up together. There she lay,

"O' the couch, still breathless, motionless, sleep's self, Wax-white, seraphic, saturate with the sun That filled the window with a light like blood."

At Guido's loud order to the officers, she started up, and stood erect, face to face with the husband: "the opprobrious blur against all peace and joy and light and life"--for he was standing against the window a-flame with morning. But in her terror, that seemed to her the flame from hell, since _he_ was in it--and she cried to him to stand away, she chose hell rather than "embracing any more."

Caponsacchi tried to go to her, but now the room was full of the rabble pouring in at the noise--he was caught--"they heaped themselves upon me." . . . Then, when she saw "my angel helplessly held back," then

"Came all the strength back in a sudden swell,"

--and she sprang at her husband, seized the sword that hung beside him,

"Drew, brandished it, the sunrise burned for joy O' the blade. 'Die,' cried she, 'devil, in God's name!' Ah, but they all closed round her, twelve to one . . . Dead-white and disarmed she lay."

She said, dying, that this, her first and last resistance, had been invincible, for she had struck at the lie in Guido; and thus not "the vain sword nor weak speech" had saved her, but Caponsacchi's truth:--

"You see, I will not have the service fail! I say the angel saved me: I am safe! . . . What o' the way to the end?--the end crowns all"

--for even though she now was dying, there had been the time at the convent with the quiet nuns, and then the safety with her parents, and then:

"My babe was given me! Yes, he saved my babe: It would not have peeped forth, the bird-like thing, Through that Arezzo noise and trouble . . . But the sweet peace cured all, and let me live And give my bird the life among the leaves God meant him! Weeks and months of quietude, I could lie in such peace and learn so much, Know life a little, I should leave so soon. Therefore, because this man restored my soul All has been right . . . For as the weakness of my time drew nigh, Nobody did me one disservice more, Spoke coldly or looked strangely, broke the love I lay in the arms of, till my boy was born, Born all in love, with nought to spoil the bliss A whole long fortnight: in a life like mine A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much."

For, thinking of her happy childhood before the marriage, already she has said that only that childhood, and the prayer that brought her Caponsacchi, and the "great fortnight" remain as real: the four bad years between

"Vanish--one quarter of my life, you know."

In that room in the inn they parted. They were borne off to separate cells of the same ignoble prison, and, separate, thence to Rome.

"Pompilia's face, then and thus, looked on me The last time in this life: not one sight more, Never another sight to be! And yet I thought I had saved her . . . It seems I simply sent her to her death. You tell me she is dying now, or dead."

But then it flashes to his mind that this may be a trick to make him confess--it would be worthy of them; and the great cry breaks forth:

"No, Sirs, I cannot have the lady dead! That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye, That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!) That vision in the blood-red daybreak--that Leap to life of the pale electric sword Angels go armed with--that was not the last O' the lady! Come, I see through it, you find-- Know the manoeuvre! . . . Let me see for myself if it be so!"

* * * * *

But it is true. Twenty-two dagger-thrusts--

"Two days ago, when Guido, with the right, Hacked her to pieces" . . .

Oh, should they not have seen at first? That very flight proved the innocence of the pair who thus fled: these judges should have recognised the accepted man, the exceptional conduct that rightly claims to be judged by exceptional rules. . . . But it is all over. She is dying--dead perhaps. He has done with being judged--he is guiltless in thought, word, and deed; and she . . .

". . . For Pompilia--be advised, Build churches, go pray! You will find me there, I know, if you come--and you will come, I know. Why, there's a judge weeping! Did not I say You were good and true at bottom? You see the truth-- I am glad I helped you: she helped me just so."

Once more he flashes forth in her defence, in rage against Guido--but the image of her, "so sweet and true and pure and beautiful," comes back to him:

"Sirs, I am quiet again. You see we are So very pitiable, she and I, Who had conceivably been otherwise"

--and at the thought of _how_ "otherwise," of what life with such a woman were for a free man, and of his life henceforth, a priest, "on earth, as good as out of it," with the memory of her, only the memory . . . for she is dying, dead perhaps . . . the whole man breaks down, and he goes from the place with one wild, anguished call to heaven:

"Oh, great, just, good God! Miserable me!"

I have chosen to reveal Pompilia chiefly through Caponsacchi's speech for two reasons. First, because there is nothing grander in our literature than that passionate and throbbing monologue; second, because to show this type of woman _through_ another speaker is the way in which Browning always shows her best. As I said when writing of Mildred Tresham, directly such a woman speaks for herself, in Browning's work, he forces the note, he takes from her (unconsciously) a part of the beauty which those other speakers have shown forth. So with Pompilia, though not in the same degree as with Mildred, for here the truth _is_ with us--Pompilia is a living soul, not a puppet of the theatre. Yet even here the same strange errors recur. She has words indeed that reach the inmost heart--poignant, overpowering in tenderness and pathos; but she has, also, words that cause the brows to draw together, the mind to pause uneasily, then to cry "Not so!" Of such is the analysis of her own blank ignorance with regard to the marriage-state. This, wholly acceptable while left unexplained, loses its verisimilitude when comparisons are found in her mouth with which to delineate it; and the particular one chosen--of marriage as a coin, "a dirty piece would purchase me the praise of those I loved"--is actually inept, since the essence of her is that she does not know anything at all about the "coin," so certainly does not know that it is or may be "dirty."

Again, here is an ignorant child, whose deep insight has come to her through love alone. She feels, in the weakness of her nearing death, and the bliss of spiritual tranquillity, that all the past with Guido is a terrific dream: "It is the good of dreams--so soon they go!" Beautiful: but Browning could not leave it in that beautiful and true simplicity. She must philosophise:

"This is the note of evil: for good lasts" . . .

Pompilia was incapable of that: she could "say" the thing, as she says it in that image of the dream--but she would have left it alone, she would have made no maxim out of it. And the maxim, when it _is_ made, says no more than the image had said.

Once again: her plea for Guido. That she should forgive him was essential, but the pardon should have been blind pardon. No reason can confirm it; and we should but have loved her more for seeking none. To put in her mouth the plea that Guido had been deceived in his hope of enrichment by marriage, and that his anger, thus to some extent justified, was aggravated by her "blindness," by her not knowing "whither he sought to drive" her with his charges of light conduct,

"So unaware, I only made things worse" . . .

--this is bad through and through; this is the excess of ingenuity which misled Browning so frequently. There is no loveliness of pardon here; but something that we cannot suffer for its gross humility. The aim of Guido, in these charges, was filthiest evil: it revolts to hear the victim, now fully aware--for the plea is based on her awareness--blame herself for not "apprehending his drift" (could _she_ have used that phrase?), and thus, in the madness of magnanimity, seem to lose all sense of good and evil. It is over-subtle; it is not true; it has no beauty of any kind. But Browning could not "leave things alone"; he had to analyse, to subtilise--and this, which comes so well when it is analytic and subtle minds that address us, makes the defect of his work whenever an innocent and ignorant girl is made to speak in her own person.

I shall not multiply instances; my aim is not destructive. But I think the unmeasured praise of Browning by some of his admirers has worked against, not for, him. It irritates to read of the "perfection" of this speech--which has beauties so many and so great that the faults may be confessed, and leave it still among the lovely things of our literature.

I turn now gladly to those beauties. Chief is the pride and love of the new-made mother--never more exquisitely shown, and here the more poignantly shown because she is on her death-bed, and has not seen her little son again since the "great fortnight." She thinks how well it was that he had been taken from her before that awful night at the Villa:

"He was too young to smile and save himself;"

--for she does not dream, not then remembering the "money" which was at the heart of all her woe, that _he_ would have been spared for that money's sake. . . . But she had not seen him again, and now will never see him. And when he grows up and comes to be her age, he will ask what his mother was like, and people will say, "Like girls of seventeen," and he will think of some girl he knows who titters and blushes when he looks at her. . . . That is not the way for a mother!

"Therefore I wish someone will please to say I looked already old, though I was young;"

--and she begs to be told that she looks "nearer twenty." Her name too is not a common one--that may help to keep apart

"A little the thing I am from what girls are."

But how hard for him to find out anything about her:

"No father that he ever knew at all, Nor never had--no, never had, I say!"

--and a mother who only lived two weeks, and Pietro and Violante gone! Only his saint to guard him--that was why she chose the new one; _he_ would not be tired of guarding namesakes. . . . After all, she hopes her boy will come to disbelieve her history, as herself almost does. It is dwindling fast to that:

"Sheer dreaming and impossibility-- Just in four days too! All the seventeen years, Not once did a suspicion visit me How very different a lot is mine From any other woman's in the world. The reason must be, 'twas by step and step It got to grow so terrible and strange. These strange woes stole on tip-toe, as it were . . . Sat down where I sat, laid them where I lay, And I was found familiarised with fear."

First there was the amazement of finding herself disowned by Pietro and Violante. Then:

"So with my husband--just such a surprise, Such a mistake, in that relationship! Everyone says that husbands love their wives, Guard them and guide them, give them happiness; 'Tis duty, law, pleasure, religion: well-- You see how much of this comes true with me!"

Next, "there is the friend." . . . People will not ask her about him; they smile and give him nicknames, and call him her lover. "Most surprise of all!" It is always that word: how he loves her, how she loves him . . . yet he is a priest, and she is married. It all seems unreal, like the childish game in which she and her little friend Tisbe would pretend to be the figures on the tapestry:--

"You know the figures never were ourselves. . . . Thus all my life."

Her life is like a "fairy thing that fades and fades."

"--Even to my babe! I thought when he was born, Something began for me that would not end, Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay For evermore, eternally, quite mine."

And hers he is, but he is gone, and it is all so confused that even _he_ "withdraws into a dream as the rest do." She fancies him grown big,

"Strong, stern, a tall young man who tutors me, Frowns with the others: 'Poor imprudent child! Why did you venture out of the safe street? Why go so far from help to that lone house? Why open at the whisper and the knock?'"

* * * * *

That New Year's Day, when she had been allowed to get up for the first time, and they had sat round the fire and talked of him, and what he should do when he was big--

"Oh, what a happy, friendly eve was that!"

And next day, old Pietro had been packed off to church, because he was so happy and would talk so much, and Violante thought he would tire her. And then he came back, and was telling them about the Christmas altars at the churches--none was so fine as San Giovanni--

". . . When, at the door, A tap: we started up: you know the rest."

Pietro had done no harm; Violante had erred in telling the lie about her birth--certainly that was wrong, but it was done with love in it, and even the giving her to Guido had had love in it . . . and at any rate it is all over now, and Pompilia has just been absolved, and thus there "seems not so much pain":

"Being right now, I am happy and colour things. Yes, everybody that leaves life sees all Softened and bettered; so with other sights: _To me at least was never evening yet_ _But seemed far beautifuller than its day_,[158:1] For past is past."

Then she falls to thinking of that real mother, who had sold her before she was born. Violante had told her of it when she came back from the nuns, and was waiting for her boy to come. That mother died at her birth:

"I shall believe she hoped in her poor heart That I at least might try be good and pure . . . And oh, my mother, it all came to this?"

Now she too is dying, and leaving her little one behind. But _she_ is leaving him "outright to God":

"All human plans and projects come to nought: My life, and what I know of other lives Prove that: no plan nor project! God shall care!"

She will lay him with God. And her last breath, for gratitude, shall spend itself in showing, now that they will really listen and not say "he was your lover" . . . her last breath shall disperse the stain around the name of Caponsacchi.

". . . There, Strength comes already with the utterance!"

* * * * *

Now she tells what we know; some of it we have learnt already from her lips. She goes back over the years in "that fell house of hate"; then, the seeing of him at the theatre, the persecution with the false letters, the Annunciation-morning, the summons to him, the meeting, the escape:

"No pause i' the leading and the light!

* * * * *

And this man, men call sinner? Jesus Christ!"

But once more, mother-like, she reverts to her boy:

". . . We poor Weak souls, how we endeavour to be strong! I was already using up my life-- This portion, now, should do him such a good, This other go to keep off such an ill. The great life: see, a breath, and it is gone!"

Still, all will be well: "Let us leave God alone." And now she will "withdraw from earth and man to her own soul," will "compose herself for God" . . . but even as she speaks, the flood of gratitude to her one friend again sweeps back, and she exclaims,

"Well, and there is more! Yes, my end of breath Shall bear away my soul in being true![159:1] He is still here, not outside with the world, Here, here, I have him in his rightful place!

* * * * *

I feel for what I verily find--again The face, again the eyes, again, through all, The heart and its immeasurable love Of my one friend, my only, all my own, Who put his breast between the spears and me. Ever with Caponsacchi! . . . O lover of my life, O soldier-saint, No work begun shall ever pause for death! Love will be helpful to me more and more I' the coming course, the new path I must tread-- My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that!

* * * * *

Not one faint fleck of failure! Why explain? What I see, oh, he sees, and how much more!

* * * * *

Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God? Say--I am all in flowers from head to foot! Say--not one flower of all he said and did, But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place At this supreme of moments!"

She has recognised the truth. This _is_ love--but how different from the love of the smilings and the whisperings, the "He is your lover!" He is a priest, and could not marry; but she thinks he would not have married if he could:

"Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,

* * * * *

In heaven we have the real and true and sure."

In heaven, where the angels "know themselves into one"; and are never married, no, nor given in marriage:

". . . They are man and wife at once When the true time is . . . So, let him wait God's instant men call years; Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, Do out the duty! Through such souls alone God, stooping, shows sufficient of his light For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise."

* * * * *

Who would analyse this child would tear a flower to pieces. Pompilia is no heroine, no character; but indeed a "rose gathered for the breast of God":

"Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses, L'espace d'un matin."

FOOTNOTES:

[126:1] _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, 1886, p. 152.

[130:1] Abandoning for the moment intermediate events, it was _this_ which moved Guido to the triple murder: for once the old couple and Pompilia dead, with the question of his claim to the dowry still undecided as it was, his child, the new-born babe, might inherit all.

[131:1] Guido's second speech, wherein he tells the truth, in the hope that his "impenitence" may defer his execution.

[131:2] Her dying speech.

[131:3] Browning's summary. Book I.

[137:1] Mrs. Orr, commenting on this passage, says: "The sudden rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the case, becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and culture; it was not suggested by the facts"--for Mrs. Orr, who had read the documents from which Browning made the poem, says: "Unless my memory much deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the historical defence of her flight. . . . The real Pompilia was a simple child, who lived in bodily terror of her husband, and had made repeated efforts to escape from him." And, as she later adds, though for many readers this character is, in its haunting pathos, the most exquisite of Browning's creations, "for others, it fails in impressiveness because it lacks the reality which habitually marks them." But (she goes on) "it was only in an idealised Pompilia that the material for poetical creation, in this 'murder story,' could have been found." These remarks will be seen partly to agree with some of my own.

[146:1] Her dying speech.

[158:1] How wonderfully is the wistful nature of the girl summed up in these two lines!

[159:1] Caponsacchi uses almost the same words of her: he will "burn his soul out in showing you the truth."